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Saudi police killed at least two suspected militants in a dawn shootout Thursday, the first such incident since King Abdullah took the helm of the oil-rich kingdom which has been fighting a wave of Islamist attacks for more than two years.
   The four-hour gunfight began at 6:00am (0300 GMT) when special forces surrounded a district in the north of the Saudi capital Riyadh, Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television said.
   Clashes also erupted between police and suspects in the southwestern holy city of Medina, with security forces detaining an unspecified number of people, the satellite channel said without identifying those held.
   The deadly shootout in the capital was later confirmed to AFP by Saudi interior ministry spokesman Mansur al-Turki, although he did not say how many of the suspects had been killed.
   The Al-Arabyia network, Saudi-funded and usually well-informed about events in the kingdom, had initially said four suspects were killed in the exchange of fire. It later reported the death toll was two, saying another one militant had been wounded while another was captured.
   The interior ministry spokesman said ‘no security force members were wounded’.
   The Riyadh gunbattle is the first in the country since the new King Abdullah came to the throne in the Gulf kingdom and follows a spate of warnings from Western embassies about possible terror attacks.
   It follows warnings by Australia, Britain and the United States 10 days earlier that attacks were imminent in the kingdom.
   The US embassy in Riyadh and its consulates in Jeddah and Dhahran were closed on August 8-9, following information about possible militant strikes against American offices and citizens.
   Australia, Britain, Canada and Germany also issued alerts against serious threats against their nationals in Saudi Arabia.
   Following the warnings, the Saudi authorities imposed stepped-up security measures around diplomatic missions and Western residential complexes in the country.
   The kingdom, the world’s top oil exporter, has been battling a wave of Islamist violence by militants linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network in the past two years, much of it against Western targets.
   The attacks began on May 12, 2003, when suicide bombers devastated three residential compounds in Riyadh, ushering in a spate of bloody attacks aimed at driving ‘infidels’ from the cradle of Islam and destabilizing the ruling regime.
   The Western residents of the country became the targets of shootings and kidnappings, including the gruesome beheading of a US aeronautics engineer in June 2004 and an attack on its consulate in Jeddah.
   The violence has left at least 90 civilians, 42 security personnel and 113 militants dead, in addition to hundreds wounded.
   King Abdullah succeeded his late half-brother king Fahd on August 1, but had been de facto ruler of the ultra-conservative kingdom for about a decade.

Protesters set abandoned houses ablaze and hurled eggs as Israeli forces dragged hysterical residents from their Gaza Strip homes and thousands of religious Jews took refuge in synagogues to block their forcible ejection from the Palestinian territory.
   ‘Shame on you,’ shrieked residents as an army bulldozer smashed its way into Netzer Hazani, the oldest settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory seized by Israel in war 38 years ago. ‘You don’t do this to Arabs.’
   Israeli forces, most of them unarmed, marched into five more of the 21 Gaza settlements on Thursday, the second day of its forcible evacuation of residents from the territory, a historic operation that has pitted Jew against Jew.
   Police also said they were poised to launch an assault in a synagogue in the largest settlement of Neve Dekalim where hundreds of young activists have been holed up.
   Radical youths began burning down abandoned homes in Neve Dekalim as fire-fighters fought in vain to put out the fires that sent plumes of smoke spewing into the sky.
   Amid scenes of chaos in Kfar Darom, one of the most defiant settler bastions, sobbing families were dragged out of homes one by one by police and soldiers who moved in after dawn. Some set fire to seats in buses laid on to transport them into Israel.
   Many have also taken refuge at the synagogue whose foundation stone was laid a decade ago by the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, the settlers’ one-time champion now vilified for orchestrating the first Israeli pullout from Palestinian land.
   Despite the high tensions, the withdrawal is being completed more peacefully and quickly than expected, with up to nine settlements reported empty, although potential confrontations loom with diehard settlers.
   In Neve Dekalim, Israeli forces gave an ultimatum to the hundreds of youths massed on the roof and balconies of the main synagogue, waving flags and protest banners.
   ‘Get the people ready,’ Uri Barlev, police chief for Israel’s southern district, told settler ringleader Hanan Porat. If the occupants were not out within an hour as agreed ‘the police will enter’.
   At the hardline beachside community of Shirat Hayam, residents and supporters hurled eggs at soldiers and urged them to disobey their orders while some locked themselves inside their homes or took refuge on the synagogue roof.
   Nearby, Palestinian residents of the Mawassi enclave who were on rooftops watching events unfold were ordered by the army to stay in their homes.
   As many has 70 per cent of the estimated 8,000 settlers have left, public radio reported, although their numbers were swelled by around 5,000 infiltrators despite the settlements being declared closed military zones.
   The radio said the final Israelis are to be evacuated by Monday or Tuesday.

