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The attacks in London and Egypt have given new urgency to the annual meeting here this week of Asia’s main security forum, which will adopt measures to boost the region’s defences against terrorism.
   The 24-member ASEAN Regional Forum, which includes many Muslim nations, is also expected to emphasise that terror attacks, mostly blamed on Islamic extremists, are not associated with religious groups.
   ‘The attacks in Egypt and London have given a sense of urgency to the ARF meeting in Laos,’ a senior foreign ministry official from a member country of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations said.
   ‘Similar attacks have happened in our region and although we have increased cooperation, we certainly need to do more to combat these kinds of threats,’ said the official.
   Most members of the ARF—including the United States, Russia and the Philippines—have been struck by terrorism, with many attacks blamed on affiliates of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terror network.
   Many are also allies in the US ‘war on terror’ including the ARF’s newest member, Pakistan, which launched a crackdown on militants groups after the July 7 suicide bombings which killed more than 50 people in London.
   ‘To have this happening in London, in Europe, I think is a reminder that this kind of threat is not the monopoly of our region,’ said Marty Natalegawa, spokesman for the foreign ministry of Indonesia, which has been the target of several attacks including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.
   ‘So what’s important in this meeting is to provide the solutions so that... countries which have been affected by this sort of calamity can share their experience and share what kind of steps they have taken,’ he said.
   The ARF will agree at its two-day meeting ending on Friday to promote cooperation in securing travel documents, said MC Abad, the head of ASEAN’s ARF unit.
   Such safeguards could include the introduction of biometrics technology to make it harder for terrorists to use stolen or forged documents such as passports.
   This will complement counter-terrorism efforts already adopted, covering law enforcement and coordination among intelligence agencies, the choking of terrorist financing, tighter monitoring of cross-border movements and heightening transport security.

Southeast Asia diplomats are not happy that the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will miss Asia’s main security forum but her absence is unlikely to affect ties between the 10-nation ASEAN and Washington, officials said Sunday.
   Rice said this month she would skip the ASEAN Regional Forum starting Thursday because of a scheduling conflict. It will be the first time since the group was set up in 1994 that a US secretary of state will not attend.
   Some Association of Southeast Asian Nations officials have suggested the absence of Rice, who will instead send her deputy Robert Zoellick, is a deliberate snub to force democratic reforms in rogue member Myanmar.
   But the Philippine foreign secretary, Alberto Romulo, said while his counterparts in ASEAN were not happy with Rice’s absence, they would not bend to pressure from a foreign power over any issue.
   ‘Let’s be candid: foreign ministers of ASEAN are not exactly ecstatic about the decision, but that is the decision they have made,’ Romulo told reporters in Manila before heading to Vientiane.
   ‘This will be the first time this is going to happen, but we are hoping that eventually she will attend meetings in our region,’ he said.
   Meanwhile, Myanmar indicated Sunday it would forfeit its chance to assume the rotating chairmanship of the regional ASEAN security organisation to spare the group from rebukes over the ruling junta’s poor democracy record.
   Also Sunday, as Asia and Pacific nations opened their top annual security conference in the Laotian capital, Australia appeared set to embrace a regional nonaggression pact, reversing long-standing opposition.
   Australia’s neighbours had made the accord a prerequisite for attending a summit next December to create an East Asian trade bloc.
   A draft conference statement obtained by The Associated Press said Australia would sign a declaration of intent to join the nonaggression treaty before Friday.
   Myanmar’s colleagues in Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, have urged it to meet US and European Union demands to release pro-democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest or pass on its scheduled chairmanship of the group in late 2006.
   Both the US and EU have threatened to boycott ASEAN meetings, which they usually attend as observers, if Myanmar becomes the bloc’s leader, and Southeast Asian nations fear the issue could endanger trade ties with the West.
   It is also likely to touch on efforts to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear programme, with six-nation talks on the issue starting in Beijing on Tuesday, and piracy in the Malacca Strait, one of the world’s busiest waterways.
   ‘There will be free-flowing discussions on non-traditional crises—piracy, disaster warnings in the wake of the (December) tsunamis,’ Romulo said.
   The ARF will group foreign ministers from ASEAN members Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam and those from other dialogue partners, including the United States, Russia, China, Japan, Australia and the European Union.

