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In another sign of growing cooperation between South Asia’s nuclear rivals, India and Pakistan on Saturday proposed setting up aid camps along their disputed border in Kashmir, allowing earthquake victims to cross the frontier for medical treatment.
   India suggested setting up three camps in the quake-hit zone of Kashmir that would provide food, drinking water and tents to Pakistani victims.
   Pakistan made its own proposal hours later, suggesting five points along the disputed border for setting up aid camps and saying those visiting its portion of Kashmir would be allowed through immediately if they had proper travel documents, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
   Islamabad had reacted cautiously to New Dehli’s announcement, saying the two sides would have to meet to discuss the proposal, which followed calls from Pakistan’s president to open up the heavily militarised frontier for Kashmiris seeking relief.
   The foreign ministry spokesman, Navtej Sarna, said Pakistan’s proposals could likely to reconciled with India’s. He said earthquake victims would be allowed to cross the border for medical treatment, provisions and shelter in the three Indian camps, which would begin operating Tuesday pending approval from Pakistan.
   
   Pakistan hit by new aftershocks
   New aftershocks rattled quake-hit northern Pakistan on Sunday as aid trickled into the mountainous region and relief agencies struggled to reach cut-off survivors before winter.
   An aftershock measuring 4.9 on the Richter scale was felt at 5:44am (0044 GMT) in Mansehra town, which has become a refuge for thousands of survivors from more badly devastated towns and villages in the Kashmiri mountains.
   There were no immediate reports of casualties from the latest tremor, one of more than 700 which have shaken the region since the 7.6-magnitude October 8 quake killed more than 53,000 people and left more than three million homeless.
   But at least five people were reportedly killed in neighbouring Afghanistan when an earthquake struck eastern Paktika province, bordering Pakistan, around dawn, the Afghan defence ministry said.
   ‘We don’t know exactly the scale of the damage. Afghan National Army troops are on the ground helping villagers,’ ministry spokesman general Mohammad Zahir Azimi told a press briefing.
   
   World failed to grasp scale of disaster
   The international community failed to grasp the scale of the South Asian earthquake and more than two weeks after the disaster, the response is still not enough, a UN relief official said Sunday.
   Rashid Khalikov, the UN humanitarian aid area coordinator in this quake-hit capital of Pakistani Kashmir, said international relief agencies were ‘still coming to grips’ with the disaster.
   ‘Two weeks after the earthquake that devastated this region countless thousands (of people) need to be reached in high-altitude terrain,’ he told reporters.
   ‘In the first few days after the earthquake the world clearly did not comprehend the magnitude and complexity of the disaster.
   ‘Even now we are still coming to grips with the extent of the people’s needs as new information comes in from previously inaccessible areas.’
   He said UN agencies, working alongside the Pakistani army and independent non-governmental groups, had distributed 60,000 tents—nowhere near enough to protect the millions of destitute from the increasingly cold nights.
   Another 190,000 tents were in the UN pipeline but more would be needed if the world body is to prevent what the secretary general, Kofi Annan, called a possible ‘second wave’ of deaths as winter bites in the Himalayan region.

Israel was increasingly resigned Sunday to Hamas standing in January’s Palestinian elections after the US president, George W Bush, failed to voice opposition to the Islamic militant movement’s participation.
   The foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, had said last week that it would be ‘madness’ for Hamas to be allowed to take part but the government now appears to have backed down from threats to disrupt January’s ballot in the absence of support from its chief ally.
   Israel had been hoping that Bush would use a summit with the Palestinian leader, Mahmud Abbas, last week to pressure him to bar Hamas from the elections.
   But Abbas said that he managed to persuade Bush that it would be better to encourage Hamas’s embrace of democracy despite its continued designation by the United States as a terrorist organisation.
   A source close to the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, sought to play down the disagreement with Washington, saying the differences were purely tactical.
   ‘There is only a tactical difference—we believe that Hamas cannot take part in elections as long as it carries out terrorism. The United States thinks otherwise, but agrees with us that any negotiation with Hamas should be ruled out,’ the source said.
   ‘We refuse to consider any representative of Hamas as a legitimate partner. but we will not prevent Hamas from participating in the election as we have no intention of intervening in the ballot,’ added the official.
   ‘While we are opposed to the participation of Hamas in elections on the grounds that it is a terrorist organisation, we do not envisage arresting political officials who are not implicated in attacks.’
   Interviewed on Israeli radio, justice minister Tzippi Livni failed to take the opportunity to demand that Hamas be prevented from standing in the elections but instead called for the international community ‘to put pressure on Hamas to renounce terrorism’.
   ‘The fact that Hamas wants to take part in the elections should make it sensitive to such pressure,’ she added.
   Hamas, which has been behind the majority of anti-Israeli attacks in the five-year Palestinian uprising, does not recognise the Jewish state’s right to exist.
   Only a month ago, Sharon was quoted by the New York Times as saying that ‘we will make every effort not to help them’ (the Palestinians) if Hamas fields candidates in only the second ever Palestinian legislative elections.