Sri Lanka’s parliament Thursday extended the state of emergency imposed after the assassination of the country’s foreign minister by suspected Tamil Tiger rebels.
   The assembly voted 124 for and 21 against extending the tough emergency laws, imposed by president Chandrika Kumaratunga and being used by police probing Friday’s killing of rebel critic Lakshman Kadirgamar, by a month.
   ‘We need the emergency to investigate the assassination,’ public security minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake said. ‘Tigers continue to violate the ceasefire and that is why we need the emergency laws to continue.’
   The minister accused the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of carrying out the assassination, but the rebels have denied any involvement.
   Although president Kumaratunga’s government was reduced to a minority in June when the main Marxist coalition partner walked out, it won opposition support Thursday for the emergency.
   ‘We support the emergency on the basis it will be used only for this investigation and not against political opponents,’ a spokesman for the main opposition United National Party said.
   Kumaratunga used emergency powers for the first time in 46 months to give more powers to security forces to arrest suspects in connection with the assassination.
   Sri Lanka was under a state of emergency from March 1983 until October 2001, during the height of the civil war between Tamil Tiger rebels and government soldiers.
   In November 2003, Kumaratunga announced a state of emergency during a political crisis but three days later retracted it.
   The president recalled parliament from its regular recess to approve the emergency.

Former deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim said Thursday that a 1.2 million dollar damages award over a book that triggered his 1998 sacking had cleared his name and proved he was the victim of a conspiracy.
   The author of ‘50 Reasons Why Anwar Cannot Be PM’, Khalid Jafri, has already been sentenced to jail for accusing Anwar of sodomy, corruption and an extra-marital affair that resulted in an illegitimate daughter.
   ‘The defendants’ main purpose in publishing the book was to destroy the plaintiff’s reputation and political career,’ said High Court judge Mohamad Hishamudin Mohamad Yunus in a strongly-worded decision.
   The judge noted the book was distributed to delegates at the general assembly of the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) in May 1998.
   ‘The defendants and others who conspired with the defendants achieve their purpose,’ he said. ‘The plaintiff’s political career was ruined as a result of the publication of the book.’
   ‘Faced with such a vicious and venomous public attack on his integrity, launched by the defendants in cahoots with others, the public humiliation and ridicule and the pain and mental distress suffered by the plaintiff and his family must be beyond description.’
   A visibly happy and relaxed Anwar embraced his wife Wan Azizah Wan Ismail outside the court and greeted supporters.
   ‘At last there is a judgement which finally takes full cognisance of the conspiracy to destroy my political career which has always been my position from day one,’ he said.

A leading state-run Chinese newspaper has scrapped a controversial appraisal system linking reporters’ pay to government approval after a high-profile protest by a veteran editor, sources said Thursday.
   Li Datong, a senior editor at the China Youth Daily, launched a rare attack on his employer over the plan to link salaries and bonuses to how much praise journalists receive from government and communist party officials.
   The unexpected move to dump the proposal was announced after the management held meetings to discuss concerns by Li and other editorial staff, said senior staff members who refused to be named.
   ‘They have scrapped the appraisal system and will design another new plan,’ a staff member close to the discussions told AFP.
   The appraisal system, which was to be implemented this week, stipulated that reporters would receive plus or minus points for their stories according to how much praise or criticism they got from government officials.
   More points would mean more money.
   Li’s open letter to editor-in-chief Li Erliang, published widely on overseas Chinese websites, said the move would jeopardise editorial freedom and would sacrifice the paper’s long tradition of unbiased reporting.
   ‘Under such an uncivilised and unreasonable system, provided that editors and journalists have not gone mad, who on earth would still want to write reports which keep officials in check?’ the letter said.
   Under the management’s latest decision, reporters and editors will be invited to discuss a new appraisal system, which was not the case before, staff said.
   But it might be too early yet for reporters to claim victory.
   ‘We are not naive, it is always difficult to predict things,’ said the senior staff member.
   The China Youth Daily is the mouthpiece of the Communist Party Youth League, the power base of President Hu Jintao. It has aggressively exposed official corruption.
   China maintains an iron grip over the media and regularly punishes outspoken reporters and editors. They are often dismissed or even jailed.

