Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
Sports «
National «
Editorial «
Op-Ed «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplement «

A Sri Lankan legislator allied with Tamil rebels was gunned down during a Christmas mass Sunday, the latest in a series of bloody attacks that international mediators fear could signal a return to war.
   Tamil MP Joseph Pararajasingham, 71, had just received Holy Communion and was returning to his pew at St Mary’s church in Batticaloa, 303 kilometres east of Colombo when he was shot in the chest, a witness said.
   ‘There was panic after the shots were fired in front of a congregation of hundreds,’ the witness who declined to be named said by telephone. ‘People generally know who did it but they are afraid to talk.’
   Eight people wounded during in the attack, including a Catholic nun, were admitted to the main hospital in Batticaloa.
   Pararajasingham’s wife, Sugunam, also suffered gunshot injuries, the police said.
   In the island’s north, meanwhile, suspected Tiger rebels lobbed grenades at two army check points Sunday, wounding a total of eight soldiers, a local military official said.
   No arrests had been made in connection with the MP’s assassination, but police were carrying out a search of the surrounding area, the police official said.
   The killing came hours after Sri Lanka’s international backers expressed ‘deep concern’ over the escalation of violence that has claimed the lives of more than 60 people this month alone.
   ‘Sri Lanka faces a crucial choice between mounting violence and reinvigorating peace,’ the quartet known as the Co-Chairs said in a statement Saturday after meeting with Tiger rebels.
   Diplomats from the Co-Chairs—the United States, European Union, Japan and Norway—said there was
   an urgent need for the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to agree to holding talks on salvaging their troubled truce.
   There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Sunday’s assassination, the first high-profile killing since then foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar was gunned down by a suspected Tiger rebel here on August 12.
   The Tigers denied killing the minister, but were warned by the European Union that they risked an EU-wide ban unless they renounced the use of violence.
   The latest assassination underlined a worsening security situation in Sri Lanka’s troubled north and east amid fears of a return to civil war.
   Five people were killed in clashes on Saturday, a day after 18 others, including 15 sailors, were killed in suspected Tamil rebel attacks. Pararajasingham, a key figure in the Tamil National Alliance party, entered parliament in 1990 replacing Sam Thambimuttu, who was killed by suspected Tiger rebels.
   Last year the TNA aligned itself with the LTTE. With 22 seats in the national parliament, the party is virtually a proxy of the guerrillas.

Some 2,000 students took to the streets of Kathmandu Sunday to protest against the king as well as the massacre this month of 11 people by a soldier.
   The demonstrations were called by an alliance of eight student unions.
   ‘Our protest is against the massacre of 11 people at Nagarkot (on the outskirts of Kathmandu) and autocracy in Nepal,’ said the general secretary of the Nepal Students Union, Badri Pandey.
   ‘We are also protesting against the undemocratic moves of the king,’ he added.
   The protests began in the busy Min Bhawan locality and later converged into a mass meeting in another part of the capital.
   The students chanted slogans against King Gyanendra and the army such as ‘We want democracy!’, ‘Down with autocracy!’ and ‘Down with army killings!’ as they marched through the busy streets of Kathmandu, disrupting traffic.
   Dozens of riot police kept watch but took no action, witnesses said.
   The students and political parties have for months been protesting against King Gyanendra’s power grab on February 1, when he sacked a four-party coalition government for failing to curb a Maoist insurgency, control corruption or hold general elections.
   Nepal’s aid donors have voiced concern over the deteriorating situation in the country.
   A soldier went on the rampage on December 14 at a Hindu festival at Nagarkot and then apparently killed himself.
   On Friday the seven main opposition parties called a general strike, bringing the capital to a standstill.

