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Southeast Asian leaders took aim at Myanmar in their annual summit Monday, demanding real steps towards democracy and the release of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
   The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations bloc is grappling with a host of issues at the two-day talks including bird flu, high oil prices and the rising economic power of China and India.
   But Myanmar’s refusal to embrace reforms or free Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest has dominated discussions among the group, which won agreement to send an envoy to the isolated military-run state.
   The Malaysian foreign minister, Syed Hamid Albar, who will represent the bloc on a mission to Myanmar ‘to learn first-hand’ whether it is making steps towards democracy, said the region demanded action from the ruling generals.
   ‘I think the leaders were very clear that there must be some movement and it should not be seen as mere words,’ he told reporters.
   ‘We have decided at our meetings that one of the most important things under the reconciliation process is the release of those in detention. We want to see them doing something.’
   Syed Hamid said however that they remained committed to continuing to engage with the pariah state, effectively ruling out calls for it to be expelled from ASEAN.
   ‘We believe in the policy of engagement, no matter how difficult it is. If we are to isolate Myanmar, what would it do to its people?’ he asked.
   The Thai foreign minister, Kantathi Suphamongkhon, said he hoped the mission would be a step towards securing the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent 10 of the last 16 years in detention.
   ‘We all want to see Aung San Suu Kyi freed,’ he told reporters.
   The UN special envoy to Myanmar, Razali Ismail, who has been blocked from visiting for nearly two years, welcomed the move and said ASEAN was ‘getting more and more worried’ about the situation in the reclusive nation.
   ‘Myanmar has promised to make some reforms, so the envoy can go and see what steps they have taken,’ he said. ‘The envoy can make a request to meet Aung San Suu Kyi.’
   In discussions Monday on a first-ever charter for ASEAN, diplomats also pushed for tougher language on how member countries conduct their affairs, in what officials said was a move aimed at Myanmar.
   ‘The charter would govern everyone but the Myanmar issue was the trigger,’ a Southeast Asian official said.
   The ASEAN group—Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam—has sometimes been criticised as being a mere talking shop without real clout in the region.
   Faced with the growing influence of China and India, it has been urged to take steps to show its muscle and help lead the way to closer cooperation among Asian nations.
   The India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, on Monday called for European-style economic integration to create an Asian free-trade zone, and pledged to bring down tariffs to help boost business ties in the region.
   ‘I am convinced that this is the only way to move forward, and India wishes to associate with other like-minded countries to make it happen,’ he said.
   In a closing statement, Malaysia said the group had agreed to collaborate closely on the emerging bird flu threat, and called for a regional stockpile of medicines to treat the disease which has killed dozens of people in Asia.
   ‘We emphasised the importance of ASEAN’s collective strength,’ it said.

A powerful mine exploded just missing a police patrol on Monday after Japan offered to host talks between Sri Lanka and Tamil Tiger rebels to save their tottering truce, officials said.
   The explosion caused by a claymore mine targeted the patrol in the northern district of Vavuniya, a military spokesman said.
   ‘The policemen were returning after a routine route-clearing patrol when they were ambushed,’ a military official here said.
   ‘They had a narrow shave. There were no casualties.’
   There was a similar explosion aimed at a bus transporting 60 constables in the east of the island late Sunday, the military said, adding the blast also narrowly missed the police.
   The attacks came as Japan’s peace envoy to Sri Lanka, Yasushi Akashi, ended a five-day visit to the island and offered to host negotiations between the Colombo government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
   ‘Japan would be delighted if the parties agree to Japan to have the talks,’ Akashi told reporters just before he left the island late Sunday.
   The Tigers have wanted talks to be held either in territory held by them or at an overseas venue, but the government had insisted that negotiations should be in Sri Lanka.
   Peace broker Norway proposed the island’s only international airport as a neutral venue but the Tigers rejected it.