Former Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas arrived Thursday in Myanmar as a special envoy of the United Nations, which two years ago appointed him to push for the release of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
   Alatas, the first UN special envoy allowed here in more than a year, said after arriving on the unannounced visit that he carried a message from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for the nation’s reclusive military rulers, but declined to give details.
   ‘I came here as the envoy of the secretary general on UN reform,’ he told reporters.
   ‘I’m hoping to discuss UN reforms that will be discussed in September in New York with the government in Myanmar.’
   Alatas was scheduled to meet with Foreign Minister Nyan Win, followed by a dinner, Myanmar officials said on condition of anonymity. On Friday, he was due to meet with Senior General Than Shwe, the junta’s top leader, the officials said.
   Alatas was appointed in 2003 as a special envoy to Myanmar to negotiate the release of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The popular Nobel peace laureate has been detained by Myanmar’s junta since May the same year.
   The former minister has since also been named one of the UN’s special envoys to promote reforms in the world body, which will be debated at a summit of global leaders next month at UN headquarters in New York.
   UN officials said Alatas’s visit was part of a tour of several Asian nations before the September summit, although Myanmar has not said if it will attend that meeting.
   Alatas said he did not know if he would meet officials from Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy.
   The NLD said it only learned of Alatas’s trip from overseas reports on short-wave radio but hoped to meet him.
   ‘NLD is expecting to meet with the special envoy if we have a chance to. We are excited to see him,’ party spokesman Nya Win said.
   Alatas is the first special UN envoy allowed into the country since March 2004, when Malaysian Razali Ismail visited.
   Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win snubbed Razali last month when he declined to meet him on the sidelines of a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Laos.

A Jewish settler shot dead four Palestinian workers in cold blood in the West Bank on Wednesday as Israeli troops started to forcibly expel settlers from the Gaza Strip, medical sources said.
   Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas urged ‘restraint’ after the shootings, which the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, denounced as an act of ‘Jewish terrorism’ that would not halt his withdrawal from Gaza after a 38-year occupation.
   The four Palestinians, employed at the Shilo settlement industrial zone in the northern West Bank, were killed by a settler from a nearby enclave who wrested a weapon from a security guard at knife point, security sources said.
   Another Palestinian was injured in the hail of bullets, Israeli medical sources said.
   The 40-year-old married father of two grabbed the guard’s gun, rammed down his finger on the trigger and killed two victims sitting in his car, the sources said.

India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh imposed a ban Wednesday on a Maoist guerrilla group after nine people including a lawmaker died in a recent upsurge of violence.
   The Andhra Pradesh government has imposed a one-year ban on the Communist Party of India-Maoist, as well as seven other pro-Maoist groups, state home minister Jana Reddy told a press conference in the state capital Hyderabad.
   ‘Weve been forced to impose the ban to restore the peoples confidence in democracy and remove a sense of fear and insecurity in the wake of renewed violence by these groups,’ Reddy said. The ban on the ultra-leftist group, imposed in 1992, was allowed to lapse last year to make way for peace talks.
   The Maoists have been waging a three-decade low-level insurgency for the rights of landless farmers and indigenous tribesmen that has claimed over 10,000 lives.
   Maoist guerrillas have killed at least 150 people including 14 policemen since the beginning of this year, Reddy said. On Monday Maoist guerrillas ambushed officials returning from an event celebrating India’s Independence Day in Narayanpet, 120 kilometres (74 miles) southwest of Hyderabad. Nine people, including state lawmaker Narsi Reddy, were killed.

Police in Kolkata said on Thursday they were questioning two men arrested in connection with distributing leaflets and raising money for an organisation which had al-Qaeda as part of its name.
   The flyers explained in Urdu that the money would be used by ‘mujahideen’ (holy warriors) fighting in support of Muslims around the world. The coupons were sold under the name of ‘Mujahideen al Qaeda Pacific International’.
   They were being distributed in some Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods in Kolkata and the men were arrested earlier this week, a senior police officer told Reuters.

