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The Myanmar issue is threatening to damage ASEAN’s international standing but the group remains an indispensable player in promoting regional cooperation and stability, diplomats and analysts say.
   Foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will gather in the Laotian capital Vientiane next week for an annual meeting whose traditional highlight is the ASEAN Regional Forum on security.
   The forum is the only annual meeting in which Asian security issues are discussed at the highest diplomatic levels.
   But military-ruled Myanmar’s imminent turn to lead the group in 2006 is causing problems ahead of the Laos meeting and threatens to cause further repercussions.
   If Myanmar takes over the ASEAN chairmanship from Malaysia in 2006 under an alphabetical rotation system, the United States and European Union are likely to boycott key meetings with the grouping.
   In what is seen as an indication of things possibly to come, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, citing scheduling conflicts, will skip the ASEAN Regional Forum, sending her deputy Robert Zoellick instead.
   ‘This is something unusual but regardless, the ASEAN dialogue process will move forward. (Rice’s absence) will not get in the way of dialogue at the ARF,’ Indonesian foreign ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa said Friday.
   Some ASEAN members cringe at the thought of Myanmar presiding over the group in 2006, but there is no precedent for forcing it to give up its turn.
   This leaves voluntary relinquishment as the only face-saving way out.
   ‘Myanmar has told us, and Myanmar has told other countries in Southeast Asia, that it will not be selfish and that it will take into account the interests of ASEAN as a whole,’ said Singapore’s foreign minister George Yeo.
   The other countries ‘took that to mean that Myanmar might withdraw on its own from assuming the chair,’ he told foreign correspondents last month.
   But such a move  – which could take place in Laos next week—might hurt the organisation’s efforts to promote democratic reform in Myanmar, ASEAN’s secretary-general Ong Ken Yong warned.
   ‘How are we going to leverage for the early release of Aung San Suu Kyi and whatever things we want in Myanmar?’ Ong said in a recent interview referring to Myanmar’s opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been under house arrest for most of the last 15 years.
   Founded in 1967 by anti-communist nations at the height of the Vietnam War, ASEAN has since embraced Vietnam itself. Its other members are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
   All 10 countries have a collective population of half a billion people moving toward a regional free trade zone.
   Some ASEAN members now say it was premature to induct Myanmar as a member in 1997.
   But American business consultant Ernest Bower, the former head of the US-ASEAN Business Council, said ‘it is too easy to look back and say admitting Myanmar into ASEAN was a mistake’.

Peace broker Norway denied a report it was planning to send envoys to Sri Lanka after a Supreme Court ruling effectively scuttled a deal to share billions of dollars in international tsunami aid with Tamil rebels.
   There were ‘no plans for any visits,’ a Norweigan embassy official, who declined to be named, said discounting a report in Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times newspaper that two envoys would be dispatched next week to discuss the current crisis in the peace process.
   On Friday Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court, citing constitutional issues, blocked a deal to share donor aid between the government and Tiger rebels who have waged a separatist war that has left more than 60,000 dead since 1972.
   The deal, reached with the help of Norway almost six months after tsunamis devastated the island nation killing nearly 31,000 and leaving one million homeless, is now in limbo with the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam so far mute on the next steps.
   About two-thirds of the tsunami damage occurred in the northeast of the country, parts of which are dominated by the LTTE.
   The collapse of the tsunami aid deal is seen as a major setback to the peace process and truce in place since February 2002 and has increased the tension in the country’s volatile northeast region.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, urged militants on Saturday to halt attacks on Israel and return to a ceasefire that has been splintered by violence a month before Israel’s planned pullout from Gaza.
   Abbas also blamed Israel for the near collapse of the five-month truce, and called on the Jewish state to help preserve the ceasefire announced during a summit with the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, in February.
   The Palestinian president’s appeals came amid escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence and vows of revenge by the Islamist group Hamas over the killing of seven of its gunmen, including four killed by air strikes in Gaza.
   ‘I call upon all factions and parties to declare their commitment to what we have agreed upon ... the commitment to calm,’ he said in a speech broadcast on Palestinian television.
   ‘We hold the Israeli government fully responsible for the results of this policy, which represents a step backward from our understandings and undermine chances of preserving calm,’ he added. ‘No one should expect the calm to be one-sided.’
   The surge of violence, the worst since February, has raised the prospect of a disruption to Israel’s planned withdrawal and pullout of Jewish settlers from occupied Gaza next month.
   Meanwhile, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, on Saturday called for an end to the renewed violence between Israelis and Palestinians and urged both sides to remain focused on a negotiated settlement.
   ‘The recent suicide bombing in (the Israeli coastal city of) Netanya and rockets fired from Gaza, killing innocent Israeli civilians, are shocking and condemnable,’ the UN chief said in a statement. ‘There is a pressing need to put a stop to such actions.’

