LOS ANGELES: The $4 Coiled Hair Stella gold coin from 1880 is scheduled to be auctioned on September 23 by Bonhams in Los Angeles and could pull in up to $1.5 million.

The extraordinary coin containing six grams of pure gold was struck in the United States, but never released into circulation and will be sold in a lot with 26 other coins worth up to $8 million.

Paul Song, director of rare coins for Bonhams said, "That's an average lot value of almost $300,000 per coin. That may not be a Monet painting but in my world, that's pretty amazing. It's been a privilege to handle them, and they are gorgeous, just because they're gold, perfectly struck and the designs are really incredible."

Song explained that the rare miniature work of art, featuring a representation of Liberty, was designed to match the weight of coinage of countries in the Latin Monetary Union like France, Belgium and Switzerland, to make inter-country trading easier.

LAHORE: Police on Saturday re-arrested four suspects allegedly involved in five-year old girl rape, who were released on Friday.

Police said that Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) was suspend due flawed prove and releasing the suspects after preliminary investigation.

The police have not been able to make any solid development into the barbaric incident, in which a minor girl, daughter of a WAPDA employee was subjected to rape after being abducted outside her house.

Doctors say although the child was physically stable, she was battling a trauma and mental agony.

BHUBANESWAR: Security forces killed 14 Maoists in a firefight in eastern India on Saturday, police said, marking the latest bloodshed in a long conflict in which the rebels have been battling to overthrow the government.

It was the single biggest rebel death toll in Orissa state from one incident and came amid an intense anti-Maoist campaign in the area conducted over the past month, police said.

“Fourteen rebels, including one woman cadre, were killed. We are awaiting further information,” Orissa state police director general Prakash Mishra told AFP.

There were no immediate reports of casualties among security forces, Mishra added.

The Maoists have grown from a rag-tag band of ideologues into a potent insurgent force, creating a so-called “Red Corridor” that stretches throughout central and eastern India.

Saturday's battle occurred in the Padia forest area of mineral-rich but impoverished Orissa state some 650 kilometers (400 miles) southwest of state capital Bhubaneswar.

The security forces, acting on a tip-off, were conducting a sweep of the area for rebels when they came across the Maoist camp, police said, adding authorities now were looking for more insurgents in the area.

The area where the battle took place was close to rebel-hit Chhattisgarh state. Police said a cache of explosives, arms and ammunition and Maoist literature was seized from the camp site.

Local media reported the rebel group camping in the forest was suspected of involvement in a May 25 ambush by Maoists of a convoy of Congress leaders in neighbouring Chhattisgarh state.

That attack in a remote tribal belt killed some 24 people, including 12 local Congress leaders and supporters.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described the Maoists as the country's most serious internal security threat and there are frequent outbreaks of violence in areas in which the rebels are present.

Maoist rebels have been fighting in the forests and rural areas for what they say are the rights of tribal people, who have some of India's highest rates of illiteracy and poverty, and landless farmers for decades.

They demand land and jobs for the poor, and want to establish a communist society by toppling what they call India's “semi-colonial, semi-feudal” form of rule. The revolt is believed to have cost tens of thousands of lives.

The Maoists are believed to be present in at least 20 states but are most active in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, occupying thousands of square kilometers (miles) of land.

Critics believe attempts to end the revolt through security offensives are doomed to fail, saying the real solution is better governance and development.

ISTANBUL (AP) — Canada's foreign minister John Baird is calling Syria's offer to begin providing information on its chemical arsenal 30 days after it signs an international convention banning such weapons "ridiculous and absurd."

Baird said Syrian President Bashar Assad could not be given extra time. Baird said: "This is a man, who up until a week ago denied that they had any such weapons."

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who joined Baird at a news conference Saturday in Istanbul, also expressed skepticism, saying that Assad was playing for time while continuing to commit atrocities.

The comments come as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were in Geneva negotiating a Russian proposal to inventory, isolate and eventually destroy Syria's chemical weapons stocks.

Kerry has rejected Syria's suggestion that it should turn over information, rather than weapons.

Davutoglu said Turkey welcomed the diplomatic initiative to remove Syria's chemical weapons, but it was still incumbent on the international community to bring to justice the Syrian officials responsible for crimes against humanity.

Western countries blame Assad for the use of chemical weapons, although he denies blames rebels engaged in a 2-year-old civil war against his government.

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LUKA: Thirty-seven people were killed when a fire swept through a wooden psychiatric hospital in northwest Russia overnight Thursday, in the latest tragedy to hit the country's mental health institutions.

The fire was started by a patient who was either smoking or deliberately set fire to his bed at the hospital in the village of Luka, 220 kilometres (137 miles) southeast of Saint Petersburg, officials said.

The institution was made out of wood and officials said it had been previously warned by the judicial authorities to improve its fire security.

A criminal probe has been opened into suspected negligence.

"During a fire in the Oksochi psychiatric hospital 37 people died," regional investigators said in a statement, adding that 10 people have already been pulled from the debris.

"A 46-year-old nurse who was saving people perished in the fire," investigators added.

The fire, which broke out in the middle of the night, reduced the aged wooden building on the outskirts of the village to smouldering wreckage.

Rescue teams were combing through the debris, and bodies in black plastic bags were taken away from the scene.

Novgorod region governor Sergei Mitin told AFP at the scene that 23 people had been rescued.

Ilya Denisov, a representative of the emergencies ministry, did not rule out that more survivors could be found.

He said the firefighters were quick to react but that by the time they arrived the fire had consumed the entire building.

Local authorities said the hospital housed patients with grave psychological disorders, making evacuation even more complicated.

Lidiya Vasilyeva, 40, who lives near the hospital, said the fire broke out around 2:00 am.

"The fire spread very quickly," she said. "Many patients were pushed out of the windows, many did not want to come out or did not come out immediately, it was very scary."

She said it was difficult to pinpoint the cause of the blaze but suggested a patient might be at fault.

"In the summer they brought a patient here who they say was suffering from pyromania," she told AFP.

Investigators said they had opened a criminal probe into suspected negligence causing death.

"According to preliminary information, one of the patients set fire to himself and his bed," said the investigative committee, a Russian law enforcement agency that probes major cases.

Officials said concerns had already been aired about the state of the building, and Russian state television said the authorities had been planning to close down the hospital.

"This building had a weak resistance to fire. It was made of wood. The administration had been told by the legal authorities to remedy numerous violations in fire security by August 1," said the head of oversight at the emergencies ministry, Yuri Deshovykh.

"But this was not done," he was quoted as saying.

The Kremlin's human rights envoy, Vladimir Lukin, sounded the alarm over the state of psychiatric hospitals in the country, calling for a joint effort to improve oversight.

"The entire society, people should protect citizens who have found themselves in a unique, difficult situation when they cannot protect themselves," Lukin said on popular radio station Moscow Echo.

The fire was the latest tragedy to hit a medical institution in Russia, which struggles with outdated Soviet-era infrastructure and lax security procedures.

In April, a fire that ravaged a psychiatric hospital in the Moscow region killed 38 people, most of them patients engulfed by flames as they slept behind barred windows.

In 2006, a fire in a Moscow drug rehabilitation clinic killed 45 women, many of whom were trapped by metal bars on the windows that staff could not open.