Survivors, families and friends gathered Sunday around the Indian Ocean to remember the dead on the eve of the anniversary of the tsunami which snatched away tens of thousands of loved ones.
   More than 220,000 people were killed and the lives of millions more were altered forever in the December 26 catastrophe, unleashed by one of the world’s largest-ever earthquakes which struck off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
   In Indonesia’s Aceh, the area most devastated by the walls of water, officials readied for the arrival of around 40 special envoys from governments around the world, including East Timorese president Xanana Gusmao.
   Around 168,000 people were killed or remain missing in Indonesia.
   At the flattened village of Lambung, near where the Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, will preside over a memorial ceremony on Monday at 8:16am (0116 GMT) – the precise time the first waves smashed ashore—survivors prepared to hold an overnight vigil.
   In Jakarta, the capital of the world’s most populous Muslim nation, people have been invited to attend a march culminating with prayers for the victims.
   In Sri Lanka, the president, Mahinda Rajapakse, is due to lead commemoration ceremonies Monday with an address to the nation from the site where a train was engulfed by the tsunami, killing over 1,000 passengers.
   Private organisations have also called for the lighting of traditional coconut oil lamps along the island’s coastlines while a charity is organising a candlelight vigil at Independence Square in Colombo.
   In India’s worst-hit southern state of Tamil Nadu, candlelight vigils will be held Monday on beaches.
   The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, is slated to visit the Andaman and Nicobar Islands which bore the brunt of the killer waves in his country, although his programme has not been finalised.
   Hundreds of relatives of victims and survivors of the tsunami were arriving in Thailand ahead of a series of memorial events planned there.
   Some 2,436 foreigners from 37 countries were among the nearly 5,400 claimed by the tsunami in Thailand. Around 1,200 foreigners accepted free flights and accommodation from the government to attend Monday’s events.
   At Ban Muang in the country’s worst hit province of Phang Nga hundreds gathered Sunday to make merit for victims in a Buddhist temple that once housed their bodies.
   Some 30 saffron-robed monks led the 90-minute ceremony with chants and the explosion of firecrackers meant to cleanse the souls of those dead. Survivors carried pictures of their relatives.

Japan’s opinion of China is at its lowest level for more than 25 years, according to a poll published at the weekend that showed less than one in three people feeling friendly towards their giant neighbour.
   The government poll showed 32.4 per cent of people saying they felt friendly towards Beijing, down 5.2 percentage points from a year earlier.
   It was the lowest level since the government started polling on the topic in 1978, the Cabinet Office said in its annual survey released on Saturday.
   The poll, conducted October 6-16 this year and including more than 1,500 respondents, showed a record 63.4 per cent saying they did not feel close to China, up from 58.2 per cent the previous year.
   A record 71.2 per cent said ties between Japan and China were not in a good state, up 10.2 percentage points, amid ongoing diplomatic rows between the two.
   Relations between China and Japan have been badly strained over the visit of Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, visits to a Tokyo shrine that
   commemorates Japan’s military dead, including convicted
   war criminals. China, which was occupied by Japan before and during Second World War, says the pilgrimage shows Tokyo does not fully regret its militarist past.
   Japan and China are also bitterly divided over gas reserves in the East China Sea, with Tokyo planning a major increase in patrols in the disputed area.
   In the latest friction, the Japanese foreign minister, Taro Aso, said last week China was becoming a ‘considerable threat’ because of its rising military spending and nuclear weapons.
   The remarks drew an immediate reaction from China accusing Aso of making irresponsible claims. Chinese leaders have refused to meet Koizumi, who paid his fifth visit to the shrine in October.

Sri Lanka’s celebrated tsunami survivor, ‘Baby 81’, was reunited with his parents after a highly publicised court drama, but almost a year later the family says the explosion of media attention has backfired on them.
   Murugpillai Jeyarajah, 31, a barber from Sri Lanka’s eastern coast, says the international publicity generated by the story is proving counter productive and they are being overlooked for aid at home.
   The long-running saga captivated a global audience from the start, but mainly because it appears to have been sexed up.
   International television networks reported nine mothers were battling for a two-month old boy who survived the tsunami. Some said that mothers were threatening to commit suicide.
   Amid the competing claims the real parents had to wait weeks and undergo a DNA test before they could claim their offspring back.
   The ‘heart-wrenching’ story earned the parents a visit to New York and an appearance on the Good Morning America programme of the US TV network ABC.
   ‘We thought we could stay on in America, but in less than two weeks after our TV show in March we were asked to return,’ Jeyarajah said in a telephone interview from his temporary home in the island’s east.
   ‘They (TV network) did not give us any money. All we got was 25,000 rupees (250 dollars) the Sri Lankans in New York collected and gave us. Abilash got a lot of soft toys. Thats all.’
   He said he regretted going to New York because after his return many villagers as well as local and foreign charities operating in his home area ignored them for tsunami aid believing they had got help from the US.
   He was called ‘Baby 81’ because his bedhead ticket was 81 when he was admitted to hospital by a neighbour who found him under a heap of rubbish after the tsunami swept the coastal region and left a trail of destruction.