Ariel Sharon’s political rivals are voicing increasing alarm that the tidal wave triggered by the prime minister’s formation of a new centrist party is threatening to engulf Israeli democracy.
   Having poached leading figures from all his main competitors, the latest polls show that Sharon’s Kadima party is on course to trounce all-comers at a March 28 parliamentary election.
   Only three weeks after its formation, a survey in Monday’s Yediot Aharonot daily predicted Kadima would have double the number of seats (41) in the next Knesset than its nearest rival, the centre-left Labour party.
   The bulk of support comes from voters who supported Likud, the right-wing party led by Sharon for five years until he became fed up battling hardliners.
   Apart from attracting Likud voters, he has also pulled in both the defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, and its acting party chairman Tzahi Hanegbi since Kadima’s launch.
   Furthermore, he has managed to win the endorsement of leading lights of the other opposition parties such as Labour’s former chief Shimon Peres.
   The secular Shinui party, which came third in the last election winning 15 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, has had to watch its founder, Uriel Reichmann, join Kadima amid polls predicting meltdown.
   Parties which otherwise would find it impossible to agree on anything are uniting to warn that Sharon is not merely bent on electoral success but in smashing all his rivals by offering plum jobs to key players.
   ‘We are talking about a threat to democracy,’ Labour leader Amir Peretz told Monday’s Maariv daily.
   ‘Sharon is using the tools of power to buy all the forces in the political market. Opportunism and defection have become the norm and are becoming part of our culture.’
   Avraham Poraz, a leading Shinui MP and former interior minister, echoed his comments.
   ‘It is a very serious blow to the most basic principles of political ethics to take a man who was a Labour prime minister (Peres), and a man who is running for the Likud leadership (Mofaz), and pay them with a quid pro quo,’ he said.
   ‘A prime minister swept by a wave of political success is bribing politicians to defect from their parties in return for jobs in the new party. I think this phenomenon poses a threat to Israeli democracy.’
   Silvan Shalom, the foreign minister who is running for the Likud leadership, agreed that the basic tenets of a multi-party democracy were being undermined.
   ‘There was a time when people followed a doctrine, a tradition or an idea. Now they go where the price is best,’ he said.

The Indian police have stopped hundreds of exiled Nepali Bhutanese from entering India on Sunday as they tried to return to Bhutan, officials said.
   Over 100,000 ethnic Nepali Bhutanese live in camps in eastern Nepal on the border with India after Bhutan’s king stripped them of citizenship or forced them to leave because they had campaigned for democracy in the Himalayan kingdom.
   ‘They (the refugees) have been trying to cross into India in small groups on their way to Bhutan, but we have been pushing them back,’ the police official SL Sarkar said from Siliguri, 650 km north of Kolkata.
   The refugees have to travel through West Bengal to reach Buddhist Bhutan from eastern Nepal.
   Gun-totting Indian police watched the India-Nepal border as the refugees, some carrying children, argued with authorities to be allowed to go to Bhutan, a five-hour drive from the frontier, officials said.
   ‘The people we pushed back are sitting quietly on the other side of the border,’ Sarkar said.
   Talks between officially Hindu Nepal and Bhutan to settle the refugees’ fate—described by some rights groups as the world’s most neglected refugee crisis—have been stalled since 2003.
   About 90,000 Nepali Bhutanese, most with farms or businesses, were forced to leave Bhutan in the early 1990s. They allege racial discrimination by authorities in Bhutan.
   The UN refugee agency said in August the refugees should stay at their camps where it can provide them with aid rather than get stranded on the border in attempts to return home.