Two US soldiers were killed and two wounded on Thursday in Afghanistan’s southern province of Kandahar when a roadside bomb blew up their armored vehicle, the US military said.
   The vehicle was part of a convoy supporting a road construction project, the US military said in statement.
   ‘This is a tragic loss for us all,’ said general Jack Sterling, deputy commander of US forces in Afghanistan. ‘These terrorists are attacking the very forces working to improve Afghanistan.’
   The statement said the soldiers were protecting a road construction project which links Kandahar to the neighbouring province of Uruzgan, where militants are also highly active.
   The wounded soldiers were taken to a military hospital at Kandahar Air Field, the main US base in southern Afghanistan. They are both stable, the statement added.

An Islamic separatist group Thursday denied it was behind recent threats to attack Muslims in southern Thailand, as the prime minister headed to the region to defuse tension over intimidation by militants.
   Anonymous handwritten leaflets distributed over the past two weeks in the Muslim majority deep south have threatened to kill or chop off the ears of people who work on Fridays, the Muslim holy day, and on Thursdays.
   The intimidation has largely shuttered businesses and transport on those days in the provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat, where a separatist insurgency and other violence has left more than 850 people dead since January 2004.
   The Mujahideen Islam Pattani (MIP), which in the past has waged an armed struggle against Bangkok’s rule, disseminated leaflets in Yala’s Raman district saying it was not involved in the threats. It accused the government of fomenting mistrust and division between Muslims.
   ‘The Mujahideen Islam Pattani wants to reiterate that we have never prohibited people from working on Thursdays and Fridays, even during the month of Ramadan,’ the MIP said in the leaflets.
   ‘In fact it’s a ploy of the Siamese (Thai) invaders to create confusion and a rift among Malayu and to counter the Mujahideen Islam Pattani.’
   It urged local residents to ignore the threats and said such attacks were not its method of struggle for an independent state.

Russia and China began unprecedented joint military exercises involving air, sea and land forces Thursday, as commanders from both nations insisted the war games weren’t meant to intimidate other countries.
   The United States isn’t sending observers to the exercises, which symbolise the bolstered ties between Russia and China since the end of the Cold War, but the US has said it hopes they don’t shake regional stability.
   ‘Our exercises don’t threaten any country,’ the general, Yuri Baluyevsky, the head of the Russian armed forces general staff, told a news conference at Russia’s Pacific Fleet command in the Far East city of Vladivostok.
   The general, Liang Guanglie, chief of the general staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, said the exercises were taking place in accord with UN principles and would serve to boost the countries’ common interests and ‘protect peace and stability in our region and the whole world.’ He said they took part in the context of the ‘fight against international terrorism, separatism and extremism.’
   Liang denied that the moves to strengthen ties between Beijing and Moscow would lead to some kind of military union or the two countries fighting together against any common foe.
   Instead, the generals said the eight days of exercises were a result of the warming ties between the countries on many levels. China and Russia have drawn closer together since the end of the Cold War after decades of estrangement, united in their opposition to US dominance in world affairs.
   The exercises, dubbed ‘Peace Mission 2005,’ started Thursday with strategic consultations between commanders, and will climax next week with an amphibious and paratroops landing on China’s Shandong peninsula in the Yellow Sea. Some 10,000 troops are involved, mostly Chinese and about 1,800 Russians.
   The new commander of the US Pacific Fleet, admiral, Gary Roughead, said in an interview that the United States was ‘very interested’ in the Chinese-Russian exercises.
   ‘We’re very interested in the exercise, we’re interested in the types of things that they’ll do,’ Roughead told The Associated Press on Wednesday in Hawaii. ‘We’re interested in the complexity and the types of systems that they bring to bear.’
   Heralding the start of the drills, the Russian and Chinese commanders laid wreaths at a World War II memorial in Vladivostok before a Russian honour guard, and veterans from both countries also placed flowers there.
   Experts say the manoeuvres are more of a sales pitch to the Chinese of Russian-made arms — including the country’s long-range strategic bombers.
   Analysts have noted the involvement of Russia’s Tu-95 strategic bombers and Tu-22M long-range bombers in the exercises — warplanes that can carry conventional or nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and are not usually part of peacekeeping operations. The aircraft are expected to top China’s shopping list both to deter US assistance to Taiwan in the event of a conflict and project Chinese strength across the region.
   Baluyevsky on Thursday praised Russian weapons as reliable and easy to repair.
   But both countries also are looking to prove their military might.
   The US Defence Department said in a report last month that China’s military was increasingly seeking to modernise and could become a threat to American and other forces in the Asia-Pacific region as it looked to spread its influence.