Christians around the world celebrated Christmas with prayers for peace Sunday amid fears of violence as pilgrims returned in droves to their saviour’s birthplace.
   Thousands of pilgrims descended on Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus Christ enjoyed its busiest Christmas of the new century while Pope Benedict XVI made an impassioned plea for peace in the Middle East, celebrating the first Christmas mass of his pontificate.

A Hindu youth from northeastern India has written a Bible in inverse, or ‘mirror language’, which is to be presented to Pope Benedict XVI as a Christmas gift, a cleric said Sunday.
   Uttam Das, 29, handed over his unique creation to Assam state’s Archbishop Thomas Menamparampil with a request that it be presented to the Pope.
   ‘I am amazed and bewildered to see this Bible copied in a different style. I don’t know how it is going to benefit, but then he has done something unique,’ the archbishop said.
   The cleric is likely to carry the Bible, for which a reader needs the help of a mirror, sometime in January to the Vatican and present it to the Pope.
   ‘It is something really bizarre, but one must appreciate the skill of the man who tried this phenomenal exercise of writing the Bible in an inverse script,’ said Allan Brooks, a Roman Catholic Church leader in the Assam capital Guwahati.
   Das claims his feat marks the first time anyone has written the Bible in what he calls ‘mirror language’.

Stalinist North Korea on Sunday described the US ambassador to Seoul, Alexander Vershbow, as a ‘tyrant wearing a mask of diplomat’ in a renewed attack on his criticism of Pyongyang, Yonhap news agency said.
   Vershbow earlier this month labelled North Korea a ‘criminal regime’ engaged in money laundering, drug running, counterfeiting and other illicit activities.
   ‘He must be a tyrant wearing a mask of diplomat since he recklessly make imprudent and provocative remarks,’ Rodong Shinmun, newspaper of the North’s ruling Workers Party, said in a commentary monitored by Yonhap.
   The North’s official Korean Central News Agency demanded earlier that the ‘bitchy and malignant’ US envoy, who took over in Seoul in October, be sacked.
   South Korean officials fear the US envoy’s harsh rhetoric might foil their efforts to end the stalemate in nuclear disarmament talks.

A father, angry that his eldest daughter had married against his wishes, slit her throat as she slept and then killed three of his other daughters in a remote village in eastern Pakistan, the police said Saturday.
   Nazir Ahmad, a labourer in his 40s, feared the younger girls, aged 4, 8, and 12, would follow in their sister’s footsteps, the police officer Shahzad Gul said.
   Ahmad surrendered to police after the killings late Friday in Burewala, about 70 miles east of Multan, a main city in eastern Punjab province, Gul said.
   ‘He (Ahmad) told us that he has killed his daughters, and we arrested him,’ he said.
   Gul said the man’s 25-year-old daughter, Muqadas Bibi, had married the man of her choice against her father’s wishes some weeks ago. Ahmad contacted Bibi this week, saying he was ready to forgive her, Gul said.
   During a visit by Bibi to her parents’ house, Ahmad slit her throat as she slept and then killed the other three girls, Gul said. He said police were investigating whether other relatives helped in the killings and were also looking for Bibi’s husband.
   Gul said the police are looking for Bibi’s husband to inform him of her death.