Increasing corruption, land seizures and official abuse of power fuelled by China’s rapid economic development are sparking a rise in rural unrest, analysts and critics said Monday.
   Last week’s clash between paramilitary police and villagers protesting a land grab for a power plant in southern China’s Guangdong province was unusual only because guns were used against demonstrators, experts said.
   As many as 30 villagers were shot dead in the confrontation on Tuesday in Dongzhou village, Shanwei city, residents said, although the government has said only three were killed and eight wounded.
   The incident was the latest of many violent clashes over the past year, including one in Guangdong in which police roughed up and detained scores of villagers and activists over a land dispute in Taishi village, Panyu city.
   In another major incident, six villagers were killed and 51 wounded in June when the local government sent hundreds of thugs into Dingzhou village in the northern Hebei province to beat locals who refused to make way for a power plant.
   ‘It’s happening everywhere in the country,’ said Liu Xiaobo, a well-known dissident and democracy activist.
   ‘Exploitation by the officials in power and the rich people, including developers, is increasing,’ he said, explaining one reason for the increase in civilian unrest.
   ‘Also, in the past few years, ordinary people’s understanding of their rights has gotten stronger.’
   According to the government’s own tally, there were 74,000 riots and other ‘incidents involving the masses’ last year, compared to 10,000 incidents of social unrest in 1994.
   The number of people involved has increased five-fold—from 730,000 in 1994 to 3.76 million people last year, according to ministry of public security statistics.
   The main causes for unrest were worker-employer relations, rural land disputes, city demolitions and evictions, and compensation over relocations, state media said.
   China’s economic development has provided more opportunities for government officials to make money. One of the easiest ways is to take people’s land and sell it to developers for housing or commercial projects.
   Land is also being seized for government projects.
   ‘In appropriating land, there’s very often corruption and inadequate compensation for the peasants, so the peasants protest,’ said Joseph Cheng, a political analyst at City University in Hong Kong.
   While in democratic countries, the government would have to negotiate a fair price, in China officials usually want to give as little money as possible, often pocketing the difference.
   ‘In China, the officials’ power is too great,’ Liu said. ‘The people’s power is too little. In these demolition and eviction situations, the officials decided the price.’
   So far, incidents of unrest have tended to be isolated with protesters fighting their own battles.
   Beijing, however, is keenly aware of the danger of simultaneous nationwide demonstrations and therefore clamps a lid on information to prevent a repeat of the pro-democracy movement in 1989, analysts said.

Israel on Sunday announced a 15-million-dollar project to develop the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism that lies inside annexed east Jerusalem.
   The site ‘is part of the religious, cultural and historical heritage of the Jewish people, and these links should be strengthened under a five-year development plan to develop Jerusalem, the capital of Israel,’ the government said in a statement.
   It said guided tours would be organised for soldiers and students, and a centre built to showcase the spiritual heritage of the site, along with a huge parking lot and a police post.
   ‘Some five million people visit the site each year and I want more and more families and young people to visit it,’ the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said in the statement.

A parliamentary watchdog Monday asked the Indian military not to drag its feet in arms purchases as delay meant equipment eventually bought often became obsolete.
   ‘A long time-frame for arms purchases often leads to weapons systems becoming obsolete on procurement,’ the parliamentary committee on defence said in its latest report unveiled in parliament’s lower house on Monday.
   It also told the military to speed up pre-purchase field trials of military equipment and asked the defence ministry to set up a panel to monitor defence deals.
   In 2004 India, after a 22-year delay, inked a billion-dollar deal with British Aerospace for 66 trainer jets but is yet to shortlist suppliers for 126 fighters worth 6.5 billion dollars it has planned to buy since 1998.

Christina Rocca, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, is likely to be replaced by Richard Boucher, said a report published in a Pakistani newspaper Sunday.
   The Dawn quoting sources at the State Department said Boucher, former US State Department spokesman, will head the newly expanded bureau of South Asia which will now include Central Asia also.
   An announcement to the effect would be made by the State Department shortly.

A drunken 39-year-old Japanese man strangled his father to death with a necktie after he refused to lend him 100 yen, or about 80 US cents, for his bus fare, the police said Monday.
   The police arrested construction worker Hirokazu Tashiro on murder charges Sunday in Ichihara, east of Tokyo, as he allegedly confessed to attacking his 67-year-old father Hiroshi, a local police spokesman said.
   The son, who had been drinking, grew infuriated after realising he was 100 yen short of pocket change to take a bus downtown, the police official said.
   ‘I asked Dad to lend it to me,’ the son was quoted as telling police. ‘I was mad when he refused so I strangled him with my necktie.’
   He called the police after seeing his father collapse. The father was confirmed dead at hospital.

