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Two US lawmakers have proposed a resolution expressing congressional disapproval for president George W Bush’s sweeping nuclear agreement with India, one of the congressmen said on Tuesday.
   If the resolution passed, it would signal lawmakers’ ‘disapproval’ of the July 18 deal, which has generated strong opposition from non-proliferation advocates because it would give India access to previously banned technology.
   ‘The administration’s move to launch nuclear co-operation with India has grave security implications for South Asia and the entire world,’ said Democratic representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts, who introduced the resolution with Republican representative Fred Upton of Michigan last week.
   Markey, co-chair of the Bipartisan Task Force on Non-proliferation, is a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as is Upton.
   ‘Supplying nuclear fuel to countries that are not party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty derails the delicate balance that has been established between nuclear nations and limits our capacity to insist that other nations continue to follow that important non-proliferation policy,’ he said.
   ‘We cannot break the nuclear rules established in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and demand that everyone else play by them,’ he added in a statement.
   A congressional resolution is a formal statement of opinion on an issue but is not binding.
   For 25 years, the United States led the global fight to deny India access to nuclear technology because it rejected the treaty, developed nuclear weapons and tested them.
   But Bush, aiming to improve ties with the world’s largest democracy, jettisoned this approach in the July 18 agreement, which would permit civilian US-India nuclear co-operation.
   Bush wants changes in US law—which would have to be approved by Congress—and international regulations—which would have to be agreed to by the 44-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group—to let India obtain the restricted items, including nuclear fuel. Bush has yet to say exactly what changes he would seek.
   The Markey-Upton resolution says the deal ‘poses far-reaching and potentially adverse implications’ for US non-proliferation objectives and will do little to bring India into closer alignment with US strategic objectives.
   Just when the resolution might be acted on is unclear. Congress is supposed to adjourn soon for a monthlong recess.
   India conducted nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998. Markey said Bush’s approach will signal to other nations that ‘there are no serious consequences for violating nuclear treaties.’
   Senior US and Indian officials are to discuss the deal in Washington on Wednesday.

The Nepalese government will not match an ongoing Maoist rebel ceasefire, a senior official said Tuesday.
   ‘Because the Maoists did not inform the government formally, we are not going to declare a ceasefire,’ said Tulsi Giri, vice chairman of the council of ministers led by the king.
   In September, Maoist insurgents announced they would observe a three-month ceasefire. It was extended by a further month at the beginning of December.
   Giri claimed the backbone of the bloody insurgency had been broken, and that the Maoists’ strength had been reduced, but did not reveal how.
   King Gyanendra sacked the government in February claiming it had failed to curb the insurgency, which has claimed more than 12,000 lives since 1996.
   The monarch has faced increasing calls to restore democracy in the Himalayan country, and in response has said local elections would be held in February 2006.
   The seven main opposition parties and the Maoists have called the local elections a sham, and have threatened to boycott and disrupt them.
   ‘Whether there is peace or not, there will be municipal elections,’ Giri told reporters at a press conference Tuesday.
   Contradicting rights groups and foreign diplomats, Giri said democracy did not need to be returned to Nepal, because it was already there.
   ‘Democracy is already functioning in Nepal, so how can it be restored?’ the senior official said.
   Student groups and opposition parties plan to organise large protests against the king in Kathmandu over the next few weeks.

Sri Lanka’s president Wednesday rejected a Tamil rebel demand to hold talks in Oslo and welcomed a statement from an international quartet this week that urged the guerrillas to halt killings.
   The president, Mahinda Rajapakse, said his new government was prepared to travel to any Asian destination for talks with the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam on upholding a fragile ceasefire.
   Colombo last week backed down from its earlier demand that the negotiations should be within government-held territory and agreed to an Asian venue, a move which saw Japan offering to host talks.
   ‘I think the Tigers are playing politics,’ Rajapakse told reporters. ‘If they are serious they must come for talks
   in Japan. I am ready for
   talks as soon as the Tigers are ready.’
   His remarks came two days after Sri Lanka’s key backers—the US, the European Union, Japan and peace mediator Norway—urged Tamil Tiger rebels to end the current cycle of violence that has claimed 37 lives this month in the northeast. The quartet, known as the co-chairs, have led international efforts to raise money in support of the island’s efforts to end three decades of ethnic bloodshed that have claimed over 60,000 lives.
   At a meeting in Brussels this week, they called on the LTTE ‘to put an immediate end to their ongoing campaign of violence and again urge the LTTE to demonstrate their commitment to the ceasefire agreement and the peace process.’
   ‘The co-chairs’ statement is very encouraging,’ the president said.

