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Sri Lanka’s new foreign minister has accused the island’s peacebroker Norway of misleading European nations about the ‘terrorist’ nature of the Tamil Tiger rebels, a report said Monday.
   Anura Bandaranaike, named after his predecessor’s slaying which Colombo has blamed on the Tigers, urged India to be ‘very emphatic to the free world that this (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) is a terrorist organisation.’
   Colombo would like India ‘to try to influence the Europeans in particular who have been misled by Norwegians...away from the LTTE,’ he told The Hindu newspaper.
   ‘The Europeans have been misinformed deliberately (about the Tigers)...the role of Norway is under severe criticism in Sri Lanka,’ Bandaranaike said.
   Norway was asked by Sri Lanka in 2000 to act as a peacebroker to end the island’s three-decade-old ethnic conflict that has claimed 60,000 lives. But Sri Lankan critics have regularly accused it of bias toward the rebels.
   The Tigers ‘must feel the heat for what they have done,’ said Bandaranaike, who spoke during a two-day visit to India late last week.
   The Sri Lankan government has accused the Tigers of the August 12 killing of Lakshman Kadirgamar, an ethnic Tamil who was a fierce critic of the rebels. The group has denied responsibility.
   Bandaranaike, brother of the Sri Lankan president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, said he would like European nations to take action against such Tiger activities as fund-raising.
   Colombo has repeatedly asked India to take a more hands-on role in the peace process but Bandaranaike’s comments marked the first time that Sri Lanka has spelt out a role it would like New Delhi to play.
   India armed the rebels in the mid-1980s but ended up fighting them between 1987 and 1990. It outlawed the Tigers after Indian police accused them of assassinating former Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
   A campaign waged by Bandaranaike’s predecessor led to the Tigers being outlawed in various countries, including the United States and Britain.
   The Tigers are seeking a homeland for the minority Tamils in the Sinhalese- majority nation. Peace talks have stalled but a ceasefire has held since early 2002.

The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in Afghanistan to rekindle traditionally warm ties, said on Monday that India was ready to help ensure Afghanistan never again becomes hostage to terrorism.
   Singh, speaking at a ceremony to unveil the foundation stone for a new Afghan parliament being built with Indian help, said democracies had to work together to deal with global terrorism.
   ‘We are ready to work with the government and people of Afghanistan to ensure that Afghanistan will never again be hostage to, or become a haven for, terrorists,’ Singh said.
   Afghanistan’s former Taliban rulers let Osama bin Laden run al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. US forces invaded in late 2001 after the Taliban refused to give up bin Laden, wanted for the September 11 attacks.
   ‘Open societies, whether old or young, are equally threatened today by the rise of global terrorism,’ Singh said.
   ‘Afghanistan has a unique position in this alliance of democracies that are fighting this menace,’ he said.

Authorities in the troubled Kashmir state have banned political speeches in Muslim shrines controlled by them, drawing protests from separatists.
   The Jammu and Kashmir Wakf Board, a state body regulating around 100 mosques and Muslim shrines, said this week it had decided to invoke a rule to enforce the ban.
   ‘We’ve not invoked anything new. It is already there in the act that the shrines should not be used for political purpose’, Naeem Akhtar, an executive member of the board, said.
   The decision has been criticised by separatist leaders in the violence-hit region.
   ‘In Islam, religion and politics cannot be practised separately,’ Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, spiritual leader and chief of the moderate faction of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference said on Sunday.
   ‘We’ve to talk about everything that concerns the community. Be it social, political or religious issues, they are all inseparable parts of the Islamic way of life,’ he said from Srinagar, the summer capital of the Himalayan region.
   More than 45,000 people have been killed since a separatist revolt erupted in 1989 in Indian Kashmir, largely Hindu India’s only Muslim-majority state.

Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan began talks here Monday on drug trafficking, terrorism and the status of nationals jailed in each other’s prisons as part of their ongoing peace process, an Indian official said.
   The talks between the two countries’ home secretaries (top interior ministry officials) follow meetings earlier this month on nuclear issues, conventional warfare and cross-border trade.
   They form part of the so-called Composite Dialogue launched in January last year and aimed at resolving decades-old conflicts, including the one over Kashmir.
   ‘Usually the agenda is terrorism and drug trafficking but this time we have requested that we would like to discuss the issue of prisoners held in both countries,’ Pakistani home secretary Syed Kamal Shah told reporters Sunday.
   Shah’s Indian counterpart VK Duggal confirmed Monday that New Delhi had agreed to talk about the fate of prisoners.
   Besides the issue of detainees, Duggal said New Delhi would press Islamabad to deport ‘terrorists’ who committed crimes in India and then took refuge in Pakistan, including mafia don Dawood Ibrahim.
   New Delhi accuses Ibrahim of masterminding 1993 serial bomb blasts in India’s commercial capital Mumbai which left hundreds dead.

Officials are making painstaking preparations for thousands of Palestinians to tour evacuated Israeli settlements in Gaza, desperate to ensure the highly symbolic visits are not hijacked by chaos.
   When the last Israeli soldier leaves the tiny sliver of occupied territory, in principle in a matter of weeks, officials are expecting busloads of Palestinians to want to visit the bulldozed Jewish settlements.
   At stake is how to ferry in the thousands of civilians impatient to visit parts of the territory that were inaccessible for decades, and how to stop armed groups from unleashing havoc on land they claim to have liberated.
   Principally, the Palestinians have to avoid chaos and prove to the world they ‘are responsible and can behave like a civilised people’ said Saleh Zeidan, an official from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
   Just as important, he said, was the need to avoid conflict between the Palestinian groups and ‘celebrate victory together’.
   The Palestinian Authority will ban the public from the abolished settlements for at least three days after the Israeli soldiers leave in order to secure the zones.
   ‘All the former settlements are guarded by Palestinian security. We will announce on television and in the press that people cannot go there immediately for security reasons,’ interior ministry spokesman Tufiq Abu Khussa said.
   Only then will Palestinians be able to make organised visits under the surveillance of security forces, he added.
   Hundreds of buses have already been hired by Palestinian leaders, said Abdel Hakim Awad, leader of the youth wing of the main governing Fatah party.
   ‘We have to deal with the logistical problems and people’s understandable impatience. How we take Jabaliya or Khan Yunis to Kfar Darom or Neve Dekalim are the challenges we have to face.’
   The northern Gaza refugee camp of Jabaliya, one of the most impoverished and radicalised areas of the territory, is home to 120,000; the depressed southern town of Khan Yunis more than 142,000.
   The former Jewish settlements of Kfar Darom and Neve Dekalim were lived in by no more than 400 and 2,500 Israelis in their heyday.

Separatist leaders in a remote northeastern state of Tripura forced their cadre to perform in pornographic films to fund their cause, the police said on Sunday, but rebels said authorities were trying to malign them.
   The police said surrendered rebels of the National Liberation Front of Tripura confessed that such films were sold in India, and neighbouring Bangladesh and Myanmar.
   ‘We have many pornographic CDs with young women and men featuring in these movies which were handed over to us by some surrendered NLFT cadres,’ Ghanshyam Murari Srivastava, the police chief of Tripura said.
   However, the rebels denied this.
   ‘This is nothing but another propaganda war launched by the police to malign our image,’ an NLFT spokesman said.
   The police said the rebel leaders frequently abused tribal women, ordinary villagers as well as members of the rebel group.
   ‘But using them to produce pornography is a new trend,’ Srivastava said.
   NLFT is fighting for a separate tribal homeland in Tripura, accusing New Delhi of flooding the state with immigrants.
   Indian security officials said most of the pornographic material was filmed in the rebels’ bases in Khagrachari district of Bangladesh.
   India’s northeast which comprises seven mountainous states and circled by China, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar has been racked by insurgencies for decades.

Hundreds of families will be urgently moved from around 30 dilapidated buildings in flood-damaged Mumbai, a top official said Monday, hours after a three-storey apartment block collapsed and killed six people.
   ‘There are at least 28 to 29 extremely dangerous buildings where 900 families reside which will have to be vacated definitely in the next seven days,’ said Vilasrao Deshmukh, chief minister of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital.
   ‘They will be put up in the city’s transit camps,’ he told television channels.
   Late Sunday night a 60-year-old structure in the south of Mumbai, India’s main financial city, collapsed without warning, the police said.
   HS Jadhav, superintendent of the city’s GT Hospital, put the toll at six dead and 13 injured.
   ‘All the injured have rib and leg fractures for whom operations will have to be conducted,’ he said.
   Of the injured, nine were residents of the building while four were volunteers assisting in rescue operations.

