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The president, George W Bush, in a dramatic policy shift, promised India full cooperation on Monday in developing its civilian nuclear power programme without demanding that it sign a major nuclear arms control treaty.
   A statement released after talks with the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, that underscored Washington’s recognition of India as a rising power said Bush would ask Congress to change US law and work with allies to adjust international rules to allow nuclear trade with India.
   Washington had barred providing atomic technology to India because of New Delhi’s status as a nuclear power that has refused to sign the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which was designed to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.
   But the joint statement said: ‘As a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology, India should acquire the same benefits and advantages as other states.’
   Bush would ‘seek agreement from Congress to adjust US laws and policies, and the United States will work with friends and allies to adjust international regimes to enable full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India,’ it said.
   India, which tested a nuclear weapon in 1998, agreed to identify and separate its civilian and military nuclear programmes, continue a moratorium on nuclear testing and place civilian nuclear facilities under the UN nuclear watchdog.
   But these are all voluntary, not legal, commitments, and India remains outside the Nuclear Nonproliferation treaty.
   Proliferation experts were quick to protest. Many are concerned about the expanding US cooperation with India, saying it sets a bad example for Iran, a Nonproliferation Treaty member, and North Korea, which the White House labelled members of an ‘axis of evil’ along with pre-war Iraq.
   Some members of Congress said they would block the change.
   ‘We cannot play favourites, breaking the rules of the non-proliferation treaty, to favour one nation at the risk of undermining critical international treaties on nuclear weapons,’ said Democratic Rep Ed Markey of Massachusetts.
   ‘The president just gave India everything it wanted. He’s rewarding India despite that country’s remaining outside the global NPT regime,’ said Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
   ‘This is the triumph of great power politics over nonproliferation policy,’ he added.
   Washington is eager to improve ties with the world’s largest democracy, attracted by India’s technology expertise, growing commercial market and strategic importance as a counterweight to China.
   Singh told reporters India’s ‘ambitious and attainable national road map’ in civilian nuclear power aimed at fuelling economic growth for its billion people.
   The joint statement was the product of months of discussion, culminating in round-the-clock negotiations that ended at noon on Monday.
   The deal nearly fell apart when Washington refused India’s demand for formal recognition as a nuclear weapons state, which would have put India on a par with the five declared nuclear states—United States, France, China, Britain and Russia, US officials and other sources said.
   The statement ‘does not mean the United States is recognizing India as a nuclear weapons state,’ a senior US official said.
   He predicted it may take months before the administration could secure necessary approvals from Congress and US nuclear allies, allowing nuclear cooperation with India to start.
   Bush’s push to help India increase its power generating capacity is being driven at least partly to give New Delhi an alternative to a proposed $4 billion gas pipeline deal with Iran, which Washington accuses of trying to secretly develop nuclear weapons.
   Singh did not get Washington’s backing for its bid for a permanent seat on an expanded UN Security Council.
   Undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns said Bush told Singh Washington wanted fundamental UN reforms before any expansion of the council and hoped there would be no vote on council enlargement in coming weeks.

Ever since Myanmar joined the 10-nation ASEAN in 1997, the military-ruled nation has been a thorn in the side of the regional bloc, but never more so than in the past year.
   The military regime’s human rights abuses, specifically the detention of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has sparked dissent within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and become an international embarrassment for the group.
   Myanmar joined ASEAN eight years ago and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has spent four of those years under house arrest, where she remains confined today.
   For the European Union and the United States, key dialogue partners for ASEAN, Aung San Suu Kyi embodies the pro-democracy struggle.
   Both have toughened their sanctions against Yangon since her latest arrest in May 2003, and both have threatened to boycott ASEAN meetings if Myanmar is allowed to chair the group.
   ‘No other member in the 38-year history of ASEAN has garnered such negative attention for the entire group ... or been the cause of multiple cancelled meetings between the group and key dialogue partners,’ Zaid Ibrahim, president of the ASEAN caucus on Burma (Myanmar), wrote recently.
   So when ASEAN foreign ministers meet in the Laotian capital Vientiane next week for an annual meeting, Myanmar’s turn to take the rotating chairmanship in 2006 looms over the talks.
   In a sign of what may come, The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has decided to send a deputy to the talks—the first time the secretary will not attend.
   A last-minute compromise saved the Europe-Asia ASEM summit in Hanoi in October 2004, after months of quarrelling over whether Myanmar would take part.
   ASEAN had insisted if all its 10 members could not attend, neither could the newly enlarged European Union’s 25 states.
   In July 2004 Myanmar also stirred controversy at ASEAN’s ministerial meetings in Jakarta, where a final communique called for a gradual transition to democracy in the military-ruled country.
   ‘For the last year, Myanmar has poisoned every discussion,’ one diplomat in Yangon said.
   The dispute over the chairmanship has also exposed a rift between ASEAN’s new members—Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam—where ‘basically there is no democracy,’ and its founding members—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand—where democracy is more secure, the diplomat said.
   In 1997 then Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad engineered Myanmar’s entry to ASEAN. But in 2003, the now-retired Mahathir said the junta could be expelled from the group.
   What happened between those two dates? Nothing.
   The junta’s self-proclaimed ‘road map to democracy’, announced in 2003, has won no converts. The opposition is boycotting the talks.