Televised scenes of police in northern India kicking and punching young couples over ‘public indecency’ prompted public outrage and protests in parliament Wednesday.
   Some students also burnt effigies of police and staged a protest march at Meerut in Uttar Pradesh state after police swooped Monday on around 30 couples sitting in a public park in the city.
   Scenes aired on television stations nationwide showed pictures of police, including female officers, kicking and hitting cowering young women and men and pulling their hair.
   ‘We had been getting complaints from people that young people indulge in indecent behaviour, but some policemen exceeded their limits,’ Meerut police superintendent Rajiv Ranjan Verma said.
   One witness said police even picked on a married couple.
   ‘They started beating a married couple...They were not even ready to listen to what the couple wanted to say. They were just slapping them,’ a witness told NDTV television.
   In parliament MPs demanded action against the police, who were accompanied by TV crews and journalists during the attack.
   The incident is a ‘blot on civilised society,’ said ruling Congress party lawmaker Mosina Kidwai.
   ‘If the police were cracking down on men out to sexually harass women, then why were the girls beaten up?’ asked Sushma Swaraj of the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
   Apparently unable to bear the public humiliation, one couple has yet to return home, media reports said.
   ‘The drive was not directed against the couples. It was only against those indulging in public indecency,’ the police superintendent said.
   But people were not satisfied with the explanation. ‘I want to know what public indecency is,’ said lawyer Anil Bakshi, who has filed a case in court.
   India’s National Commission for Women has asked the state government for a report on the incident.
   Young couples in sexually conservative India often meet in parks and cafes without the knowledge of their parents who disapprove of dating. Married couples who live in traditional joint families also go to parks for privacy.

The head of the Roman Catholic church in the Holy Land accused Israel on Wednesday of turning the birthplace of Jesus Christ into a ‘giant prison’ with its West Bank separation barrier.
   In his traditional pre-Christmas press conference, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Michel Sabbah also appealed for leaders on both sides in the Middle East conflict to work harder to put an end to bloodshed.
   Thousands of pilgrims are expected to flock to Bethlehem over the weekend where Sabbah will conduct the midnight mass service on Christmas eve.
   However Bethlehem’s economy has shrivelled in the five years since the start of the Palestinian uprising as overall tourist numbers have nosedived while its residents have found themselves cut off from neighbouring Jerusalem by the giant barrier which Israel says is needed to prevent attacks on its territory.
   ‘Bethlehem is now a big prison,’ Sabbah told reporters.
   ‘It is abnormal for people to live in a prison. It is influencing the economic and social life of the people of Bethlehem.’
   Sabbah, who is himself Palestinian, said that an end to the conflict with Israel was long overdue.
   ‘It is necessary to put an end to the suffering that has lasted too long on this land,’ he said.
   ‘We hope that our leaders will now take the time and will expend their energies to accomplish what should have been accomplished a long time ago—peace and justice for two people living side by side in peace and as good neighbours.’

