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The United States is discussing with Israel and the Palestinians the creation of a crisis management group to keep peace talks alive even through ‘inevitable’ outbreaks of violence, a senior US official said Saturday.
   Speaking as secretary of state Condoleezza Rice prepared for her first Middle East trip as top US diplomat, the state department official suggested the group would comprise representatives of both sides and the United States.
   The official said they were working on ‘some sort of mechanism to deal with problems’ that arise during the talks, including ‘the inevitable violence’ that has wrecked past negotiations.
   Rice, who is on an eight-nation tour of Europe as well as the Middle East, alluded to the discussions in a briefing for reporters aboard the plane taking her Saturday from Warsaw to Ankara.
   She said Washington was working to help the parties ‘develop means by which they can talk and solve the kind of crises that are inevitably going to come up as they go along this road.’
   ‘We know the rejectionists and the terrorists are going to continue to try to make statements, sometimes violent statements, that they are unreconciled to a process of reconciliation and forward movement,’ she said.
   Rice was scheduled to meet with the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, on Sunday and the Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, on Monday, setting the stage for their summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh a day later.
   Hopes for movement in efforts to end 52 months of bloodshed that has claimed more than 4,700 lives have been rekindled since Abbas was elected last month to succeed the late Yasser Arafat.
   The senior US official said details of the crisis management plan had not been worked out. ‘We’re still discussing these sorts of issues with the parties and they’re discussing things among themselves,’ he said.
   But he said talks have been held about ‘ways in which Israelis and the Palestinians, usually with the United States in some form there, can get together and look at problems, raise problems with each other.’
   The idea, he said, would be to raise ‘things that they think might be difficult areas or indeed events that have occurred, and try to make sure that these things get resolved without disrupting the overall process.’
   Sharon and Mahmud Abbas will try to buck the trend of recent history at a Middle East summit this week which has seen hopes for peace raised by previous initiatives dashed on the rock of violence.
   The talks in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh will be the most senior contacts between the two sides in more than four years, as the Israeli prime minister, Sharon, boycotted Abbas’ late predecessor Yasser Arafat.
   Chastened by the failures of previous summits, the two sides are making efforts this time not to raise the bar of expectation far from the ground.
   The US president, George W Bush, may have predicted last week that the goal of an independent Palestinian state is within reach, but neither Sharon nor Abbas have shown any desire to address the thorniest issues such as the plight of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem.
   The euphoria which greeted the 1993 signing of the Oslo autonomy accords, seen at the time as a stepping stone towards Palestinian independence, has long since evaporated and unravelled into mutual distrust.

The landslide election victory of Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, Sunday cements his formidable grip on power and bodes ill for opponents and rights advocates eager to rein in his domineering leadership, analysts said.
   The re-election of the tycoon-turned-political heavyweight was virtually assured from well before the campaign season, but few dared predict his win could be so one-sided. Should the television exit polls prove accurate, Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai party has won an unprecedented 399 of parliament’s 500 seats.
   ‘It was more than we expected, it was a landslide,’ the director of the centre for international policy studies at Thammasat University, Prapat Thepchatree, said of Thaksin’s victory.
   ‘I think it will make him more confident. He will say this is a strong mandate to do whatever he wants, with more centralisation of power,’ Prapat added. ‘Whether it’s good for Thailand or not, it’s difficult to say.’
   Thaksin, who swept into office in 2001 by promising to improve the lot of impoverished farmers and villagers, intends to push his political agenda in a second term.
   He has generally received high marks for implementing his proposals, even as a string of crises demanded his government’s urgent attention—from outbreaks of SARS and bird flu, to a bloody Islamic insurgency and the tsunami’s unprecedented devastation.
   The extent of the win ensures that Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai will be able to govern outright, shedding its outgoing coalition partner party Chart Thai. ‘The margin of victory indicates we are still in an unconsolidated democracy. Populism is still the key to victory, and the democratic principle of checks and balances has not yet fully emerged in this election,’ said Panitan Wattanayagorn, a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University.
   Thaksin had come under fire from critics within and outside Thailand for being too authoritarian. Analysts fear that his huge victory could embolden him further.
   ‘I think the management style of Thaksin could become even more pronounced, with centralised bureaucracy and administration,’ said Panitan. ‘If not controlled, it would become a centralised democracy and that may create unintended consequences.’
   By being shut out of any effective parliamentary censure of the premier, civil society could resort to ‘checks and balances outside the parliamentary system’, including the use of populist upswells such as those seen recently in Ukraine, or in recent years in the Philippines, he said.