The visiting US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has reported progress in efforts to coordinate next month’s pullout from the Gaza Strip but the fatal overnight shooting of an Israeli couple in the area underlined the security problems that lie ahead.
   An Israeli man and woman were killed by Palestinian assailants near the Kissufim checkpoint between the Gaza Strip and Israeli territory, military sources said early Sunday.
   An Israeli settler and two soldiers were injured in the attack in the Gaza Strip, two kilometres from the checkpoint, when the gunmen opened fire with light automatic weapons. One of the soldiers was said to be in serious condition in hospital.
   The attackers shot at a car that the murdered couple were in. Israeli soldiers responded, injuring or killing one of the attackers, the sources said.
   The Al-Qods armed wing of the radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah group, claimed responsibility for the shootings.
   And just 24 days before the landmark pullout of Israeli troops and settlers was due to begin, Palestinians complained they still had no answers on basic issues such as border controls and freedom of movement in Gaza.

Caught between Western demands to fight Islamic terrorism and protests from hardline Muslims at home, Pakistan’s leader faces a dilemma that will only grow with each new attack, analysts say.
   The president, Pervez Musharraf, a key Western ally since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, has earned praise abroad but criticism at home for ordering the arrests of some 300 suspected militants after it emerged the London bombers had ties to Pakistan.
   The latest bloody attacks in Egypt are only likely to heighten international pressure on him to uproot Islamic extremists in a country many see as a breeding ground of global terror and the likely hideout of Osama bin Laden.
   ‘He is caught between the devil of the West, which wants him to crush religious extremism, and the deep blue sea of taking on the entire religious community,’ said Lahore-based political commentator Mohammed Afzal Niazi.
   General Musharraf, who once led troops in Kashmir, pinned his fate to the ‘war on terror’ after September 11 and allowed US forces to launch the 2001 Afghanistan invasion to unseat bin Laden and the Taliban from Pakistani soil.
   Washington has since been a strong political and economic backer of Musharraf despite the fact he took power in a military coup and turned Pakistan into a declared nuclear state in its arms race with India.
   Yet at home, Musharraf faces both open and silent opposition to each new crackdown he orders, both from Muslim clerics and the government and security apparatus over which he presides, said political scientist Hasan Askari.
   Muslim protesters on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, condemned Musharraf, who has escaped two assassination attempts for his pro-Western stance.
   Many of his generals and spy chiefs have also backed jihadists, or Islamic holy warriors, in the past to fight in the divided state of Kashmir and in the 1979-1989 US-backed war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, said Askari.
   ‘It seems that opinion in the official circles is divided on how these (militant) groups should be dealt with,’ Askari, the former head of political science at Lahore’s Punjab University, said.
   ‘There are elements in the establishment who continue to see the extremists as potentially relevant for their Kashmir policy. Therefore they let them get off the hook after some time.’

While 52 per cent of Japanese people do not trust the US government, 59 per cent of US citizens think of Tokyo as trustworthy, a joint public perception survey by Kyodo News and the Associated Press found Sunday.
   The survey, conducted earlier this month to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, covered 1,045 respondents aged 20 or older in Japan and 1,000 aged 18 or older in the United States.
   Japanese distrust of the United States has risen 26 per centage points from a similar survey conducted in 1991 shortly after the Gulf War. The figure reflects rising concern about the unilateralism of George Bush’s administration on foreign and security policy as seen in the Iraq war.
   Those in the United States who have ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ favourable views toward Japan accounted for 81 per cent, exceeding the 68 per cent of Japanese who indicated the same attitude toward the United States.
   Most respondents on both sides think bilateral relations will remain intact over the next several years, while only 25 per cent of the US and 3 per cent of the Japanese respondents believe ties between the two countries will improve.
   A difference of opinion was seen in the question on US military bases in Japan, which are a subject in bilateral realignment talks.
   Of US respondents, 74 per cent said the military presence should be maintained and 22 per cent said it should be removed. Of Japanese respondents, 47 per cent said it should be maintained while another 47 per cent said it should be removed.