Drunken Santas on a rampage in New Zealand, armed German robbers in Santa disguises, a British St Nick wanted for flashing, and a Swedish vandal in a Santa outfit are giving the big man in red a bad name this year.
   Reports of ‘Bad Santas’ breaking the law or otherwise wreaking havoc have been circulating around the world.
   Armed with a gun, a man in a Santa outfit held up a furniture store in the German town of Ludwigshafen on Saturday and forced two cashiers to open the safe. He filled his sack with cash, locked the two women in the safe and escaped.
   He is still on the loose, but police in Tuebingen were able to nab a bank robber armed with a machine gun in a Santa costume with the aid of an infrared camera and helicopter. They found him hiding in a ditch in a nearby forest.
   One Santa was stopped by police for driving 150 kph on a northern German motorway, 50 kph over the speed limit.
   ‘He said he was in a rush because he still had packages to deliver,’ said a spokesman for the police. They gave Santa a fine and took away his licence.
   Last week an inebriated half-naked Santa disrupted a Christmas market in Dabringhausen before police intervened.
   In New York, one man fed up with the growing commercial aspect of Christmas set up a ghoulish life-sized Santa holding a severed doll’s head in front of his house, local media said.
   Those incidents paled in comparison to what happened in Auckland on Saturday when 40 drunken Santas rampaged through the city centre, stealing from stores and assaulting security guards in protest against Christmas becoming too commercial.
   In Britain, police said they were looking for a Santa acting suspiciously—a flasher who exposed himself to women.
   In Sweden, one Santa set on fire a 13-metre-high straw ram built by the town fathers by shooting burning arrows into it.
   Last Christmas, a shopping centre in south Wales installed a webcam dubbed ‘Santacam’ in his grotto to overcome parents’ concerns after several high-profile paedophile cases in Britain.

Japan hopes to become the third nation to produce a space suit, using its technology to design a slimmer outfit for
   the next US mission to the moon, an official said Wednesday.
   Japan will use its computer and fibber knowhow to design gear weighing 20 kilograms, down from the burdensome 120 kilograms of the current US-made outfit, a space agency official said.
   Space suits, which are also made by Russia, must shield humans from massive change in temperature and protect them from nuisances such as meteoric stones.
   The agency aims to develop the new space outfit in time for the US manned mission to the Moon due in 2018, the first since 1972.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said he doubted that al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden was now capable of supervising the global operations of the militant organisation.
   ‘I have trouble believing that he is able to operate sufficiently to be in a position of major command over a worldwide al-Qaeda operation but I could be wrong. We just don’t know,’ Rumsfeld told reporters aboard his plane en route to Pakistan.
   Pakistan has been a key ally in the US-led ‘war on terror’ and during his visit, Rumsfeld was to tour areas of the country that were hit by the October earthquake, which killed more than 73,000 people here.

Pakistan and India Wednesday signed an agreement to start operating a bus service next month between their border cities of Lahore and Amritsar, the Pakistani foreign ministry said in a statement.
   The two sides also agreed on a trial run for another two-way bus service from Amritsar in India to the holy Sikh shrine at Nankana Sahib in Pakistan.
   The agreement came after two days of talks between senior transport officials from the two South Asian rivals, which have been engaged in a peace dialogue since January 2004.
   The regular operation of the new bus service would start within a month from the trial runs late next month.

Conservative mainly-Muslim Malaysia will next year introduce sex education in schools, as part of efforts to combat sex crimes and Internet porn, reports said.
   The education minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, said sex education would start from pre-school level, where children are aged between four to six, and would extend to university level and community programmes for adults.
   Children from the age of four would likely be taught how to protect themselves from sexual predators while older kids will learn about a range of subjects from human reproduction to masturbation and safe sex.

Chinese officials lowered a dam gate to block a toxic slick from entering a southern city’s urban water supplies but the spill has already polluted water nearby, officials said Wednesday.
   The incident follows a chemical spill in another Chinese river last month that cut off water supplies to millions of people for days and raised questions about China’s ability to handle its rapid pace of development.
   Xinhua news agency said the latest slick of the chemical cadmium was caused by excessive discharge from a state-owned smelting works into the Beijiang river in Shaoguan city, Guangdong province.
   ‘We have blocked the slick with a gate. It will not influence the drinking water too much,’ said an official from the city of Yingde, 90 kilometres south of Shaoguan, which has a population of one million.