Rights group Human Rights Watch accused Pakistani authorities in the quake-stricken city of Muzaffarabad of hoarding tents and essential supplies instead of distributing them to victims.
   Scarce tents and other relief supplies were being put in storage in Muzaffarabad by civilian authorities working under the supervision of the military, rather than handed out to needy, homeless persons, the US-based rights group said in a statement on Saturday.
   Human Rights Watch said civilian administration officials in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir, told it Wednesday that tents and other emergency supplies, which had been designated for government workers were being stored instead.
   It quoted officials present as saying this was being done so they would be able to avoid problems when senior military and civilian officials demand supplies that otherwise would not be available.
   It quoted another official as saying he would be fired if he handed out the tents.
   A Pakistani relief spokesman denied the allegations.
   ‘We will look into this (HRW) report. But to our knowledge there are no civil secretariat employees distributing relief supplies and tents to earthquake affectees,’ a spokesman for Federal Relief Commissioner said.

The United States calls it a ‘black box’ but beyond the mystery of the upcoming inaugural East Asia Summit is anxiety over the future direction of the forum in a region where China is stamping its mark.
   The summit is scheduled to be held in Kuala Lumpur in December among the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as well as China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand.
   The original idea was to turn the annual leaders’ meeting between ASEAN members and China, Japan and South Korea – under the existing ‘ASEAN plus three’ process – into an East Asian Summit as part of an ambitious plan to create an East Asian community backed by a regionwide free trade area.
   But Singapore, Japan and Indonesia particularly objected, fearing it would alienate the United States and lead to possible Chinese dominance. They lobbied for the expansion of the forum to cover Australia, New Zealand and India.
   Still, China and some of the ASEAN states remain hopeful that the ‘ASEAN plus three’ vehicle is the umbrella forum to forge an East Asian community.
   As the upcoming summit has expanded to cover countries beyond the geographic notion of East Asia, the question has arisen whether the United States – which is on the other side of the Pacific – should be a participant.
   ‘It’s a question we get all the time: what is our policy on the East Asia summit? Quite frankly, we haven’t determined a policy because the East Asia summit, if you really look at it, is a black box,’ said deputy US assistant secretary of state Eric John.
   ‘Nobody knows what the East Asia summit is other than leaders coming together,’ he told a recent Congressional hearing when legislators asked why the United States, being the Asia-Pacific region’s largest economic and military power, was not invited to join the forum.

The latest visit of Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to a controversial war shrine has made the job of being Tokyo’s top diplomat a difficult one, the foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura, said Sunday.
   ‘Frankly speaking, the objective situation has become tougher this year’ with Koizumi’s visit to Yasukuni shrine, Machimura said on a talk show broadcast on the private Asahi network.
   Koizumi made his latest pilgrimage to the shrine last week, outraging China and South Korea who say the shrine glorifies Japan’s brutal occupation of the two countries.
   Both Beijing and Seoul cancelled diplomatic exchanges with Tokyo in the wake of the October 17 visit, the fifth since Koizumi took office in 2001.
   Machimura held out some cautious optimism with respect to Sino-Japanese relations, based on the aftermath of Koizumi’s prior visits to Yasukuni.
   ‘If you look at the previous four visits ... talks at the foreign ministerial or summit levels were held after a certain period of time, though the fifth time may be different from the previous four,’ he said.
   Machimura admitted Koizumi and Chinese President Hu Jintao had ‘harsh exchanges of words’ when they met in November last year on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in the Chilean capital of Santiago.
   Asked to comment on concern that the two could again do verbal battle when next they meet, the minister said: ‘It’s good, as each of us would be able to know what the other is thinking.’
   Machimura argued that Japan, in order to create a new relationship with China through frank discussions, should change its post-war weak-kneed belief that Japan must listen to what China says to improve bilateral ties.

