"The parties have moved to Plan B," the official said, saying Sunni, ethnic Kurdish and majority Shi'ite blocs were looking at ways to divide power and resources and to solve the conundrum of Baghdad's mixed population of seven million.

"There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into east and west," said the official, who has long been a proponent of the present government's objectives. "We are extremely worried."

Officials and delegates from a range of political, tribal, regional and religious groups will meet in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone government compound on Saturday for the inaugural meeting of the National Reconciliation Commission.

Maliki, who meets President Bush on Tuesday, has described a 24-point reconciliation plan outlined a month ago as a "last chance" for peace.

So far, however, it is unclear what substance it has beyond vague promises of amnesty for former rebels and a call for political parties' militias to disarm.

U.S. Republicans hope better news from Iraq will help the ruling party at congressional elections in November and maintain hopes that American soldiers can start coming home soon.

MOSQUES BOMBED

Bombs outside Sunni mosques in Khalis, north of the capital, and in the mainly Shi'ite east of Baghdad, each killed one man and wounded two during weekly prayers, police said.

There were also new clashes in Mahmudiya, a violent town just south of the city where nearly 60 people were killed in a mass assault by gunmen on Monday. Three police and three Iraqi soldiers were killed in Friday's fighting, police said.

U.S. troops killed two women and a three-year-old girl during a raid that, they said, also killed two suspected al Qaeda militants in violent Diyala province northwest of Baghdad.

State television announced a four-hour traffic ban in force in the city every Friday would be extended until 7 p.m. A nightly nine-hour curfew from 9 p.m. also remains in effect.

U.S. commanders see a looming fight to the finish in Baghdad between the two-month-old unity government and Sunni Arab rebels with links to al Qaeda and ousted president
Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. ambassador has warned that a greater threat may be the mounting sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi'ites.

That has brought a risk that millions of ordinary but almost universally armed Iraqis may be dragged into all-out civil war.

U.S., Iraqi and international leaders have sounded alarms this week as new data showed tens of thousands of people have fled their homes in fear of death squads and that some 6,000 civilians may have been killed in just two months.

U.S. data showed attacks on security forces in Baghdad averaged 34 a day over several days, compared to 24 in recent months. Baghdad morgue has taken in 1,000 bodies this month.

Describing the capital as a "must-win" for both the rebels and the government, U.S. military spokesman Major General William Caldwell conceded on Thursday that a month-old clampdown in Baghdad had achieved only a "slight downtick" in violence.

The increasing violence has pushed up the number of displaced people in Iraq to at least 162,000, the Ministry of Displaced and Migration said yesterday. A ministry spokesman, Sattar Nowruz, speaking a day after the United States and United Nations sounded alarm bells over a surge in sectarian bloodshed, said there was a "dangerous" rise of about 32,000 internal refugees over the past three weeks.

The abduction on Tuesday and Wednesday of workers from the Sunni Endowment, Iraq's most prominent association of Sunni mosques and shrines, continued a string of high-profile kidnappings of government officials and employees this month. Many of the attacks have been against Sunni officials, leading to speculation that Shiite militias or death squads are involved.

The abduction of Taiseer Najeh Awad al-Mashhadani, a prominent Sunni member of parliament early in the month led to threats from the main Sunni coalition that it would boycott the Government unless it did more to rein in Shiite militias and factions in the Interior Ministry's security forces.

On Saturday, in the most audacious kidnapping attack in recent weeks, 60 gunmen stormed a meeting of the country's top sports officials in Baghdad and abducted 30 people, including guards and the president of Iraq's National Olympic committee, Ahmed al-Hijiya. Six of the hostages were freed the next day, but the rest are unaccounted for.

In another high-profile abduction, the president of the state-owned Northern Oil Company, Adil Mohamed al-Qazaz, was kidnapped in Baghdad on Sunday.

In a carefully timed attack on Wednesday, five people were killed and 18 were wounded when two roadside bombs, followed by a car bomb, exploded near Baghdad's Technology University, police said.

Seven others died in a vegetable shop when a bomb inside a plastic bag exploded.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, a car bomb exploded beside a police patrol on Wednesday, killing two people and wounding eight, including five policemen.

In his first statement since this wave of killings began, the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, struck a defiant note, describing the attacks as an effort to "hinder the political process through thwarting the national reconciliation initiative".

But that effort would continue, he said, with the Government's reconciliation commission meeting tomorrow.

"These crimes do not indicate the power of al-Qaeda, but its weakness," he said, adding that the insurgents had hit areas formerly described as calm.