At least 40 people have been confirmed killed by a fire aboard a bus in Pakistan sparked when a firecracker let off to celebrate a wedding set the vehicle’s fuel tank alight, the police said on Monday.
   The toll from Sunday’s tragedy in the eastern city of Lahore could be higher as several bodies were completely burned and shocked relatives had not yet given a full count of those aboard the bus, the police said.
   They said the bus may have been carrying as many as 70 passengers, including women and children. The police said five people were rescued from the blaze and others may have escaped themselves.

A prominent anti-Syrian journalist and MP and three other people were killed in a car bombing in a Beirut suburb on Monday, the latest in a string of similar attacks in Lebanon.
   One witness said the bomb blew up inside Christian MP Gibran Tueni’s vehicle, blasting it off the road and setting it ablaze.
   Firemen recovered the body of Tueni, 48, that of his driver Nicolas Flouti and two other people, the sources said. Ten other people were wounded, two of them seriously, in the attack at around 9:00am (0700 GMT) in the Christian suburb of Mkalles.
   The attack came just a day after UN chief investigator Detlev Mehlis delivered a report to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Syria’s cooperation with the probe into the February murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri. And Druze leader and fellow MP Walid Jumblatt immediately pointed the finger at Syria over the bombing.
   ‘The terrorist message has come to us... the person who threatened on television to make the whole world pay the price,’ he said, alluding to remarks made by the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, on Russian television on Sunday.
   Bashar, referring to possible UN sanctions against Damascus, said that if the situation in Syria and Iraq was not good, the Middle East would be unstable and the whole world would pay.
   But Syria denied any role in the bombing, at least the 13th in Lebanon since Hariri was killed in a massive bomb blast on the Beirut seafront on February 14.
   The Syrian information minister, Mehdi Dakhlallah, told Lebanese television LBC that ‘foreign interference is at the root of the current chaos.’ Many Lebanese blame Damascus for Hariri’s death, a charge Syria denies, although it has been implicated in a report into the killing by the Mehlis commission.
   Later on Monday, the UN Security Council was due to receive the sensitive Mehlis report.
   There was no word on the content of Mehlis’s latest report, which follows one in October that concluded that senior Syrian and Lebanese security officials were implicated in the killing and chided Damascus for failing to cooperate fully with the probe.

Hospital patients, detainees and security forces voted in Iraq on Monday with violence shadowing the early special polling ahead of a general election for a full-term parliament.
   Nearly three years after the US-led invasion, US and Iraqi officials hope the vote, expected to draw Sunni Arabs back into the political process, will undermine support for guerrillas who have battled them since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
   ‘The election has begun,’ electoral commission member Farid Ayar said.
   Three days before the rest of the country cast their ballots, Iraqis being treated in hospitals, those held in jail and members of the security forces voted for a total of 275 deputies who are to serve four-year terms.
   Electoral officials went from bed to bed with transparent ballot boxes, attending to patients too weak to walk at Baghdad’s Yarmuk hospital, which is often on the frontline in treating victims of attacks.
   One patient lying flat on his back, his head, shoulder and upper arm wrapped in bandages following an assault by thieves, slid his ballot into a box as did another who had been wounded in a bomb attack.
   Draconian security measures, similar to those enforced during two earlier elections this year, have been imposed to keep attacks at bay and minimise bloodshed during Thursday’s main event.
   But violence flared in the capital before the clamp-down took full effect, with at least seven people being killed. Three police officers and a woman bystander died during a clash between Iraqi security forces and gunmen in the western Ghaazaliyah neighbourhood. Another eight police officers were wounded.
   Two more civilians died in an explosion near the Kindi hospital in eastern Baghdad and a policeman was killed and seven others wounded when gunmen fired on their vehicle in a third attack.
   Airports and borders will shut from Wednesday until Friday or Saturday, curfews extended and a ban on carrying weapons imposed even for civilians with permits.
   A five-day public holiday will come into effect on Tuesday and Jordan sealed its border with Iraq on Monday for five days.