North Korea on Sunday demanded the United States grant the communist state the same status as Israel, a US ally suspected of having nuclear arms outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
   The demand came as six-way talks aimed at disarming North Korea, a self-declared nuclear power yet to return to the NPT, are scheduled to resume in Beijing early next month.
   Rodong Sinmun, the North Korean ruling Workers’ Party newspaper which serves as an official mouthpiece, accused the United States of applying ‘double standards’ on North Korea and Israel.
   ‘The US is allowing some countries to go without any trouble even after failing to fulfil their commitments under the NPT, while pressurising other countries to remain true to it,’ Rodong said in a commentary.

A top Sri Lankan Buddhist monk legislator Sunday admitted for the first time his all-monks party had been mistaken to enter politics, but stopped short of quitting the legislature where it has nine crucial seats.
   Monk Uduwe Dhammaloka told reporters here that he realised the monks could have done more for the people of Sri Lanka had they stayed clear of politics and concentrated on their theological work.
   ‘Monks can do better by not joining political parties,’ Dhammaloka said. ‘The climate is not conducive for monks to enter politics. It is corrupt.’
   His National Heritage Party, or JHU, the first-ever all-monk party to contest a poll, won nine seats at the April parliamentary elections.
   Last year, he led the monks’ campaign to enter politics.

Accusations that US soldiers burned the corpses of two Afghan guerrillas to taunt the Taliban have damaged the American military, whether or not they are true, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, said on Saturday.
   Rumsfeld told reporters aboard a plane to Lithuania, where he will attend a NATO meeting, that he had not seen video footage showing the alleged incident in the southern province of Kandahar and did not know if the accusations were true.
   But he added: ‘One hates to see the adverse effect of it if it is true. You also recognise the damage that can be done by the allegations alone if they are not true.’
   The US military – already under fire for the abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq and the mishandling of the Koran in Guantanamo Bay – has ordered an inquiry into the footage shown on Australian television.
   The television report quoted the US soldiers as saying they burned the bodies for reasons of hygiene. But the act could be deeply offensive to Muslims, whose faith prohibits cremation and demands respect for the dead.

The Philippines president, Gloria Arroyo, should resign if necessary to avoid bloodshed, amid increasingly violent protests calling for her to step down over alleged vote fraud, her half sister was quoted as saying Sunday.
   ‘If she has to go to save her life, her family and the people, I would rather that she do that than cause deaths,’ Arroyo’s elder sister Cielo Salgado told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in an exclusive interview.
   Arroyo survived an impeachment vote in parliament last month after admitting in June that she had improperly called an unnamed independent election official before the winner of the May 2004 presidential election was announced.
   The failure to unseat Arroyo has sparked frequent and at times violent street protests. The government is also investigating allegations of an assassination plot against her.

Thailand’s foreign minister said in remarks published on Sunday he was hopeful of an improvement in relations with neighbouring Malaysia, strained over an insurgency raging near their border.
   ‘I look forward to good cooperation. I am optimistic,’ Kantathi Suphamongkhon was quoted by the Nation newspaper as saying.
   Ties have deteriorated since 131 Thai Muslims from southern Narathiwat province crossed into majority Muslim Malaysia in August, saying they were fleeing separatist unrest, triggering a diplomatic tussle over their fate.
   ‘I consider this episode past and gone,’ Kantathi was quoted as saying. The comments contrast with Kantathi’s remarks on Wednesday, when he told reporters he had stopped speaking with Malaysia, amid an escalating war of words sparked by the border-crossing incident.