The United States is determined to strengthen political and trade ties with Southeast Asia even as it takes a tougher line on Myanmar under the new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, officials say.
   This year, it could resume full military ties with Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and clinch its second free trade deal in the region with Thailand, some analysts predict.
   Southeast Asia may not be familiar ground to Rice, who did little travelling in her previous job as top security adviser to the president, George W Bush, but her piano-playing skills will come in handy in breaking the ice with counterparts in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
   Her first assignment in the region will be in July when she attends the annual ASEAN meeting, where regional security issues are discussed with key trading partners and ministers regularly give their own take on classic tunes at an after-dinner show.
   ‘I think you’ll have a very musical secretary of state playing the ivories in Southeast Asia this summer,’ said Washington-based regional expert Ernest Bower, the former US-ASEAN Business Council chief.
   But given her Senate pre-confirmation testimony in which she branded Myanmar an ‘outpost of tyranny,’ Rice could give the ASEAN ministers an earful on the need to reign in the military-ruled state accused of human rights abuses.
   The United States is very likely to boycott next year’s ASEAN meeting in Myanmar.
   ‘I am prepared to make a prediction here: there is not a chance in hell the United States is going to Burma (Myanmar) next year unless dramatic changes takes place,’ said Karen Brooks, who had worked under Rice as Asia director in the National Security Council.
   Aside from pushing democracy for Myanmar, Rice’s other priorities this year would be reestablishment of full military ties with Indonesia, strengthening links with another Muslim majority country Malaysia and traditional allies Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore, Karen predicted.
   She said more than a decade of ‘bad blood’ resulting from Washington’s ban on key military cooperation with Indonesia due to human rights problems had been largely erased, especially after the recent tsunami disaster when their armies worked hand-in-hand to offer relief to victims.
   Another upbeat factor for US-Southeast Asia relations is the nomination of US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick as Rice’s number two.
   ‘He has a soft for the region and has established solid links with leaders there over the years,’ Bower said.
   Under Zoellick’s stewardship last year, the United States launched a free trade agreement with Singapore and negotiations for a similar deal with Thailand, and sealed a trade and investment framework agreement with Malaysia.
   The moves were part of Bush’s ‘Enterprise for ASEAN Initiative’ designed to strengthen ties with the region covering a two-way annual trade of nearly 120 billion dollars. ASEAN is the fifth largest US trading partner.
   US officials talked to Singaporean and Malaysian counterparts last week to expand trade ties.

US-based Human Rights Watch accused the Cambodian government of trying to eliminate its opponents, warning that the country’s faltering progress towards multi-party democracy was at stake.
   The kingdom’s national assembly voted in a closed session last week to strike down rules giving immunity to opposition leader Sam Rainsy and two members of his party, paving the way for them to face prosecution.
   Rainsy, an arch enemy of the prime minister, Hun Sen, immediately fled the country, while legislator Cheam Channy was arrested and charged at a military court and Chea Poch was being held at an opposition safe house.
   Between them, the opposition MPs face criminal charges including defamation and building an army as part of a coup plot.
   ‘This is nothing less than a move to get rid of the political opposition in Cambodia,’ Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Sunday.
   ‘If Sam Rainsy and his party members are prosecuted or expelled from the parliament on such bogus grounds, the progress on political pluralism made since the 1991 peace agreements will be lost.’
   Human Rights Watch said that the move by a military court to charge Cheam Channy was illegal as the mandate of the court only covers military offences committed by current military personnel.
   ‘Cheam Channy should be immediately released,’ said Adams.
   ‘He’s a member of the National Assembly and by definition he’s a civilian, not a military officer. It’s illegal for him to be charged and detained by the military court.’
   Shortly after Hun Sen formed a new government in July last year in coalition with the royalist party headed by the prince, Norodom Ranariddh, who is president of the national assembly Cheam Channy was accused with organising a militia.

