KFC to use no-trans-fat oil in chicken, KFC Corp. said Monday it will start using zero trans fat soybean oil for its Original Recipe and Extra Crispy fried chicken, Potato Wedges and other menu items.

The news preceded the Board of Health's first public hearing Monday on a plan to make New York the first U.S. city to ban restaurants from serving food containing artificial trans fats.

KFC's systemwide rollout is to be completed by April 2007, but the company said many of its approximately 5,500 restaurants already have switched to low linolenic soybean oil, replacing partially hydrogenated soybean oil.

KFC President Gregg Dedrick said there would be no change in the taste of the chicken and other food items.

"There is no compromise," he said at a Manhattan news conference. "Nothing is more important to us than the quality of our food and preserving the terrific taste of our product."

Crispy Strips, Wings, Boneless Wings, Buffalo and Crispy Snacker Sandwiches, Popcorn Chicken and Twisters also are part of the menu change.

"We've tested a wide variety of oils available and we're pleased we have found a way to keep our chicken finger lickin' good — but with zero grams of trans fat," Dedrick said.

Some products including biscuits will still be made with trans fat while KFC keeps looking for alternatives, he said.

The change applies only to U.S. restaurants for now, Dedrick said. He said the company was trying to find replacement oils for its overseas restaurants. He added that KFC outlets in some countries already use trans fat-free oils, but he would not say which countries.

Artificial trans fat is so common that the average American eats 4.7 pounds of it a year, according to the Food and Drug Administration, yet so unhealthy, city health officials say it belongs in the same category as food spoiled by poor refrigeration or rodent droppings.

The switch was applauded by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which sued the Louisville, Ky.-based KFC in June over the trans fat content of its chicken.

KFC isn't the only business preparing for a trans-fat-free future.

Dow AgroScience, a maker of three types of zero-trans-fat canola and sunflower seed oils, said it has ramped up production capacity to 1.5 billion pounds a year — enough to replace about a third of the 5 billion pounds of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil sold annually in the U.S.

Wendy's, the national burger chain, has already switched to a zero-trans fat oil. McDonald's had announced that it intended to do so as well in 2003, but has yet to follow through.

If New York City approves banning food with artificial trans fats, it would only affect restaurants, not grocery stores, and wouldn't extend beyond the city's limits. But experts said the city's foodservice industry is so large, any change in its rules is likely to ripple nationwide.

"It's huge. It's going to be the trendsetter for the entire country," said Suzanne Vieira, director of the culinary nutrition program at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., where students are experimenting with substitute oils and shortenings.

New York's thousands of independently owned restaurants are beginning to look for ways to make changes too — not all happily.

Richard Lipsky, a spokesman for the Neighborhood Retail Alliance, said many eatery owners rely on ingredients prepared elsewhere, and aren't always aware whether the foods they sell contain trans fats.

Invented in the early 1900s, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil was initially believed to be a healthy substitute for natural fats like butter or lard. It was also cheaper, performed better under high heat and had a longer shelf life.

Today, the oil is used as a shortening in baked goods like cookies, crackers and doughnuts, as well as in deep frying.

Ironically, many big fast food companies only became dependent on hydrogenated oil a decade and a half ago when they were pressured by health groups to do something about saturated fat.

McDonald's emptied its french fryers of beef tallow in 1990 and filled them with what was then thought to be "heart healthy" partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.

"They did so in all innocence, trying to do the right thing," said Jacobson, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "Everybody thought it was safe. We thought it was safe."

Some restaurants were still completing the changeover when the first major study appeared indicating that the hydrogenated oils were just as bad for you, if not worse.

When eaten, trans fats significantly raise the level of so-called "bad" cholesterol in the blood, clogging arteries and causing heart disease. Researchers at Harvard's School of Public Health estimated that trans fats contribute to 30,000 U.S. deaths a year.

"This is something we'd like to dismiss from our food supply," said Dr. Robert H. Eckel, immediate past president of the American Heart Association.

Suburban gangs defy French police,Immigrant suburbs sometimes look like war zones
Police responsible for law enforcement in France's tense immigrant-majority housing estates liken their job to a military mission."What we have is urban warfare," according to Patrick Trotignon, a 30-year veteran working for the police union Synergie.

Gaelle James, an officer who works in Montreuil, a poor suburb just east of Paris, agrees.

"We are confronted by ever more criminals who are getting ever more violent," .

"They are now out to kill cops."

This may sound like hyperbole - but a year after a wave of rioting spread through France's ghettos, a number of attacks in recent weeks seem to confirm this grim assessment.