Latest move of the prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, to consolidate his control over Thailand’s Muslim south could worsen tensions and escalate an already deadly insurgency, experts said Sunday.
   An emergency decree issued by cabinet Friday took from the military and gave to Thaksin broad powers to declare states of emergency in the restive southern provinces along the Malaysian border.
   His new powers allow him to ban gatherings, censor news, impose curfews, and order searches and arrests without warrant, among other actions.
   Many such measures were already in place since martial law was imposed in January 2004 at the start of the insurgency.
   But the move drew swift criticism that Thaksin—already the most powerful premier ever elected in Thailand and often criticised for his authoritarian style—was taking too much power.
   Somboon Ahmad Bualuang, a Muslim member of the National Reconciliation Commission created in March to chart a peace plan, said Thaksin’s decision gave the prime minister more power but did nothing to ease the crisis.
   ‘I strongly disagree with Thaksin promulgating a new law. Changing to a new law for governing the south will not solve the problem,’ he said.
   ‘The only way to tackle the problem is through peaceful means. Thaksin has listened to our proposals, but he has never implemented them in the south,’ he said.
   Thailand declared emergency rule across virtually the whole of its Muslim south on Sunday in a surprisingly tough move to reign in a raging insurgency.
   Invoking new powers, the government declared an emergency in Narathiwat, Yala and Pattani provinces plus four districts in neighbouring Songkhla province, where at least 810 people have died in violence since January 2004.
   ‘The decree will cover every district in the three provinces, plus four neighbouring districts in Songkhla province.

Twenty rebels including five foreigners were killed in a joint operation by Afghan and US-led forces in south-eastern Afghanistan, officials said Sunday amid rising militant activity.
   The rebels including three Chechens and two Uzbeks were killed after firing rockets at Afghan National Army bases in the Spera and Lewara districts of Khost province, defence ministry spokesman general Mohammed Zahir Azimi told reporters.
   ‘The enemies launched rocket attacks on ANA bases in Spera and Lewara districts of Khost province on Thursday and Friday in which one ANA solider was killed,’ defence ministry spokesman general Mohammed Zahir Azimi told reporters.
   ‘In response, Afghan and coalition forces launched an operation with coalition air support in which 20 enemy elements were killed, their bodies were left on the spot,’ he said.
   Azimi added: ‘Based on the documents obtained from the bodies, three of them are citizens of Chechnya and another two of them are from Uzbekistan. There may be more foreigners but the documents indicate five.’

Seventy-six per cent of Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki still experience flashbacks, according to a poll released Sunday.
   The survey, conducted by the Asahi Shimbun in March and April, showed that 23 per cent of the respondents said they often recall the experience, while 53 per cent of them said they do so occasionally.
   The poll covered 40,000 survivors of whom 13,204 or 32 per cent responded.
   The western Japanese city of Hiroshima will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bombing on August 6.
   Some 140,000 people—almost half the city’s population at the time—died immediately or in the months after the nuclear attack from radiation injuries or horrific burns.
   The Hiroshima bombing was followed by the dropping of a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, leaving tens of thousands more dead.
   According to the Health and Welfare Ministry, the number of officially recognised atomic bomb survivors stood at 266,600 across the nation, mostly in the two cities, as of March this year.

At least 17 suspected foreign militants were killed in pre-dawn a clash with Pakistani security forces in a remote tribal belt along the border with Afghanistan, military officials said Sunday.
   A Pakistani soldier also died in the six-hour gun battle near Miranshah, the main town in the North Waziristan region, while at least five people were captured, military spokesman major general Shaukat Sultan said.
   ‘Those killed were mostly foreigners,’ Sultan said, adding that the five men who were arrested were believed to be their local helpers.
   The militants began the firefight at about 10:00pm (1700 GMT) on Saturday after security forces trying to hunt down al-Qaeda suspects surrounded them in houses within a compound on the outskirts of Miranshah, Sultan said.
   At about 4:30am Sunday, the security forces killed 17 militants when they tried to escape the compound in two vehicles, he added.
   ‘In the process we have lost one soldier,’ the spokesman said.
   The security forces captured ‘five local facilitators’ who were injured in the clash.