The president, Gloria Arroyo, is to make her annual state of the nation address on Monday to the same Congress that will later in the week decide whether she should be impeached over allegations of vote-rigging.
   Security forces across the country have been put on alert and some 6,000 riot police are to be deployed outside the House of Representatives, where parts of the opposition are trying to muster large crowds to back calls for her resignation.
   Aside from the riot police, the entire 15,000-member Manila police force and two battalions of army infantry—some 1,000 soldiers—will be on standby, according to interior secretary Angelo Reyes.
   Arroyo has been fighting for her political survival since early June when the opposition released wiretapped conversations in which a woman who sounds like the president is heard asking a presumed top election official to secure her a comfortable margin in the May 2004 elections.
   Meanwhile, a majority of Filipinos want Arroyo to resign over allegations she cheated her way to victory in the 2004 Philippine election, according to an independent survey released Sunday.
   The July 2-14 Pulse Asia poll said that after Arroyo admitted in June having called an independent election official last year while the votes were being tallied, 52 per cent of 1,200 respondents said ‘the most appropriate thing for the President to do is to resign.’
   Nineteen per cent said she should ‘focus more on state matters’, 18 per cent said Congress should impeach her, and 11 per cent wanted her to take a leave of absence to ‘reflect on the mistake she made.’

The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, faces a grilling when parliament reopens Monday over whether he gave away too much in striking a landmark nuclear technology deal during his trip to the United States last week.
   While some experts say president Bush’s decision to allow civilian nuclear sales to India will help solve the vast energy needs of one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies, there has been mounting domestic criticism the agreement could hurt national security.
   The opposition Hindu nationalists say the accord reached during Singh’s visit puts a ceiling on India’s nuclear arsenal and New Delhi would lose ‘flexibility’ in deciding its weapons strategy. They vowed over the weekend to make it a central issue during the new parliamentary session.

The daughter of a wealthy Indian fugitive accused by Washington of links to al-Qaeda married the son of a top Pakistani cricketer in Dubai on Saturday, in a high society wedding with all the trappings of a Bollywood film.
   Indian businessman Dawood Ibrahim, whose whereabouts are not known, was said not to have attended the ceremony in the glitzy city in the United Arab Emirates.
   Former Pakistani cricket captain Javed Miandad confirmed earlier this month that his son Junaid would marry Mahrukh Ibrahim, whose father is accused by India of a wave of bomb attacks in Bombay in 1993 that killed 260 people.
   The police with sniffer dogs patrolled the grounds of the Dubai five-star hotel where a small crowd of media and onlookers gathered on a balmy night after news of the venue was leaked.

An Indian court has freed a man who languished in jail or a mental home in the eastern state of Assam for 54 years without ever facing trial, the police said Sunday.
   Machang Lalung, 77, was arrested in 1951 in his native village of Silsang, 64 kilometres from the state’s main city of Guwahati.
   The police said records showed Lalung, a tribal, was booked for ‘voluntarily causing grievous hurt by dangerous weapons or means,’ an offence carrying a maximum 10-year prison term.
   But they said there were no records backing up the accusation.
   Soon after his arrest police shifted Lalung to a mental asylum. Though certified ‘fully recovered’ by asylum authorities in 1967, prison officials only returned him to jail this year.
   In May the National Human Rights Commission took up Lalung’s case and sought his release. He was freed last week after posting a token personal bond of one rupee (two cents).
   Magistrate HK Sarma, who released Lalung, had harsh words for India’s notoriously slow-moving and inefficient legal system.

At least two dozen people were injured on Sunday when supporters of sacked Nepali prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba clashed with the police when he appeared before an anti-graft body hearing corruption charges, witnesses said.
   The police used batons to push back about 200 activists of the Nepali Congress (Democratic) Party who were protesting against the anti-graft body, demanding it be abolished as it was illegal.
   The protesters, some of them carrying placards, threw stones and bricks at the heavy security cordon as Deuba arrived for the hearing at the office of the Royal Commission for Corruption Control, which is investigating charges of graft against him.