Saddam Hussein was back in court on Wednesday on charges of crimes against humanity, calmly taking notes as a witness recounted how he and his family were tortured and beaten after an attempt on the now-ousted Iraqi dictator's life.
   Saddam, 68, had defiantly boycotted the last hearing two weeks ago after denouncing the legality of the tribunal and telling the judge to 'go to hell'.
   He and seven of his associates are being tried over the killing of 148 Shiites from Dujail after Saddam was targeted by an assassination attempt in the village in 1982.
   The trial resumed after a two-week break allowing for a key general election to elect the first full-term government since Saddam's repressive Baathist regime was toppled from power by the 2003 US-led invasion.
   'I cannot describe the torture we were subjected to. They would take one of us away and he would return in a sheet, dripping in blood,' said witness Ali Mohammed Hussein al-Haydari, who was 14 at the time.
   Saddam and his co-defendants have all pleaded not guilty to charges including murder and torture but face the death penalty if convicted.
   The witness told how his entire family of 43 members-women, children and the elderly included-were arrested in the wake of the attack against Saddam.
   Haydari said he recognised Saddam's half-brother, Barzan Tikriti, who at the time was in charge of the secret police and who, he said, was involved in interrogating detainees.
   At one stage as he was lying down because of sickness, 'Tikriti came by and asked what was wrong with me'.
   'He then kicked me on the leg and told guards not to treat me, adding that none in my family was worth being kept alive,' he said.
   Barzan, who is one of the eight defendants, angrily denied being involved in torture and accused the witness of lying.
   Two defence lawyers were assassinated shortly after the start of the trial on October 19.
   The judge also rejected a prosecution appeal to bar foreign lawyers assisting Saddam's team from the proceedings.
   Former US attorney general Ramsey Clark has not returned to Baghdad because of security concerns, but another US attorney who was to stand in for him, Curtis Doebbler, was not immediately seated at the start of Wednesday's hearing.
   Liable to be hanged if found guilty, Saddam, who once embodied Arab defiance of the West, is the first Middle East head of state to be tried by his own people.
   'Saddam, your name makes America tremble,' demonstrators shouted as they marched through heavily policed streets of his hometown of Tikrit carrying portraits of the former president, as others called Saddam the 'pride of the Arabs.'
   The trial, however, is not expected to extend past Thursday when it is likely to be adjourned again until mid-January because of the announcement of Iraq's election results, holidays and the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
   In court, Saddam demanded in vain that the trial be adjourned to allow him to say his prayers.
   He then turned in his chair, facing towards Mecca, and prayed for about 10 minutes while the prosecution witness continued to testify.

A federal judge on a court that oversees intelligence cases has resigned to protest president George W Bush’s authorisation of a domestic spying programme, The Washington Post said.
   US District Judge James Robertson resigned late Monday from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on which he served for 11 years and which he believes may have been tainted by Bush’s 2002 authorisation, two associates familiar with his decision told the daily.
   The resignation is the latest fallout of Bush’s weekend public admission that he authorised the National Security Agency — the country’s super-secret electronic surveillance arm—to eavesdrop on international telephone calls and electronic mail of US citizens suspected of having links with terrorist organisations including al-Qaeda.
   Bush’s statement on the weekend that the secret programme did not require FISA court orders—according to his reading of the Patriot Act passed after the September 11 attacks, has angered civil rights groups and lawmakers, some of whom have called for a congressional investigation.
   The New York Times first revealed last week the secret NSA programme that officials said has likely involved eavesdropping on thousands of people in the United States. Bush said he expected the Justice Department to investigate the leak of such sensitive information.
   On Wednesday, The New York Times quoted US officials as saying that ‘a very small fraction’ of those wiretaps and e-mail intercepts were of communications between people in the United States and were caused by technical glitches.
   The revelation is likely to add fuel to the firestorm over the NSA spying programme.
   Robertson’s associates said the judge - one of 11 on the FISA court—in recent conversations said he was concerned that the information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have been used to obtain FISA warrants.
   ‘They just don’t know if the product of wiretaps were used for FISA warrants—to kind of cleanse the information,’ said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the FISA warrants.

