A laboratory technician for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been placed under observation for possible exposure to the deadly Ebola virus due to an apparent mix-up in lab specimens, the Atlanta-based agency said on Wednesday.

The technician, who was working on Monday with Ebola specimens that were supposed to have been inactivated but which may instead 

have contained live virus, will be monitored for signs of infection for 21 days, the disease's incubation period, CDC officials said.

The error follows two high-profile cases of mishandled samples of anthrax and avian influenza at the CDC earlier this year that called into question safety practices at the highly respected research institute and drew criticism from Capitol Hill.

CDC spokeswoman Barbara Reynolds told Reuters the technician's risk of exposure to Ebola, even if the virus were active, was believed to be low and that the worker was not being quarantined while under observation.

She said a small number of other CDC employees who entered the lab where the samples in question were handled also "were assessed and none require monitoring."

"There was no possible exposure outside the secure laboratory at CDC and no exposure or risk to the public," the agency said in a statement. Lab scientists discovered on Tuesday what had transpired, and reported it to superiors within an hour, it said.

The problem occurred when active Ebola virus samples were believed to have been mixed up with specimens that had been rendered inactive for further testing in a lower-security lab down the hall, Reynolds said.

When inactivated specimens turned up the next day in storage, lab personnel realized that they apparently had transferred the wrong samples, ones that had contained active virus material, out of the higher-security lab, Reynolds said.

CDC officials could not be certain because the material in question had by then been destroyed and the lower-security lab decontaminated under routine safety procedures, she said.

The technician who handled the samples had worn protective gloves and a gown but not a face mask, she said. Ebola virus is not airborne. In a lab environment, it could be transmitted from a contaminated surface through physical contact that spreads the virus to the eyes, nose or mouth of an individual.

ANTHRAX INCIDENT

The mishap resembled the anthrax incident, in which researchers mistakenly believed they had transferred an inactivated sample of bacteria to a lower-security lab where workers wear less-protective gear. No illnesses resulted from that breach.

Then as now, the CDC temporarily halted the transfer of samples at its high-security labs while it reviewed its protocols.

In July an agency scientist, Dr. Michael Bell, was appointed to a new role overseeing lab safety and a panel of independent experts was formed to advise the institute on such issues.

Bell has since returned to his previous post, Reynolds told Reuters, though she did not say whether anyone else had assumed the lead role for lab safety.

"I am troubled by this incident in our Ebola research laboratory in Atlanta," the CDC director, Dr. Tom Frieden, said of the latest error. "Thousands of laboratory scientists in more than 150 labs throughout CDC have taken extraordinary steps in recent months to improve safety."

The CDC also was criticized by some for not doing more to prepare the U.S. medical establishment to deal with Ebola when a Liberian man visiting Dallas in October was diagnosed with the disease after initially being turned away from a hospital emergency room there.

Two nurses who treated that patient before he died ended up contracting the virus but survived. They are the only two people known to have been infected on U.S. soil during the current Ebola epidemic, which has killed more than 7,500 people, most of them in West Africa.

Reuters

Queen Elizabeth II used her traditional Christmas broadcast Thursday to call for reconciliation throughout the United Kingdom and to praise medical workers fighting Ebola in Africa.

She said it will take time to heal divisions in Scotland, where a referendum was held this year on whether to remain part of Britain, and praised progress resolving the conflict in Northern Ireland. Elizabeth cited

 the "Christmas truce" in 1914 as an example to be remembered.

"Something remarkable did happen that Christmas, exactly 100 years ago today," she said. "Without any instruction or command, the shooting stopped and German and British soldiers met in No Man's Land. Photographs were taken and gifts exchanged. It was a Christmas truce."

She said German forces sang "Silent Night" so that it could be heard on the British side of the front line.

"That carol is still much-loved today, a legacy of the Christmas truce, and a reminder to us all that even in the unlikeliest of places hope can still be found," the queen said before wishing everyone a happy Christmas.