The deadly attacks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt’s flagship resort and second seat of power, dealt a blow to the regime six weeks before a landmark presidential election but could also inhibit the opposition, analysts said Sunday.
   The multiple bombings, in which medics said 88 people died, sounded a death knell for Egypt’s image as a beacon of stability in the region, they said.
   The attacks ‘were aimed at discrediting the Egyptian regime by challenging its ability to secure its own stability even as it poses as the guarantor of regional security,’ said Nabil Abdel Fattah of the Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies.
   The bombings were the deadliest targeting foreigners in Egypt and followed two smaller attacks on tourist targets in Cairo in April and triple blasts that killed 34 in the Sinai last October.
   Israel was swift to point an accusing finger at regime of the president, Hosni Mubarak, for failing to take appropriate measures following the October attacks and questioned the performance of Egypt’s intelligence services.
   Israel’s comments came as Egypt was seeking to heighten its profile and assist the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip by taking over some of the security responsibilities in the sensitive Palestinian territory.
   The Saudi Gazette argued that the attackers were seeking to foment popular discontent by stalling the promise of reforms it said were contained in the September 7 presidential election.
   Although Egypt’s opposition has branded the regime’s electoral reform a smoke screen, the first ever contested presidential poll has given unprecedented impetus to a movement for democratic change.
   Egyptian analyst Diaa Rashwan said the attacks would have a damaging impact on the election, which is due to be followed in November by parliamentary polls.
   ‘This attack, by its magnitude, has no precedent in the history of Egypt. It will have tremendous effects on the country’s political scene,’ he said.
   ‘The opposition will hesitate to stage even a peaceful demonstration in this context... The government has every pretext it needs to maintain the state of emergency,’ Rashwan argued.
   ‘It will be intimidating for the opposition, negative for democracy.’
   The state of emergency which Mubarak has maintained ever since the 1981 assassination of his predecessor Anwar al-Sadat is one of the main grievances of the opposition.
   The independent Al-Masri Al-Yom daily also blamed Egyptian and world leaders for letting Salafi ideology spread.

The devastating al-Qaeda-linked attacks in Sharm el-Sheikh that left at least 88 dead have turned the spotlight once more on Osama bin Laden’s deputy and Egypt’s most shadowy son, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
   Saturday’s coordinated attacks at the Red Sea resort were swiftly claimed by the al-Qaeda Organisation in the Levant and Egypt, ‘as part of the response against the global evil powers which are spilling the blood of Muslims.’
   The United States believes Zawahiri, who has a 25-million-dollar bounty on his head, is the main strategist and key ideologist in the al-Qaeda hierarchy.
   In his most recent appearance, on a videotape aired by Arab television channel Al-Jazeera in June, Zawahiri singled out Egypt particularly for criticism, along with his usual calls for more jihads (holy war).
   In the tape, Zawahiri referred to demonstrations in Egypt in May during which female activists protesting against the slow pace of democratic reform were molested by civilian-clothed ruling party supporters.
   He ‘criticised what he deemed to be violations of women’s rights during demonstrations demanding an amendment of the constitution in Egypt,’ the satellite channel said.
   Before becoming bin Laden’s right-hand man, Zawahiri was the leader of the Jihad group, which spearheaded with the Jamaa Islamiya organisation a wave of attacks that rocked Egypt in the 1990s.
   ‘Ayman al-Zawahiri is the brain of Osama bin Laden. It was only after the two men met that bin Laden became so well known,’ said Egyptian Islamist lawyer Muntasser al-Zayat, who knew him well.
   Zawahiri, implicated in the 1981 assassination of the president, Anwar Sadat, and the massacre of foreign tourists at Luxor in 1997, often appears in video tapes at bin Laden’s side.
   An eye surgeon by training from a wealthy Egyptian family, he faces a death sentence in Egypt. He has published several books and studies on Islamic fundamentalism and has come to symbolise the radical Islamist movement.

The former US president, Bill Clinton, visiting a Rwandan genocide memorial on Saturday, expressed regret for his ‘personal failure’ to prevent the 1994 slaughter of 800,000 people.
   On a brief visit to look at HIV/ AIDS projects in the central African country, Clinton laid a wreath at a museum commemorating victims of the 100-day massacre by extremists from the Hutu majority which took place during his presidency.
   ‘I express regret for my personal failure,’ he said before touring the museum, which features graphic images of people being decapitated and bodies twitching on the road.
   ‘I think it faithfully, honestly, painfully presents the truth of the Rwandan genocide,’ he said.
   ‘It is an important contribution to the history of the world, that the world cannot afford to forget,’ he said.
   Clinton apologised on a previous visit to Rwanda in 1998 for not recognising the crime of genocide.
   Clinton administration officials avoided the word in public for fear it would spark an outcry for action they were loathe to take, six months after US troops were killed by Somali warlords in Mogadishu.
   Rwanda was the last leg of Clinton’s six nation African tours to see how the AIDS pandemic is affecting children on the world’s poorest continent.