The London Metropolitan Police chief, Ian Blair, faced growing calls to resign over the shooting of an innocent Brazilian man, as reports emerged that he tried to stop an inquiry into the killing.
   Supporters of Jean Charles de Menezes said Blair must go if he deliberately gave misleading information about the death of the 27-year-old, who was shot by police on a subway train last month after being mistaken for a suicide bomber.
   Adding to the sense of error, the Daily Mirror tabloid said a senior London police officer in charge of surveillance had ordered her men to take the electrician alive before he entered Stockwell station in south London.
   Public confidence in the police was undermined this week after leaked documents contradicted earlier claims about the shooting and revealed a series of blunders that led to de Menezes’s death on July 22–a day after four would-be bombers tried but failed to repeat the July 7 attacks on the city.
   Harriet Wistrich, a lawyer for de Menezes’s family, called on Blair to step down and said relatives wanted to know why police gave false information about the operation and never retracted it.
   ‘Sir Ian Blair should resign,’ Wistrich told ITV News. ‘The lies that appear to have been put out, like the statement from Sir Ian Blair for instance are clearly wrong. And nobody has stepped in to correct the lies.’
   On the day of the shooting, Blair said it had been ‘directly linked’ to anti-terror operations and that the suspect had refused to obey police instructions when challenged.
   Initial reports also said de Menezes had been acting suspiciously—wearing a bulky jacket, jumping a ticket barrier and sprinting onto the train.
   But witness accounts and photographs leaked to ITV on Tuesday showed him in a light denim jacket walking calmly into the station, using a ticket to enter and only running along the platform to catch his train in time.
   Nick Harvery, an MP for the smaller opposition Liberal Democrats, said Blair’s position was becoming ‘untenable’.
   ‘He would do himself a lot of good if he could show some contrition and make some public acknowledgement of just how badly it’s all been handled,’ he was quoted as saying in the Financial Times newspaper.
   Lawmakers are due to quiz Blair at a meeting of the committee next month.
   Turning up the heat on the police chief, The Times and The Guardian newspapers reported that he asked the Home Office on the day of the killing to stop an independent external investigation.
   Blair wrote to John Grieve, permanent secretary at the Home Office, to ask for an internal inquiry instead because he felt one by the Independent Police Complaints Commission would impede anti-terror operations, they said.

Lawmakers tried to reach compromises with Sunni Arab leaders Thursday in the country’s draft constitution, one day after synchronised bombings at a bus station and nearby hospital killed up to 43 people in the capital.
   Government officials said Thursday that the bombings were an attempt to target Shias and stoke civil war between religious groups in the country.
   ‘They targeted an area that has a population of people from southern Shia provinces, and their message was that their government is unable to protect you from us,’ government spokesman Laith Kubba said. ‘They want a reaction against Sunnis to therefore deepen the sectarian crisis in the country.’
   Kubba said flyers had recently been handed out in some Baghdad neighbourhoods threatening Shias if they did not leave the city. At least one person, a Sunni Arab woman married to a Shia, had been killed after the threats, he said.
   Kubba also said four suspects arrested on suspicion of being involved in the attack the prior day had been released after questioning.
   As the constitutional talks began, one Sunni Arab lawmaker expressed confidence that remaining differences would be resolved in time for the Monday deadline.
   ‘I expect that the constitution would be finished before Monday. Negotiations are still underway and everybody is determined to finish it before the deadline,’ said Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni member of the constitutional committee.
   On Wednesday, the country’s largest Sunni political group, the Iraqi Islamic Party, issued a blistering attack on the drafting committee, accusing it of bias and incompetence. The party said major differences remain on the same issues that blocked a deal last week.
   Lawmakers said the unresolved differences included federalism, the role of the Shia clergy and the distribution of Iraq’s vast oil wealth. The Sunnis also want the new constitution to affirm the country’s Arab and Islamic identity and that Islam is declared a main source in legislation.
   Once the draft is approved by parliament, it will be submitted to the voters in a referendum October 15. If two-thirds of the voters in three of the 18 provinces reject the constitution, it will be defeated. Sunnis form the majority in at least four provinces.