Pope Benedict XVI issued a spiritual wake-up call Sunday, telling pilgrims in his traditional Christmas Day message they risked ‘spiritual barrenness’ if they become too involved in modern-day intellectual and technical achievements.
   The pope told tens of thousands of pilgrims in a rain-soaked St Peter’s Square that ‘men and women in our technological age risk becoming victims of their own intellectual and technical achievements, ending up in spiritual barrenness and emptiness of heart.’
   ‘Wake up, O men and women of the third millennium,’ he said.
   For his first Christmas Day message as pope, Benedict appeared on the loggia of St Peter’s basilica, from where his election as successor to the late Pope John Paul II was announced to the world on April 19.
   A festive crowd, including thousands of children, took shelter under a sea of colourful umbrellas in the square, dominated by a giant Nativity scene and a 30 metre tree donated by Austria.
   ‘The modern age is often seen as an awakening of reason from its slumbers, humanity’s enlightenment after an age of darkness,’ the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics said.
   ‘Yet without the light of Christ, the light of reason is not sufficient to enlighten humanity and the world.’
   Benedict delighted the huge crowd when he launched into Christmas greetings to viewers around the world in 32 languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese and even Finnish—a tradition first begun by John Paul II.
   However, Benedict bowed to his doctrinal roots by rounding off the greetings in Latin, the traditional language of the Church.
   In particular, he urged Italians—facing a general election in April—to ‘keep alive’ their nation’s Christian heritage.
   In a message in which the pope traditionally calls for peace in the world’s trouble spots, Benedict prayed for those who work for peace ‘and the prevention of fratricidal conflicts’ in Africa, making special mention of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
   In the Holy Land of the Middle East, Iraq, and Lebanon, he welcomed ‘signs of hope,’ but said they needed to be confirmed ‘by actions inspired by fairness and wisdom.’
   He also prayed for the slow process of dialogue in the Korean peninsula and elsewhere in Asia.
   ‘By the settlement of dangerous disputes, consistent and peaceful conclusions can be reached in a spirit of friendship, conclusions which their peoples expectantly await.’

A Manhattan man’s holiday spirits soared to celestial heights on Friday when a judge gave him permission to change his name to Jesus Christ.
   Jose Luis Espinal, 42, said he was ‘happy’ and ‘grateful’ that the judge approved the change, effective immediately. Espinal said he was moved to seek the name change about a year ago when it dawned on him, ‘I am the person that is that name.’ Espinal, who acted as his own lawyer, got the change approved by Manhattan civil court judge Diane Lebedeff, who said she was ‘satisfied that this application is neither novel, nor would grant it pose practical problems’.
   The judge said name change applications usually were not denied just because the change might cause practical difficulties or be thought unwise, as long as a person with the same name did not object to the proposed change. She cited a 2001 Utah case in which a man legally changed his name to ‘Santa Claus’ and a Washington, DC, case earlier this year in which a name change applicant obtained a driver’s license and social security card in the name of ‘Jesus Christ’.
   The judge compared those cases with that of actor Peter Lorre’s widow; who objected to a man who said he was the actor’s relative, changing his name to ‘Peter Lorie’.
   Although laws differ by jurisdiction, the judge said, there seemed to be a nationwide consensus that a name could not be changed to a number. She cited a South Dakota court ruling against a change to ‘1069’ and a California court rejecting ‘III’ as a name.

Iran rejected an offer from Russia for the Islamic republic to conduct uranium enrichment activities on its soil, foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said.
   ‘We have still not received the concrete offer, but it is clear that we will accept positively the propositions and the plans that recognise the right of the Islamic republic to carry out enrichment on its own soil,’ he told reporters Sunday.
   Russia on Saturday had said its proposal to create ‘on Russian soil a joint Russo-Iranian undertaking to enrich uranium still stands,’ despite earlier indications from Tehran that it was not interested. The Russian embassy in Tehran put the suggestion put to the Iranian government on Saturday, the Russian foreign ministry said.
   ‘This proposal represents Russia’s contribution to the search for a solution acceptable to all in the context of the settling of the situation... by political and diplomatic methods,’ it said in a statement.
   The Europe Union wants Iran to accept the Russian idea that enrichment operations should take place in Russia without the direct involvement of Iranian scientists. EU negotiators Britain, France and Germany restarted talks Wednesday with Iran over Western concerns about Tehran’s nuclear programme and agreed to meet again in January.