Indian and Pakistani experts will meet next month for a third round of talks aimed at building trust on military issues and avoiding the possibility of an accidental nuclear war, Indian officials said at the weekend.
   The experts are scheduled to meet August 5-6 in New Delhi to discuss nuclear weapons and then again two days later to consider conventional arms, the Press Trust of India news agency said quoting Indian officials on Sunday.
   ‘The two sides will review the progress made so far in the last two rounds held on nuclear confidence-building measures and steps to carry them forward,’ Press Trust of India said quoting Indian officials.
   India and Pakistan conducted tit-for-tat nuclear weapon tests in May 1998. The two sides have fought three wars since independence in 1947, two of them over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
   After coming close to a fourth war in 2002 the nuclear armed rivals launched a peace process in January 2004 to resolve all issues through dialogue including the Kashmir dispute.

A minister said on Sunday he had resigned from Arroyo’s cabinet, underlining sharp divisions in her government as she tries to ride out the worst crisis of her presidency.
   Silvestre Afable, the president’s communications director, told reporters in a cellphone text message that he had resigned on July 6, two days before the mass resignation of 10 cabinet officials and agency heads.
   He gave no reason for his departure and said he would stay on in his other role as chief negotiator in peace talks with Muslim rebels.
   The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported he had quit as communications director because he was upset with Arroyo’s appointment of another official to lead a planned makeover of the president’s tattered public image.
   The newspaper said the plan was to present Arroyo as a friendlier, more empathetic
   person in an attempt to improve her dire popularity ratings.

South Korea’s Hwang Woo-Suk, who cloned the world’s first human embryos for stem-cell therapy, will open a stem cell bank here in October, a news report said Sunday.
   Hwang, a Seoul National University professor, told Yonhap news agency the proposed stem cell bank could serve as a global supply hub for patients.
   ‘We plan to hold the opening ceremony for the World Stem Cell Bank on October 19 in Seoul with stem cell researchers, including Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh, attending,’ Hwang told Yonhap.
   Details still need to be finalised on the management of the stem cell bank, but Hwang wants it to be a state-run entity.
   ‘As the stem cell bank should exist in the interest of the public, it is desirable to run it at a government level,’ he was quoted as saying.

Ma Ying-jeou’s election as head of Taiwan’s nationalist opposition party, the Kuomintang, ushers in a new generation of reform-minded leadership but analysts say he faces an uphill battle to heal internal rifts.
   ‘Ma’s victory reflected the hope of the majority KMT members for a younger leadership to continue reforming the party,’ said Liu Bi-rung, a political science professor at Soochow University.
   But the new chairman ‘has first to prevent opponent Wang Jin-pyng and his supporters from leaving the party or forming a faction against him. The KMT needs Wang’s strong ties with the grassroots to survive,’ he said.

There are no survivors in the crash of an Antonov plane in Equatorial Guinea, which went down in flames shortly after takeoff from the capital Malabo with 55 people aboard, national radio reported Sunday.
   The plane, which crashed Saturday, ‘was completely destroyed, burned and there were no survivors,’ the radio announced, playing somber music as it reported the news.
   A search-and-rescue team was Sunday seeking the wreckage of a Russian-built Antonio airliner that crashed with 55 people aboard about 30 kilometres from the Equatorial Guinea capital Malabo, an official statement said Sunday.
   Earlier the transport minister, Demetrius Leo Dung Sedum, did not give a death toll but said the plane operated by the private airline Ecuador had 55 people on board when it crashed early Saturday.
   An eyewitness said Saturday that he saw the aircraft go down shortly after takeoff at 10:00am from Malabo for the city of Bata on the Equatorial Guinea mainland.
   The wreckage was not found until eight hours later near the district of Barney, the statement indicated.
   The plane skidded over trees for a distance of about a kilometre (half a mile) before it crashed, according to aerial photographs, the statement added.
   Airport sources said Saturday that the plane’s passenger manifest showed 35 passengers and 10 crew members but that determining the exact number of people aboard the aircraft was difficult as crews are often bribed to take additional passengers.
   One airport employee suggested that about 80 people may have been aboard the 42-seater plane.
   The witness, who was aboard an off-shore oil platform in the oil-rich country, told AFP on condition of anonymity that he saw flames coming from the plane which suddenly tilted and then fell into the jungle.
   The aircraft was on its way from Malabo—on an island off mainland Equatorial Guinea—to Bata in the larger mainland part of the country.
   Ecuatair, which is among a handful of companies serving domestic routes in the West African country, has only one other plane, a Soviet-built Yak-40.
   Most of the planes, piloted mainly by Russians, Ukrainians and Armenians, are Soviet-era aircraft that often no longer meet international flight standards and are not allowed to land at airports in other countries in the region.
   Several international organizations ask their employees not to use the airlines.
   In April the Equatorial Guinea authorities grounded another local company, the Union de Transportes Aereo de Guinea Ecuatorial, for safety reasons after a series of technical breakdowns.
   The company offered two regional routes—to Cotonou and Libreville—as well as domestic routes serviced by three Russian-piloted Antonov 24s.
   Equatorial Guinea, with a population of just over one million, is in the midst of an oil boom, and has seen double-digit growth since the mid-1990s.