Four US soldiers were killed in Iraq Thursday, a day after 43 people died in rush-hour Baghdad bombings which the government said sought to create a sectarian crisis in the war-torn country.
   The soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in the northern town of Samarra, the US military said, taking to around 50 the US military deaths across Iraq in August, according to an AFP tally based on Pentagon figures.
   Another US military convoy was hit by a roadside bomb in Baghdad early Thursday with Iraqi officials reporting some American casualties in the blast although the US military had no immediate comment.
   The total US military deaths in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion were at 1,849, according to Pentagon figures as of August 17.
   The latest attack on US forces came just 24 hours after the deadliest bombings in the Iraqi capital this year when three car bombs ripped through a busy bus station and a nearby hospital killing at least 43 people.

The United States has launched a last-minute drive to scrap much of a draft plan for comprehensive UN reform just weeks before it is to be adopted at a world summit, Western diplomats said on Thursday.
   One option put forward by Washington would be to return to square one and launch line-by-line negotiations on the document, the diplomats said.
   But another top diplomat involved in the negotiations dismissed the others’ concerns, saying the initiative was a negotiating tactic the United States fully expected would be rejected by UN General Assembly president, Jean Ping, who is leading the talks.
   ‘Their position is still evolving. They are looking at other ways forward,’ this diplomat said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
   The US effort comes in the final stages of the drafting process; with negotiators last Friday unveiling what they hoped would be a near-final draft. Negotiations resume on Monday.

Racial disparities still exist in US medical care despite years of attempts to reduce them, with black women typically being the least likely to get the care they need, research published on Wednesday shows.
   ‘For most of the areas studied, disparities between white patients and black patients have not substantially improved during the past decade or so,’ said Nicole Lurie in an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, where the findings appear.
   Lurie of the Rand Corp. said there was hope for improvement because the leaders of insurance plans covering 90 million people ‘now understand that in order to make further improvement in the quality of health care and respond to a more demographically diverse marketplace, they need to make progress in racial disparities.’
   A study led by Amal Trivedi of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston contained a glimmer of good news, showing that racial disparities for patients in managed care plans had declined in seven out of nine categories from 1997 to 2003.
   ‘When you have programs that provide more consistency for everyone, that seems to have some effect on racial disparities,’ Ashish Jha of the Harvard School of Public Health, author of one of the other studies, told Reuters.
   But the other research was less encouraging.
   The Jha team found that the racial disparities for five procedures, such as surgery to replace a hip, knee or heart valve, actually increased between 1992 and 2001.
   The gap in care for blacks narrowed for only one of the nine procedures studied.
   ‘When we started our study two years ago, we did it with the hope that we would find a few procedures where the gap was narrowing, or a few regions around the country where the gap truly got eliminated so we could try to extrapolate that to the rest of the country,’ Jha said. ‘We couldn’t find any place in the country, or any set of procedures, where we could consistently see the gap narrowing.’
   ‘It’s a little shocking,’ he said.
   The third study came to a similar conclusion.
   Using data from a national heart attack registry, researchers found that between 1994 and 2002, for every 100 white men who needed and received treatment to have their narrowed heart arteries reopened, the same care was received by 97 white women, 91 black men and 89 black women.
   Similar trends were found for both the likelihood of receiving coronary angiography, where doctors locate specific blockages in the heart, and the risk of death in hospital following a heart attack.
   There was ‘no evidence that the differences have narrowed in recent years,’ said Viola Vaccarino of Emory University School of Medicine. ‘We could not determine the reasons for the differences,’ Vaccarino said.