On 13 October, for instance, police responding to an emergency call in Epinay-sur-Seine, north of Paris, drove into a trap - two cars blocked their vehicle, which was set upon by dozens of youths wielding iron bars and knives.

The officers fought their way out without firing their guns, but one ended up in hospital with a broken jaw.


Ms James says this kind of attack is becoming worryingly frequent - washing machines have even been dropped from tower blocks on official vehicles.

"Doctors and other emergency services no longer venture into some estates," she notes.

The increasingly organised nature of violence is highlighted in a recent report by the interior ministry's intelligence service.

A future wave of suburban disturbances, it warns darkly, could target "the last remaining institutional representatives in a number of areas - the police".

Filming attacks

According to Mr Trotignon, the attacks are the work of teams structured along military lines.

"Operations are planned by senior commanders, with underlings making emergency calls and the foot soldiers carrying out the assaults," he says.



What's the point of taking risks to catch criminals when they can just walk out of court?
Gaelle James ,Police lieutenant "And the icing on the cake is filming the whole thing with your mobile phone."

The violence in French suburbs has devastating consequences on police morale. "Those posted there can't leave fast enough," Mr Trotignon says.

The impoverished area of Seine-Saint-Denis north-east of Paris - where the 2005 riots began - is "haemorrhaging" officers, he adds, as those with enough seniority get transferred to the provinces.

This high turnover means that those tasked with France's most dangerous districts tend to be young - as the prefect, the top official in Seine-Saint-Denis, noted in a leaked note to the interior ministry.

The prefect and many in the police blame this situation on soft judges reluctant to jail the young offenders.

After last year's disturbances, the prefect wrote, only one minor in Seine-Saint-Denis was imprisoned out of 85 prosecuted.

"What's the point of taking risks to catch criminals when they can just walk out of court?" Ms James complains.

'Wildlife park'

According to Mr Trotignon, the head of the Seine-Saint-Denis tribunal is nicknamed "Father Christmas" by delinquents.

But few in the suburbs feel they are getting fair - let alone preferential - treatment from the authorities.

Contempt for police, in particular, is almost universal among young men. Here is a sample of quotes from youths recently interviewed in housing estates near Paris:


"We don't want a police station here. Some cops are racist."
"Riots are caused by police. They think we are all delinquents."
"The cops don't respect us. They come in and smash doors.
They systematically suspect blacks and Arabs."
"Some cops are aggressive and use racial slurs when they check you."
Older residents, of course, express different views. They deeply resent the rampant lawlessness and want more, not fewer, police.



Youths from the French suburbs say they think all the ingredients for chaos remain
"Cars are vandalised and youths fight all the time, but when we call the cops they never come," complains a North African man living in Clichy-sous-Bois, a dismal ghetto north-east of Paris.

Nadir Dendoune, a 34-year-old journalist living in l'Ile-Saint-Denis, says what is needed above all is better policing.

"When I was young, the cops were patrolling on mopeds and talked to us," he recalls.

"Now they don't know us. They just patrol the area locked in their cars and look around as if they were in a wildlife park."

Beatings

In 2002 Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy decided to abandon community policing based on prevention in favour of a strict law-and-order approach.

Beat officers were replaced by shock "anti-crime brigades" who police the suburbs mostly from outside. Many local officials and youth workers in the suburbs feel this was a dreadful mistake.


"In this area community-based policing played a very positive role. Officers did real work in the estates," says Clichy's deputy mayor, Olivier Klein.

"Now they go in only for tough security missions, but this does not make people more secure."

Laurence Ribeaucourt, a social worker in the Clichy area, says the riots reveal a growing divide between police and people.

"For the past three years things have been getting steadily worse," she says. "Youths tell me they have been beaten up in custody and harassed by police."

Whether France's housing estates need soft "prevention" or tough repression is a matter of debate.

What is beyond dispute, however, is that the law is no longer enforced in many of France's deprived suburbs.


Relations between large sections of the population and the police have broken down.

Both sides are afraid of each other and as long as the climate of fear prevails, the urban warfare will continue.

South Africa: Mbeki's New HIV/Aids Focus is Applauded, PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki's move to repackage SA's fight against HIV/AIDS seems to be paying off. Mbeki has earned himself a breather from calls to sack his bungling health minister by placing Deputy President Phumzile-Mlambo Ngcuka in charge of managing the pandemic.

Mbeki and his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang have become objects of ridicule both here and abroad for their unorthodox and often denialist views on HIV/AIDS.