Tens of thousands of opponents of the Israeli government’s plan to pull out of the Gaza Strip were being held back from marching on the territory by a mass of police and soldiers Tuesday.
   With the police placed on a maximum state of alert for the first time since the start of the war in Iraq more than two years ago, security forces were under strict instructions to prevent protestors from reaching the Kissufim border crossing and forcing their way into the Jewish settlements.
   The mass protest represents one of the last shows of strength by opponents of next month’s pullout from Gaza and four small West Bank settlements, a plan which has overcome all parliamentary and legal hurdles.
   Public access to the 21 Gaza settlements was sealed off last week, infuriating the organisers of the mass protest and leading to accusations that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was acting like a dictator.
   Organisers of the protest estimated that around 50,000 supporters had assembled at the small town of Kfar Maimon overnight ahead of a march on Kissufim although police at the scene put the number at no more than 20,000.
   Most of the protesters spent the night camped out in a giant car park, where the atmosphere was largely jovial.
   The red alert status, however, reflected fears that events could spiral out of control. At one point, dozens of settlers surrounded several border police jeeps and urged the occupants to refuse to obey orders.
   They danced around the vehicles and tied orange ribbons to them, the colour that has come to symbolise the campaign against the evacuation from Gaza.

Heroin users and prostitutes in Myanmar have spread HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, through large parts of Asia, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study released on Monday.
   The use of so-called genetic fingerprinting now allows scientists to identify changes in the evolution of the virus and thereby dispute accusations, such as the one Libya made against Bulgarian nurses, that one group or another was spreading the virus.
   ‘With the exception of one serious outbreak in China, virtually all the strains of HIV now circulating in Asia—from Manipur, India, all the way to Vietnam, from mid-China all the way down to Indonesia, come from a single country,’ Laurie Garrett, author of the 67-page report, told a news conference.
   ‘Several research teams have proven that these various HIV strains can be tracked along four major routes, all originating in Burma,’ she said, referring to Myanmar’s former name.
   The highest infection rates are among prostitutes and heroin users in Myanmar, ranked as the world’s top opium producer until 2003 when Afghanistan moved to first place.
   ‘Burma is a failed state, rife with civil war and rival gangs of drug, gem and sex-slave smugglers,’ said the report, entitled ‘HIV and National Security: Where Are The Links?’

The key foreign backers of Sri Lanka’s peace process Tuesday expressed concern over escalating violence on the island and asked both the Colombo government and Tamil rebels to stop the bloodshed.
   The United States, Japan, the European Union and Norway, heading efforts to drum up international support for the peace process, said in a joint statement they were alarmed by the deteriorating situation and the 2002 truce.
   ‘Unless security is guaranteed, a central pillar of the ceasefire agreement will be undermined,’ the statement said.
   ‘If the ceasefire agreement ceases to function, the wider peace process would be gravely jeopardised and international support for that process would be deeply eroded.’
   The warning from the peace effort’s co-chairs came as Sri Lanka, trying to ease tension in the volatile northeast coastal region, stepped up a probe into charges that security forces were involved in the killing of four Tamil rebels earlier this month.
   President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s spokesman said she had ordered a broad investigation to identify those responsible for the deaths of the unarmed rebels, which sparked a wave of bombings in the region.
   The rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam accused government forces of supporting ‘paramilitary elements’ or members of a breakaway faction to carry out strikes against the main rebel outfit.
   The co-chairs said there had been an escalation of violence since February resulting in the killing and injuring of persons associated with the government, the LTTE and other political groups.
   ‘The LTTE must stop all killings by their forces,’ the statement said.

Prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s new emergency powers threaten to spark an even deeper crisis in Thailand’s southern Muslim provinces, the head of a peacemaking commission said, as five more people were killed Tuesday.
   The new powers, which the government adopted Sunday after a rise in the violence, meant little if authorities did not arrest those responsible, said respected former prime minister Anand Panyarachun, who heads a commission set up to restore peace to the restive south.
   Anand said late Monday he was also worried that the authorities could be heavy-handed in implementing the measures, intended to end an insurgency that has claimed at least 820 lives since it broke out in January 2004.

Afghan warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a British court Tuesday for torture and hostage-taking in Afghanistan in a landmark case for international law.
   Zardad, 41, who lived in south London and had denied the charges, lifted his fist three times in salute and shouted in his own language ‘Allah is great’ as he was led off to cells.
   The ruling came as Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai began a two-day trip to Britain, where he will hold talks with the prime minister, Tony Blair, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and other British officials.

Pakistan accused Indian soldiers on Monday of crossing the ceasefire line dividing the disputed Kashmir region and seizing a villager.
   The alleged violation involved ‘a few Indian soldiers’ and a protest had been lodged, Pakistani military spokesman major-general Shaukat Sultan said.
   Other military sources said the incident occurred at the village of Kundi in the Kotli sector.
   ‘The Indians crossed over the Line of Control, and got into a house around 200-250 metres inside (Pakistani territory) and tried to take away two people,’ Sultan said.
   They returned to the Indian side with one man, and also roughed up an elderly man in the house, he said.
   ‘They haven’t returned the citizen so far,’ the spokesman said.

Almost 25,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since US and British troops invaded the country two years ago, an average of 34 every single day, a British study said on Tuesday.
   The vast majority of civilian deaths caused by US and British troops took place in the weeks following the start of war in March 2003, the study by Iraq Body Count and the Oxford Research Group said.
   The estimate of 24,865 deaths over the two-year period to March this year is considerably lower than a number of 98,000 suggested in a study published last October by British-based medical journal The Lancet.
   Nonetheless, the new report focuses attention on the suffering of Iraq’s civilians, following a recent spate of suicide bombings which have killed more than 100 people in the past few days.
   The report, ‘A Dossier on Civilian Casualties in Iraq 2003-2005’, by a team led by John Sloboda from Britain’s Keele University, analysed more than 10,000 media reports, many from Iraqi journalists and sourced from mortuary officials and medical staff.
   In contrast, the study by The Lancet was based on a sample of 988 households in 33 randomly-selected neighbourhoods in Iraq, with the figures extrapolated for the whole country.
   The new report attributes 37 per cent of civilian deaths to foreign forces and nine per cent to insurgents targeting occupying troops or Iraqi government agencies such as police.
   However, a further 11 per cent of deaths are recorded as the responsibility of ‘unknown agents’—meaning suicide bombs and other attacks not directly aimed at foreign or official Iraqi targets but possibly still intended to destabilise society.
   The report also highlights ‘extraordinary’ levels of criminal violence, recording almost 9,000 deaths—more than a third of the total—not directly related to the occupation and insurgency.
   These fatalities, recorded by Iraqi morgues, include people killed in robberies and kidnappings and battles between criminal gangs.
   The figures say that 30 per cent of the total casualties happened during the US-led, British-backed invasion, a total of 7,088 people, of whom 6,882 died as a result of foreign military action.
   After the invasion had ended, almost twice as many civilians died in the second year of the occupation as the first — 11,351 against 6,215 — as the insurgency increased and US troops targeted militants in the city of Fallujah.
   Despite the media profile given to suicide blasts, just 7.7 per cent of the civilian deaths were caused by vehicle bombs, just over half of which were suicide bombs.
   More than three-quarters of the civilian deaths occurred in 12 of Iraq’s biggest cities and towns, with almost half of the total in Baghdad.
   ‘The ever-mounting Iraqi death toll is the forgotten cost of the decision to go to war in Iraq,’ Sloboda said on Tuesday at the launch of the report.
   ‘Our data show that no sector of Iraqi society has escaped. We sincerely hope that this research will help to inform decision-makers around the world about the real needs of the Iraqi people as they struggle to rebuild their country.’
   Sloboda stressed that his report did not necessarily contradict the study in The Lancet, which also included non-violent deaths said to be caused by the war.
   The new figures were simply meant to be ‘an absolutely firm, unshakeable baseline’ for the minimum number of violent deaths, he said.