The queen writes her own Christmas speech, which is pre-recorded and televised in many parts of the world. She made her first Christmas broadcast on radio in 1952.

The queen and her close family celebrated Christmas at the sprawling Sandringham estate in Norfolk.

The royals attended a church service Christmas morning before a gala lunch. Prince William and his pregnant wife Kate were present, but their toddler son, Prince George, didn't go to church.

Kate told one person in the crowd she didn't bring 1-year-old George because he would have made too much noise.

Prince Charles' wife Camilla also didn't attend because of a painful back injury suffered earlier this month, officials said.

The queen arrived by car while the other royals walked from her estate to the village church.

Hundreds of well-wishers lined the route to the church to exchange Christmas greetings with the royals. Some shouted with glee as Prince Harry walked by. One visitor from Spain told reporters she had asked Harry to marry her.

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby cancelled his Christmas sermon because of a severe cold. In a statement he expressed "great regret" about his inability to preach his planned sermon about the true meaning of Christmas.

Church officials said the sermon at Canterbury Cathedral would instead be delivered by the Dean of Canterbury Robert Willis.

AP

The police killings of unarmed blacks in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere — and the investigations and tumultuous protests they inspired — was the top news story of 2014, according to The Associated Press' annual poll of U.S. editors and news directors.

In a year crowded with dramatic and often wrenching news developments around the world, the No. 2 story was the devastating outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, followed by the conflict in Iraq and Syria fueled by the brutal actions of Islamic State militants.

Among the 85 voters casting ballots, first-place votes were spread among 15 different stories. The Ferguson entry received 22 first-place votes, Ebola 11 and the Islamic State story 12.

The voting was conducted before the announcement that the United States and Cuba were re-establishing diplomatic relations and Sony Pictures' decision to withdraw its film "The Interview" in the wake of computer hacking and threats.

Last year's top story was the glitch-plagued rollout of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, followed by the Boston Marathon bombing. The continuing saga of "Obamacare" made this year's Top 10 as well, coming in fifth.

The first AP top-stories poll was conducted in 1936, when editors chose the abdication of Britain's King Edward VIII.

Here are 2014's top 10 stories, in order:

POLICE KILLINGS: Some witnesses said 18-year-old Michael Brown had his hands up in surrender, others said he was making a charge. But there was no dispute he was unarmed and shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson. In New York City, another unarmed black, Eric Garner, was killed after a white officer put him in a chokehold during an arrest for unauthorized cigarette sales. After grand juries opted not to indict the officers, protests erupted across the country, punctuated by chants of "Hands up, don't shoot" and "I can't breathe." In both cases, federal officials launched investigations.

EBOLA OUTBREAK: The first wave of Ebola deaths, early in the year, attracted little notice. By March, the World Health Organization was monitoring the outbreak. By midsummer, it was the worst Ebola epidemic on record, with a death toll now approaching 7,000, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. A Liberian man with the disease died at a Dallas hospital, followed by a few other cases involving U.S. health workers, sparking worries about the readiness of the U.S. health system.

ISLAMIC STATE: Militant fighters from the Islamic State group startled the world with rapid, brutal seizures of territory in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. and its allies responded with air strikes, hoping that Iraqi and Kurdish forces on the ground could retake captured areas. Revulsion toward Islamic State intensified as it broadcast videos of its beheadings of several Western hostages.

US ELECTIONS: For months, political oddsmakers sought to calculate if Republicans had a chance to gain control of the U.S. Senate. It turned out there was no suspense — the GOP won 54 of the Senate's 100 seats, expanded its already strong majority in the House of Representatives, and gained at the state level, where Republicans now hold 31 governorships.

OBAMACARE: Millions more Americans signed up to be covered under President Obama's health care initiative, but controversy about "Obamacare" raged on. Criticism from Republicans in Congress was relentless, many GOP-governed states balked at participation, and opinion polls suggested most Americans remained skeptical about the program.