Chinese authorities have shut down 10,000 kindergartens and 2,000 schools and sacked 27,000 staff in a nationwide campaign to increase safety after a spate of knife attacks on pupils, state media reported Sunday.
   The State Council or cabinet ordered an inspection of all schools from October to December last year following a string of deadly attacks in the facilities, the Beijing Morning Post said.
   More than 340,000 schools and 120,000 kindergartens were inspected in recent weeks, leading to the closure of 2,000 elementary and middle schools and 10,000 kindergartens which did not meet safety standards, the report said.
   Staff who failed to meet the criteria for working with children were dismissed, including 20,000 from the schools and 7,000 from the kindergartens.
   The report did not specify what criteria were used, but there have been demands that staff be checked for criminal records and any mental health problems.
   In the bloodiest incident a man in November stabbed eight teenagers to death as they slept and injured four others after breaking into a school dormitory in central Henan province.
   In December a knife-wielding man forced his way into a primary school classroom in Jilin province and attacked 12 young children, slashing them in the head and back.
   In October a five-year-old boy and his teacher were killed at a Beijing kindergarten by a would-be thief. The boy’s body was found stuffed in a washing machine.
   In September a man with a knife and homemade bombs attacked 28 children at a kindergarten in the eastern city of Suzhou. No one was killed.
   The same month, a knife-wielding man stabbed 25 children and kidnapped a nine-year-old girl at a primary school in the eastern province of Shandong.

As North Korea gears up to celebrate the birthday of Kim Jong-Il this month, there is growing talk that the ageing dictator is looking to prolong the dynasty through one of his sons.
   Kim turns 63 on February 16 and, North Korea watchers say, appears to have no plans to stand down any time soon.
   He could be measuring up one of his own three sons for the job of third-generation dictator, they say.
   North Korea has been ruled by the Kim family since it was founded nearly six decades ago by Kim’s father, Kim Il-Sung.
   A pervasive personality cult has elevated Kim Jong-Il, known to his own people as the ‘sun of the 21st century,’ and his late father to god-like status.
   Now the regime and the dynasty are so closely intertwined that they have become one, according to North Korea watchers.
   South Korea, concerned about a possible collapse of North Korea, is closely watching the developments.

Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels Sunday accused the government of dragging its feet on forming a joint panel to distribute tsunami aid, a move backed by peacebroker Norway.
   The accusation came just hours after Norway made a fresh bid to set up such a mechanism to distribute aid in rebel-held areas.
   ‘The government is dragging its feet over the establishment of a joint mechanism to take forward the rehabilitation of tsunami destroyed northeast province,’ SP Tamilselvan, political head of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, said in a statement on the Tamilnet.com website.
   ‘The government is increasingly demonstrating its unwillingness to work with the LTTE in rebuilding the devastated areas.’
   Nearly 31,000 people were killed and more than 5,600 missing in Sri Lanka after the December 26 tsunamis which also caused severe destruction in northeast coastal areas controlled by the Tigers.
   Tamilselvan said the rebels had submitted several proposals through Norwegian officials to the government ‘but the government is not sincere in creating a situation that would enable us to move forward.’

A man in the Chinese capital Beijing killed his wife and hid her body in a refrigerator for three years to keep her close to him, local media reported Sunday.
   Zhao Qingsong confessed in court Saturday that he strangled his wife in 2001 after she admitted she was having an affair, the Beijing Times said.
   The couple married in 1994 shortly after meeting through a matchmaking agency. Over the years, they began to argue frequently due to financial difficulties and his ill health, the report said.
   Zhao managed to keep the murder from the couple’s child and his wife’s parents by telling the child his wife died in a car accident and informing her parents that she had gone missing.
   He also moved house three times, carefully moving the sealed refrigerator each time.