In Baghdad and across much of the center and south of the country, the rhythms of normal life and commerce are rapidly breaking down in a sign that US and Iraqi government plans to build an effective security force are faltering. Reports of police standing aside as civilians get attacked are common, as are claims by survivors that government security forces, infiltrated by sectarian militias, took part in the killings.

The United Nations estimates 14,338 Iraqis were killed in the first six months of the year, and there are indications the rate of bloodshed is rising; more than 3,000 Iraqis were killed in June, most after the June 7 killing of Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose death US officials had hoped would diminsh violence.

"The government promised security, but the increasing number of bombs in our neighborhood proves that they're failing,'' says Ibrahim Mohammed, who runs a leather-jacket store in Karada where sales have collapsed "to almost nothing" in the past few months.

The escalating violence induced the reclusive top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to call Thursday "on those who are keen for the unity and future of this country ... to exert maximum efforts to stop the bloodletting."

Members of the Shiite endowment board, which oversees Shiite mosques, suspended their work for five days in a sign of solidarity with their Sunni counterparts after 20 members of the Sunni endowment board were kidnapped. But despite such moves to bring unity, violence has continued largely unabated.

US military officials said Thursday that violence jumped in the capital over the past five days from an average of 24 attacks a day to 34 despite a security plan unveiled last month with much fanfare.

"We have not witnessed the reduction in violence one would have hoped for in a perfect world," said US spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell at a press conference. But he said the plan is "a start." Policemen interviewed across the capital say it's too dangerous to confront insurgents and militia groups. Recently in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, men, women, and children were killed in an insurgent assault that witnesses interviewed by Iraqi journalists say local police did nothing to stop.

The kidnapping of Ms. Sammarai's husband illustrates the extent of the problem. Her husband, Ahmed al-Hajia, who heads Iraq's National Olympic Committee, was leading a committee meeting on Saturday at the Oil Culture Center in Baghdad's Bab al-Sheikh neighborhood.

The center is next to Baghdad's busiest bank, a quarter-mile from Baghdad's Major Crimes Unit, and a half-mile from Tahrir Square, where Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled after US forces captured Baghdad.

The area is usually rife with Iraqi police and army checkpoints.

Nevertheless, at about 2 p.m. that day a group of more than 20 gunmen in the uniforms of police commandos roared up to the hall in about 20 white Toyota pickup trucks - the type used by Iraq's police. The men overpowered the few guards and burst inside, according to four witnesses, none of whom wished to divulge their names because they feared retribution.

The attackers were "very calm, very professional, not nervous at all," says a hall employee, pointing to four bullet holes in the ceiling from a rifle burst used to establish control over the hostages.

He and other witnesses say the gunmen spent a methodical 30 minutes separating Olympic Committee officials and journalists from waiters and other employees of the hall, cuffing them with plastic zip ties and blindfolding them. By 3 p.m. they had left with about 30 hostages, Mr. Hajia among them. Since the attack, 10 of the hostages have been released while two of the guards have been found dead.

"What this really proves is how far out of control Iraq is now,'' says an official from the Olympic Committee. "We know there are checkpoints in the area. But any group of men with uniforms, with guns, can just drive wherever they want and no one will dare stop them."

The witnesses refused to speculate on whether police were responsible or insurgents in uniform.

"Answering those kinds of questions is very dangerous,'' one man said. But some quarters seemed convinced the police were involved. Last Saturday US and Iraqi soldiers raided the Major Crimes Unit (MCU).

They arrived after dark without warning and policemen there opened up on the soldiers. A brief firefight ensued, injuring some bystanders. Eventually order was restored and US soldiers went inside saying they were looking for Mr. Hajia and others kidnapped but found nothing, according to a policeman who works there.

The MCU has been considered by US military trainers to be one of the most professional police units in Baghdad. It has managed to sidestep the sectarian loyalties that lead many Baghdad residents to view police as little more than Shiite militias. American Military Police working to improve the unit's effectiveness had gone home for the day shortly before the US raid.

"Clearly they got a bad tip, but I'm very, very angry,'' says the police officer. "We've worked closely with the Americans, we've taken a lot of risks and they couldn't have handled this in a different way?" For him, he says the raid was the last straw.

In recent months he says the unit has captured a number of men they believed were running Shiite death-squads in the city. But the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, secured the alleged killers' freedom in all cases. "There's too much interference from politicians, from the Americans, to do this job properly." He says that he and five other senior members of the unit are likely to quit soon.

Sammarai says her husband's kidnapping was political, and not financially motivated. She charges there are opponents of her husband who wanted to drag the committee into sectarian politics and were angry at his insistence that "sports and politics shouldn't be mixed."