Gunmen shot and killed three Sunni Arab members of the committee drafting Iraq's new constitution as they left a Baghdad restaurant on Tuesday, police sources said.
   The killings in the Karrada district of central Baghdad would be a crushing blow to hopes that a nascent political process would undermine Iraq's insurgency.
   The Sunni Arabs on the committee were seen as central figures in the US-backed strategy of drawing members of the restive minority off the streets and into peaceful politics.
   A Reuters television cameraman at the city's St Raphael's Hospital saw three bodies being pulled out of a dark blue car that had been sprayed with bullets. Their wounded driver was loaded into the back of a truck.
   Police sources named the victims as Sheikh Mujbil al -Sheikh Isa, Aziz Ibrahim and Dhamin Hussein Ileywi.
   The 71-strong committee is due to deliver Iraq's new constitution by August 15.
   Fifteen Sunni members joined it last month, making it the first nationwide political body to include significant Sunni representation since the new government took power in April.
   The other members are mostly Shi'ites and Kurds, elected to parliament in a January vote when most Sunnis stayed home.
   Two members of parliament have been assassinated since the elections, but Tuesday's victims were the first members of the constitution-drafting committee to be killed.
   Insurgents had sworn to kill any Sunni Arabs that took part.

Iraq urged the international community on Tuesday to deliver immediately on its aid pledges and warned more delays would further destabilise the troubled country and threaten global security.
   The international community has pledged billions of dollars to help rebuild Iraq but only a small amount of that has actually been spent.
   Concerns about the sustainability of the post-Saddam Hussein political system, violence and widespread corruption have led donors to be cautious about implementing their pledges.
   ‘Unless we move fast and effectively in the next few months we will have very serious problems on our hands,’ the planning minister, Barham Salih, told Reuters.
   ‘Failure is not an option because it will have dire consequences for the Iraqi people and for the region and for world security.’

Pakistani police on Tuesday said they were holding Islamic militants who may have had links with the suspects in the London bombings, while the prime minister, Tony Blair, asked Muslim leaders how to weed out extremists blamed for radicalizing Muslim youth.
   In Pakistan, the police chief of an eastern Punjab province town said officials were trying to find out whether the ‘London bombings have any tentacles in Pakistan, especially in Lahore.’
   ‘We are holding a few militants who are suspected of having links to the London suicide bombers,’ said Lahore Police Chief Tariq Saleem. He did not name the suspects or say how many were detained.
   Muslim leaders meet Blair
   More than two dozen representatives of the Muslim community, meanwhile, met with Blair Tuesday morning.
   The community members discussed anti-terror legislation the government plans to introduce by the end of the year, saying they fear the laws may unfairly targeted their community.
   ‘It’s fair the government should ask itself whether policies such as those involving the Iraq war have contributed to this,’ said Dr. Zaki Badawi, head of the Muslim College. ‘We need a partnership between government and Muslims to show people they are not being ignored and that their concerns will be heard.’
   ‘Egyptian had no role’
   British authorities are sure that an Egyptian biochemist being questioned in Egypt had no role in the London bombings, a state-owned Egyptian newspaper said on Tuesday, quoting a senior security official.
   State Egyptian authorities last week detained Magdy Elnashar. Police have been searching Elnashar’s rented flat in Leeds in connection with the bombings.
   Three of the four British bombers were from the same area in the north of England.

US President George W. Bush said Monday he would fire anyone in his administration found to have committed a crime in connection to a leak that may have unmasked a covert CIA agent in 2003.
   The president seemed to be raising the bar for punishing aides involved in leaking that Valerie Wilson, also known as Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA after her husband accused the administration of exaggerating the case for war in Iraq.
   Asked about news reports that his senior political strategist, Karl Rove, revealed the operative’s identity to reporters, Bush said: ‘If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration.’
   But Bush pledged in June 2004 to fire anyone who leaked the agent’s name to the press, and referred to the leak in October 2003 as ‘a criminal action.’ The White House denied for two years that Rove was involved.
   A federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has been investigating whether a crime was committed when administration officials revealed that Plame, the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, worked for the CIA.
   ‘We have a serious, ongoing investigation here,’ Bush said. ‘It’s best if people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions.’
   ‘I will do so as well. I don’t know all the facts. I want to know all the facts. The best place for the facts to be done is by somebody who is spending time investigating it. I would like this to end as quickly as possible so we know the facts,’ said the president.
   For the second time in a week, he declined to comment specifically on Rove, the architect of his two presidential victories.