Indian troops have ringed voting stations to prevent attacks by Islamic militants as balloting for the third round of municipal elections in Kashmir began, officials said.
   Separatist politicians and rebel groups have called on voters to shun the elections, the first in more than a quarter century, saying the polls are no substitute for the right to self-determination.
   On Sunday two districts in southern Kashmir, Anantnag and Pulwama, were voting to elect municipal councillors.
   Both districts are strongholds of militants opposed to Indian rule in Kashmir. They want to join Kashmir with Pakistan or make it independent.
   Troops in full battle-gear have positioned themselves around all the voting stations, frisking people moving in the streets and those entering election booths, witnesses said.
   ‘We have made fool-proof security arrangements for the day,’ police officer Abdul Majid said.
   ‘Voting was slow initially but has started picking up,’ an election official Munawar Abbas said in Anantnag.

A week after a euphoric taste of democracy, war-scarred Iraqis are back under the guerrilla cosh and facing weeks of uncertainty over who their new political masters will be.
   Iyad Allawi, the US-backed interim prime minister, called the landmark January 30 election a victory over the guerrillas. ‘The terrorists know they cannot win,’ he said, confident that rebels could be beaten in months.
   But the Sunni Muslim guerrillas have killed scores of Iraqi security forces and civilians since the vote. Bombs, although smaller in scale, continue to scar Baghdad and other cities still suffering power cuts and other shortages.
   The prime minister is also in the race to lead the transitional government that oversees the drawing up of a constitution before an election for a permanent government is held in December.
   Negotiations between the majority Shia Muslims, the Sunnis who have been shunted from power and Kurds, who are seeking to extend their autonomous region, promise to be rancorous and protracted.
   ‘Although the elections were certainly a challenge, in many ways the harder work has really to begin,’ said a Western diplomat in Baghdad. ‘In a sense (the election) was almost pre-season football.’
   The fundamentalist Shia coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, leads in the partial count of the vote—which authorities have promised will be finished by Thursday.
   With Iraq’s Shia spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani leading from behind-the-scenes, the alliance is certain to be the largest single bloc in the 275-seat national assembly.
   Shias, who make up 60 per cent of the population of about 27 million, are returning to the fore after decades of Sunni domination under previous governments.
   Alliance chiefs have insisted the new prime minister should be a Shia and offered to have a Sunni as president and a Kurd head of the national assembly.
   Ibrahim Jaafari, leader of Hezb al-Dawa al-Islamiyya (Islamic Call Party), Ahmed Chalabi, former US favourite who leads the Iraqi National Congress, finance minister Adel Abdel Mahdi and nuclear scientist Hussein Shahrastani have been touted as the leading alliance candidates to run the government.
   Power brokers such as Jaafari highlight the reconciliatory tone. ‘We want Shias back in power but at the same time we don’t want to do what Saddam did,’ he said.
   But Sunni religious leaders have demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of the US and other foreign troops before they get involved in talks on a constitution.
   The Kurds, whose list could come second in the election, are also unhappy. Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two major Kurdish parties, has laid claim to be president or prime minister.
   He has also insisted that the future of the key oil city of Kirkuk, which has a Kurd majority but is not part of the Kurdish autonomous region, be part of any negotiations with the other communities.
   The future of Kirkuk worries neighbouring Turkey which fears the Kurds could try to use it as a capital of an independent Kurd state.
   Turkey has its own restive Kurd region and the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, this week accused the United States of failing to rein in Kurdish moves in northern Iraq which he said risked throwing the entire region into turmoil.
   The various inter-communal tensions, as well as those inside the Shia alliance, could leave Allawi, a secular Shia, as a compromise candidate for prime minister in the transitional government, even though he has been criticised by the other parties for failing to improve security.
   Allawi has the backing of the United States, which wants someone to bolster Iraqi security forces so it can move toward a withdrawal, according to officials in the US-led coalition.
   ‘Everyone shudders at the mention of the words ‘civil war’,’ said one senior official from a member nation of the coalition.
   ‘Right now we believe it won’t happen. Not even the Sunnis want it. It would be bad for them, bad for Iraq and very bad for the countries that have troops here.’