Pressure is building for greater use of video cameras to keep watch over the nations cities–particularly in transportation systems and other spots vulnerable to terrorism - after the bombings in London.
   The calls have come over the last few weeks as British investigators released surveillance footage of the bombers in the deadly July 7 attacks and then put out frames of suspects in Thursday’s failed attacks.
   ‘I do not think that cameras are the big mortal threat to civil liberties that people are painting them to be,’ Washington, DC, Mayor Anthony A Williams said Friday.
   In many other spots around the country, cameras already are in place.
   ‘In general, I think we’re getting used to cameras. Hey, that’s just the way the world is,’ said Roy Bordes, who runs an Orlando, Fla.-based security design consultant firm.
   Consider these recent developments:
   Chicago now has at least 2,000 surveillance cameras across its neighborhoods, after leaders last year launched an ambitious project at a cost of roughly $5 million. Law enforcement says they’ve helped drive crime rates to the lowest they’ve seen in 40 years.
   In Philadelphia, where the city has increasingly relied on video surveillance, cameras caught an early morning murder which ultimately led to the capture of a suspect. Police say the accused is now a suspect in an unsolved murder from 1998.
   Homeland Security officials last week announced they would install hundreds of surveillance cameras and sensors on a rail line near the Capitol at a cost of $9.8 million, months after an effort by local officials to ban hazardous shipments on the line. In most cases prior to the last few years, street crime - not terrorism - was the driving factor behind the cameras. There has also been a boom in traffic-monitoring cameras, and huge reliance on surveillance cameras in private business, especially in retail establishments like convenience and department stores.
   Security experts say that technology hasn’t yet caught up with hopes for the equipment, however.
   They point out that despite London’s huge network of cameras, the bombings weren’t prevented. In those two cases, the cameras have only helped in the investigations.

Democrats attacked the response to the president, Bush, to a top aide’s role in outing a CIA operative on Saturday, turning their radio address over to an ex-agent critical of his actions.
   Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent and registered Republican, accused Bush of flip-flopping on his promise to fire anyone at the White House implicated in the leak and said Americans deserved better.
   ‘We deserve people who work in the White House who are committed to protecting classified information, telling the truth to the American people, and living by example to the idea that a country at war with Islamic extremists cannot focus its efforts on attacking other American citizens,’ Johnson said.
   Democrats have urged Bush to fire top adviser Karl Rove or revoke his access to classified information after he was identified by a reporter as being a source in the leak of Valerie Plame’s name two years ago. The leak came after her
   husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, accused the White House of twisting intelligence to justify an invasion
   of Iraq.
   Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is leading the probe into the unmasking of Plame, whose identity and role at the CIA were made public in a column by Robert Novak.
   According to articles on Saturday in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, Fitzgerald is also looking into potential discrepancies between the accounts given to investigators by Rove and vice
   presidential aide Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, and the accounts given by journalists who have
   testified.
   For example, the Post, citing an anonymous source, said that Libby has testified that he learned about Plame from NBC correspondent Tim Russert. But Russert has said he gave no such information to Libby, who is Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.
   Rove testified that he and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper discussed welfare reform in their conversation and only spoke about Plame near the end of the call, the Post said, citing lawyers involved in the case. However, Cooper has said he does not recall talking to Rove about welfare reform.

Twenty-two people were killed and 25 wounded on Sunday when a suicide bomber blew up a truck full of explosives outside a police station in Baghdad.
   ‘The bodies of the victims, many of whom were policemen, were completely burnt by the blast,’ an interior ministry official said.
   Around 22 cars, 10 shops and a residential building were set ablaze in the massive explosion outside Al-Rashid police station in the Al-Mashtel neighbourhood in the southeast of the capital.
   ‘It appears that the bomber who was driving the truck wanted to enter the police station, but for some reasons the explosives exploded 20 metres before the police station,’ the official said, adding that US and Iraqi security forces had now cordoned off the area.
   The bombing, one of a number of deadly attacks against police, occurred as Sunni Arab leaders were considering ending a boycott of talks on a constitution to lay out Iraq’s future following the ousting of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
   With an August 15 deadline looming for parliament to vote on a draft constitution, Sunni Arab leaders said they would reconsider their boycott of the committee writing the basic law.
   The boycott was called in protest at the murder by insurgents on Tuesday of two Sunni members of the committee.
   ‘Today we are holding meetings amongst ourselves to reach a joint decision on whether to resume our work in the committee,’ Ayad Al-Sammarai, number two in the Sunni-based Islamic Party, told AFP.
   ‘Circumstances forced us to suspend our participation, but this is a very delicate time and we must participate and give our opinion on the constitution,’ he said.
   ‘We might rejoin the committee as early as tomorrow (Monday).’
   The leader of the Sunni Waqf, a religious endowment body, said the boycott was only meant to be a temporary measure to protest at the murders.
   ‘Sunni Arabs must have a say in drawing up the country’s constitution,’ said Adnan Al-Dulaimi.
   The government was responding positively to several of their demands, including one for better security for committee members, the officials said.
   Sunni Arabs account for a fifth of the country’s population, but are currently under-represented in parliament because much of the community boycotted the January general elections.
   The government recently increased Sunni representation on the constitutional drafting committee in a bid to broaden support for the vital document, whose adoption in a referendum set for October 15 is considered crucial to maintaining political momentum.
   The government, dominated by Kurds and Shias, also hopes increased Sunni Arab participation in the political process will undermine the community’s support for insurgents.