MALAYSIA AIRLINES MYSTERY: En route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board. In the weeks that followed, aircraft, ships and searchers from two-dozen countries mobilized to look in vain for the wreckage on the Indian Ocean floor. To date, there's no consensus as to why the plane vanished.

IMMIGRATION: Frustrated by an impasse in Congress, President Obama took executive actions in November to curb deportations for many immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally. GOP leaders in the House and Senate pledged efforts to block the president's moves. Prospects for reform legislation were dimmed earlier in the year by the influx of unaccompanied Central American minors arriving at the U.S. border, causing shelter overloads and case backlogs.

TURMOIL IN UKRAINE: A sometimes bloody revolt that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych in February triggered a chain of events that continued to roil Ukraine as the year drew to a close. Russia, worried that Ukraine would tilt increasingly toward the West, annexed the Crimean peninsula in March and backed an armed separatist insurgency in coal-rich eastern regions of Ukraine. The U.S. and its allies responded with sanctions against Russia.

GAY MARRIAGE: Due to a wave of federal court rulings, 19 more U.S. states began allowing same-sex marriages, raising the total to 35 states encompassing about 64 percent of the population. Given that one U.S. court of appeals bucked the trend by upholding state bans on gay marriage, there was widespread expectation that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the issue and make a national ruling.

VA SCANDAL: The Department of Veterans Affairs became embroiled in a nationwide scandal over allegations of misconduct and cover-ups. Several senior officials were fired or forced to resign, including VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. At the heart of the scandal was the VA hospital in Phoenix; allegations surfaced that 40 veterans died while awaiting treatment there.

AP

Colorado health officials awarded $8 million in research grants on Wednesday to study the use of medical marijuana in the treatment of symptoms associated with Parkinson's disease, childhood epilepsy and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Colorado was one of the first two U.S. states to legalize recreational pot use, and it is among 23 states and the District of Columbia that permit use of the drug for medicinal purposes.

But weed remains illegal under federal law for any reason, leading to a dearth of funding for medical marijuana research, and meaning results are limited and largely anecdotal.

Awarding eight grants for landmark peer-reviewed studies into an array of maladies, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said it sought to provide objective scientific research on the efficacy of medical marijuana.

"The grant program ... should not be construed as encouraging or sanctioning the social or recreational use of marijuana," the department said in a statement.

Colorado lawmakers set up a Medical Marijuana Scientific Advisory Council last year and allocated $10 million to administer a program to conduct the studies. The council received some three dozen applications, from which it chose the eight approved by the department on Wednesday.

Funding for the program is derived from registration fees paid by medical marijuana patients in the state.

Six of the grants will go to the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, said university spokesman Mark Couch.

Researchers there will study whether marijuana in its various forms can alleviate the tremors associated with Parkinson's and whether it can provide relief for children with brain tumors or pediatric epilepsy.

Other projects will research using marijuana to treat irritable bowel syndrome in adolescents and young adults, and how cannabis compares with the pain medication Oxycodone.

Teams at the University of Pennsylvania will conduct two separate studies on whether cannabis is effective in treating patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, including combat veterans.

"It's true that little research has been done due to federal restrictions. I think that will change as more states are legalizing," said Brian Smith, a spokesman for the Washington State Liquor Control Board, which oversees legalized recreational cannabis there.

Voters in Oregon and Alaska cast ballots in November to join Colorado and Washington in legalizing recreational pot use.

Reuters

 Europe's top court has opened the door to certain stem cell patents in the European Union by ruling that an organism incapable of developing into a human being is not a human embryo and may be patented.

Thursday's judgment by the European Court of Justice was made following a case brought in Britain by U.S. company International Stem Cell Corporation (ISCO.PK) over whether it 

could patent processes covering the use of human egg cells.

The case is significant because three years ago the EU court ruled that stem cell research involving human embryos could not be patented, a decision condemned at the time by some scientists as a "devastating" blow for medical research in Europe.