The author of a book which helped trigger the 1998 sacking of Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim died Monday of diabetes, the official Bernama news agency said.
   Bernama said Khalid Jafri, 65, would be buried Tuesday in the town of Port Dickson. He leaves a wife and four children.
   Khalid, the author of ‘50 Reasons Why Anwar Cannot Be PM’, had been sentenced in July to one year in jail for accusing Anwar of sodomy, corruption and an extra-marital affair that resulted in an illegitimate daughter.
   Khalid was free on bail pending an appeal. However, early this month he was admitted to hospital for treatment for diabetes. His right leg was amputated and he was put on a life support machine. On August 18 a court awarded Anwar 4.5 million ringgit (1.2 million dollars) in damages over the book.
   ‘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.
   Khalid’s wife Rozihan was named as the second defendant in the libel case, in her role as publisher of the book.

Former Nepali prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, sacked by King Gyanendra, has asked the nation’s top court to overturn an anti-graft body’s decision to jail him for two years for corruption, his party said on Monday.
   It said a petition was filed in the Supreme Court on Sunday against the Royal Commission for Corruption Control that jailed Deuba, accusing him of embezzling $5.3 million in awarding a contract to supply drinking water to Kathmandu.
   ‘The commission is unconstitutional. Therefore, its decision to punish Deuba is illegal,’ Bimalendra Nidhi, a senior member of Deuba’s Nepali Congress (Democratic) Party, said.

Bhutan has assured India that it will not allow separatist rebels fleeing a weekend crackdown in India’s restive northeast to find refuge in the remote Himalayan kingdom, an official said on Monday.
   ‘We shall render all possible help in preventing militants from India’s northeast entering our territory and also uprooting any rebel bases, although there are no camps right now inside our kingdom,’ said Sonam Dawa, the district magistrate of Bhutan’s Serpang district bordering India’s Assam state.
   Dawa was leading a high-level team of Bhutanese civil and army officials to Assam’s western district of Kokrajhar to discuss reports of Assamese rebels trying to set up bases in Bhutan once again.

Hurricane Katrina claimed its first victims in Louisiana early Monday as it slammed into barrier islands while dumping torrential rain on a wide swath of the US Gulf of Mexico coast and threatened more death and massive destruction.
   The hurricane made its first landfall as its northern eye crossed the coast near Grand Isle, one of Louisiana’s barrier islands, at about 1000 GMT, said Martin Nelson, an official with the National Hurricane Centre.
   ‘We may have a second landfall later on,’ Nelson said in a brief telephone interview.
   Although slightly weaker than on Sunday, the monster storm has already forced hundreds of thousands of residents from New Orleans to Biloxi, Mississippi, to flee and seek refuge on higher ground.
   An estimated 80 percent of New Orleans residents have left the low-lying city, according to local officials.
   But for three elderly people, evacuation from New Orleans to Baton Rouge proved fatal, officials said.
   State police spokesman Markus Smith said the people were ‘indirect’ victims of the storm, which has been downgraded to category four from the highest level of five but is still packing a powerful punch.
   ‘It may have been dehydration-related,’ Smith said in a telephone interview.
   He explained that Louisiana State Police views natural disaster casualties as direct when they are killed by falling trees and downed power lines or die as a result of flooding or storm surges.
   The National Hurricane Centre downgraded Katrina to a category four storm after it measured sustained winds reaching 240 kilometres an hour.
   Forecasters warned that although ‘some fluctuations in strength’ were likely, Katrina was expected to come ashore with its current vigour.
   At 0900 GMT, the eye of the hurricane was located 145 kilometres (90 miles) southeast of New Orleans, barreling toward shore at 24 kilometres an hour.
   Landfall was expected sometime between 1200 and 1400 GMT, weather officials said.
   New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who issued an unprecedented mandatory evacuation order for the city known as ‘The Big Easy,’ warned people to remain vigilant.
   ‘I do not want to create panic,’ he said. ‘But I do want the citizens to understand that this is very serious and it’s of the highest nature.’
   The US president, George W Bush, declared a state of emergency that clears the way for federal aid, and urged people to get out of the hurricane’s path.
   ‘We cannot stress enough the dangers this hurricane poses to Gulf Coast communities. I ask citizens to put their safety and the safety of their families first by moving to safe ground,’ Bush said from his Texas ranch.
   Some 30,000 people took refuge in the Superdome sports arena, which authorities designated a shelter of last resort for those unable to flee the city.
   Authorities also ordered evacuations in neighbouring Mississippi, which is also expected to be slammed by the monster storm.
   Since Katrina raged dangerously close to offshore oil platforms, most of which have been evacuated, oil prices hit new record highs after crossing 70 dollars a barrel in Asia Monday and were expected to go higher.
   The deadly storm wrought havoc in Miami and other areas of south Florida last week, killing seven people, uprooting trees and flooding entire neighbourhoods.