Muslim communities worldwide have stressed that terrorist attacks like those carried out in London in the name of Islam are against their religion’s values.
   In London on Friday, dozens of British Muslim leaders unanimously condemned the July 7 bombings in which 55 people died, including at least one Muslim, saying the perpetrators did not deserve the title ‘martyr’.
   ‘It is our understanding that those who carried out the bombings in London should in no sense be regarded as martyrs,’ they said in a statement read by Mohammad Shahid Reza, imam of the Leicester central mosque, on their behalf.
   ‘We regard these acts as utterly criminal, totally reprehensible, and absolutely un-Islamic.’
   ‘We are not firmly of the view that these killings have absolutely no sanction in Islam, nor is there any justification whatsoever in our noble religion for such evil actions.’
   In France, the president of Marseilles’ Al-Islah mosque accused Western media of ‘cultivating a fear of Arabs and Muslims’ by insisting on the religion of the alleged bombers.
   ‘We must stop saying that (the alleged perpetrators) are Muslims or Islamists. They are criminals, mentally handicapped,’ said Abdelli Bualia.
   Muslim activist Tariq Ramadan, who lives in France along with Europe’s largest Muslim community, called for increased integration of Muslims in response to the bombers.
   He slammed the perpetrators as ‘killers, whose probable justifications in the name of an ideology, a religion or a political cause can neither be accepted nor heard’.
   The leader of Spain’s Muslim community, Riay Tatary Bakry, said the London attacks, like last year’s Madrid train bombings, ‘harm all, especially Muslims who live in Europe, and don’t help coexistence and peace between communities.’
   The president of Germany’s Islamic council, which counts 140,000 people, said he was ‘dismayed’ by the attacks.
   ‘We are sad that religion is sullied in this way,’ Ali Kizilkaya said.
   The Netherlands’ Muslim Contact Organ swiftly called for mosques to condemn ‘this abominable event’.
   In Rome, Muslim community spokesman Hamid Guersi said that Muslim leaders were ‘working to remove the bad ideas that can emerge from some of us’, admitting that ‘it’s a difficult job.’
   The Malaysian prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, meanwhile, said Islam had become the hostage of those who use it to further their own agenda.
   The Arab world’s Muslim Brotherhood, which is currently the main opposition party in Egypt and the mother organisation for several Islamist movements around the world, condemned the bombings as ‘a criminal act which is against Islam’.
   An imam in Abu Dhabi on Friday condemned any attack on civilians, saying those involved in such actions are ‘infidels’.
   ‘Do these people not see the results of their actions? They have turned people against us–and made them link the name of Islam with terrorism,’ Sheikh Hamdan Musallam al-Mazruhi said in his Friday sermon.

Britain’s government is set to push through tough new anti-terrorism laws in the wake of the London bombings, but must at the same time tread carefully to avoid accusations of exploiting the tragedy for political ends.
   A key element of the legislative fight-back against the July 7 suicide bombs which killed around 55 people in the British capital is set to be measures to outlaw the indirect incitement of terrorism.
   Ministers are also reportedly planning laws intended to stop the alleged flow of British recruits to terrorism camps or extremist schools in Pakistan and Iran. Three of the four suspected bombers who set off blasts on London Underground subway trains and a bus were Britons of Pakistani origin, who are said to have visited the country ahead of the attacks.
   The home secretary, Charles Clarke, wrote to opposition parties Friday outlining plans for a bill to ban ‘indirect incitement to commit terrorist acts’, such as describing suicide bombers as martyrs, as well as making it illegal to undergo terrorist training, whether in Britain or abroad.
   The bill would seem likely to win widespread support among a public still reeling from the twin shock of Britain’s worst-ever terrorist offence coupled with the discovery the attackers were home grown.
   Opposition parties would also be expected to back the measures, especially given the government’s careful move of consulting them in advance. Despite winning three straight terms in office, all but the current one with thumping parliamentary majorities, Blair’s administration has repeatedly come unstuck over anti-terrorism legislation.

