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Fears of an impending crisis in the nuclear standoff with North Korea grew Thursday after Pyongyang said it had completed another step towards making more atomic weapons.
   North Korea said Wednesday it had unloaded 8,000 spent fuel rods from its nuclear reactor and planned to reprocess them to make nuclear bombs.
   A senior US envoy said the same day preparations for North Korea’s first ever nuclear weapons test were in the works.
   ‘The (South Korean) government has serious concern about the aggravated situation. I think China, Russia, the United States and Japan all have serious concerns about it,’ the South Korean foreign minister, Ban Ki-Moon, said in an interview with YTN television.
   He said North Korea reprocessing would be viewed as further ‘aggravating’ the standoff while a nuclear test would be regarded more seriously.
   ‘If North Korea goes ahead with a nuclear test, it will be completely isolated from the international community as a result,’ he said.
   Analysts are divided on whether North Korea wants atomic weapons or is using nuclear brinkmanship as a tool to extract concessions from the United States.
   But a sense of an impending crisis is brewing.
   ‘It is quite clear we are heading to a very serious crisis,’ said Jun Bong-Geum, who heads the Institute for peace and Cooperation, a Seoul think tank.
   ‘History of the past 15 years shows that there have only been useful negotiations when matters have reached a crisis.’
   The South Korean government said the North should stop being unhelpful and return to dialogue.
   ‘North Korea should immediately return to the dialogue table and talk, rather than delay the settlement of the nuclear issue by taking unhelpful measures,’ Rhee Bong-Jo, South Korea’s vice unification minister, told a news briefing here.
   South Korean officials believe North Korea’s latest move indicates the regime is busily raising the stakes in a game of nuclear brinkmanship.
   Last month, Pyongyang said it had shut down its nuclear reactor, a necessary step prior to unloading spent nuclear fuel. The new claim that unloading has been completed was a logical escalation.
   China on Thursday rebuffed US demands to take tough action on North Korea and instead called for positive signals in order to restart talks on the isolated country’s nuclear ambitions.
   The Chinese government said it was also against Washington’s call for imposing UN sanctions on North Korea a day after Pyongyang raised the stakes by announcing it had taken another step towards making nuclear weapons.

International aid agencies have evacuated workers from a riot-hit city in eastern Afghanistan as protests at the alleged defilement of the Koran by US soldiers moved to Kabul, officials said.
   Witnesses said the situation remained tense in Jalalabad, where four people died Wednesday after police opened fire on thousands of demonstrators who burned down humanitarian organisation offices and the Pakistani consulate.
   Two people were wounded when security forces opened fire on a gathering of 100 villagers early Thursday in Khagyani, a district just northwest of the city, provincial spokesman, Faizan Ul-Haq, said.
   Afghan troops and the police cleared roadblocks set up by several groups of between 100 and 200 people just outside Jalalabad along the highway towards the Pakistani border, border police sergeant Mohammed Nabi said.
   Vehicles belonging to the fledgling national army were stoned by small groups of demonstrators and an AFP reporter also head gunshots, but saw no casualties.
   Jalalabad city centre was quiet and shops were open but it looked like a warzone, with broken glass as well as burnt tires and wood littered everywhere, an AFP reporter witnessed. Some shopkeepers were repairing their premises.
   However, students took to the streets of the capital Thursday in a third day of protests sparked by allegations in Newsweek magazine that interrogators at the US military detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, desecrated a Koran by stuffing it down a toilet to rattle Muslim prisoners.
   They shouted slogans calling on the US president, George W Bush, to apologise to Islamic countries and saying that proposals for permanent American bases on Afghan soil could damage the country’s independence.
   A similar demonstration started at the Polytechnic Institute, northeast of Kabul, where protesters torched a US flag. Police were at the scene but there were no Afghan or US-led coalition troops present, witnesses said.
   ‘It makes one laugh how ignorant US soldiers are,’ student Mohammed Shasiq said at the university protest.
   The US, which leads an international coalition of some 18,000 troops hunting Taliban militants three years after the regime was toppled, has promised to look into the Koran claims.
   Foreign workers whose offices were targeted on Wednesday were evacuated from conservative Jalalabad, 130 kilometres east of Kabul, in fear of further protests.