Iraqi officials began distributing millions of copies of a hard-won draft constitution Monday as the battleground moved to the hustings after weeks of tortuous negotiations among politicians on the text.
   In a worrying sign for the government and its US backers, leaders of the disgruntled Sunni Arab former elite, which has been the driving force behind the insurgency, immediately began mobilising for a massive ‘no’ vote in an October referendum that could throw the whole process back to square one.
   But the US president, George W Bush, played down the opposition and hailed a new milestone in a political transition seen as vital to an eventual withdrawal of foreign troops.
   Hundreds of Sunnis took to the streets of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit to protest against the draft constitution and its provisions for a fully federal Iraq with autonomous regions in Arab as well as Kurdish areas.
   ‘No, No, To The Constitution—Yes, Yes To A United Iraq,’ read one of the banners brandished by the demonstrators in a show of strength that could spread in the run-up to the referendum.
   Sunni negotiators, who were unhappy with the 11th-hour concessions made by the majority Shias and Kurds before the text was finalised on Sunday, warned that the text would be defeated and that the resulting setback to the political process would pour further fuel on the insurgency.
   ‘We are unhappy and reject the constitution,’ said Sunni drafting committee member Saleh al-Motlag.
   ‘Anyone who tries to impose views forcefully on the public may actually aid an escalation of violence,’ he warned.
   In the Sunni guerrilla stronghold of Fallujah, which was recaptured by US-led troops in a massive offensive late last year, residents were already registering for the referendum in large numbers in a bid to shoot the charter down.
   The rules for October’s referendum stipulate that the constitution fails if it is rejected by two-thirds of voters in three provinces. At least three provinces are predominantly Sunni.
   ‘Everybody is registering to vote in the referendum—this constitution is against Iraq as a united Arab Islamic nation,’ Sheikh Majed Jassim al-Showah said.
   Another local tribal leader said the city’s ‘imams are encouraging everybody to vote (in their sermons) at prayers every Friday’.
   It was a far cry from landmark parliamentary elections in January when the city’s powerful Sunni clergy urged a boycott and insurgents ordered voters to stay away on pain of death.
   But the US president played down the opposition to the draft constitution, saying differences were inevitable in a democracy.
   ‘This is a document of which the Iraqis, and the rest of the world, can be proud,’ Bush said.
   ‘Iraqis deserve to celebrate,’ said the independent Al-Sabah al-Jadid. ‘It is paramount that we are (now) ruling ourselves through the ballot box and dialogue, not through the secret police and the Republican Guards,’ the paper said, referring to the disbanded shock troops of Saddam Hussein’s regime. But the rival Al-Iraq was more pessimistic.
   ‘The problem of federalism, as well as religion and the Baath (former ruling party) remain disputed issues,’ the paper said, referring to the main Sunni objections to the final text.
   ‘Problems have therefore been postponed in the hope that the people will decide on October 15.’
   Rejection of the hard-won charter text at referendum would force the dissolution of the current parliament and the election of a new legislature to start the whole process all over again.
   But the president, Jalal Talabani, who is himself a Kurd, insisted that he was unfazed by the possibility of defeat in the referendum.
   ‘If the nation rejects it, we will write another one,’ he said.
   In violence on the ground, two people were killed in a guerrilla attacks and a mortar round was fired at the oil ministry in Baghdad without causing casualties or damage.