"Our country is bleeding. All my husband wanted to do was build something - he helped get us to Athens, he was putting the past behind us. This is so unfair," says Sammarai. Another official on the committee, who didn't attend the meeting, also says he believes the attack may have been undertaken at the behest of Hajia's rivals. He points out that the hostages released so far have included Shiites, Sunnis and Christians, which implies it wasn't motivated by sectarian hatred.

"The extra medical costs of treating drug-related injuries occurring in hospitals alone conservatively amount to $3.5 billion a year, and this estimate does not take into account lost wages and productivity or additional health care costs," the institute added.

One example -- a Denver hospital gave a newborn infant a tenfold overdose of penicillin in case it had been infected with syphilis from its mother in 1996.

Nurses balked at giving the baby five injections so administered the medicine in what turned out to be an unusual and improper way -- intravenously. The baby died, and the autopsy showed it did not have syphilis and never needed the treatment in the first place.

"This case illustrates that medication errors are almost never the fault of a single practitioner or caused by the failure of a single element," the report read.

"According to one estimate, in any given week, four out of every five U.S. adults will use prescription medicines, over-the-counter drugs, or dietary supplements of some sort, and nearly one-third of adults will take five or more different medications," the report said.

ONE-A-DAY

"The committee estimates that on average a hospital patient is subject to at least one medication error per day."

Errors occur when prescriptions are written, filled, administered, when patients are monitored and when drugs interact with one another, according to the committee of experts who wrote the report.

"Our recommendations boil down to ensuring that consumers are fully informed about how to take medications safely and achieve the desired results, and that health care providers have the tools and data necessary to prescribe, dispense, and administer drugs as safely as possible and to monitor for problems," said J. Lyle Bootman, dean of the University of Arizona's College of Pharmacy and a committee chairman.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it was already working on some of the recommendations, including better patient education and labeling.

Health care providers typically do not inform the patient or the patient's guardians about errors unless injury or death results, the report said. But if they did, it would help make everyone involved more aware of the errors and would encourage them to take more care, the report said.

"Electronic prescribing is safer because it eliminates problems with handwriting legibility and, when combined with decision-support tools, automatically alerts prescribers to possible interactions, allergies, and other potential problems," the institute added.

It said that by 2010 all providers should be using e-prescribing systems and all pharmacies should be able to receive prescriptions electronically.

In the paper, Dr Zavos and his colleague Karl Illmensee described how they copied the technique used by UK scientists to make Dolly the sheep - known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). They said they took DNA from the man's skin cells and fused it inside three eggs taken from the woman's ovaries, which were given a burst of electricity to encourage them to develop as embryos.

After three days, the paper said, one of the embryos had reached the four-cell stage and "was subsequently transferred into the patient's uterus". Two weeks later, blood tests showed the 35-year-old woman was not pregnant.

The paper said: "This is the first evidence of the creation and transfer of a cloned human embryo for reproductive purposes. Even though no pregnancy was established, human reproduction via SCNT may be possible and applicable in the future." The paper did not say where the pair performed the experiments, which would be illegal in the UK.

Dr Zavos told the Guardian yesterday that he submitted the paper a year ago and had subsequently transferred cloned human embryos to another five women, including a 52-year-old Briton earlier this year. None had resulted in pregnancies.

He confirmed that each was an attempt to produce a cloned baby and said he accepted the risks involved.

"People are right to have concerns, we have those concerns ourselves. Our team is prepared to subject any pregnancy to a very strict scrutiny and make sure they are taken securely and safely to completion."

Richard Gardner, a cloning expert at Oxford University and chairman of the Royal Society's working group on stem cell research, said: "We wanted Zavos to publish his findings and now he has, but a four-cell embryo is very early stage and doesn't tell you anything about whether it would be able to develop further."

According to the paper, the couple involved in the research did not want the scientists to run invasive tests on the embryo to see whether it was healthy because of their religious beliefs. Dr Zavos said the subsequent transferred embryos were more advanced, up to 10-12 cells each.

Professor Gardner supported calls for a worldwide ban on reproductive cloning because he said the technology was currently unproven, but said the technique could possibly be used in future to treat infertility in rare cases where the man produces no sperm.

"It's always difficult to make the decision about when you should be able to transfer animal work into humans."

In a separate paper published in the journal Fertility and Sterility in April, Dr Zavos' group described experiments that created dozens of hybrid embryos made by fusing human DNA inside cow eggs. These embryos were not intended to be transferred to women, but to help improve the cloning process.