Both the US marriage and divorce rates are dropping while the number of unwed couples living together is rising, according to an annual study of marriage released on Monday.
   The numbers show a gradual trend in the United States toward the lifestyles in Scandinavia, particularly Sweden, where unmarried cohabitation with children is far more common, said David Popenoe, coauthor of ‘The State of Our Unions’ study.
   The number of unmarried couples living together in the United States grew to more than 5 million last year, according to the study by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
   More than half of all first US marriages are preceded by living together, it said. The study did not specify whether it meant first marriage for both men and women.
   Meanwhile, the US marriage rate fell to 39.9 per 1,000 unmarried women in 2004 from 46.5 in 2000 and 76.5 in 1970, the study said. The ratio of married US adults has fallen to its lowest since 1960, to about 55 per cent from 69 per cent, it said.
   The divorce rate dropped to 17.7 per 1,000 married women in 2004 from 18.8 in 2000 and a high of 22.6 in 1980, the study said.
   Eleven per cent of adult US women and 8 per cent of adult men are divorced, the study said.
   ‘Put all those together, and it means that those people who marry might have a little stronger marriages than they once did, but fewer people are marrying and more people are living together outside of marriage,’ Popenoe said.

NASA has yet to find a glitch that scrubbed the space shuttle Discovery’s launch six days ago, said officials Monday who still could not set a new launch date.
   ‘We are still looking for the problem,’ shuttle program manager Bill Parsons said.
   At the soonest, NASA said, Discovery could blast off on July 26.
   ‘We will try to make that window,’ which closes July 31 for Discovery’s intended rendezvous with the International Space Station.
   NASA is well aware that this is the first launch attempt since Columbia tore apart in February 2003, killing all seven aboard.
   ‘Our number-one goal is to find this problem and fix this problem,’ said Wayne Hale, deputy shuttle program manager, during a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral in Florida.
   After NASA scrubbed Wednesday’s lift-off, officials initially indicated they might be able to send Discovery into orbit on Saturday, then said a lift-off could not take place before the end of next week, and finally said they could not set a date at all.
   Engineers at the Florida seashore installation Friday emptied the shuttle’s massive external tank and unloaded cryogenic reactants that power fuel cells, to allow safe access to an electronics box that processes signals from the tank’s fuel level sensors.
   If the shuttle is not ready for a July lift-off, NASA will have to wait for the next launch window, September 9 to 24.

The secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will return to the Middle East this week to stem a surge in violence that threatens Israel’s Gaza withdrawal but the success of her mission is at the mercy of militants.
   Rice shortened a planned trip to Africa to squeeze in her second visit to the region since last month to show support for dismantling Israeli settlements in occupied Gaza, which Washington hopes will resuscitate peace talks.
   The superpower’s top diplomat holds some sway over the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, both of whom have a huge political stake in a successful withdrawal next month, US political analysts said.
   But Rice has no influence over Hamas.
   The Palestinian group, which the United States refuses to deal with because of its years of suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israel, can choose to destroy an already crumbling cease-fire whenever it wants.
   That would likely trigger a spiral of violence that would drive the two sides’ leaders farther apart just as they need to coordinate the mid-August withdrawal, the analysts said.
   ‘She’s trying to keep a lid on the violence and stop the withdrawal falling apart,’ said Aaron David Miller, a former adviser on the Middle East to six secretaries of state. ‘But the United States is not going to be able to affect whether or not Hamas changes its stance to a strategy of forcing the Israelis out under fire.’
   Coupled with US calls for restraint, the announcement on Friday of Rice’s third visit this year appeared to help calm the violence, especially because both sides had an excuse to climb down.
   Rice, who was scheduled to arrive in the region late in the week, wants to hammer out agreements on how to implement the plan so that Palestinians, especially, start to perceive the benefit of the withdrawal, a State Department official said.

Majority of Filipinos want Arroyo out
About 61 per cent of Filipinos want the president, Gloria Arroyo, out of office over a political scandal, whether by resignation, impeachment or unconstitutional means, according to an independent national survey released Tuesday. The June 20-23 Pulse Asia survey found that 22 per cent believe Arroyo should be allowed to complete her term despite opposition charges that she cheated to win the May 2004 elections. Some 1,200 respondents took part in the nationwide survey. The survey found 28 per cent believed ‘the most beneficial/constructive political scenario’ to end the crisis would involve Arroyo handing over power to constitutional successor vice-president Noli de Castro.