Despite suspending sensitive nuclear activities due to Western fears it is seeking to make atomic bombs, Iran has still managed to make progress on its programme but analysts differ on just how far along it has got.
   The question is critical, as Iran this month resumed work on part of the nuclear fuel cycle and wants to negotiate further agreement to develop enriched uranium, the reactor fuel that can also be used to make bombs.
   Analysis of public comments by Iranian officials, and the views of experts, shows an often tortuous cycle of frantic activity on the ground, tough talking and eventually compromise as the West barters to secure guarantees from Tehran that its program is for peaceful purposes.
   In talks with the European Union to obtain trade and other benefits, Iran suspended uranium enrichment in October 2003 followed in November 2004 by all enrichment-related activities.
   It broke the total suspension August 8 by resuming uranium conversion work, but has so far held off on enrichment.
   Hassan Rowhani, Iran’s top security official before new hardline president Mahmood Ahmadinejad took office this month, told the Kayhan newspaper in July that Tehran’s tactics in the past two years had been to secure postponement of any referral to the UN Security Council while using suspension of some work to focus ‘all our capabilities on other activities.’
   The UN could impose sanctions if it believes, as the United States alleges, that the program is not for peaceful use.
   He said Iran has worked piece-by-piece on the process of converting uranium ore, or yellowcake, into the gas which is refined by centrifuges into enriched uranium.

Anti-war protesters held candles, sang, and chanted in vigils across the country on Wednesday in support of Cindy Sheehan, who has camped out near the ranch of the president, George W Bush, to urge him to bring US troops home from Iraq, where her son was killed a year ago.
   Sheehan has become a magnet for anti-war protesters who have crowded around her since her vigil began August 6 in Crawford, a community of 705 people, where Bush is on a month long vacation.
   More than 1,800 Americans have been killed in Iraq and thousands more have been wounded.

Up to 104 people drowned when an Ecuadoran motorboat packed with illegal migrants sank in the Pacific Ocean off Colombia, officials said Wednesday.
   The boat was headed for Central America, carrying 113 people hoping to enter the United States, when it sank Friday, according to Armando Elizalde, captain of the Ecuadoran port of Manta. A fishing boat rescued nine people, seven men and two women, found clinging to a crate and buoys off Colombia, on Sunday, he said.
   One of the nine said the overloaded vessel broke in two and then quickly sank, according to a news report Wednesday. A 25-year-old male survivor identified as Julio Sisalema said stricken migrants tried to grab parts of the boat and even other people as the vessel sank in a bid to stay afloat.
   ‘Suddenly it broke in two,’ Sisalema was quoted saying of the boat sinking which occurred on Friday.

A waitress in Sweden thought her elderly customer was joking when he offered her his Porsche as a tip, but he kept his word and gave her the keys to the car, daily Aftonbladet reported on Thursday.
   ‘I thought at first he was joking with me,’ 19-year-old Josefin Justin told the paper.
   Justin was waiting tables at the Njuraanger Cafe in Sundsvall in central Sweden when the man, who had recently retired and was dining with a group of gentlemen, asked her age.
   ‘At first I was a little suspicious but I didn’t get the feeling he was hitting on me or anything, he just seemed really nice,’ she said.
   It turned out to be 1979 Porsche 924 worth 30,000 kronor (4,000 dollars, 3,215 euros).

Floods kill at least 16 in China
Severe flooding and landslides caused by torrential rains have killed at least 16 people in northern and central China and left 18 missing, state media said Thursday. In the central province of Hubei, 12 people were reported dead and 18 were missing amid serious flooding and landslides, said Xinhua news agency. Heavy rainstorms which hit 17 counties on Sunday and Monday destroyed many houses and caused failures in transportation, telecommunications and power supply, it said. In the city of Shiyan alone, 6 people died and 11 were missing. Some 2,200 houses collapsed while thousands of hectares of crops were destroyed, Xinhua said. The rain also damaged 133 kilometers (83 miles) of highways, 17 bridges and cut off communications in

Hanoi defends human rights record
Vietnam Thursday published its first statement on human rights in the communist country, admitting shortcomings but denying some of the worst allegations made against the government. ‘We are still a poor, less developed country, so we still have existing shortcomings,’ vice minister of foreign affairs Le Van Bang said, launching the document, named a white paper. Bang did not name the shortcomings but admitted in response to a question on the neglect of ethnic minority areas that, ‘to some extent there are development gaps between regions in Vietnam.’ A Western diplomat in Hanoi said the document smacked of ‘wooden language’ and gave no cause for optimism that Vietnam would improve its rights record.