Britain’s most senior police officers believe that it will ‘take decades’ to successfully tackle British Islamist terror networks because of a failure to penetrate extremists in the Muslim community.
   Senior police sources have said that the current state of knowledge about Islamic terrorism is comparable to that gathered on the IRA in the early Seventies, when it struck almost with impunity.
   Cabinet ministers are also known to share concerns that the government, the intelligence services and the police have failed to provide a ‘fundamental right’ to British people to live in a secure country.
   The parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee is now expected to hold a top-level inquiry into possible intelligence failures in the run-up to the 7 July London bombings.
   One senior anti-terrorist officer who spoke to The Observer said that by the Nineties the IRA was ‘completely penetrated’, which helped to force it to the negotiating table. ‘That wasn’t the case in the Seventies. We had very little idea about what they were going to do,’ he added.
   The Observer can reveal that Pakistani counter-terrorism officials warned their British counterparts about plans by militants to bomb London pubs, restaurants and possibly railway stations last May.
   Interrogations of a Pakistan-born Briton, who was arrested by Pakistani authorities close to the border with Afghanistan that month, exposed the plot, which was supposed to be put into action in the early summer.
   This claim will be embarrassing to UK authorities, already reeling from accusations that they failed to place under surveillance a key al-Qaeda operative who arrived in Britain a month before the London blasts.
   Senior British police officers have denied receiving any warning but it is understood from Pakistani sources that British officials have arrived in Pakistan in recent days to interview the man, aged 25, about his claims.
   The government is also drawing up plans to force religious leaders entering Britain to pass a test demonstrating involvement with their local community - including people of other faiths - before they receive an extension of leave to stay, normally a year after arrival.
   Ideas for discussion include a confidential hotline for Muslims to pass on tips about suspicious individuals. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said one option was a hotline like one run by the Jewish community, which passes important tips to police.
   However, they could not play the role of the police or security agencies, he said. ‘This is a major burden that cannot be passed on to the community - the capacity to police themselves in terms of finding out the criminality is not on.

The Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, on Sunday hailed a ‘turning point’ in relations with Baghdad as the Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, made a historic visit to Tehran aimed at strengthening ties after decades of enmity.
   Following talks with the first Iraqi head of government to visit Iran since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Khatami said that Iran was prepared to do anything it could to help its one-time foe, with whom it fought a devastating eight year war.
   ‘The visit of the Iraqi prime minister to Iran is a turning point in the historic relations between the two countries. It will allow us to plaster the wounds and repair the damage caused by Saddam Hussein through joint cooperation,’ said Khatami.
   ‘The Islamic Republic of Iran will do everything it can to assure the reconstruction, security and stability of Iraq,’ said Khatami. ‘The strategy of Iran is to support a free Iraq, independent and developed.’
   Jaafari is heading a large delegation on the visit and is expected to sign a number of deals aimed at aiding his war-torn country to meet its growing energy needs.
   ‘We know the evil wrought by Saddam Hussein on the peoples of the region but he does not represent the Iraqi people,’ IRNA quoted Jaafari as saying after the talks.
   ‘Putting security and stability in place in Iraq will benefit all the countries in the region,’ he added.
   Although serious sources of friction have remained, the two neighbours have embarked on a major process of reconciliation whose success has worried the United States and some Arab countries.
   Iraq’s Shia-led government is the first such in an Arab country for centuries and should be a natural ally for the theocratic regime in Iran, an almost entirely Shiite country.
   Jaafari, who took refuge in Iran during the rule of Saddam Hussein, visited the tomb of Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on Sunday, and paid homage by laying a wreath of flowers.
   Iraq is expecting that Iran will improve its border controls to prevent trafficking and any hostile infiltrations, while Jaafari is also expected to warn Iran off any interference in its neighbour.
   Khatami is due to hand over his post to the ultra conservative president-elect Mahmood Ahmadinejad at the start of August but officials have been at pains to emphasise there will be continuity in policy towards Iraq despite the changeover.