Iran reiterated its intention to develop a fully-fledged nuclear programme on Wednesday as Europe’s top three powers revived a dialogue with Tehran over suspicions it is secretly trying to make nuclear bombs.
   Confrontation rather than compromise has been brewing after declarations from Iran that the Holocaust is a myth and Israel should be wiped out, and a European Union accusation on Tuesday that Tehran has systematically violated human rights at home. Tehran says it aims only to generate more electricity for an energy-hungry economy. But it dodged UN nuclear inspectors for 18 years until 2003 and the West says its cooperation since has fallen short of what is needed to regain diplomatic confidence.
   Wednesday’s meeting between Iran and Britain, France and Germany in Vienna will be ‘talks about talks’—exploring whether any basis exists for resuming negotiations on the future of Iran’s nuclear activity, frozen by the ‘EU3’ last August.
   ‘We won’t reopen negotiations, we will only listen to what the Iranians have to say, especially about research and development,’ said an EU3 diplomat, alluding to centrifuge machines capable of enriching uranium to arms-grade level.

The leftist winner of Bolivia’s presidential election, Evo Morales, was quoted on Tuesday as calling the president, George W Bush, a ‘terrorist,’ but a spokesman in La Paz said the remark must have been mistranslated.
   Morales spoke in Spanish to Arabic satellite television station Al Jazeera, which dubbed his comments into Arabic.
   ‘The only terrorist in this world that I know of is Bush. His military intervention, such as the one in Iraq, that is state terrorism,’ Al Jazeera quoted him as saying.
   ‘There is a difference between people fighting for a cause and what terrorists do,’ Morales was quoted as saying.
   ‘Today in Bolivia and Latin America, it’s no longer people that are lifting their weapons against imperialism, but it’s imperialism that is lifting its weapons against people through military intervention and military bases.’
   A Morales spokesman in La Paz, who was present during the interview, said he did not remember Morales saying that and that he must have been translated incorrectly.

The British prime minister, Tony Blair, will stay in office until at least 2008, the tabloid Daily Mirror reported Wednesday, quoting unnamed senior allies.
   Blair's future has been the source of much speculation in Britain after he announced some months ahead of the last general election in May that he would not be seeking a fourth term of office.
   Although finance minister Gordon Brown is widely tipped to take over, Blair, who has been in power since 1997, has not said when he will step down. The next election is due before mid 2010 at the latest.
   Some Brown allies have called on the prime minister to depart sooner rather than later to prevent himself becoming a 'lame duck' leader.

The secretary general, Kofi Annan, has approved long-delayed rules to protect UN employees from reprisals when they accuse superiors of misconduct, UN officials said on Tuesday.
   The new rules, aimed at rooting out UN corruption and due to take effect on January 1, won quick praise as groundbreaking and a model for similar organisations from the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, which had advised the United Nations.
   But the group said the UN General Assembly needed to take further action to ensure that the main UN internal watchdog agency, the Office of Internal Oversight Services or OIOS, was shielded from interference by top UN executives.
   'They have made a really genuine effort to adopt state-of-the-art legal protections. The new rules are going to be a model for other intergovernmental organisations,' said Melanie Oliviero, the group's international program director.
   Annan promised to bolster protections for whistle-blowers in June 2004 after a staff survey found UN employees believed little was being done to root out unethical behaviour and that workers who exposed wrongdoing might suffer for it.

HK suffers over political reform
The Hong Kong government Wednesday suffered its first defeat over its unpopular proposals for limited political reform, in the culmination of a bitter row over the slow pace of democratic change in the Chinese territory. Pro-democracy legislators, who say the reforms to not go far enough, rejected a recommendation to double the size of the committee which elects the chief executive of the semi-autonomous Chinese territory. The proposal was to double the size of the committee, currently composed mainly of Beijing-backed elites, to 1,600. Some 34 legislators voted for it, 24 were opposed and one abstained. Constitutional changes need the support of two-thirds of the 60-seat chamber – 40 members.

Malaysian floods recede as rains abate
Severe floods in Malaysia’s north have forced thousands more people to flee their homes but the situation is improving in some areas as the monsoon rains ease, officials said Wednesday. The floods, described as the worst in 30 years in the worst-affected regions, have hit five states—Perlis and Kedah in the north, Kelantan and Terengganu in the northeast and north-central Perak. At least three people have been killed in the raging floodwaters, including a 22-year-old woman and two young children. Another 40-year-old man in Kelantan remains missing, feared dead.