Iran’s Islamic regime used to subject its prisoners to solitary confinement and torture, the hardline judiciary admitted in an unprecedented report carried by the student news agency ISNA Sunday.
   The regime also resorted to prolonged detention without trial and the extraction of confessions under duress but these were now all things of the past, judiciary chief Abbas Ali Alizadeh said.
   ‘We’ve taken steps and we can proudly state that all these failings have now disappeared,’ Alizadeh said.
   ‘Iranian prisons are among the best in the world.’
   Judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimi Rad added: ‘These actions are part of the past,’ crediting ‘great progresses in human rights.
   The Islamic republic is regularly criticised by international human rights watchdogs for the persistence of torture in its jails.
   Relations between Tehran and Ottawa are still reeling from the July 2003 death in custody of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi and
   Iran has largely rejected criticism as interference in its internal affairs, but in April 2004 the hardline judiciary implicitly recognised such practices by publishing a flyer ordering an end to torturing, blindfolding or humiliating prisoners.
   This flyer, which was revived nearly point by point in a law forbidding torture and guaranteeing civil rights, spurred the creation of a judiciary civil rights commission, which created the report.
   The commission reported that some prisons continued to use blindfolds and ‘one police commander acknowledged some cases in which prisoners were hit.’
   Some prisoners also had one square meter (11 square feet) of cell space, but ‘today each detainee has about 12 square meters (130 square feet)’ said Alizadeh.
   At the Rajae Shahr prison west of Tehran, 1,400 prisoners were awaiting a court judgement when the report was released.

More than 200 shocked British tourists returned Sunday to tearful family reunions from an Egyptian Red Sea resort torn by multiple bombings, a new jolt for Britons reeling from a wave of attacks in London.
   Many tourists, some draped in blankets, burst into tears as they were met by worried relatives at Manchester Airport after being flown home on special flights from Sharm el-Sheikh, Britain’s domestic Press Association said.
   And they trembled or wept as they spoke of seeing dead, mutilated and injured people lying in the rubble amid scenes of panic and hysteria.
   They were among some 240 tourists who landed at Manchester Airport and Gatwick Airport, near London.
   The Foreign Office confirmed seven Britons were injured and two missing in Egypt’s bomb-hit Sharm el-Sheikh resort on Saturday, as Egyptian police sources said two Britons were among the dead.

One person was killed and four others injured when a bomb blast hit a train in the Russian Caucasus republic of Dagestan, bordering Chechnya early Sunday, Interfax quoted authorities as saying.
   The bomb went off at 5:30am (0130 GMT) underneath the first carriage of an electric train travelling between the town of Khassaviourt in the west of the republic and the regional capital Makhatchkala, the sources said.
   Two hundred metres of track were damaged by the blast and train movements’ ssuspended temporarily.

US soldier killed in Afghan attack
A US soldier was killed and another wounded in an attack by suspected Taliban guerrillas in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, a US military spokesman said. At least one militant was killed and two wounded in the clash in Helmand province, lieutenant-colonel Jerry O’Hara said, adding that an Afghan interpreter for US forces was also wounded. ‘The (US) forces were on patrol, part of a regular operation against enemy forces when they came under attack,’ he said. US troops called in air support against a group of up to 20 militants involved in the attack, O’Hara said. ‘We bombed them,’ he said.
— Reuters