18 security personnel released in Nepal
Maoist rebels released 18 police and soldiers captured during a gunbattle in eastern Nepal in June, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Tuesday. Twelve police and six soldiers were handed over to the Red Cross at Sindhuli, about 160 kilometers southeast of Kathmandu, the ICRC said in a statement. ‘The eighteen men had been captured in Khotang and Bhojpur districts during encounters on June 19 and 22 respectively,’ the statement said. The police and soldiers were taken to a nearby city and handed over to local officials, the statement said without specifying the date of the handover.

N Korean nuke talks to start July 26
A fourth round of six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear disarmament will begin in Beijing on July 26, China said Tuesday, although analysts are skeptical significant progress will be made. Foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan made the announcement via Xinhua news agency after a flurry of diplomacy but declined to say how long they would last. In previous rounds, the negotiations have spanned three days before ending inconclusively. ‘The decision to restart the six-party talks was made through consultations with all relevant parties,’ Kong said of the talks that involve the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Victoria Cross holder fighting cancer
Second World War gunner Umrao Singh, India’s only surviving recipient of the Victoria Cross, is battling cancer in a hospital ward but says he has yet to surrender in the biggest battle of his life. The 85-year-old soldier was diagnosed with prostate cancer July 5 and underwent surgery this week, but the disease has spread to his bones, doctors at the military’s Base Hospital in New Delhi said. ‘We are proud to have him here,’ hospital commandant Brigadier Venu Gopal said of Singh, one of 27 Indians to be awarded the Victoria Cross, the British and Commonwealth forces’ most prestigious gallantry medal, during Second World War while fighting for the then Indian-British army.
— AFP

Brown pledges £20m to fight terror
Chancellor Gordon Brown is to announce an additional £20 million to step up the fight against terrorism and support victims of the July 7 bomb attacks in London. Brown is expected to say the Treasury will provide up to £10 million for the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme to cover loss of earnings and other unforeseen costs for victims and their families. And the Government is understood to be giving a further £1 million to the Relief Charitable Fund set up by London Mayor Ken Livingstone and the Red Cross. Meanwhile, the Treasury is expected to provide an additional £10 million to help the Metropolitan Police in their counter-terrorist operations.
— Press Association

Shevardnadze to receive pension
Georgia’s authorities have decided to pay ousted president Eduard Shevardnadze a monthly pension of 410 dollars (340 euros), the ITAR-TASS news agency reported Monday, quoting officials with the Georgian social affairs and health ministry. Shevardnadze, 77, who ruled Georgia for eight years before being toppled in mass street protests in November 2003, until now received no pension and lived on his savings and his son’s salary. He will receive his pension as former deputy and parliament speaker, offices he held from 1992 to 1995, when he was first elected president.
— AFP

3 pilots missing after two US jets crash
Three US Navy pilots were missing after two warplanes collided in mid-air on Monday while training over the western state of California, officials told AFP. The pair of US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter-attack jets were on a routine training drill over the remote China Lake weapons testing ground when they flew into each other at 11:29 am (1829 GMT). ‘We have no news from pilots so far,’ said Dennis McGrath, public affairs officer at Lemoore Naval Air Station on the California coast, where the jets took off. ‘There is no live ordnance on board. Helicopters of search and rescue team are on the site, waiting to see what they find,’ he added.
— AFP

Kenya bus crash
kills 16
At least 16 people died and many more were injured on Tuesday when a bus travelling to the Kenyan coast collided with a truck, police said. The accident occurred before dawn at Maungu, west of Mombasa on Kenya’s east coast, a police spokesman said. ‘The truck was stationary at the time, we don’t know yet how the bus came to hit it,’ added the spokesman from the nearby town of Voi, where the injured were being treated. A Mombasa Liners source in Nairobi said there were initial reports of 20 dead and 40 injured. But the company’s office in Mombasa said a team was still on the scene checking.
— AFP

Hurricane Emily gathers strength
in Gulf
Hurricane Emily gathered strength Tuesday in the Gulf of Mexico, threatening south Texas and a second strike against Mexico after ripping roofs off resort hotels and stranding thousands of tourists in the Yucatan Peninsula. Emily hit the Mayan Riviera on Monday as a fierce Category 4 storm with 135 mph winds, causing millions of dollars in damage. Hundreds of local residents were left homeless, but no deaths or major injuries were reported. The storm weakened during the rampage but once back out to sea it began to strengthen again, developing sustained winds of nearly 90 mph.
— AP