As a result of that 2011 ruling, Britain's patent office objected to a patent application from the California-based company.

Although work on stem cell therapies is still experimental, researchers believe they have potential to treat a range of diseases from Parkinson's to blindness. But rigid curbs on obtaining patents could hobble their commercialization.

International Stem Cell, however, uses processes based on unfertilized human eggs and the EU court ruled that such eggs should be excluded from the ban on embryo-derived stem cell patents, if it was proven they could not develop into human beings.

"The mere fact that a parthenogenetically-activated human ovum commences a process of development is not sufficient for it to be regarded as a 'human embryo'," the court ruled. Parthenogenesis is the development of unfertilized eggs.

The court said it left it to British judges to determine whether the specific cells used by the U.S. company lacked the inherent capacity of developing into human beings and therefore met these criteria.

Adam Cooke, a partner at law firm DLA Piper, representing International Stem Cell, said the court's decision was "a big step in the right direction". In addition to the patent application in Britain, the company is also seeking patents at the European Patent Office.

Its parthenogenetic stem cells are in pre-clinical development for treating severe diseases of the eye, the nervous system and the liver.

Stem cell research has long been controversial. Critics argue that using embryonic stem cells is wrong because obtaining these cells involves the destruction of embryos which are left over from fertility treatment.

Scientists contend the research is justified, since the embryonic stem cells they use are cell lines derived from original surplus eggs that can be maintained indefinitely. While adult stem cells are also being investigated as potential medicines, they are less flexible than embryonic ones.

Reuters

Health workers in Sierra Leone began combing the streets of the capital Freetown for Ebola patients on Wednesday, moving house-to-house as the government launched a major operation to contain infection in West Africa's worst-hit country.

President Ernest Bai Koroma said on national television that, as part of "Operation Western  Area Surge", travel between all parts of the country would be restricted and public gatherings would be restrained in the run-up to Christmas.

An encounter in the Devil's Hole neighborhood just outside Freetown showed why the program was vital. Ibrahim Kamara sat in a discarded vehicle tire, his eyes glassy and his breath coming in gasps, as he tried to answer questions from Ebola surveillance officers.

"Is the body weak?" a surveillance officer shouted. Kamara, 31, nodded despondently while onlookers gathered round.

"Vomiting," the officer asked. Kamara nodded again.

Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia are at the heart of the world's worst recorded outbreak of Ebola. Rates of infection are rising fastest in Sierra Leone and the country has more than half of the 18,000 confirmed cases of the virus.

House-to-house searches form one part of the month-long push in and around Freetown by the government, a British task force and international groups that aims to make a breakthrough against the disease within four to six weeks.

Kamara's wife, Adama, said they had tried to take a taxi to hospital but the driver made them get out when he discovered her husband was ill.

She said a neighbor died on Saturday from Ebola-like symptoms. Ibrahim had been taking anti-malaria medicine but his condition deteriorated, she said, starting to cry.

With the annual malaria season at its height, aid groups have distributed the free treatment in a bid to prevent people with malaria being misdiagnosed with Ebola, which has similar symptoms.

The surveillance officers wrote down the Kamaras' address and the names of five family members in their household before calling an ambulance. Nearby, a hearse drove by with the slogan 'dust to dust' painted on its back window.

Kamara's diagnosis was unconfirmed, but local chief Alhagi Ibrahim Sesay said Kamara's arrival in the area could mean Ebola has come to Devil's Hole, a community with no previous history of the virus.

"Today, on the day the government starts its house-to-house exercise, this man gives a problem in our area. As head man, I don't want any sick from another community," he said.

NEW MEASURES

Health officials are alarmed by the widespread transmission in Freetown, which is similar to an earlier spread in the Liberian capital Monrovia now slowly being brought under control.

According to a government plan announced this week, health workers will seek victims and anyone with whom they have had contact, transporting those infected to new British-built treatment centers.

