German star apologises for HIV sex

A German singer facing charges for allegedly infecting a man with HIV has admitted to having unprotected sex with several partners despite knowing she was HIV-positive.

Nadja Benaissa, a member of German girl band No Angels, is charged with grievous bodily harm for allegedly infecting a partner in 2004 with the virus that causes AIDS.

The pop star also faces charges of attempted bodily harm for having unprotected sex with two other men.

Benaissa has denied deliberately infecting anyone.

"I am sorry from my heart," she said in a statement read by her lawyer at the opening of her trial in the German city of Darmstadt on Monday.

"No way did I want my partner to be infected," she told the administrative court.

In her statement, Benaissa told the court she became a cocaine addict at 14 and that during her pregnancy at 16, she found out she was HIV positive, according to the news agency ddp.

Five more sessions are scheduled in her trial. It is not clear if Benaissa will give any further testimony.

HIV-positive

The man who claims the singer infected him says they had a three-month relationship in early 2004, and that he got tested for HIV after the singer's aunt asked him in 2007 whether he knew Benaissa was HIV-positive.

In 2000 Benaissa won a television talent show Popstars and joined No Angels with four other young women but hid her illness from everyone for fear it would damage her career.

"I grew apart from everyone, even myself," she said in the statement about that period of her life.

No Angels sold more than 5 million albums before breaking up in 2003.

Along with three other members from the original band, Benaissa helped reform the group in 2007 but performed with disastrous results in the 2008 Eurovision song contest.

No Angels were heading into a concert in Frankfurt in April 2009, when Benaissa was taken into custody and kept for 10 days – a move a German AIDS awareness group has criticised as disproportionate.

The Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe group argued that the question of whether her partners also carried a share of the responsibility had been neglected.

Karzai bans private security firms

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has given private security firms working in Afghanistan four months to end their operations.

Karzai has repeatedly called for banning private security companies, saying they undermine government security forces.

"Today the president is going to issue a four-month deadline for the dissolution of private security companies," Waheed Omer, Karzai's spokesman, said on Monday.

Omer gave notice last week that the president intended to act over private security firms, calling it "a serious programme that the government of Afghanistan will execute".

"It's not about regulating the activities of private security companies, it's about their presence, it's about the way they function in Afghanistan ... all the problems they have created," Omer said.

US support

Omer said more than 50 private security companies, roughly half of them Afghan and the other half international, employ 30,000 to 40,000 armed personnel in Afghanistan.

He said Karzai had spoken to his Western backers as well as leaders of the US and Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) who contract the companies, to safeguard many aspects of their work, including supply convoys.

The US military responded on Monday saying it supported the plan and was tightening oversight of its own armed contractors in the meantime.

"Certainly we understand President Karzai's statements that he is determined to dissolve private security companies," Brigadier General Margaret Boor, head of a new task force to better regulate and oversee private security operations, said.

"We are committed to partnering with the government in meeting that intent," she said.

However, Boor declined to give a timeline, saying private security contractors can only be phased out as the security situation improves.

That could be a long time given worsening security in recent months in areas of northern and central Afghanistan that had previously been relatively safe.

Protecting convoys

About 26,000 armed security contractors work with the US government in Afghanistan, including 19,000 with the US military, Boor said.

The majority of military contractors protect convoys, though some also provide base
security, Major Joel Harper, a spokesman for Nato forces, said.

Karzai has said such responsibilities should fall to either enlisted military or police, though it is unclear how soon Afghan forces would be ready to take on additional jobs.

Boor said private contractors were needed right now to keep development projects and military operations running.

"Since the Afghan army and the Afghan police are not quite at the stages of capability and capacity to provide all the security that is needed, private security companies are filling a gap,'' Boor said.

'Behaviour questioned'

Reporting from Kabul, said the conduct of private security personnel had caused "a lot of uproar among the Afghan population".

"Their behaviour has always been questioned. Many of them were involved in accidents on highways where innocent Afghan civilians were killed," she said.

"[To ban those firms] is certainly a move that will be widely accepted by the Afghan people and it's certainly a move that comes at a very good time for the Afghan president.

"Parliamentary elections are expected to be held here next month and certainly a this is a move that could could garner some support for the president."

Contractors in Afghanistan have been in the spotlight on several occasions.

In February, US senate investigators said the contractor formerly known as Blackwater hired violent drug users to help train the Afghan army and declared "sidearms for everyone'', even though employees were not authorised to carry weapons.

The allegations came as part of an investigation into the 2009 shooting deaths of two Afghan civilians by employees of the company, now known as Xe.

Timescale set for Iran atomic plant

Iran has announced that the construction of the first of 10 new uranium enrichment facilities in the country will start early next year.

Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's nuclear programme, told state television that the search for sites for the facilities "is in its final stages".

"Construction of a new uranium enrichment site will begin by the end of the [Iranian] year [March] or early next year," Salehi said on Monday.

"The new enrichment facilities will be built inside mountains."

Western powers have imposed several rounds of sanctions aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear activities amid fears that it aiming to produce nuclear weapons.