Iran accused the United States Sunday of being the world’s main supporter of terrorism through its backing of Israel, and shrugged off fresh criticism from Washington as mere sour grapes.
   Responding to president George W Bush’s description of Iran as ‘the world’s primary state sponsor of terror’ and his pledge to stand by supporters of democracy in the Islamic republic, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi, said Bush ‘doesn’t have very good advisers’.
   ‘America is the biggest supporter of a terrorist regime: Israel. And the one who supports terrorism cannot talk about human rights,’ he said, also reacting US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s comment that the clerical regime was ‘something to be loathed’.
   According to Asefi, the recent hardening of the tone from US officials was a case of ‘bitterness’ coinciding with the forthcoming February 10 anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
   ‘For Iranians, these days are full of nice memories and sweetness,’ Asefi said. ‘But for Americans, these days are painful because their days of dominating and bullying Iran were brought to an end.’
   ‘There is no need to be worried,’ the spokesman added.
   Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, in a British television interview said a shock military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be a ‘mistake’,
   Speaking on ITV’s Jonathan Dimbleby programme, the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy said that such unilateral action would be counter-productive.
   Asked about the US vice president, Dick Cheney’s warning last month that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities without warning, Solana said: ‘I think that would be something I would not like to see taking place. That would be a mistake. That will complicate enormously the situation.’
   ‘Unilateral action of that nature I don’t think will contribute to what is the aim of everybody,’ he added. ‘I don’t think at this point in time that it is worth thinking about that.’
   Asked if he agreed with the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw that US military action against Iran is ‘inconceivable’, Solana replied: ‘I think at this point in time military action–is very difficult to conceive.’
   ‘I don’t think that the United States has at this point of time the wish or the will or the capability to do that.’
   Last week in London, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, insisted that a military strike against Tehran was ‘simply not on the agenda’.
   Britain, France and Germany have been involved in diplomatic efforts to get Iran to abandon any military nuclear programme in return for co-operation with civilian projects.

Investigators probing alleged corruption at the United Nations oil-for-food programme are scrutinising thousands of pages documents of the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, including e-mail and phone records, to determine whether he exerted influence in securing a contract for a Swiss company that employed his son.
   Paul Volcker, the head of the independent investigation, confirmed the document search and told The Associated Press that new information had led investigators to delay publishing their findings about Annan’s son Kojo, whose activities have embroiled the UN chief in the growing scandal.
   ‘There were things that came along that threw us back,’ Volcker said in an AP interview.
   The United Nations’ oil-for-food programme was its largest humanitarian aid operation and ran from 1996 to 2003 when it ended. It was designed to allow the former Iraqi government to sell limited amounts of oil in exchange for humanitarian goods as an exemption from sanctions in place since 1991.
   Mohammed al-Jibouri, Iraq’s trade minister, said on Saturday that more has yet to be revealed on specific individuals’ roles in the scandal. He did not specify any names in his comments, made to Associated Press Television News.
   ‘There are a lot of names, and I hope there will be some fairness on that — not to shut out the light, and put this in the dark, under the carpet,’ al-Jibouri said.
   Al-Jibouri said the programme initially had been a ‘huge successes in helping ordinary Iraqis contend with UN sanctions imposed on Saddam’s regime after the 1991 Gulf War.
   Problems began when Iraq began imposing a surcharge on contracts for goods bought under the programme, he said.’ A lot of companies refused to do this, so a lot of them actually withdrew from that programme,’ he said.
   As Volcker issued an interim investigative report Thursday, he said he had planned to include the findings about Kojo Annan’s employment with Cotecna Inspection SA. The company had a UN contract to certify deals for humanitarian supplies imported by Iraq under the oil-for-food programme.
   But Volcker’s committee decided to issue that part of the report along with other conclusions later this winter to give investigators time to review the new information. About 10 investigators have focused solely on the Annan files.
   There were delays in organizing access to UN files, including those stored on hard-drives in Annan’s office, but Volcker said the United Nations has been cooperating with his requests.
   ‘It is supposed to be an open book and we have not identified conscious deliberate evasions, like shredding papers before we got there,’ Volcker said. ‘But we have been slowed — and I am not criticizing this — by sensitivity on the part of the UN’
   He explained that officials were sensitive about his investigative panel’s access to personal e-mails, but that they had resolved the matter.
   Kofi Annan, who has been interviewed at least three times during the investigation, has said Volcker’s panel would have complete access to UN officials and documents.
   Investigators also have interviewed Kojo Annan several times, but Volcker said there had been some frustrations.
   ‘He is a little difficult to get a hold of, but he doesn’t refuse to be interviewed,’ Volcker said. ‘How forthcoming he is for the interview is another question.’
   Kojo Annan, 31, worked for Cotecna from 1996 to 1998, leaving at about the time the company received the UN contract. He has said that he only worked for the company in Africa and has denied any involvement in its oil-for-food dealings.