Lebanese authorities have arrested a Sunni Muslim who according to a UN report telephoned the president, Emile Lahoud, minutes before the murder of former premier Rafiq Hariri, officials said Sunday.
   Mahmoud Abdel-Al, who is also member of the Islamic charity Al-Ahbache that is believed to have strong links with Syria, was arrested on Saturday on the order of the Lebanon’s top prosecutor Said Mirza, judicial sources said.
   His detention is sure to wrench up the pressure even more on the embattled pro-Syrian Lahoud, who has faced impassioned calls from opponents to step down ever since the murder of the five-time premier in a February Beirut bomb blast.
   The arrest is the first to be made over the murder since the report’s publication on Thursday. However four other suspects, all seen as close to Lahoud, were arrested in August and are still held in custody.
   The move is the latest twist in a dramatic sequence of events after UN investigators probing the assassination implicated security officials in both Lebanon and Syria over the crime in their report.
   Lahoud, a Maronite Christian, on Friday was forced to deny the claims in the UN report that he received a call on his mobile phone from Mahmoud Abdel-Al minutes before the bomb blast.
   According to the UN report, Abdel-Al phoned Lahoud at 12:47 local time from his own mobile, just minutes before the blast, and followed this call up at 12:49 with one to Raymound Azar, the then head of Lebanese military intelligence.
   Azar was arrested over the murder in August along with three other close aides of Lahoud: presidential guard head, Mustafa Hamdan, former general security chief Jamil al-Sayed, ex-internal security head Ali al-Hage.

A UN report on the killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri is ‘very serious’ for Syria and the international community must act, the United States and Britain said on Sunday.
   In a joint interview with BBC television, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, ratcheted up pressure on Damascus, saying the report implicated senior Syrian figures in the assassination and indicated attempts at a cover-up.
   ‘I am quite sure that when the international community gets together we will decide what to do but it can’t be–just left lying on the table,’ Rice said.
   ‘There is–the very strong implication that Syria was involved somehow in the assassination of former prime minister, Hariri. So these are very serious charges,’ Rice said.
   Washington is working to arrange a quick high-level UN Security Council meeting to consider a response to the investigation by chief UN investigator Detlev Mehlis.
   Straw, who has been touring Alabama with Rice, said: ‘The report indicates that people of a high level of this Syrian regime were implicated. We also have evidence from the Mehlis report of false testimony being given by senior people in the regime. This is very serious.’

Iran denied Sunday it had banned imports from countries that backed a tough UN nuclear agency resolution against it, despite widespread reports that certain imports were indeed being blocked.
   ‘So far no sanctions against the mentioned countries have been imposed,’ foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told the government daily Iran.
   Countries reportedly affected by the alleged restrictions include South Korea and Britain—who backed an International Atomic Energy Agency resolution last month that paves the way for Iran to be referred to the UN Security Council.
   Iran had vowed to punish its trade partners if they voted for the resolution, which chastised Iran for being in ‘non-compliance’ with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
   Diplomats confirmed that goods were being deliberately held up by Iranian customs as a result of what appeared to be ‘an unwritten directive’.
   ‘There have been problems,’ a foreign diplomat told AFP. ‘The Iranians are not telling us anything but customs are stopping some of our goods.’
   South Korea’s deputy foreign minister Lee Kyu-Hyung is due in Tehran in the coming days to discuss the issue, the embassy said.
   On Thursday, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad refused to confirm or deny the ban but did assert that trade and international relations were linked.
   But quoted by the Iran News paper, a parliamentary deputy spoke openly of a ban and voiced concern over its effect on Iranian industry which is heavily dependent on imported industrial machinery and parts.
   ‘Our committee will soon investigate the negative effects of the ban on imports from certain countries on Iran’s main industries such as auto manufacturing,’ said Vali Maleki, a member of parliament’s industries committee.
   He said continuing such a policy would be ‘economically unfeasible’.

A secret poll commissioned by senior British officers’ shows that millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a newspaper reported Sunday.
   The poll shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and less than one per cent thinks allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country, the Sunday Telegraph said.
   The nationwide survey, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence, demonstrates for the first time the true strength of anti-Western feeling in Iraq after more than two and a half years of bloody occupation, the newspaper said.
   The survey also suggests that the coalition has lost the
   battle to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, which the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the US president, George W Bush, believed was fundamental to creating a safe and secure country, it said.
   The newspaper also said lieutenant colonel Nick Henderson, the commanding officer of the Coldstream Guards in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, in charge of security for the region, has resigned from the army.
   The secret poll appears to contradict claims made by General Sir Mike Jackson, the Chief of the General Staff, who only days ago congratulated British soldiers for ‘supporting the Iraqi people in building a new and better Iraq’.