A top official in Nepal’s royal-appointed ruling council has charged that ‘foreign powers’ were backing opposition party calls for the restoration of democracy, state radio said Thursday.
   The statements by the co-vice chairman of the council of ministers, Tulsi Giri, were reported a day after the US assistant secretary of state, Christina Rocca, on a visit to Nepal urged king Gyanendra to bury the hatchet with political parties and focus on tackling an increasingly bloody Maoist insurgency.
   Rocca, who called for a return to multi-party democracy as soon as possible, said, ‘the palace and parties need to pull together to find a sustainable peace.’
   ‘The ongoing movement for the revival of parliament and full democracy is backed by foreign powers,’ Giri told a function Wednesday marking ‘achievements of the 100 days’ of the royal takeover in Birjung, south of the capital Kathmandu.
   Gyanendra sacked the government, suspended civil liberties and took power February 1, saying the move was needed because squabbling political parties had failed to end the insurgency that has claimed more than 11,000 lives.
   In a rare show of solidarity last weekend, the seven mainstream parties called for the restoration of democracy and parliament rather than immediate elections, saying it was impossible to hold fair elections due to the Maoist insurgency.
   ‘The political parties do not have the support of the people so they fear going to the polls and instead have opted for the reinstatement of the dissolved parliament,’ Giri said.
   Gyanendra dissolved the 205-member parliament in May 2002 to pave the way for elections that were never held after then premier Sher Bahadur Deuba said the revolt made it too dangerous to hold polls. Afterwards Nepal was plunged into a political impasse that culminated in the royal takeover.
   The Maoists said Wednesday they would back the mainstream parties in their democracy drive.
   Nepal Thursday asked all its citizens to supply full personal details along with those of relatives and domestic workers in the wake of Gyanendra’s seizure of power in February.
   ‘The home ministry has asked for personal details, including a photograph of all landlords, tenants, relatives and domestic workers living in the country, by June 14,’ an announcement broadcast on state-run radio said.

Building of a controversial power project in Indian Kashmir will continue despite opposition by Pakistan and appointment of a neutral expert by the World Bank to sort things out.
   Pakistan, which fears the one-billion-dollar project could deprive its wheat-bowl state of Punjab of vital irrigation water, charges that the plant violates a 44-year-old water sharing treaty.
   But Indian Kashmir officials say the 450-megawatt Baglihar project on the Chenab River in south Kashmir does not contravene the pact and could go a long way to ending routine 12-hour blackouts plaguing the Himalayan state.
   ‘The work on the project is continuing as we are not doing anything outside the parameters of the treaty,’ a senior state official said.
   The row over the Baglihar Dam has been an irritant in the ongoing peace process between the South Asian nuclear rivals who have fought three wars, two over the disputed region of Kashmir which both hold in part but claim in full.
   The announcement by the World Bank came after the two countries ended three days of talks in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore Tuesday with no agreement on the Baglihar dam. But Jamaat Ali Shah, head of the Pakistani team, said its design would be ‘further discussed in New Delhi in the last week of May.’
   Pakistan says it never approved the project’s design as stipulated under the Indus Water Treaty and raised the issue with the World Bank which brokered the agreement.
   The World Bank named a Swiss national, Raymond Lafitte, as a neutral expert to ‘address differences’ over the project between India and Pakistan, the Bank’s website said Wednesday. Lafitte is a civil engineer and professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
   ‘(Lafitte) will be asked to make a finding on a ‘difference’ between the two governments concerning the construction of the Baglihar project,’ it said.
   ‘Both India and Pakistan have found Professor Lafitte suitably qualified as a Neutral Expert. His findings will be made known in time. Under the terms of the Indus Waters Treaty, his determination will be final and binding.’
   The treaty bars India from interfering with the flow of the three rivers feeding Pakistan—the Indus, the Chenab and the Jhelum—but allows it to generate electricity from them.
   The treaty is one of the nuclear-armed South Asian rivals’ most enduring agreements and has survived wars between them.
   Kashmiri power authorities insist the project, on which work began in April 1999 and is due to be completed next year; will not store water, thus cutting off the flow to Pakistan.
   ‘We have not violated the treaty. We are following it religiously,’ says Kashmir’s power minister Mohammed Sharief Niaz.

Kuala Lumpur Malaysia is considering whipping convicts more in exchange for shorter jail sentences in a bid to combat overcrowding in prisons and cut costs, the senate was told Thursday.
   The plan is among eight alternatives being studied by the government, the deputy internal security minister, Noh Omar, was quoted as saying by the official Bernama news agency.
   The government spends more than 409 million ringgit (107.63 million dollars) a year on prisons, he said.
   ‘The cost of each prisoner is 35 ringgit a day and there are 32,464 prisoners in the country. The cost includes spending on food, rehabilitation, training, clothes, guards, equipment and others.’
   The government was also considering other alternatives including allowing the payment of fines in instalments for light sentences and sending mentally ill prisoners direct to mental hospitals, he said.
   Malaysian law prescribes whipping as a punishment for a wide range of crimes.
   Meanwhile, a bill has been introduced in the US Senate seeking renewal of sanctions on Myanmar, with a senator urging the UN chief, Kofi Annan to take firm action against the military-ruled state.
   ‘While I welcome UN Secretary General Kofi Annans personal comments in support of freedom in Burma, the time for talk is over,’ said Senator Mitch McConnell, using Myanmar’s old name.
   The second-ranking Republican in the Senate made the remarks after introducing together with five other senators a bill to renew sanctions against Myanmar, including an import ban and visa restrictions on officials from the military junta and affiliated groups.
   ‘The UN must act on Burma – in New York. It is past time for the UN to discuss and debate the myriad threats Burma poses to the region. What are they waiting for?’ said McConnell, a longtime critic of the military regime.
   The bill, proposed Tuesday, would renew a complete ban on all imports from Myanmar until the president, George W Bush, determines and certifies to Congress that it has made substantial and measurable progress on a number of democracy and human rights issues.
   The United States halted new investments to Myanmar in 1997 and imposed bans on financial transactions and imports in 2003.