Philippines rejects ‘partly free’ tag
President Gloria Arroyo’s government on Wednesday vigorously contested a report by independent monitoring group Freedom House that downgraded the Philippines from free to only ‘partly free.’ ‘Those who say that there is no freedom in the Philippines are out of touch with reality,’ Arroyo spokesman Ignacio Bunye said in a statement. The US-based group said in a report released on Monday that the number of electoral democracies around the world rose from 119 to 122 this year amid encouraging inroads in the Middle East and Africa.

Quake hits Sulawesi island
A strong earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale struck Indonesia’s eastern island of Sulawesi Wednesday, causing panic but no casualties or damage, the meteorology office said. The quake struck at 2:09pm with its epicentre 33 kilometres beneath the sea, some 180 kilometres south of the North Sulawesi provincial capital of Manado, the Jakarta met office said. The tremor, which was brief but felt moderately in Manado, caused some people to flee their homes and offices, another official with the town’s meteorology office said.
— AFP

Cuba launches verbal attack on US envoy
Cuba launched a blistering verbal attack on the top US diplomat in Havana on Tuesday and on dissidents it accused him of organising to overthrow the government. A daily state-run television talk show dedicated its 90- minute broadcast to accusing US mission chief Michael Parmly, who arrived in the country in September, of being the new point man for the Bush administration’s declared goal of ousting the president, Fidel Castro, from power. ‘Michael Parmly has quickly begun to carry out his job as the ruthless guardian and springboard of the anti-Cuba Bush policy, having frequent contacts with his mercenaries, guiding them, supplying them and exhibiting them to the press,’ program moderator Randy Alonso said.
— Reuters

US greenhouse gas emissions up
US greenhouse gas emissions increased by a higher than usual two per cent in 2004, the Department of Energy announced. A total 7.12 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide was pumped into US skies in 2004, up from 6.98 million tonnes in 2003, the DoE said in a statement released Monday. Those levels represent a 16 per cent increase from 1990, it said. The average annual increase since 1990 has been 1.1 per cent. Carbon dioxide accounted for 5.87 tonnes or 80 per cent of the emissions, produced by burning oil, gas and coal, with electrical power plants and manufacturing industries the biggest contributors.
— AFP

8 Peruvian cops
killed in ambush
At least eight police officers were killed and one injured when they were ambushed by Maoist Shining Path guerrillas in the central Peruvian jungle, a top police official said late Tuesday. The police were ambushed in Aucayacu, in the province of Huanuco, said national police General Luis Vizcarra. The killers were members of the Shining Path, an insurgent group largely defeated in the early 1990s. Vizcarra said he knew because they left a calling card in the car—’a red rag with a hammer and sickle’, he said. The Shining Path was largely defeated after police captured the group’s founder and leader, Abimael Guzman, in 1992.
— AFP

Blair’s wife earned £210,000 from BCCI
Cherie Blair, the lawyer wife of the British prime minister, Tony Blair, earned 210,000 pounds (310,500 euros, 368,500 dollars) for legal work on the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the Legal Services Commission revealed Tuesday. The commission—the government body in charge of administering legal aid—released the figure in response to a Freedom of Information request from London’s Evening Standard newspaper. Blair, who uses her maiden name of Cherie Booth in a professional capacity, was part of a 31-strong legal team representing 450 BCCI employees and their spouses who claimed unpaid salaries and repayment of loans following the collapse in 1991.
— AFP

Russian city braces for toxic spill
Khabarovsk residents stocked up on water Wednesday as toxic benzene which spilled into a river in China last month neared the eastern Russian city, threatening public water supplies and eliciting warnings of wider environmental and health crises in the area. The Russian emergency situations minister, Sergei Shoigu, said 58,000 cubic meters of fresh water had been delivered to Khabarovsk and local residents could be seen filling containers from cisterns on trucks at sites around the city.
— AFP