US troops and warplanes killed 20 guerrillas Saturday while destroying safe houses for foreign militants near the Syrian border, and four more American military deaths edged the war’s US death toll closer to 2,000.
   Iraqi election officials, meanwhile, said no significant fraud had been detected in last weekend’s constitutional referendum as they released partial results. Officials indicated the final count would not come for at least a few more days.
   The day’s heaviest fighting came when US-led forces raided five houses suspected of sheltering foreign fighters in Husaybah, a town near Iraq’s border with Syria, the military said. The troops reportedly killed 20 guerrillas and captured one.
   The raiders found two caches of small arms, ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and bomb-making materials, the military said. Troops set off a car bomb found near one of the buildings, and the Air Force then used precision-guided munitions to destroy the houses.
   Seven Iraqis, including two civilians, were reported killed in drive-by shootings and bombings Saturday. But in the week since the October 15 constitutional referendum there have been none of the major suicide attacks that militants had been staging.
   Twenty-three US military personnel have been reported dead over the week, bringing the total of American dead since the war began in March 2003 to 1,996, according to an Associated Press Count. No agency keeps a comprehensive count of Iraqi deaths from violence, but an AP count found more than 3,700 killed since April 28, when the first elected government took power.

Judges, prosecutors, attorneys, even law clerks and accountants involved in cases linked to Saddam Hussein’s decades of rule in Iraq live in constant fear of being targeted for death.
   Last week’s abduction and murder of Saadoun Janabi, attorney for one of Saddam’s seven co-defendants in a trial for crimes committed against residents of the town of Dujail in 1982 that opened Wednesday, points to the delicate issue of protecting the hundreds of people involved in the case.
   Janabi was kidnapped just one day after the trial opened. His body was found the next morning with a bullet to his head.
   His client was Awad Hamad al-Bandar al-Sadun, a former chief judge of the revolutionary court and deputy head of Saddam’s office. Sadun sat next to Saddam on the first day of the trial.
   Iraq’s Special Tribunal, set up especially to try crimes against humanity, war crimes and charges of genocide committed between July 1968 — when Saddam’s Baath party came to power—and May 2003, when he was ousted by a US-led invasion, may handle up to 12 major cases on atrocities.
   The cases will likely involving dozens of co-defendants and their teams of attorneys, and could potentially drag on for years.
   Many of the tribunal judges and court employees have chosen to remain anonymous for security reasons.
   ‘Everyone that participates in the process takes enormous risks and is very courageous,’ said Wesley Gryk, a member of the human rights group Amnesty International.
   Janabi was the sixth person linked to the Special Tribunal and its cases killed since the court was set up in December 2003.
   In early March a Kurdish investigative judge, Barwize Mohammed Marwane, was shot dead outside his home along with his son Arayan, also a court employee.
   Assailants at least once tried to kill one of the five judges on the panel trying Saddam in the Dujail case, Gryk said.

One man was stabbed to death and several other people hurt in Birmingham when riots erupted over allegations a black girl was raped, though police said there is nothing to substantiate the claim.
   In an echo of violence in the same Lozzels Road area 20 years ago, mobs pelted police with bricks, stones and bottles or smashed shop and car windows with baseball bats and sticks, witnesses said Saturday. At least one car was torched.
   Police said that a black man died in the hospital of stab wounds, while three other people suffered stab wounds and a police officer had been injured in the thigh by a ball bearing gun.
   One other person was shot but his wounds were not life threading.
   It was widely alleged that a 14-year-old black girl was raped and Inn owner India Murray told BBC television that the allegations were directed at south Asians.
   But assistant chief Constable David Shaw told a press conference later that there was ‘not a shred of evidence’ to support allegations that a black girl had been subjected to a serious sexual assault.
   The riots erupted after members of the Afro-Caribbean and south Asian communities held what police and media said was a peaceful meeting designed to reassure the black community and encourage the girl to come forward.
   However, members of the black community claim she is reluctant to contact officers because she may be deported as an illegal immigrant. The violence erupted around 6:00pm (1700 GMT).
   The police did not say who was involved in the violence or how it erupted, but the Sunday Times said a gang of up to 30 Asian youths began throwing stones at some of the 300 people attending the meeting in the church.