A senior Syrian official on Saturday slammed the US pressure as ‘short sighted’, saying the US charge that Syria supports terrorism is meant to satisfy arch foe Israel.
   The US president, George W Bush said Wednesday in his State of the Union speech that ‘Syria still allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon, to be used by terrorists who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region.’
   ‘The US officials acted as a mouthpiece for Israel, not for the United States, when they talked about independent countries like Syria and Iran,’ Syrian Information Minister Mahdi Dakhlullah said in an interview with Xinhua.
   He added that ‘the continued the US pressure confirm two things: the first is Syria is independent on international and regional affairs, if not, the United States does not need to do this; The second is Syria can stand under such pressure without changing its positions.’
   On the prospect of the US-Syrian relations, Dakhlullah said there are two rival approaches in the US government. He said ‘one is those who call for dialogue with Syria, but they are weak, and the other, on the contrary, are strong.’
   He noted that Bush always ‘encourages the new conservatives who believe that pressure is the only way to realize their political targets.’

The United States has won a battle in Iraq with last Sunday’s successful elections despite violence and threats from Islamic extremists, but, analysts concur, the war on al-Qaeda is far from over.
   ‘It would be premature to call it a major victory,’ said David Rothkopf of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, who added: ‘It is certainly a step in the right direction. Even the critics of president need to acknowledge the courage of the Iraqi people.’
   Bush on Sunday called Iraq’s first free elections in half a century ‘a resounding success’ and said that by participating in them, ‘the Iraqi people have firmly rejected the anti-democratic ideology of the terrorists.’
   The British prime minister, Tony Blair, said the election was ‘a blow right to the heart of the global terrorism that threatens destruction not just in Iraq’ and around the world.
   Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution said: ‘It seems a victory. But a victory in one battle does not mean you won the war. It certainly helps. ‘It does not mean it is over,’ he said, noting that Jordanian Islamic extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, with links to the al-Qaeda terror network, ‘is still out there.’
   Zarqawi pledged bloodshed in Sunday’s vote to stop Iraqis from going to the polls.
   But, his group’s end goal—to try and prevent people turning out—’seems to have failed.’
   With violence in Iraq somewhat contained Sunday, amid Iraqis’ massive turnout, ‘it shows they (terrorists) are even disconnected from any kind of political cause,’ said Singer.
   ‘It seems that from at least what we have seen from the voters in Iraq, they want some kind of return in normalcy.
   The US media on Monday applauded the elections in Iraq. The New York Times hailed it as ‘remarkably successful.’ For The Wall Street Journal the Iraqi election delivered an ‘eloquent rebuttal’ to US critics of Iraq policy.
   A less positive Democratic opposition in the United States called for an exit strategy for the US troops in Iraq. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said Iraq was now ‘a breeding ground for terrorists.’

Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, insisted Saturday that US president George W Bush’s call for democratic reform had caused no offence in the conservative kingdom.
   ‘Friendly states advise each other,’ Prince Saud told reporters.
   ‘When we advise the United States to change its foreign policy in the Middle East, does this affect relations?’ he asked.
   ‘I don’t think he said something which ... hurts. He expressed his hopes and aspirations, and so do we.’
   In a keynote State of the Union address on Wednesday, Bush issued a rare rebuke to key regional allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt, urging them to accelerate democratic reforms.
   ‘The government of Saudi Arabia can demonstrate its leadership in the region by expanding the role of its people in determining their future,’ the president said.
   Saudi Arabia is holding its first ever elections on February 10 but initially just 38 municipal councils around the capital will be involved and, even there, only half the seats are up for grabs and women will be denied the vote.

British leader Tony Blair became the longest-serving Labour prime minister, holding down the top job for 2,838 days and with no intention of letting go just yet.
   The record previously belonged to Harold Wilson, a giant of British post-war left-wing politics, who occupied Downing Street from 1964-70 and, after a Conservative interlude, from 1974-76.
   Blair is expected to call a general election for May 5 — a day before his 52nd birthday—in hopes of winning an unprecedented third consecutive Labour mandate.
   Opinion polls point to another Labour victory, although probably with a reduced parliamentary majority.
   Blair, an Edinburgh-born former lawyer who once dabbled in theatre and rock music, took the reins of the Labour Party in 1994 after the death of then leader John Smith.
   Three years later, in May 1997, after scrapping Labour’s core socialist principles, Blair led his reframed ‘New Labour’ to power, and kept it there at the 2001 elections.
   He still has some way to go before he overtakes the 11 years and 209 days which Margaret Thatcher held sway as Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990.
   Given the feeble state of the Tories today, however, and the absence of a credible alternative on the British political scene, political analysts think Blair stands a good chance of leaping that hurdle.

Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, faces parliamentary questioning about whether taxpayers’ money is being spent on his live-in partner, Camilla Parker Bowles.
   A parliamentary committee will question one of Charles’ financial aides on Monday over whether Parker Bowles shares the use of his staff, whose salaries are paid with pre-tax income from the prince’s Duchy of Cornwall estate.
   The duchy’s chief executive, Bertie Ross, will appear before a House of Common’s committee, the prince’s office confirmed.
   The Duchy of Cornwall, given to Charles on his 21st birthday from his mother Queen Elizabeth II, provides the prince’s sole source of income.
   He gets a salary from the profits—though does not own the capital—of the 140,000-acre (57,000-hectare) duchy, which has existed since the 14th century to provide revenue for Britain’s heir apparent.
   But the prince’s office insisted that Parker Bowles’ staffs were paid for by the prince with income he had paid tax on.
   ‘There is no cost to the taxpayer for Mrs. Parker Bowles,’ a spokeswoman told AFP.

13 killed in Pakistan kite-flying festival
Thirteen people have been killed and more than 500 injured during an annual kite-flying festival in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, officials said Sunday. Seven people with severe head injuries died in the city’s General Hospital alone and some 220 people were admitted with a variety of injuries including broken bones overnight, hospital officials said. The two-day festival of Basant marking the start of spring began Saturday evening with thousands of revellers perched on rooftops. Two teenagers were killed when they fell from a roof Sunday and two more were killed when a car hit them while they were trying to catch a stray kite, police said.
— AFP

Panic hits Borneo after quake in Philippines
Thousands of people in Malaysia’s Sabah state on Borneo island fled coastal areas for higher ground when officials warned of a possible tsunami after a strong earthquake hit the neighbouring southern Philippines, officials said Sunday. An earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale was recorded late Saturday with its epicentre in the sea south of Mindanao island, about 500 kilometres from Dent Haven near Lahad Datu on Sabah’s east coast. The Prime Minister’s Crisis and Disaster Centre issued Malaysia’s first-ever tsunami alert after the meteorological department told it about the quake.
— AFP