But Iran insists that its nuclear programme has only peaceful intentions.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, originally announced plans to build the 10 new plants late last year.

'Our rights'

"We insist that we we will have to use our rights for our own national interest," Salehi told.

"We are exploring Iran now and we have seen promising places that contain [a] relatively good amount of uranium and the ability to enrich it."

Enriching uranium creates fuel for nuclear power plants but can also, if taken to higher levels (90 per cent) produce the material for an atom bomb.

Iran says it is enriching uranium to 20 per cent to produce fuel for a research reactor in Tehran.

On Monday, Ahmadinejad signed a new law which obligates his government to continue the 20 per cent uranium enrichment work.

The new law also stipulates that the government "co-operate with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) only under the framework of the Non-Proliferation Treaty's (NPT) general regulations".

It bans any co-operation that goes beyond the NPT requirements, Iran's English language Press TV said on its website, a measure likely to anger Western powers.

'Deep worries'

The United Nations Security Council in June imposed a fourth set of sanctions against Iran and the European Union and the United States have added even more extensive sanctions targeting its foreign trade.

Steve Field, the spokesman for David Cameron, the British prime minister, said Salehi's announcement was a cause for concern.

"The reports that we have seen this morning certainly do not give us any comfort that Iran is moving in the right direction," Field told reporters.

Christine Fages, a French foreign ministry spokeswoman, said the announcement "only intensifies the deep worries of the international community about the Iranian nuclear programme".

"We want Iran to respect its international obligations by suspending all its activities of uranium enrichment," she said.

Disease risk for Pakistani children

Millions of children in Pakistan are at high risk from deadly water-borne diseases in the wake of the country's worst flooding in living memory, the UN has warned.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has been placed on standby to deal with a potential cholera outbreak following warnings from medical experts of "a second wave of death" in the disaster zone.

"WHO is preparing to assist up to 140,000 people in case there is any cholera, but the government has not notified us of any confirmed case," Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said on Monday.

"Up to 3.5 million children are at high risk of deadly water-borne diseases including diarrhoea-related, such as watery diarrhoea and dysentery," he said, estimating the total number at risk from such diseases to be around six million.

OCHA said figures for how many people may have already died from disease following the floods were not available, but insisted work was being done to assess the situation.

"The mortality caused by the incidence of these diseases is increasing. We don't have figures at this moment, but WHO is working round the clock in support for the government to come up with numbers," he said.

Patients turned away

Medical teams working on the ground are in no doubt as to the scale of the threat posed by diseases. At the Dera Ismail Khan government hospital in Peshawar on Monday, staff reported being inundated with hundreds of patients suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting.

Many were turned away from the hospital as doctors focused their resources on helping sick children, staff said.

Cholera, which can spread rapidly after floods and other disasters, poses a serious threat, says the UN. The disease has been detected in the northwest, but there have been only a few reported cases so far.

Typhoid and hepatitis outbreaks are also a risk as survivors of the floods, which have killed at least 1,600 people, are forced to drink unclean water to survive.

The health warning comes a day after Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, said that the disaster was the worst he had ever seen and renewed calls for international aid donations.

Huge losses

The cost of rebuilding Pakistan could exceed $10 to $15 billion, the country's High Commissioner to Britain said on Monday.

"It will take at least five years," High Commissioner Wajid Shamsul Hasan told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

Asked about the cost of rebuilding, he said, "I think more than $10 to $15 billion."

He said this was a rough estimate because an assessment of the extent of the damage caused by the floods had yet to be carried out.

But the number gave an indication of the scale of the reconstruction needed.

The World Bank has said that $1 billion in crops have been lost. On top of that is damage to infrastructure, to schools, hospitals and houses, to dairy farming, and to industry.

"These floods have really dislocated everything," Hasan said.

After the flood waters receded, the World Bank and other institutions would have to assess the damage.

"In the longer term, when the water subsides, we need reconstruction ... We'll have to have a long-term plan, something like the Marshall Plan."

The UN has appealed for an initial $460 million to provide relief, but only 20 per cent of the total has so far been pledged. Officials say that billions more will be needed for reconstruction after flood waters recede.

With more than 20 million people made homeless by the floods, authorities have been overwhelmed by the scale of disaster, and many have been angered by the lack of assistance they have received.

Angry protests

In the hard-hit Sukkur area in southern Sindh province, hundreds of flood victims blocked a major road with stones and rubbish to protest what they described as a slow delivery of aid.

Kalu Mangiani, one of the protesters, said government officials only came to hand out food when media were present.

"They are throwing packets of food to us like we are dogs. They are making people fight for these packets," he said.

Al Jazeera's Imran Khan, reporting from Sukkur, said it was clear that not enough aid was getting to flood victims.

"Without a co-ordinated effort by the government or aid groups, delivering supplies becomes a piecemeal effort that falls short of what is needed," he said.

"The scale of this disaster is overwhelming and the lack of a centralised effort means good intentions can go to waste."