"Given the efforts we have undertaken we would expect to see a significant decrease in cases within several weeks," Tom Frieden, director of the U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Reuters during a visit to Freetown.

The program showed some early signs of progress. Russell Macleod, a British military consultant with the surveillance team in the Western command and control center in Freetown, told Reuters they received a record number of alerts this morning.

By lunchtime, they exceeded Tuesday's total by 50 percent with 140 alerts generated from an Ebola hotline. In response, the live case management team dispatched teams to 52 suspected cases, he said.

As part of the efforts, Koroma said worshippers on Christmas Day must return home after services and other festivities are banned. New Year's Eve services must stop by 5 p.m. local time (12p.m. ET), while New Year's Day festivities are prohibited.

"This is the festive season where Sierra Leoneans often celebrate with families in a flamboyant and joyous manner, but all must be reminded that our country is at war with a vicious enemy," he said in his nationwide address.

The government was also imposing a ban on Sunday trading and the end of Saturday shopping at noon, Koroma said. He spoke one day after opening an Ebola Community Care Centre outside the capital.

Reuters

Amgen Inc on Wednesday said its new type of treatment for a deadly form of leukemia would cost about $178,000 when it becomes available on Thursday, which would make it one of the world's most expensive cancer drugs.

Company spokeswoman Danielle Bertrand said the price for the infused medicine, called Blincyto, would reflect two courses of treatment, at $89,000 per cycle.

"We believe the price reflects the significant clinical, economic and humanistic value of the product to patients and the healthcare system, for an ultra-orphan population with a dramatic impact on a serious illness," Amgen said in an emailed statement.

The world's largest biotech company also said the price reflects the complexity of developing and making innovative biotech drugs.

U.S. regulators on Dec. 3 approved the Amgen drug more than five months ahead of the expected decision date, to treat a blood cancer called acute lyphoblastic leukemia (ALL), for which there are few options once a patient has relapsed following standard treatment.

The initial approval is for patients whose cancer has returned after treatment or did not respond to previous treatment, such as a stem cell transplant or chemotherapy.

In a clinical trial used for the approval decision, 32 percent of patients achieved complete remission for nearly seven months after receiving the drug via infusion for four weeks.

An estimated 6,020 Americans in 2014, almost half of them children, will be diagnosed with ALL and 1,440 will die from the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute. It is the most common form of leukemia affecting children.

Amgen acquired Blincyto through its $1.2 billion purchase in 2012 of Micromet, a biotechnology company founded in Germany. At the time, Blincyto was known by its chemical name, blinatumomab.

The drug is a so-called bispecific antibody, a hot emerging technology that could prove more potent than conventional antibodies, which have become mainstay treatments for a wide array of cancers.

Antibodies are proteins that look out for "foreign" invaders such as bacteria, as well as for aberrant fast-growing cells like cancer. The Y-shaped proteins have two arms that bind the same protein target found on cancer cells, in an attempt to neutralize the cells.

With bispecific antibodies, however, one arm grasps the cancer cell, while the other takes hold of an immune system defender called a T cell, bringing the enemies into contact and leading to destruction of the cancer cell.

Immuno-oncology drugs, which stimulate the immune system or prevent tumor cells from hiding themselves, have become a main focus of drugmakers, following approval in 2011 of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co's Yervoy treatment for melanoma. It costs about $120,000 for a complete course of four infusions.

Yervoy and members of another class of drugs called PD-1 inhibitors, including Merck & Co's recently approved Keytruda, work by removing a brake on the immune system. Keytruda costs about $150,000 for a year of treatment.

Reuters

Robin Williams' suicide seared into the world's collective mindset more than anything else this year, based on what people were searching for on Google.