The governing Shia coalition has called on Iraqis to accept results showing the religious bloc leading in parliamentary elections and moved ahead with efforts to form a ‘national unity’ government.
   But as they reached out Saturday to Sunni Arabs and others, senior officials in the United Iraqi Alliance deepened the post-election turmoil by claiming that Islamic extremists and Saddam Hussein loyalists were at the forefront of those questioning the results.
   At least one Sunni Arab leader said he was upset by the Shia comments.
   Violence in Iraq left at least nine people dead. Guerrillas killed eight people around Baghdad, and a United States soldier died from wounds sustained in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in northern Iraq.
   The soldier was assigned to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and was wounded in an attack while on patrol near the town of Hawijah, the military said.
   Meanwhile, militants released a video of a Jordanian hostage and gave that country three days to cut ties with the Baghdad government and free a female would-be suicide bomber whose explosives belt failed to go off during November 9 attacks that killed 60 people in Amman.
   Al-Arabiya satellite channel, which broadcast parts of the video, did not specify if the militants threatened to kill the hostage, Mahmoud Suleiman Saidat, if the deadline was not met.
   Jordan’s government rejected the demands.
   ‘Jordan will not succumb to any blackmail or pressure, whatever the source is,’ Nasser Judeh, a Jordanian government spokesperson, told The Associated Press.
   Saidat, a Jordanian embassy driver, was kidnapped on Tuesday. The video had a sign identifying the kidnappers as the Hawk Brigades, a previously unknown group.
   Baghdad’s tiny Christian community celebrated a sombre Christmas Eve in Baghdad, with a few dozen Catholics holding Mass in the early afternoon to avoid travelling after dark—one of the most dangerous times in the Iraqi capital. An 11pm curfew also bans all traffic.
   The alliance, headed by the cleric Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, said preliminary results showing it with a clear lead in the December 15 elections were not the result of fraud or intimidation. It charged that many violations took place in Sunni Arab areas, and claimed that many of its opponents conspired with guerrillas to alter results.
   ‘There will be no going back and no new elections,’ Jawad al-Maliki, a senior Alliance official, said at a news conference. ‘The results must be accepted and the will of the people must be respected.’
   He added that the alliance had been expecting to win more seats.
   ‘The opponents have made it clear through their statements and warnings that they stand alongside the terrorists.’
   He was referring to statements by senior Sunni Arab politicians, including Adnan al-Dulaimi, the head of the main Sunni Arab coalition known as the Iraqi Accordance Front, who openly thanked some insurgent groups for not attacking polling stations, and to reports that masked militants were guarding some of them.
   The alliance’s harsh comments demonstrated the difficulty that Iraqi parties will face in forming a government after final election results are released in early January.
   The officials added that the alliance has begun talks with other groups about the possibility of forming a ‘national unity government’. But they ruled out having anyone other than a Shia member of their religious bloc become Iraq’s new prime minister.
   ‘The door is open for dialogue with our brothers and partners because we believe that Iraq cannot stand up without its main components,’ al-Maliki said.
   Many people outside the alliance allege that last week’s elections were unfair to Sunni Arabs and secular Shia groups.
   Sunni Arab and secular Shia factions are demanding that an international body review the fraud complaints, warning that they may boycott the new legislature. The United Nations has rejected an outside review.
   About 1 500 complaints have been lodged about the elections; including at least 35 the Iraqi election commission said could be serious enough to change the results in certain areas.
   But Adel al-Lami, general director of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, said an initial review of the complaints showed ‘they don’t significantly affect the results of the vote’.
   The protesting groups have demanded the disbandment of the commission, accusing it of covering up ballot stuffing and fraud.
   The commission also said it will carry out a court decision to remove 90 former members of Saddam’s outlawed Ba’ath party from the tickets of political parties and coalitions that participated in the elections.

A senior Iraqi official has called for the re-arrest of two of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons experts, released by US forces earlier this week.
   The national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubbaie, said warrants had been issued for the arrest of Rihab Taha and Huda Ammash.
   The pair was among 22 high-ranking Iraqi detainees set free by the US.
   They had been accused of running Iraq’s bio-weapons programme. The US concluded they had no useful information.
   A lawyer for Dr Ammash dismissed the threat to re-arrest her, saying the Iraqi government had agreed to the release of the detainees on the condition that they left Iraq.
   Mrs Ammash was nicknamed ‘Mrs Anthrax’ by the US, and Mrs Taha was known as ‘Dr Germ’.
   Reports have been circulating of a pre-election deal to free former regime figures in order to appease Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, correspondents say.
   The British-educated Taha and US-educated Mrs Ammash had both been accused by the Bush administration of involvement in Saddam Hussein’s banned weapons programme.
   Neutralising the threat posed by the former leader’s chemical and biological weapons was cited by the US as its prime motive for invading Iraq in 2003.
   No such weapons have been found since the invasion.