Taiwan on Thursday condemned China for trying to block its latest bid to join the World Health Organisation, saying the move was against the spirit of an agreement reached with Beijing earlier this month.
   ‘China... attempted to persuade our allies not to make proposals or show support for us and this shows that its previous statement of helping Taiwan participate in the WHO was not credible,’ the foreign ministry said in a statement.
   The Chinese president, Hu Jintao, in a joint statement released with Taiwan’s opposition leader Lien Chan from the Kuomintang earlier this month, agreed to would push for cross-strait negotiations on ‘Taiwan’s participation in international activities,’ especially its aim to join the world health body.
   But China had sent formal notices to Taiwan’s diplomatic allies ahead of the World Health Assembly meetings scheduled next week in Geneva urging them not to back the island’s bid to become an observer, the ministry said.

Two endangered Bengal tiger cubs breastfed for weeks by a Myanmar woman have died of dehydration, a report said Thursday.
   The two cubs, a male and a female, were taken from their mother Noah Noah after she killed the third cub in her litter in March.
   Hla Htay, 40, a relative of a Yangon Zoological Gardens staffer, stepped in when she learned the cubs needed breast milk to survive.
   But the cubs had trouble digesting human breastmilk, which combined with the grinding heat here proved fatal, Khin Maung Win, chief veterinarian at the Yangon zoo, told Interview Journal.
   ‘The weather is too hot. The tiger cubs were not a month old when they stopped receiving their mother’s milk,’ he told the Myanmar-language weekly.
   ‘They just had the human mother breastfeeding, but their livers could not process the human milk. We tried to treat them,’ he said.

A Japanese man allegedly chained a teenage girl with a dog collar for more than three months and repeatedly raped and beat her after meeting her in an Internet chatroom, police said Thursday.
   Yasuyoshi Kobayashi—who at age 24 has been married and divorced four times—was arrested Wednesday nearly a year after the crime when the traumatised girl came forward to police.
   The girl, who is now 19, travelled from the western province of Hyogo to Tokyo to see Kobayashi in March last year after he threatened over the Internet to send gangsters to her home if she did not obey him, police said.
   He allegedly kept her in hotels and his apartment in a dog collar, demanding she address him as ‘master’ and repeatedly raping her and assaulting her in an ordeal he photographed with his mobile telephone, a police official said.
   Kobayashi pretended he had guards to dissuade the girl from leaving and he would call her home in Hyogo to assure her family that everything was fine.
   The girl was rescued in June 2004 after she escaped from his apartment and called for help from a shop. Jiji Press said the teenager was visibly worn out and has begun balding.

Iran’s intention to restart sensitive nuclear activities earlier frozen under a deal with the European Union is ‘legitimate’ and will not alter Russia’s nuclear cooperation with the Islamic state, a Russian nuclear official said.
   ‘The fact that Iran has restarted conversion will not have an impact on nuclear cooperation between Russia and Iran,’ said the official.
   ‘This does not threaten international security because this uranium will be used for peaceful ends and under the strict IAEA control,’ the official said Thursday, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
   ‘It is legitimate and legal,’ she said, adding that differences between Russia and the United States regarding Moscow’s nuclear cooperation with Iran were ‘narrowing.’
   The official’s comments came after a top Iranian nuclear official said the country was set to announce the resumption of ‘a noticeable part’ of uranium conversion work, a precursor to uranium enrichment.
   A European diplomat said in Tehran that such a move would automatically trigger referral of the Iranian nuclear issue to the United Nations Security Council.
   ‘The Iranians are well aware of the consequences,’ the diplomat said. ‘If they do decide to resume conversion, or any other activity linked to the process of enrichment ... the matter will be sent to the United Nations Security Council.’
   In a newspaper interview published Thursday, the head of Russia’s atomic energy agency, Alexander Rumyantsev, said Russia planned to make its first delivery of nuclear fuel to Iran at the end of the year or early next year.
   Russia and Iran signed an agreement in February under which Iran agreed that all spent nuclear fuel from the civilian reactor being built at Bushehr under Russian direction would be repatriated directly to Russia for reprocessing.
   ‘They have to start to fire it up in mid-2006,’ Rumyantsev said, referring to the Bushehr reactor. ‘The fuel has to be at the plant six months before that.’
   Under the accord between Russia and Iran signed in February, Russia is to send nearly 100 tonnes of fuel to Iran in several consignments under IAEA supervision. Tehran initially rejected the condition that it repatriate to Russia the spent nuclear fuel, but relented after two years of negotiations.
   ‘All the necessary precautions have been made in line with international standards,’ Rumyantsev said.
   The United States alleges that the Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran is part of a cover for weapons development.
   Washington is convinced that Iran is seeking to build atomic weapons—charges that Tehran denies—and has been trying to convince Moscow to halt its nuclear cooperation.
   Three EU countries—Britain, France and Germany—have been leading efforts since last year to persuade Tehran diplomatically to drop any activities in the treatment of uranium that could result in acquisition of capacity to build a nuclear weapon.
   But a vice president and head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, told state television, that Iran intended to resume some activities that it had suspended under a deal with the EU countries.