The reaction to Williams' death in August topped Google's list of 2014's fastest-rising search requests. It beat notable events such as the World Cup, the Ebola outbreak, the March disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the Ice Bucket Challenge,   an Internet video craze to raise awareness and money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Other topics of worldwide intrigue on Google included the addictive smartphone game "Flappy Bird," bearded drag queen Conchita Wurst, the Middle East extremist group ISIS, the hit Disney movie "Frozen," and the Winter Olympics in Russia.

Williams, Ebola, the World Cup and the Ice Bucket also ranked among the most-discussed subjects this year on Facebook, which released its list last week. Google released its list Tuesday.

Williams' death drove many people to reminisce about his career highlights. In the first few days after his suicide, there was a six-fold increase in the number of Google searches for "carpe diem" — a Latin phrase for "seize the day" that Williams popularized in the film "Dead Poets Society." Reports about Williams' long-running battle with depression caused searches for that term to triple. There was also a flurry of searches about his movies (the top five were: "Mrs. Doubtfire," ''Dead Poets Society," ''Good Will Hunting," ''Jumanji" and "Patch Adams.")

Google's worldwide list of the year's hottest search requests mirrored the activity in the U.S. with a few exceptions. Wurst didn't make the Top 10 list in the U.S., nor did the Winter Olympics. Instead, Web surfers in the U.S. were seeking more information about the August confrontation that culminated in a white policeman shooting and killing Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Ukraine's conflict with Russia also held more intrigue in the U.S. than the rest of the world.

Google's review follows annual roundups compiled during the previous two weeks by its main search rivals. Although Google's list usually comes last each year, its rankings typically provide more telling insights into what people were thinking because the company's technology processes about two out of every three search requests made on the Internet.

Yahoo's search lists indicated that its websites tend to attract entertainment-minded people. While Ebola topped Yahoo's rankings for 2014, celebrities or entertainers occupied six of the other slots. They were singer Ariana Grande (No. 3), actress Jennifer Lawrence (No. 4), actress Kaley Cuoco (No. 5), reality TV star Kim Kardashian (No. 6), singer Miley Cyrus (No. 8) and actress Jennifer Aniston (No. 10). Yahoo's list was rounded out by: the video game "Minecraft," whose popularity prompted Microsoft to buy it for $2.5 billion earlier this year; "Frozen" and Apple's latest gadget, the iPhone 6.

Instead of doing a wide-ranging compilation of top searches, Microsoft's Bing separated its lists into disparate categories, such as athletes (NBA star LeBron James soared the highest), celebrities (Kardashian reigned), vacation destinations (Costa Rica) and musicians (Beyonce).

AP

Merck & Co Inc (MRK.N) said it would buy Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc (CBST.O) for $8.4 billion plus assumption of debt, giving the major drugmaker an entry into the market for drugs that combat so-called superbugs.

The deal is the latest sign that large pharmaceutical companies are turning their attention back to antibiotics after decades of low investment.

The spread of superbugs that evade even the most powerful antibiotics threatens modern medicine, the World Health Organization said in April, warning of "a post-antibiotic era" in which common infections were killers once again.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated last year that more than 2 million people in the United States are sickened every year by superbug infections, with at least 23,000 dying as a result.

Merck said on Monday that the deal, which will give it access to Cubist's antibiotic Cubicin, is expected to add more than $1 billion to revenue in 2015 after closing in the first quarter, but will be neutral to non-GAAP earnings per share until 2016.

Cubist's third-quarter sales rose 16 percent, driven by strong sales of Cubicin.

The company's lead drug in development, Ceftolozane/Tazobactam, is widely expected to win marketing approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration later this month as a treatment for complicated urinary tract infections.

Merck will pay $102 per share for Cubist, a premium of 37 percent to the Lexington, Massachussetts-based company's closing share price of $74.36 on Friday.

The deal includes assumption of $1.1 billion in debt.

"Cubist is a global leader in antibiotics and has built a strong portfolio of both marketed and late-stage pipeline medicines," Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier said in a statement.