Racial violence erupted for the second straight day in Australia’s biggest city Sydney on Monday night, with cars smashed and reports of shots fired, local media said.
   A reporter from Sydney radio station 2GB said ‘chaos’ had broken out in a shopping centre at Cronulla beach in the city’s south, with vehicles damaged and police making arrests as mobs of men roamed the streets.
   ‘People are standing around in shock, just watching,’ the reporter said. ‘Every window in some cars has been smashed. Roads have been blocked (by police).’
   He witnessed police arrest a group of five people.
   ‘There’s chaos, with ambulances and police going in all directions.’
   One resident, who did not want to be named, told the Australian Associated Press that about 50 cars carrying men of Middle Eastern appearance had driven into the area.
   Some of the men emerged from the vehicles and began trashing every car in sight with baseball bats, the resident said.
   Ambulance officers also had been called to help at least one injured man seen by reporters lying on the side of the road.
   Reporters in the area said gunshots had been heard near a hotel in Cronulla, but police could not confirm reports that a person had been shot.
   The hotel is located opposite North Cronulla beach, the scene of violent attacks Sunday by mobs of local whites targeting men of Middle Eastern appearance.
   More than 30 people were injured in Sunday’s violence and 16 were arrested.

The British press raised questions Monday about the toxic cloud hanging over southern England following a massive blaze at a key oil depot which fire-fighters were still attempting to control.
   Pictures of the conflagration, which sent orange fireballs and thick black smoke into the sky of southern England, dominated the front pages.
   The best-selling Sun daily used the banner headline ‘Black Sunday’ next to a picture of a massive toxic black cloud from the fire which appeared to have been the result of an accident at the Buncefield depot near the town of Hemel Hempstead, around 25 miles (40 kilometres) northwest of London.
   If the photographs on the front pages of The Times and The Guardian were less dramatic, the papers’ levels of concern were sky-high. ‘Toxic cloud fear as oil blaze rages,’ was the headline in the Guardian, which reported that 20 of the 26 oil containers at the depot had been destroyed in the flames. The paper also pondered the possible cause of the catastrophe, asking whether it was ‘Accident, arson or terrorist, attack?’
   For The Times, the casualty list of 43 injured, one seriously, was a ‘Sunday miracle’.
   But the remaining environmental concerns were of most concern: ‘Toxic smoke threatens asthmatics’ was the headline.
   ‘It will burn for days,’ The Sun warned, while casting some doubt over the security measures in place at the oil depot.
   According to witnesses cited by the tabloid, two leaks had occurred at the site in the previous three weeks. The Guardian also threw up doubts over the Hemel Hempstead site, saying that the oil depot did not have top-notch security systems in place.

Former Croatian general Ante Gotovina on Monday pleaded not guilty to charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity before the UN court for the former Yugoslavia here.
   'Your honour, I am not guilty,' Gotovina, looking tanned and wearing a dark blue suit, said as each of the seven counts against him was read out in court.
   After four years on the run, Gotovina was arrested last week in Spain's Canary Islands and transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on Saturday.
   Gotovina, 50, one of the three most wanted suspects of ICTY, was visibly annoyed Monday as the judge had the entire 14-page indictment read out to him.
   The ICTY charged him with committing atrocities against ethnic Serbs in 1995 during a Croatian offensive on Serb-held territory. If convicted he could get a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, but such a sentence has been handed down only once in the tribunal's history.

Four die in fresh Kashmir violence
Indian troops Monday shot dead three Islamic militants, while suspected rebels shot dead a shopkeeper in revolt-hit Kashmir, the police said. Two of the rebels were killed by the army in the northern Kupwara district early Monday, an army spokesman said, adding that the third militant was shot dead during another gunbattle in the southern Anantnag district. In northern quake-hit Baramulla district suspected rebels shot dead a Muslim shopkeeper, the police said. Kashmir is in the grip of a 16-year-old insurgency against Indian rule that has left more than 44,000 people dead by official count.
— AFP

French, German women feared
dead in Nepal
Two women, German and French, who disappeared while walking in a forest near Kathmandu in September and October, are feared dead, investigators said Monday. ‘The case is a very mysterious one and we are still trying to substantiate it,’ said deputy superintendent Ganesh. ‘A major search has been launched to locate the missing tourists,’ he said. Neither body has been found and no one has yet been arrested. It is suspected both women were murdered by the same person who has taken great care to conceal the corpses, sources close to the inquiry said. A French judge has launched proceedings for an international inquiry in Nepal, a request the Kathmandu authorities have never before agreed to.
— AFP