Get ready for a minute with 61 seconds. Scientists are delaying the start of 2006 by the first ‘leap second’ in seven years, a timing tweak meant to make up for changes in the Earth’s rotation.
   The adjustment will be carried out by sticking an extra second into atomic clocks worldwide at the stroke of midnight Coordinated Universal Time, the widely adopted international standard, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology said this week.
   ‘Enjoy New Year’s Eve a second longer,’ the institute said in an explanatory notice. ‘You can toot your horn an extra second this year.’
   Coordinated Universal Time coincides with winter time in London. On the US East Coast, the extra second occurs just before 7:00pm on New Year’s Eve. Atomic clocks at that moment will read 23:59:60 before rolling over to all zeros.
   A leap second is added to keep uniform timekeeping within 0.9 second of the Earth’s rotational time, which can speed up or slow down because of many factors, including ocean tides. The first leap second was added on June 30, 1972, according to NIST, an arm of the US Commerce Department.
   Since 1999 until recently, the two time standards have been in close enough synch to escape any need to add a leap second, NIST said.
   Although it is possible to have a negative leap second—that is, a second deducted from Coordinated Universal Time—so far all have been add-ons, reflecting the Earth’s general slowing trend due to tidal breaking.
   Deciding when to introduce a leap second is the responsibility of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, a standards-setting body. Under an international pact, the preference for leap seconds is December 31 or June 30.

The former top aide to then-secretary of state Colin Powell has reportedly emerged as an increasingly high-profile and vocal critic of US administration policy at home and abroad.
   Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Powell’s chief-of-staff, ‘says his decision to speak in the open about the policy wars of the first Bush term was slow in coming, but a major factor was the revelations about Abu Ghraib, which he said he realised ... had resulted from decisions on prisoner treatment and intelligence set shortly after September 11, 2001.’

The official Christmas tree of the US state of Rhode Island has fallen victim to the state’s strict anti-fire code.
   The tree was dried with fans and sprayed with flame-retardant chemicals under laws enacted after a nightclub blaze in which nearly 100 people died.
   But the 5.4-metre (18 foot) blue spruce turned brown, lost its needles and died - and a new one had to be found.
   Governor Donald Carcieri told local radio that next year the state might get an artificial tree.
   ‘With the new fire code, we’re supposed to spray it, and apparently the spray killed it,’ governor Carcieri said.
   Finding a new tree for the state house proved complicated because the law requires a fire marshal to be on hand when a tree destined for public display is cut down.
   Under Rhode Island law, Christmas trees are ‘flammable vegetation’, and their display in public buildings is regulated.
   Until 6 December, Christmas trees had to be treated with fire retardant. The state tree was first put up in late November. But that requirement has now been lifted.

Experts voiced optimism Sunday that a toxic slick flowing down the Amur River in Russia’s Far East region from China would not pose a danger to marine life when it reaches the sea.
   ‘The concentration of dangerous elements would be so insignificant by the time the river carries it into the sea, that it would be simply undetectable for the fish,’ said the chief of the Pacific fish industry research institute’s department in the city of Khabarovsk, German Novomodny.
   ‘Even in spring, when the benzene now frozen in ice and nitrobenzene which now sinks to the bottom get into the river, this will not poison the sea fauna,’ Novomodny said.

Landmine blast kills six in Afghanistan
Six suspected Taliban militants were killed when a landmine they were planting on a road exploded in the insurgency-hit southern province of Kandahar, Afghan officials said Sunday. The incident occurred on Saturday night in Maywand district, Kandahar police chief Abdul Malik Wahidi said. Maywand administration chief Mohammad Nabi Idari said the men were planting the landmine on a road used by Afghan and US forces on patrol. The dead were believed to be Taliban, whose regime was ousted by a US-led military campaign in late 2001 for sheltering terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network. Separately police said they had arrested three militants in neighbouring Dand district and charged them with planning suicide attacks.