US tsunami efforts to wrap up soon
The US military is likely to wrap up its relief efforts for tsunami victims in Indonesia this month, a Navy commander said Saturday, a move that would end the biggest American military operation in Southeast Asia since the Vietnam War. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has already left the waters off Sumatra, where at least 113,000 people were killed in the December 26 tsunami. The ship spent one month leading a massive helicopter relief mission into devastated villages on the island’s western coast. Rear Admiral William Douglas Crowder, the commander of the Lincoln’s battle group, said 4,000 to 5,000 US military personnel remain deployed, mostly offshore, as part of the multinational relief effort.
— AP

Cambodia reports fresh bird flu outbreak
A deadly strain of bird flu has broken out in a Cambodian village five kilometres from the capital, the country’s first reported outbreak since September, officials said Sunday. ‘We found a new outbreak of bird flu in Kropuer Ha village, Ta Khmao district, about five kilometres south of Phnom Penh,’ Suon Sothoeun, the deputy director for animal health at the agriculture ministry, said. Test results on fowl raised in backyard pens determined the H5N1 virus, which can be deadly to humans, had infected two chickens, he said.
— AP

AU denounces Togo ‘military coup’
The African Union has denounced the appointment of a son of Togo president, Gnassingbe Eyadema, to succeed his father hours after he died on Saturday. AU leaders described the naming of Faure Eyadema as a military coup. The army announced the replacement saying the speaker of parliament who should have taken over under the constitution was out of the country. It is reported he was unable to get in because the West African country’s borders have been sealed by the army. Army Chief of Staff Gen Zakari Nandja said the decision had been taken to avoid a power vacuum.
— BBC

US drops charge against Abu Ghraib accused
The US Government has dropped the main charge against a female soldier who posed in front of a pyramid of naked Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison. The charge against Sabrina Harman, over viewing and failing to prevent other soldiers from forcing detainees to masturbate, was dropped without discussion. The charge carried a maximum sentence of five years. Harman now faces five counts of maltreatment, one count of conspiracy and one count of dereliction of duty. When charges were filed in March, she faced a maximum 17-year sentence.
— AP

Ex-Guantanamo prisoner to sue UK govt
A British man held captive in Guantanamo Bay for 33 months plans to sue the government, it is reported. Martin Mubanga claimed in the Observer that an MI6 officer played a key role in consigning him to the US camp in Cuba, following his arrest in Zambia. Mubanga, from London, who holds dual British and Zambian nationality, says at the camp he was subjected to brutal interrogation and daubed with urine. The Foreign Office said it could not comment on matters of intelligence. Mubanga, 32, was freed from the US camp last month along with fellow Britons Feroz Abbasi, Richard Belmar and Moazzam Begg. He added that, even as US authorities began to doubt his guilt, he was stripped of his clothes and mattress and forced to remain in an empty metal box, naked except for boxer shorts.
— BBC

Somalia approves foreign troops’ deployment
Somalia’s government on Saturday approved the deployment of at least 5,000 foreign troops to help restore the first national administration in 14 years, but powerful warlords balked, officials said. ‘The ministers approved between 5,000 and 7,000 thousands troops to help stabilize Somalia,’ a government minister from the Horn of Africa country, who did not want to be named, told AFP here. The plan was voted on at a cabinet meeting chaired by the president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, in the Kenyan capital, but it will have to be taken to the country’s parliament for final approval. Thirty eight out of 47 ministers voted in favour of the deployment, but nine of them voted against, including powerful warlords in the cabinet, the minister added.
— AFP

UN urges regional help in African disarmament
UN refugee agency chief Ruud Lubbers has called for regional cooperation in tackling the problem of the cross-border movement of armed elements between Cote de Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. ‘The process of disarmament is 80 per cent effective in Sierra Leone, and it is completed in Liberia. Now it must begin in Cote de Ivoire. It would be useful to put in place a regional approach to halt the migration of armed elements between these countries,’ Lubbers told a press conference here Friday. ‘Many young men still possess light arms,’ he added. Lubbers also stressed the vulnerability of inhabitants of Cote de Ivoire’s western border with Liberia.
— AFP