A Reuters Television soundman was shot dead in Baghdad on Sunday and a cameraman who was wounded was still being questioned by US troops 12 hours later.
   Iraqi police said the two, both Iraqis, were shot by US forces. A US military spokesman said the incident was being investigated. The cameraman was being held and questioned because of ‘inconsistencies in his initial testimony,’ he added.
   Waleed Khaled, 35, was hit by a shot to the face and at least four to the chest as he drove to check a report, called in to the Reuters bureau by a police source, of an incident involving police and gunmen in the western Hay al-Adil district.
   ‘A team from Reuters news agency was on assignment to cover the killing of two policemen in Hay al-Adil; US forces opened fire on the team from Reuters and killed Waleed Khaled, who was shot in the head, and wounded Haider Kadhem,’ an Interior Ministry official quoted the police incident report as saying.
   Cameraman Kadhem, 24, who was wounded in the back, told colleagues at the scene: ‘I heard shooting, looked up and saw an American sniper on the roof of the shopping centre.’
   The only known witness, he was later detained by the US troops. For 10 hours, US officers said they could not trace Kadhem.

The Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, has warned he will lodge a complaint against the United States at the United Nations and other international bodies if the US government fails to act against television evangelist Pat Robertson, who has called for Chavez’s assassination.
   ‘If the US government does not take action that it must take, we will go to the United Nations and Organisation of American States to denounce the US government,’ the Venezuelan leader said Sunday as he addressed participants at talks on a social charter for the Americas.
   He added he believed that by failing to act against Robertson, the United States was ‘giving protection to a terrorist, who is demanding the assassination of a legitimate president.’
   Robertson caused a diplomatic stir last Monday when he said on the air that if Chavez believed the United States was trying to kill him, ‘I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.’
   Robertson apologised Wednesday, but then went on to compare Chavez to Saddam Hussein and to suggest the United States could one day be at war with his oil-rich country.
   Chavez, a twice-elected leftist and close ally of the Cuban president, Fidel Castro, has often said Washington would like to assassinate him, and accuses the Bush administration of involvement in a coup d’etat that toppled him for 47 hours in April 2002.
   Chavez said he had already instructed his foreign minister and the country’s ambassador to Washington to begin the process in the international bodies.

The French president, Jacques Chirac, on Monday called on the world to combat terrorism ‘ceaselessly and without flinching.’
   Recalling a number of recent terrorist attacks around the world—in London, Egypt, Turkey and Israel—Chirac also said the world community must not lose sight of its basic values in combating the threat.
   ‘Against this barbarism which usurps and warps the causes that it claims to defend, we must fight ceaselessly and without flinching, while ensuring absolute respect for our values,’ he told the annual gathering of French ambassadors based around the world.
   Chirac called for France to be in the vanguard of the fight against terrorism, describing it as a threat to French values of ‘liberty, justice and solidarity.’
   Chirac, whose country is one of three European Union states that has been negotiating with Iran over the implementation of its nuclear programme, also called on that country to respect a commitment to suspend fuel enrichment work, or see the issue referred to the UN Security Council.
   ‘I call on the Iranian authorities to choose cooperation and trust by seriously examining’ an offer from the European Union and ‘returning to their commitments to suspend activities linked to the production of fissile material,’ Chirac said in his speech.
   ‘We appeal to Iran’s spirit of responsibility to re-establish cooperation and trust, otherwise, and I would regret this, the Security Council would have no other choice than to take up the issue,’ he said.