Four die in Japan’s latest suicide pact
Three men and a woman were found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in a car on Sunday in Japan’s latest suicide pact, the police said. The four in their 20s and 30s were found in the car parked on the side of a forest road at Tokigawa in Saitama prefecture north of Tokyo, a police spokesman said. The police found burnt charcoal inside the car, whose windows were sealed with adhesive tape. ‘We suspect the case is a group suicide,’ the police spokesman said, adding that further details were not immediately available. Dozens of Japanese people have killed themselves since late last year after forming pacts on Internet suicide sites to support one another as they die.

S Korean panel grills ex-researcher
South Korean investigators Sunday grilled a former key researcher of disgraced cloning expert Hwang Woo-Suk’s team in their intensified probe of its fabricated stem cell research, reports said. A panel at Seoul National University quizzed Kim Seon-Jeong, who had admitted faking data for Hwang’s 2005 paper published in US journal Science as ordered by his former boss, for hours overnight, Yonhap news agency said. Kim arrived tense at an airport here late Saturday from his study at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine but remained silent on questions by journalists, YTN cable news showed.

Moderate tremor jolts northern Pakistan
An aftershock measuring 5.2 on the Richter Scale jolted northern Pakistan on Sunday, causing panic among tens of thousands of survivors of the devastating October 8 earthquake. It was the latest of more than 1,500 aftershocks that have rocked the region since more than 73,000 people were killed and 3.5 million made homeless in Pakistan’s worst natural disaster. The tremor, which was felt at 13:02 (0902 GMT), originated in the same area where the October earthquake caused havoc, seismological chief Qamaruz Zaman said.
— AFP

Hollywood actress Brunetti dies at 98
Actress Argentina Brunetti, who began her film career with the Christmas classic ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ has died in Rome aged 98, her son Mario Brunetti said on her website. Born to an actress mother on the stage of a Buenos Aires theatre, Brunetti made her name in stage plays before embarking on her Hollywood career in Frank Capra’s 1947 classic starring James Stewart. Her career spanned more than 100 films including ‘Anything Goes’ with Bing Crosby in 1956 and ‘The Caddy’ with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in 1953. She was made a ‘Cavalier of the Republic’ of Italy for her positive portrayals of Italian Americans in film.
— Reuters

Bush talks region with Colombian president
The US president, George W Bush, discussed regional developments in a telephone call with the Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, on Saturday, the White House said. ‘The presidents wished each other a Merry Christmas and noted the progress made this year,’ spokesman Allen Abney said. ‘They also briefly discussed developments in the region and the work ahead in 2006, including reaffirming their commitment to a free trade agreement,’ the spokesman said. Uribe, 53, who enjoys strong public approval ratings, announced in November he would stand for a second term in May 2006 elections after the constitutional court ruled to permit his candidacy.
— Reuters

Cameroonian killed in Russian attack
Youths in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg have attacked and killed an African student and seriously another, police said Sunday. ‘Two African students have been attacked by a group of youths. One was killed on the spot, the other was injured and hospitalised,’ Alexei Grebtsov, of the city’s police, told AFP by telephone. Russian NTV television said the victim was a 28-year-old Cameroonian student who had been living in Russia for three months. He was ‘stabbed twice in the neck’ by the youths in the attacks Saturday night, according to a witness, another African student, questioned by the television channel. The group of six then stabbed a Zambian student in the stomach with a knife. He was taken to hospital.
— AFP

US rebukes Egypt over Nur’s imprisonment
The United States sharply criticised a five-year jail term handed down to Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Nur and said it calls into question its key Middle East ally’s commitment to democracy. ‘The United States is deeply troubled by the conviction today of Egyptian politician Ayman Nur by an Egyptian court,’ the White House said in a statement, after Nur was sentenced to five years in prison in a Cairo court. ‘The conviction of Mr. Nur, the runner-up in Egypt’s 2005 presidential elections, calls into question Egypt’s commitment to democracy, freedom, and the rule of law,’ it said. ‘We are also disturbed by reports that Mr. Nur’s health has seriously declined due to the hunger strike on which he has embarked in protest of the conditions of his trial and detention.
— Reuters

Libyan scraps nurses’ HIV death sentences
Libya’s Supreme Court on Sunday scrapped death sentences against five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted of infecting children with the HIV virus, sending the case back to a lower court for a retrial. The six, in jail since 1999, had been sentenced to death by firing squad in a case that has become a hurdle to Libya’s efforts to improve ties with the West.
— Reuters