Italian police sketch Jesus

ROME - Using the same technology that adds wrinkles to the drawings of Mafia bosses to identify them after decades on the lam, the Italian police have shaved years, and a beard, off an image taken from the Shroud of Turin to create what newspapers here last week hailed as the very visage of a young Jesus.

"Here it is, the real face of the baby Jesus," declared the front page of the newspaper Il Giornale. Italy's largest newspaper, Corriere della Sera, ran a more cautious headline: "Here Is Jesus at Age 12 (According to a Computer)."

In a country awash in creches and sensationalism, exposes and revelations about the birth of Jesus are not exactly rare. But few reports have generated as much discussion as the image in Thursday's newspapers.

The image shows a 12-year-old boy with fair, smooth skin, glassy blue eyes, fleshy lips and waves of dirty blond hair streaked with just enough purple and pink to suggest a sprinkling of cosmic dust.

The scientific unit of Rome's police force created the image at the behest of reporters of another investigative report about Jesus to be televised after Christmas.

Millions of Christians believe that the Shroud of Turin, a linen cloth imprinted with the image of a man's face and wounded body, is the burial shroud of Jesus. But after using carbon-14 dating tests in 1988, a group of scientists dated the cloth between 1260 and 1390, and ruled that it was probably a medieval forgery.

Paul Damon, a geoscientist who was a member of the 1988 testing team at the University of Arizona in Tucson, had serious reservations about the methods the police used.

"I think that it's malarkey," he said.

The Vatican refused to comment about the face of the 12-year-old Jesus, but Damon expressed bewilderment.

"The boy would not be blond," he said.

Elena Guarnieri, the host of the news special, acknowledged that the fair complexion was a bit fanciful, but said the features counted most.

She also noted that when the police added receding hairlines or wrinkles to mobsters, they had family photographs to work from. They had no such genetic information about the parents of Jesus.

"It's very difficult, because it happened many years ago. We're not magicians," Guarnieri said.

HAVANA - President Fidel Castro said a crude oil deposit has been discovered off Cuba containing up to 100-million barrels, good news for a country that imports about half the petroleum it needs.

"This is the first discovery since 1999," Castro said Friday in a speech to a closed session of the National Assembly. His comments were aired on state television Saturday.

Castro said the deposit was located off the coast of Santa Cruz del Norte, east of Havana, during an exploratory drilling. He said production at the site could begin during 2006.

Cuba currently produces 75,000 barrels daily, about half of what it needs. It imports most of the rest, much of it on favorable terms from ally Venezuela.

Oil specialists believe Cuba's waters in the Gulf of Mexico could contain large quantities of crude, just as those of Mexico and the United States do.

HONDURAN MASSACRE ARRESTS: Authorities on Saturday announced the arrest of two additional suspects in an attack on a bus that killed 28 passengers and wounded 14, while thousands of soldiers searched for more gunmen and families buried the victims. Six children and 22 adults died Thursday when suspected gang members cornered a city bus in the San Pedro Sula suburb of Chamelecon, 125 miles north of the capital, Tegucigalpa, and sprayed it with gunfire.

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