South Korean minister resigns
The South Korean vice-justice minister, Kim Sang-Hee, on Thursday offered to resign following allegations that he received bribes from Samsung, the country’s top business group. His decision came hours after an opposition lawmaker told parliament that Kim Sang-Hee and six other former and incumbent prosecutors regularly received kickbacks from the Samsung Group. Kim denied the allegations but said he was stepping down to open the way for a full investigation of the charges. Democratic Labour Party lawmaker Roh Hoe-Chan said in a statement that Samsung regularly drew up lists of people it sought to bribe with ‘rice cake’ money, a euphemism for cash handouts.

Electricity restored partially in Jakarta
Power has been partially restored in sections of the Indonesian capital Jakarta and its neighbouring province of Banten Thursday after blackouts caused by malfunctioning power plants, officials said. Earlier many districts across Jakarta and Banten suffered blackouts in mid-morning after generators at power plants in Paiton, Suralaya, Tanjung Priok and Muara Karang broke down, said Made Rosakiya of state electricity firm PLN. Hundreds of passengers using electric trains which connect Jakarta to its outlying districts were stranded when the outages occurred.
— AFP

Critics to review Roberts’ documents
Critics and supporters of Supreme Court nominee John Roberts are hoping that more than 38,000 newly released documents from his time as a government lawyer will give them fresh insight into his thinking. The American Bar Association, the nation’s largest lawyers group, called Roberts ‘well qualified’ on Wednesday, a day before the release of the documents from his tenure in the Reagan White House. Republicans cheered the ABA announcement.
— AP

Ugandan army kills 13 rebels in Sudan
Ugandan troops have killed 13 Lord’s Resistance Army rebels in two separate helicopter raids in Atiki, southern Sudan, local press reported on Thursday. The Ugandan army’s intelligence coordinator, colonel, Charles Otema Awany, said the army on Tuesday carried out two separate raids on the rebels’ hideouts in southern Sudan, killing 13 rebels on the spot. Otema said their new wave of attacks has forced the LRA leader, Joseph Kony, to flee from Kit Valley, where he had been hiding, to deeper into southern Sudan.
— AFP

Pope in Germany for first foreign visit
Pope Benedict XVI arrived at a blustery Cologne-Bonn airport in his native Germany early Thursday, sparking a rapturous ovation from a welcoming party of young pilgrims at the start of the first foreign visit of his pontificate. The 78-year-old pontiff suffered a brief mishap when his skullcap was blown off by a gust of wind as he stepped from the Alitalia plane. Smiling, he waved to the cheering crowd after being greeted by the German president, Horst Koehler, and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder.
— AFP

Four killed in Russian copter crash
Four people died Thursday in a helicopter crash near the western Siberian oil town of Nefteyugansk, the Russian emergency situations ministry said. Another two people were wounded when the Mi-8 passenger helicopter came down, a spokesman for the ministry said. Reasons for the crash, which took place in a region with important oil reserves, were still unknown. Earlier Thursday, the chief of Russia’s air force, General Vladimir Mikhailov, suspended flights of military Mi-8 choppers following an accident near the far eastern town of Khabarovsk that injured three crewmembers.
— AFP

Teenager jailed for racist attack
A teenage member of a white gang which attacked three Asian schoolboys, beating two of them unconscious, has been jailed for 16 months by a judge who likened the attack to ‘wolves seeking, stalking and chasing their prey.’ One of the boys was son of Asgher Ali, 40 who had come here from Jammu and Kashmir in the early 1980s. Eighteen-year-old James Peters was in a gang of up to 100 youths who hunted and cornered the children, aged 11 and 14, playing close to their school. Two boys were beaten to the ground and a boy of 14, who had stepped in to help his friends.
— Reuters

Michael Jackson hit with fine
Michael Jackson–who has been keeping a low profile since being acquitted of child sex charges in June–was fined 10,000 dollars on Wednesday for failing to appear in a US court to face sexual abuse allegations. A judge in a New Orleans court in the southern state of Louisiana issued the fine against the ‘King of Pop’ after Jackson, or one of his representatives, failed to show up in court to defend the allegations.
— Reuters