In contrast Mlambo-Ngcuka received rapturous applause at a stakeholder conference on Friday in Johannesburg when she said that the bickering between role players had set the country back in its fight against the disease.

Government's new anti-AIDS drive is also beginning to win international recognition. On Friday a report in the US-based Washington Post hailed what it called SA's "dramatic shift on AIDS".

"The beetroot and all that lemon stuff is out the window. These guys are now serious about getting it right," an adviser involved in recasting government's policy told the influential daily.

He was referring to Tshabalala-Msimang's much-ridiculed obsession with vegetables as a method to manage the disease.

Organisers of this weekend's conference said the minister, who was discharged from hospital on Friday after suffering from a lung ailment, was not invited to the conference to ensure unity and no controversy.

In September, after an United Nations AIDS conference where Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy for AIDS in Africa, accused the South African government of expounding HIV/AIDS theories "more worthy of a lunatic fringe than a concerned and compassionate state".

The attack, aided by internal pressure from labour and civic groups prompted Mbeki to announce a shake-up which sidelined Tshabalala-Msimang and established an inter-ministerial committee to oversee the implementation of the comprehensive plan against HIV/AIDS. The plan included reviving the South African National AIDS Council (Sanac), now headed by Mlambo-Ngcuka.

A council workshop on Tuesday will help to plot the way forward.

The AIDS conference, attended by a number of civil society groups, including the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the South African Council of Churches, as well as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), aims to come up with a plan to help government curb HIV/AIDS.

Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi told the deputy president: "Now you've come and you have been brilliant... It looks like the days of marching against the government (on being ineffective regarding HIV/AIDS) are over. We are happy people."


Vavi said SA was facing a disaster regarding HIV/AIDS, and the bold leadership and unified action needed was finally taking place.

TAC general secretary Sipho Mthathi saluted the spirit with which Mlambo-Ngcuka has approached the AIDS pandemic.

More than 5-million of SA's 47-million people are thought to be living with HIV, which is one of the highest infection rates in the world. Over 1000 people die of AIDS everyday.

Iraq PM says he's not America's man,US PRESIDENT George Bush has had a video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki after days of angry comments by Iraqi leaders about what they regard as US meddling.

According to an aide to Mr Maliki, the Iraqi leader said that he was "a friend of the United States but not America's man in Iraq".

The remarks appear to be part of a growing schism between the Iraqi Government and its US supporters.

Iraqi leaders say that the US has been too meddlesome and that they would not be swayed by US pressure over how to conduct internal affairs.

Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, who sat in on the talks, said that during the session Mr Maliki made "no demands, and it was a very cordial discussion".

But it was also one in which the Prime Minister, he said, made it clear that he wanted to move quickly towards "an Iraqi assumption of command and control" over the forces operating in Baghdad and elsewhere.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr Maliki said: "I am now Prime Minister and overall commander of the armed forces, yet I cannot move a single company without coalition approval because of the UN mandate. If anyone is responsible for the poor security situation in Iraq it is the coalition."

NEW YORK TIMES

Ford Worker Wins Lottery as Plant Closes, A worker at the Ford Motor Co. Atlanta Assembly Plant won $225,000 from a Georgia Lottery scratch-off ticket as he was headed to work for the last time, the day production ended at the plant.

Jerome McInnis said he plans to invest most of his winnings and the prize "will enable me to take care of everything."

Jerome McInnis, 52, of College Park, Ga., bought a $5 instant game ticket Friday morning when he stopped for gas at US Amoco in College Park.

In a statement issued by the Georgia Lottery Corp., McInnis said he was so excited when he won the prize, he drove off without putting gas in his tank even though he had paid for the gas.

The 13-year employee of the Hapeville, Ga., plant won the first of six top prizes in the "Bah Humbucks" instant game, the lottery statement said.

McInnis said he had opted to take an early retirement package after Ford announced in January that it would idle the plant. About 1,950 employees lost their jobs and were given their choice of one of eight kinds of severance package when the plant ceased production of the Ford Taurus sedan Friday morning.

"This came at a great time. It's just exciting to win like this," he said in a statement. McInnis was not immediately available to be interviewed Friday because he was still working at the plant for his last day, said lottery spokesman J.B. Landroche.

McInnis said in the statement he plans to invest most of his winnings and the prize "will enable me to take care of everything."

The Atlanta Assembly Plant had been producing cars since 1947. In the last five years it was ranked as one of the company's top 10 most productive assembly lines in North America. Friday's milestone concluded 21 years of producing the popular sedan, with sales of more than 7 million vehicles.