Australian nuclear experts raised concerns on Monday that unsecured sources of radioactive waste in medical centres in Southeast Asia could be used by militants to build a ‘dirty bomb.’
   Experts from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, who have checked radioactive waste in South-east Asia for the past year, said cobalt was found unsecured in two countries after radiation therapy centres closed.
   ‘This is all to do with preventing there ever being a dirty bomb,’ ANSTO chief of operations Ron Cameron told Reuters.
   ‘The more we can get sources in control, the more we can have a reassurance that there isn’t material out there that could be used for a malicious purpose.’
   About 25 other radiation centres are being investigated in a third country, The Australian newspaper reported on Monday.
   Cameron declined to name the countries involved, but said Asian governments needed to do more to guarantee the safe disposal of the material, common in cancer treatments in major hospitals.
   He said without stronger security and disposal rules, there was a risk militants could find the radioactive material and use it to build a weapon capable of contaminating a large area of a major city.
   Conventional explosives wrapped around radioactive material could make a so-called dirty bomb, which would do little immediate damage but could spread radioactive material across a city, causing panic and an increase in cancer rates.
   Cameron said radioactive cobalt and caesium were the most common materials, and were used in the mining and gas industries and in radiation treatment for cancer patients.
   A team of 10 ANSTO experts are training officials from 11 Southeast Asian and Pacific island nations under a three-year programme to help countries find and secure radioactive waste.
   Cameron said most radioactive material was strictly controlled and it would be difficult for militants to identify and procure enough material to do build an effective dirty bomb.
   ‘But if you locate a source (of material), the threat of doing it or the claim you have done it would cause a lot of damage,’ he said.
   ‘A dirty bomb is not a weapon of mass destruction, it is a weapon of mass disruption,’ he said.
   ANSTO is Australia’s nuclear research and development organisation. It runs Australia’s only nuclear reactor, which produces radioactive products for medical use.

Starving–officially known as caloric restriction–may make worms and mice live up to 50 per cent longer but it will not help humans live super-long lives, two biologists argued on Sunday.
   They said their mathematical model showed that a lifetime of low-calorie dieting would only extend human life span by about 7 per cent, unlike smaller animals, whose life spans are affected more by the effects of starvation.
   Researchers at various universities and the national Institutes of Health are testing the theories but there are groups already cutting calories by up to a third in the hope they can live to be 120 or 125, while staying healthy.

Some 63 people were wounded, two seriously, during a bull running event in San Sebastian de los Reyes, just north of Madrid, emergency services said Sunday.
   A 18-year-old man was undergoing surgery after suffering serious facial wounds when he was struck by a bull’s horn while a 16-year-old boy was in a serious condition with multiple fractures to the head and a chest injury.
   Two other people were in hospital while 59 people were treated on site for minor injuries, at the end of the fourth day of the bull running festival at San Sebastian de Los Reyes, 15 kilometres (nine miles) north of Madrid.
   The event is a small-scale version of the annual bull running event in Pamplona, near the French border, which occurs in July.

Chancellor candidate Angela Merkel rallied her conservative alliance Sunday for the final push of the German election campaign with polls showing unanimously that victory is within their grasp.
   At a party congress in the western city of Dortmund ahead of the September 18 election, Merkel said the Christian Union parties were ready to unseat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder after seven years in the opposition.
   ‘At his campaign rallies, (Schroeder) says seven years of Red-Green have been seven good years for the country,’ Merkel said, referring to Schroeder’s center-left coalition of Social Democrats and Greens.
   ‘Such sentences must sound like sheer mockery to the five million unemployed in the east and west of the country.’

British embassy in Jakarta evacuated
The British embassy in Indonesia was evacuated on Monday after a suspicious package mailed to a local staff member sparked an alert, an embassy official and the police said. ‘We received a suspicious package delivered to the embassy this morning. On inspection it aroused suspicion,’ embassy spokeswoman Faye Belnis said. ‘At that stage the decision was taken to evacuate the embassy. The relevant Indonesian authorities were summoned to the site and the package was examined according to established procedure, and then was found to be harmless.’ She said the embassy, which employs approximately 80 foreign and local staff, had already reopened.
— AFP

‘Bin Laden wounded report untrue’
The US military and NATO peacekeeping forces on Monday dismissed reports carried on Islamic websites that Osama bin Laden had been injured in western Afghanistan. US spokesman colonel James Yonts said that his military had checked claims that the al-Qaeda leader had been wounded by Spanish troops based in the western province of Herat. ‘When we looked into that report—you know any allegation such as this, we take it very seriously—we found no proof,’ US spokesman colonel James Yonts told reporters in Kabul. The claim first surfaced on August 24 in a story on Italian news website Adnkronos
International.
— AFP