Four die in Japan’s latest suicide pact
Three men and a woman were found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in a car in Japan’s latest suspected Internet suicide pact, the police said Monday. The four—a 39-year-old businessman, a 27-year-old unemployed man, a 25-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman—were found in the car in Yabu in western Hyogo prefecture on Sunday, a police spokesman said. The police found burned charcoal and a suicide note in the car owned by the businessman. of Japanese people have killed themselves since late last year after forming pacts on Internet suicide sites to support one another as they die.
— AFP

Plot against Arroyo uncovered
Philippine troops loyal to the president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, uncovered an attempt by rogue soldiers to seize power over the weekend, a senior military official said on Monday. Rumours of plots against Arroyo, or any other leader, are relatively routine in the Philippines, where army-backed ‘people power’ uprisings toppled two presidents and there have been at least a dozen coup attempts since 1986. But fresh talk of action by some elements of the military, before Christmas or early in the new year, began last week when allegations of cheating by Arroyo in the 2004 elections were resurrected in public inquiries in the two houses of Congress.
— Reuters

25 Muslims
arrested in France
Some 25 mainly Tunisian and Algerian men were arrested early Monday in the Paris region under an investigation into the funding of Islamist extremists, officials said. Investigators believe some of the detainees are active in organised crime and have carried out armed robberies to raise money for Islamist groups, the officials said. The suspects were under surveillance for several weeks and were detained after evidence emerged that ‘violent actions’ were being planned, they added. ‘We have not identified any precise target or time-frame, but we are convinced that eventually they would take action,’ one said.
— AFP

Two injured in Greek ministry bomb blast
A bomb explosion rocked Greece’s Economy Ministry in central Athens on Monday, injuring two people and causing extensive damage, police said. The blast blew out nearby shop fronts, damaged cars and cafes and shattered windows in the business district of the city shortly before the morning rush hour. The ministry, located above a post office in the city’s main System Square and about 100 metres from parliament, was closed at the time of the blast, the second such attack in six months. ‘Initial evidence shows the explosion was triggered by a home-made explosive device placed outside the ministry,’ a police spokeswoman said.
— Reuters

Three charged in UK with terrorism
Three men charged with terrorism offences were to appear in a London magistrate’s court on Monday, sources at Scotland Yard said. The three men, who were arrested in central England, last week, face charges of supporting terrorists. One of the men, aged 39, is also charged with directing the activities of a terror group. His co-accused is 34 and 42 years of age. All three were arrested in the central county of Worcestershire last Monday by officers of Scotland Yard’anti-terrorism branch. but their detention was said not to be linked to enquiries into the deadly suicide bomb attacks on the London transport system on July 7 or a set of similar failed attacks two weeks later. No details were given of the three suspects who were to appear at London’s Bow Street magistrate’s court on Monday.
— AFP

CIA chief to meet Turkish PM
US Central Intelligence Agency chief Porter Goss arrived in Turkey on Sunday for talks with the prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and intelligence officials. The Hurriyet daily said the talks on Monday would focus on the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party, a separatist militant outfit from Turkey’s Kurdish minority branded a ‘terrorist’ group by Washington and Ankara. Turkey has long expressed frustration at Washington’s reluctance to remove PKK sanctuaries in Kurdish-majority areas of northern Iraq, from where they launch armed operations in Turkey.
— AFP

Rights group urges Darfur probe
Human Rights Watch has called for senior Sudanese officials - including the president - to be investigated for crimes against humanity in Darfur. Its latest report names more than a dozen civilian and military officials it says helped co-ordinate militias and armed forces that attacked civilians. Tens of thousands have been killed and two million displaced from their homes since the violence began in early 2003. Militias have attacked villages as part of a campaign against a rebel uprising. This report reflects the frustration felt by many humanitarian workers, UN officials and diplomats about the lack of action taken against those involved in the violence in Darfur.
— BBC