"Combining this expertise with Merck's strong capabilities and global reach will enable us to create a stronger position in hospital acute care while addressing critical areas of unmet medical need, such as antibiotic resistance."

Merck has said it is focusing on acute care within hospitals - considered a hotbed for superbug infections such as bacterial pneumonia - as a top priority.

Many drugmakers have cut investment in the past because antibiotics are typically low-priced and used for only short periods, generating poor returns. That has fueled demands for a rethink of the antibiotic market model.

It has also left Cubist as a leading investor in the field, with an annual research budget for antibiotics of $400 million.

More recently, however, there have been signs of a revival, with Roche Holding AG (ROG.VX), GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK.L) and Sanofi SA (SASY.PA) all investing in new approaches to fight superbugs.

Cubist shares were trading at $101.04 premarket. Merck shares were unchanged from Friday's close at $61.50.

The New York Times, citing people briefed on the matter, first reported the deal on Friday.

The Cubist deal is Merck's second big acquisition this year. The company bought Idenix Pharmaceuticals for $3.85 billion in June to boost its hepatitis C drug portfolio.

Reuters

Six Guantanamo Bay prisoners sent to Uruguay to be resettled as refugees are undergoing medical checkups before being released to begin new lives, the country's defense minister said Monday, and one issued a letter thanking Uruguay for taking them in.

Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro told local radio Carve that the six, who arrived early Sunday, are doing well and will be fully welcomed into Uruguayan society, getting jobs and bringing their families.

He said that one of the men who had been on a long-term hunger strike has begun eating and will soon be released from the hospital.

The six — four Syrians, a Tunisian and a Palestinian — were detained as suspected militants with ties to al-Qaeda in 2002 but were never charged. They had been cleared for release since 2009 but could not be sent home and the U.S. struggled to find countries willing to take them.

Fernandez Huidobro said suspicions the men were part of a terrorist cell were "pure silliness."

One of the men, Abedlhadi Omar Faraj, issued a letter through his attorney thanking Uruguayans for accepting the group, and even said he'd become a fan of the country's national soccer team.

The Syrian described himself as an innocent man from a modest background who was captured and turned over to U.S. forces in Pakistan for ransom and then sent to Guantanamo as a suspected terrorist.

"Were it not for Uruguay, I would still be in the black hole in Cuba today," said the letter released by his attorney, Ramzi Kassem, in New York. "It is difficult for me to express how grateful I am for the immense trust that you, the Uruguayan people, placed in me and the other prisoners when you opened the doors of your country to us.

"We cannot thank you enough for welcoming us in your land."

He said he looked forward to following the national soccer team, nicknamed the Celeste, in the next Copa America, South America's chief regional soccer tournament.

Uruguayan President Jose Mujica agreed to accept the men as a humanitarian gesture and said they would be given help getting established in a country of 3.3 million with a total Muslim population of perhaps 300 people.

Uruguay already has taken in 42 Syrian civil war refugees, who arrived in October, and has said it will take about 80 more.

They are coming to what may be the only country in the Americas without an Islamic mosque, said Tamar Chaky, director of the Islamic Cultural Organization of Uruguay. He promised that the local Muslim community would welcome them, but said there had been no contact with the government.

The U.S. has now transferred 19 prisoners out of Guantanamo this year, all but one of them within the last 30 days, and 136 remain, the lowest number since shortly after the prison opened in January 2002. Officials say several more releases are expected by the end of the year.

Upon taking office, Obama had pledged to close the prison but was blocked by Congress, which banned sending prisoners to the U.S. for any reason, including trial, and placed restrictions on sending them abroad.

The U.S. now holds 67 men at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release or transfer but, like the six sent to Uruguay, can't go home because they might face persecution, a lack of security or some other reason.

Prisoners from Guantanamo have been sent around the world but this weekend's transfer was the largest group sent to the Western Hemisphere. Four Guantanamo prisoners were sent to Bermuda in 2009 and two were sent to El Salvador in 2012 but have since left.

AP