Taliban commander killed in Afghan clash
US forces have killed a senior Taliban commander responsible for a spate of attacks in southern Afghanistan, the US military said on Monday. The man, identified as Payenda Mohammed, was in command of more than 150 Taliban fighters in Uruzgan province. He was killed along with three of his men in a battle last week, a US military spokesman said. ‘He was known for conducting rocket attacks, ambushes, guerrilla-style attacks and setting up illegal checkpoints,’ Colonel Jim Yonts told a briefing. Taliban insurgents are battling the government army and about 20,000 US troops across a rugged swathe of south and east Afghanistan. About 1,000 people have been killed in violence this year, most of them militants, but including 48 US soldiers.
— Reuters

Nuclear talks off for now: N Korea
North Korea said Monday it will not return to talks on its nuclear weapons programs before mid-September at the earliest, blaming the delay on military drills between the United States and South Korea. A fourth round of six-party negotiations on the issue involving the two Koreas, China, the United States, Japan and Russia broke up on August 7 after 13 days of intense and sometimes fiery discussions. All six sides had agreed to meet again this week but North Korean foreign minister Paek Nam-Sun said the wargames had complicated matters. ‘That is totally responsible for the delay of the next round of the six-party talks,’ he said of the exercises that started last week, Japan’s Kyodo News reported from Pyongyang.
— AFP

Australian govt sued over immigration detention
A 10-year-old Iranian boy launched a landmark legal action against the Australian government Monday, with his lawyers arguing he was psychologically damaged by living in immigration detention camps for two years. Through his father Mahommad Saeed Badraie, Shayan Badraie is suing the Immigration Department and two detention centre operators in a case which could open the way for other inmates to claim compensation. Shayan’s legal team told the New South Wales Supreme Court that the government had failed to provide adequate care to the boy while he was in custody and he had developed post-traumatic stress as a result.

London’s carnival a big draw despite bomb fears
Organisers of London’s Notting Hill carnival said on Monday they were hoping up to a million people would gather for the final day of one Europe’s biggest street parties, despite jitters about hypothetical bomb threats. The 41st Notting Hill festival, a huge street party celebrating West Indian culture in West London, has been called ‘Unity and Diversity’ this year to celebrate London’s multiculturalism, less than two months after the bomb attacks of July 7 that left 56 dead, including four apparent suicide bombers. ‘July 7 has changed London in many respects, but the one aspect that will never change is the strength of this city, and its diversity. And nothing embodies this better than the Notting Hill carnival,’ the head of the organising committee, Chris Mullard, said.

US senators’ plane detained in Russia
Veteran US Republican Senator Richard Lugar said Monday a plane carrying him and Democratic Senator Barack Obama had been detained by Russian security officials for three hours at an airport in western Russia. Speaking in Ukraine, to which the plane was eventually allowed to continue, Lugar said he had not received an explanation for the hold-up late on Sunday in the west Russian regional centre of Perm. ‘We are not certain as to why, or what particular –caused that delay,’ Lugar told journalists after the two senators held talks with Ukrainian officials.

Burundi, Rwanda adopt disparate
peace paths
Emerging from near identical ethnically sparked civil wars, central African neighbors Burundi and Rwanda have adopted disparate political strategies to heal war-tainted pasts that cost the lives of millions. With equal ethnic mixes—Hutu majorities of about 85 percent and Tutsi minorities of about 14 percent, plus a small Twa pygmy population—tribal factors have assumed great prominence in war and relative peace in the two small former Belgian colonies.

Jackson sails around the World in Dubai
Michael Jackson has sailed around The World—man-made islands in the shape of a world map—on a trip to the Gulf emirate of Dubai where he is reportedly eyeing property, local newspapers said Monday. The superstar has secretly been in Dubai since August 20, arriving from the small Gulf kingdom of Bahrain where he has been staying since being acquitted of child molestation trial in the United States. Braving the summer heat, Jackson wore his signature black hat and sunglasses as he cruised in the hot waters off the coast of Dubai around The World and other palm tree-shaped islands.
— AFP