Lawmakers can express themselves in Spanish or any other language in the US Congress, but they must provide a translation to ensure that their words are preserved for posterity in the congressional archives, Senate sources said.
   ‘Senate laws don’t prohibit senators from speaking any language in plenary,’ said Noe Garcia, Spanish-language spokesperson for Bill Frist, the Republican leader of the Senate. ‘But the (Senate) secretary generally needs a translation to archive.’
   Fabiola Rodriguez, Spanish media director for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, said a senator must request ‘unanimous consent’ before launching into a language other than English on the Senate floor, as Republican Mel Martinez did in February.
   Martinez requested that his speech be entered into the Senate archives in both Spanish and English. Democrat Ken Salazar did his own translation when he addressed the Senate about murdered Salvadoran Bishop Oscar Romero.
   According to Senate historian Richard Baker, the three previous Hispanic senators probably uttered some words in Spanish on the Senate floor. But there is no proof of that in the archives, he said.
   The three, all from south-western state of New Mexico, were Octaviano Larrazolo (1928-1929), Dennis Chavez (1935-1962) and Joseph Montoya (1964-1977).

Ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has been charged for the first time in connection with a 1982 massacre and a date for his trial will be announced soon, Iraqi investigative judge Raed Juhi said Sunday.
   Juhi said the investigation into a case relating to the 1982 killing of 143 residents of the village of Dujail, northeast of Baghdad, was complete and that charges had been made against Hussein and several former regime henchmen.
   ‘The investigation is completed. The accused ... are transferred to the special court,’ said Juhi, reading from a prepared statement.
   ‘The date for the trial will be announced in the coming days’ by a panel of judges, he said.
   The killings took place after Saddam Hussein survived an assassination bid in the village.
   Giovanni di Stefano, one of Saddam Hussein’s lawyers, acknowledged that his client had been questioned in mid-June in connection with the Dujail case, but added that, to his knowledge, the former dictator had not yet been officially charged.
   ‘The investigative judge has ‘announced’ charges. Yet, to date, there is no formal indictment,’ di Stefano said.
   This is the first time an investigative judge has referred a specific case involving Saddam Hussein to the Iraqi Special Tribunal for judgment since his capture by US forces over one-and-a-half years’ ago.

Iran on Sunday accused US and Israeli agents of tricking Iranian nuclear scientists abroad into giving away crucial information, newspapers reported.
   The comments by the intelligence minister, Ali Yunesi, came days after an Iranian defector identified as Alireza Assar told the Iran Focus Web site Tehran was close to getting an atom bomb.
   Yunesi advised Iranian scientists abroad to be suspicious and vigilant, and not to be distracted from the purpose of their visit.
   Iran has been rebuked for failing to disclose key parts of its nuclear programme, and many revelations on its technology have come from intelligence sources.

Suspicions in a probe into the bomb attack that killed five people Saturday in this western Turkish seaside resort have focused on Kurdish separatists believed to have brought in large amounts of explosives from Iraq, officials said Sunday.
   Two tourists, one British and one Irish, were among the dead and another 13 people were injured when the blast ripped through a minibus shuttling between central Kusadasi and a popular nearby beach.
   The incident came just one week after 20 people were injured in a bomb attack in the nearby resort of Cesme.

Indonesia, Aceh rebels agree to
peace deal
Indonesia’s government and Aceh rebels have reached a peace deal to end a 29-year insurgency in the tsunami-devastated province, a top Indonesian official said Sunday. A draft peace deal submitted by the rebel Free Aceh Movement was approved Saturday by the Indonesian president in Jakarta, said Communications Minister Sofyan Djalil, one of the lead negotiators at peace talks in Finland. On Saturday, negotiators from both sides said they had reached a tentative agreement to end one of the world’s longest-running wars. The peace deal will ease the delivery of international reconstruction aid to the province of 4.1 million inhabitants which was severely damaged by the December 26 tsunami that killed at least 130,000 people.
— AP

12 dead in Assam floods, landslides
Flash floods and landslides triggered by heavy monsoon rains in India’s northeast Assam state have left at least 12 people dead and displaced more than 121,000 others, officials Sunday said. Low-lying villages along the main Brahmaputra River in Assam were swept away in the rising waters and landslides, the state government said in a statement. ‘At least 12 people were drowned and more than 121,000 villagers were displaced during the floods so far,’ it said. The Brahmaputra is now flowing above the danger level in Assam, snapping communication and road links to remote areas, according to officials.
— AFP