Brazilians headed for the polls Sunday to decide whether gun sales in this crime-riven country should be banned, but opinion polls indicated the proposed ban was likely to be shot down.
   Voting in southern and central parts of the country began at 8:00am (1000 GMT). Final returns were expected before midnight.
   The government of president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, human rights groups and the Roman Catholic Church are all backing the ban. But the public has swung dramatically against the proposal in recent weeks.
   A Datafolha poll of 2,086 people published Saturday by the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper said 57 per cent of the public would vote against the measure and only 43 per cent would support it. An Ibope poll said 51 per cent would vote against it and only 41 per cent would back it.
   More than 500,000 people were killed in Brazil between 1979 and 2003, according to UN figures.

Despite indications of Central Intelligence Agency involvement in the deaths of at least four prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, its employees appear likely to escape criminal charges in all but one of those incidents, The New York Times reported Sunday
   Citing current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials, the newspaper said that David Passaro, a contract worker, is the only person linked to the CIA to be charged in the deaths of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   Federal prosecutors reviewing cases of possible misconduct by CIA employees have recently notified lawyers that they do not intend to bring criminal charges, the report said.
   The details of the CIA cases remain classified, as do the Justice Department reviews.
   But the prosecutors’ decisions appear to reflect judgments that the CIA was far less culpable in the mistreatment of prisoners than was the military, where dozens of soldiers have been convicted or accepted administrative punishment for their actions in cases in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Times said.

A report prepared for the British prime minister, Tony Blair, has warned that the government’s counter-terrorism strategy is failing, a newspaper reported Sunday.
   Key policies aimed at preventing al-Qaeda attacks and rooting out terrorists are ‘immature’ and ‘disjointed’, the prime minister’s delivery unit concluded, according to the Sunday Times.
   Others have been deemed unrelated to the ‘real world’, the daily said.
   The paper formed the backbone of a presentation this monthly to insiders at Blair’s office in 10 Downing Street this month, the newspaper said.
   The unit has proposed appointing a new minister inside the Cabinet Office with responsibility for counter-terrorism.
   The opposition Conservative Party has long demanded a minister for homeland security but that was strongly resisted by the former home secretary, David Blunkett.
   The leaked document is a critique of Project Contest, the codename for the government’s overall counter-terrorism strategy.
   It was apparently drawn up last year in the wake of the Madrid bombings and given extra impetus by the July 7 London bomb attacks on subway trains and a bus, which killed 52 commuters and the four presumed suicide bombers.

Afghan magazine editor jailed
A court in Afghanistan has convicted the editor of a women’s magazine of blasphemy after complaints his articles questioned Islam, and sentenced him to two years in jail, a media rights group said Sunday. The Afghanistan Independent Journalists Association said it would complain to the president, Hamid Karzai, about the sentencing of editor Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, who has been in jail since his arrest two weeks ago. ‘This trial was against the law, the arrest was against the law since the beginning,’ the association’s president, Rahimullah Samander, said. ‘We told the court he didn’t make any mistake. He wrote what he had the right to write according to Afghan law and press freedom and freedom of expression,’ he said.
— AFP

Pakistan gang rape victim heads to US
A Pakistani woman who won international fame but irked the government for speaking out about her gang rape left for the United States on Saturday to receive an award for her courage. Mukhtar Mai, 36, has been declared Woman of the Year 2005 by Glamour, an American women’s magazine. She’s due to receive the award with a $20,000 cash prize Nov. 2 in New York. Past winners include US senator Hillary Clinton and former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. Mai braved social stigma by going public over her June 2002 assault, which was ordered by a village council in retaliation for her brother’s alleged affair with a woman from a higher-caste family.
— AFP

