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'Miracle' baby recovering well from mermaid operation

By wire services
Published June 3, 2005

LIMA, Peru - Doctors on Thursday gave the world its first peek at 13-month-old Milagros Cerron since surgery to separate her fused legs in the second such successful operation on record to correct "mermaid syndrome."

Grasping a pink and green plastic toy dog, the bright-eyed baby was alert and tranquil while Dr. Luis Rubio flexed her toes and spoke to her softly.

Rubio said Thursday, 28 hours after the operation, that her condition was satisfactory with full blood flow in each of her legs.

"The blood is reaching the tips of her toes with good pressure, constant temperature," he said, adding that the stitches will be removed in 10 days.

TOKYO - North Korea issued a series of verbal attacks on Thursday through its Korean Central News Agency that ruled out cooperation on retrieving American war dead from its territory, called the American dispatch of Nighthawk stealth fighter jets to South Korea "tantamount to turning a gun" on Korean unity, and then called Vice President Dick Cheney a "bloodthirsty beast."

In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the comments were "more of the same kind of bluster we hear from North Korea from time to time" and serve only to "further isolate themselves from the international community," Reuters reported. He called on North Korea to return to the six-nation talks about its nuclear program.

PARIS - In a struggle to win back the confidence of his people, President Jacques Chirac shuffled his Cabinet on Thursday, firing his foreign minister and welcoming a political foe back into the Cabinet as interior minister.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's team offered a streamlined government marked by a new foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, and the return of ambitious Nicolas Sarkozy, who gets back his cherished post as interior minister. The center-right Cabinet was to get right to work, scheduling a first meeting today.

The moves followed the bruising defeat by French voters of a constitution for Europe on Sunday, which was seen as a rejection of Chirac's presidency. In poll results issued Thursday, Chirac's approval rating had plunged 8 points since April, to 24 percent, the lowest level in his 10 years in office.

EU CONSTITUTION: Chastened by the voters, the Dutch government on Thursday withdrew a plan to ratify the European constitution, as the leaders of Germany and Luxembourg prepared for a European Union summit June 16-17 on the deepening crisis.

In Latvia, Parliament ratified the proposed charter. It was the 10th nation to approve the treaty.

UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations' top HIV/AIDS official acknowledged at a conference Thursday that it was no longer realistic to hope that the world will meet its goal of halting and reversing the spread of the pandemic by 2015.

Peter Piot, head of the U.N. campaign to combat AIDS, told reporters that it was still "possible" to reach that goal. But HIV/AIDS is spreading much faster than efforts to rein it in crucial regions including Eastern Europe and Central America, and stopping the spread isn't realistic, he said.

WASHINGTON - Preservationists announced Thursday that the Bush administration has eased the trade embargo against Cuba enough to allow at least the first steps toward saving Ernest Hemingway's crumbling home on a hilltop near Havana.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation put Finca Vigia - the Cuban home where Hemingway lived from 1939 to 1960 and where he wrote The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls - on its 2005 list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

In the nearly two decades that the list has been issued, this marks the first time a spot outside the United States has been included, said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust. He said preservationists have received permission from the Treasury Department to send a team of experts to prepare a preservation plan.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. has word of potential terrorist attacks in Uzbekistan, possibly against U.S. interests, and gave permission Thursday for some workers at the American Embassy and relatives to leave. The State Department also warned U.S. citizens to put off all but essential travel to Uzbekistan.

[Last modified June 3, 2005, 01:17:39]