Taiwan braces itself for Typhoon Haitang
Taipei residents fearful of flash floods piled up sandbags around their homes Sunday as Taiwan braced itself for Typhoon Haitang with weathermen warning it would bring torrential rains and strong winds. Authorities said they would suspend air and railway traffic later Sunday, while thousands of fishing vessels sought shelter in harbours around the island’s permiter. Haitang, the name of a Chinese flower, was 330 kilometres east-southeast of Taiwan’s eastern Hualien city at 4:00pm (0800 GMT) Sunday, the Central Weather Bureau said. With a radius of 280 kilometres and wind gusts of up to 234 kilometres per hour, it was moving in a northwest direction at 17 kilometres per hour and was expected to hit the island later Sunday.
— AFP

90m affected in
China floods
China’s summer floods have affected 90 million people so far, the official Xinhua news agency said Sunday, while confirming an earlier report that 764 people have been killed with another 191 missing. The China Youth Daily had reported the casualty figures on Friday from this year’s floods. Xinhua, the government’s mouthpiece, confirmed them and said 27 provinces, municipalities and regions have been affected. About seven million hectares of crops were destroyed and 702,100 houses collapsed during the disaster, which has caused 47.65 billion yuan (5.79 billion US dollars) in direct economic losses, Xinhua said, citing information from the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.
— AFP

Bill Clinton in Mozambique for African AIDS tour
The former US president, Bill Clinton, arrived in Mozambique early Sunday on the first leg of a six-nation Africa tour aimed at boosting his foundation’s work in the fight against AIDS on the continent, a spokesman said. Clinton Foundation spokesman Joachim Salvador said that the former president had arrived, and an earlier press release said that he would visit the pediatric section of Maputo Central Hospital later Sunday. Some 300 children with HIV and AIDS are being treated with anti- retroviral drugs at the hospital, which is a beneficiary of Clinton Foundation funds.
— AFP

Six killed in Costa Rica plane crash
At least six people, possibly including an American, were killed when a seaplane crashed into the Pacific Ocean off Costa Rica and sank on Saturday, emergency services said. Rescue divers found the plane’s wreck underwater off the Playa Flamingo beach at Santa Cruz de Guanacaste and recovered three of the bodies, a Red Cross official said. Local media said the pilot was an American who lived in Costa Rica and often took friends for a ride in his seaplane. The cause of the accident was unknown. It was the third plane accident in Costa Rica in less than two months. The first killed three Costa Ricans and the second killed five people including three foreigners.
— Reuters

Iran arrests 200 in sweep for terrorists
Iran said Saturday that it had arrested 200 people and deported another 800, all of whom it said were part of a terrorist cell. The intelligence minister, Ali Younessi, said the arrests were made last week after the ministry started a ‘fifth wave’ of a crackdown against operatives linked to al-Qaeda, the ISNA news agency reported. It was the largest roundup of terrorism suspects announced by the Iranian authorities. Iran rarely discloses information about the operations of Qaeda suspects or the arrests it makes, and Mr. Younessi’s public comments were unusually detailed.
— AFP

German president to dissolve parliament
The German president, Horst Kohler, has decided to dissolve the lower house of parliament, opening the way for a general election and staving off a political crisis, the weekly Der Spiegel reported Sunday on its website. Kohler, a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), had already indicated internally that he wanted to dissolve the lower house, the Bundestag, the magazine said in its edition dated Monday. The German president is expected to announce his decision on television, Der Spiegel said. Kohler has until Friday to make the decision, exactly three weeks after Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder deliberately lost a no-confidence vote before parliament with the aim of prompting a national poll one year ahead of schedule.
— AFP

Rwanda deployes soldiers to Darfur
Rwanda on Sunday deployed the first 95 soldiers of nearly 2,000 assigned to Sudan’s troubled Darfur region as part of an African Union reinforcement mission, military officials said. Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Charles Karamba said the country would send a total of three batallions to Darfur, which has been wracked by two years of war that has claimed between 180,000 and 300,000 lives and displaced 2.4 million people. ‘Ninety-five soldiers are leaving today (Sunday),’ Karamba said. ‘In total, three batallions of 1,756 Rwandan soldiers will be sent.’ Karamba said the deployment would be completed before August 9.
— AFP