5 killed in Mumbai building collapse
Five people died and six were injured when a building in a suburban area of India’s commercial capital Mumbai collapsed Sunday, an official said. ‘A portion of an under-construction building fell in the Andheri suburb of north Mumbai and the labourers who were working at the construction site were buried in the debris,’ AD Jhandwal, Mumbai’s chief fire officer, said. He said a team of rescue workers pulled out 11 labourers from under the debris, of whom five were dead and the others injured. Mumbai, a city of 15 million people, has seen half-a-dozen building collapses since record rains in August. The police have launched an eviction drive against people living in dilapidated buildings in the city. — AFP

Nepal searches
for 18 climbers
Rescue workers are searching for seven French and 11 Nepali climbers who went missing four days ago after an avalanche in western Nepal, rescue officials said on Sunday. Authorities in Kathmandu lost contact with the 21-member climbing team on Wednesday after the avalanche tore through the base camp of the 6,981-metre Kang Guru peak. The team was at the base camp when the avalanche struck, Bikram Neupane, chief of the Himalayan Rescue Association, told the news agency. Three Nepali climbers were rescued on Sunday, but the rest were still missing, he said.
— Reuters

Poles choose new president
Poles voted Sunday in the second round of an election to choose a new president from two former comrades-in-arms in the Solidarity movement, Donald Tusk, a liberal, and his conservative rival, Lech Kaczynski. Opinion polls on Friday showed the race would be close between the two contenders, who finished far in front of a field of 12 in a first round two weeks ago. Their parties did best in a legislative election at the end of last month and are in talks to form a coalition government. Tusk was credited with around 51 per cent of the vote and Kaczynski with 49 per cent. Although they once sang from the same hymn sheet when they were in Solidarity, the ideologies of the two have evolved differently since the heady days of the 1980s.
— AFP

Times endorses Bloomberg
The New York Times enthusiastically endorsed Mayor Michael Bloomberg for re-election, saying he was on course to be one of the best mayors the city has ever had. The overwhelmingly positive editorial published in Sunday’s editions said Bloomberg, a Republican, has not been as entertaining as his predecessors but ‘has been better at running the city.’ ‘If he continues his record of accomplishment over the next four years, he may be remembered as one of the greatest mayors in New York history,’ the editorial said. Recent opinion polls put Bloomberg well ahead of his Democratic challenger, Fernando Ferrer.
— AP

Pope Benedict XVI canonises first saints
Tens of thousands of pilgrims gathered in St Peter’s Square early Sunday as Pope Benedict XVI began a ceremony canonising the first saints of his pontificate—two Polish-born Ukrainians, two Italians and a Chilean. Flag-waving pilgrims packed the giant Vatican square as the 78-year-old pontiff began the ceremony in bright sunshine which burned off the mist that had earlier obscured the dome of St Peter’s basilica. Choirs sang hymns in English, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish. During the two-hour ceremony, the pope was to proclaim the canonisation of Polish Archbishop Jozef Bilczewski, (1860-1923), diocesan priest Zygmunt Gorazdowski (1845-1920), Italian priest Gaetano Catanoso (1879-1963), a Capuchin monk Felice da Nicosa (1715-1787) and Chilean Jesuit Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga (1901-1952).
— AFP

Chalabi to visit US next month
The Iraqi deputy prime minister, Ahmad Chalabi, will be visiting the US capital in November at the invitation of the Treasury secretary, John Snow, Time magazine reported Sunday. The visit is likely to mark a political rehabilitation in the United States of the controversial former Iraqi exile leader, whose Baghdad headquarters were raided in 2004 and who was accused of passing on secret information to Iran.
— AFP

Turkey’s Pamuk defends US remarks
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said on Saturday he stood by remarks about the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks and about the deaths of Kurds in Turkey that could land him in jail for three years. Pamuk goes on trial in December for ‘insulting and weakening Turkish identity’ after talking about the massacre, a taboo in Turkey. He also said Turkish forces were partly to blame for the deaths of more than 30,000 Kurds in the 1980s and 90s. ‘I repeat, I said loud and clear that 1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey, and I stand by that,’ Pamuk told a news conference in Frankfurt, where he is due to receive a major literary award on Sunday.
— Reuters