Koreas delegations meet ahead of talks
North and South Korean delegations met in Beijing Sunday for bilateral talks ahead of negotiations this week on the North’s nuclear weapons programme, Xinhua news agency reported. Xinhua, quoting an anonymous South Korean diplomat, did not elaborate on the content of the meeting, while a South Korean embassy spokeswoman said she was not in a position to confirm whether it had taken place. The two sides are to hold talks also involving the United States, Russia, Japan and China from Tuesday in Beijing in an effort to resolve a nearly three-year standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme. Three previous rounds of talks have stalled without making any significant progress.
— AFP

‘The Statesman’ editor-in-chief dead
The editor-in-chief of India’s ‘The Statesman’ newspaper, CR Irani, has died at the age of 75. Doctors say Irani had been suffering a kidney ailment and died Saturday from massive organ failure while hospitalised in Kolkata. Irani was known as a fierce defender of press freedoms for criticising government censorship rules in the 1970’s. He published blank spaces in The Statesman where reports or photos had been barred. Irani had served as the chairman of the Press Trust of India, and was the first Indian named chairman of the International Press Institute. He is survived by his wife and three daughters.
— BDNews

Girl killed in China blast
An eight-year-old girl was killed and 26 others injured after an explosion at a children’s park in China’s northern province of Shanxi caused several buildings to collapse, state media reported Sunday. The powerful blast on Thursday flattened a two-storey office building at the Xishan children’s park and three houses nearby, Xinhua news agency said. Many residents were buried underneath the rubble and an eight-year-old girl was later found dead, it said. Four people among the 26 injured are still hospitalised. The police said a park worker had illegally stored 100 kilograms of explosives inside a warehouse and that the blast was caused by high temperatures.
— AFP

Two injured in Istanbul blast
Two people, one of them a Dutch tourist, were injured in an explosion Saturday outside a cafe in Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city, media reports said. The cause of the explosion was not immediately known, but the city’s police chief, Cellattin Cerrah, ruled out a gas explosion and said officers were investigating the scene, the Anatolia news agency said. The explosion, which left a Dutch tourist and a waiter injured, took place outside one of the restaurants and cafes under the Galata bridge over the Golden Horn, an inlet of the Bosphorus Strait on the European side of the city, the CNN-turk news channel said.
— AFP

56 killed in Nigeria bus accident
Fifty-six people were killed and six others seriously injured Sunday near the northern Nigerian city of Kano when the bus in which they were traveling plunged into a river, road safety officials and witnesses said. A Federal Road Safety Commission official in Kano, Hammed Ibrahim, told journalists at the scene that only six passengers were rescued after the accident, and were hospitalised in government hospital in Kano with serious injuries.
— AFP

Shuttle Discovery set for blastoff
The Space Shuttle Discovery is set to launch Tuesday with seven astronauts on board, in the first shuttle flight since the 2003 Columbia disaster, NASA said, 10 days after a glitch first delayed liftoff. ‘Discovery is in excellent shape as we complete the troubleshooting from the liquid hydrogen engine sensor cutoff anomaly which caused our first launch attempt scrub on July 13,’ said NASA test director Pete Nickolenko.
— Reuters

Bulgaria’s Socialists form minority govt
The leader of Bulgaria’s Socialist party Sergey Stanishev on Sunday formed a minority government with a Muslim party after winning June elections. Stanishev unveiled a cabinet comprising 13 ministers from his Bulgarian Socialist Party, which was born out of the country’s former communist party, and five from the Movement for Rights and Freedoms. He was forced to form a minority government after the country’s former centrist rulers, the National Movement Simeon II, refused to enter a coalition led by the Socialists.
— AP

Cuba frees nine dissidents
Cuba has released nine detained political dissidents, including Marta Beatriz Roque, but continued to hold another 17 activists, dissidents said. The nine were let go Saturday, a day after being rounded up in Cuba’s latest move against the island’s political opposition. Roque, a 60-year-old economist, is president of the Assembly for the Promotion of Civil Society, which had organised a protest in front of the French embassy here Friday to demand the release of political prisoners from Cuban jails.
— AP

Four killed in Cote d’ Ivoire
Unidentified assailants attacked two security force posts in Cote d’ Ivoire’s main city, sparking gunfights that reportedly killed at least four people, officials said Sunday. Gunmen attacked a gendarmerie station house in a northern suburb of Abidjan late Saturday and four reportedly died in the fight, said the captain, Bois Moreuai of the UN peacekeeping force for Cote d’ Ivoire. Moreuai said UN officials hadn’t yet confirmed the deaths, or from which side they may have come.
— AP