He can’t just blame the Democrats. Some lawmakers in president Bush’s own party are giving him an increasingly hard time over everything from Social Security to a free-trade pact for Central America to his plan to ease immigration laws. It may be an early lame-duck warning for his presidency.
   Bush returned from a celebratory trip to Europe to a domestic agenda badly in need of his quick attention. And one of his chores is to shore up GOP support where possible.
   ‘The president stays in regular contact with members of Congress, congressional leaders, about how to move forward on our shared priorities,’ the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said Wednesday.
   But some of those priorities are fraught with disagreement, and others are not as shared as the White House might like.
   The Senate is racing toward a constitutional confrontation over a proposal by senate majority leader, Bill Frist, to force a rules change on filibusters to clear the way for votes on Bush’s judicial nominations.
   The move is a top priority for most party conservatives. But the upending of a long-standing Senate tradition is not viewed enthusiastically by all Republicans.
   Also, the Senate is moving toward approval of a giant highway bill that exceeds the spending ceiling set by the White House, possibly setting the stage for Bush’s first veto.
   Misgivings by four Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee triggered a three-week postponement of a vote on the nomination of John Bolton to be UN ambassador.
   Momentum seemed to be growing behind Bolton on the eve of an expected committee vote on Thursday, but only after fierce lobbying by the president’s team of fellow Republicans.
   Meanwhile, partisan acrimony has gotten so strong that Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada recently called Bush ‘a loser.’
   ‘Maybe it was a poor choice of words,’ Reid later said. ‘But I want everyone within the sound of my voice to know how displeased I am with what this White House is doing to our country.’
   Bush’s poll number has declined into the mid 40 per cent range. And the situation in Iraq remains difficult. A string of suicide bombings struck several Iraqi cities Wednesday, killing more than 60 people and wounding more than 100.
   Bush’s troubles in moving his major proposals through Congress are aggravated by having to do a difficult dance: angling for support from Republican moderates and reaching out to Democrats on initiatives like Social Security without driving away members of his conservative base.

The British prime minister, Tony Blair, refused to be drawn Thursday on his future in office following calls by some members of his Labour Party to step down following last week’s election victory.
   ‘I’ve got nothing to add to what I said during the election campaign,’ Blair told reporters at a press conference in response to a question on whether he planned to serve a complete third term in office.
   ‘That remains the position,’ he added. ‘I think the party and the country in a sense just wants to see us get on to business now.’
   Last year, Blair announced that if Labour was re-elected, he planned to serve a third full term before retiring, with most pundits expecting his popular finance minister, Gordon Brown, to take over then.
   However, since last week’s general election, when Labour was returned for a historic third straight term but with a sharply reduced majority, a series of Labour lawmakers have called on Blair to go much sooner, saying his unpopular decision to back the US-led Iraq war had been an electoral liability.
   Speaking to Labour members of Parliament on Wednesday, Blair assured lawmakers he would leave before the next election—without specifying exactly when—but warned that the party needed a ‘stable and orderly transition’.

Russian troops killed up to 40 Chechen rebels in counter-terrorist operations in the Caucasus while Moscow hosted world leaders for celebrations marking victory in Second World War, an army spokesman said on Thursday. Fearing a repeat of Chechen attacks aimed at past May 9 Victory Day parades; authorities introduced tough security measures across Russia before the arrival of more than 50 heads of state, including the president, Bush.
   But army spokesman general, Ilya Shabalkin, denied any link between the Moscow events and the Chechnya security operation, which ran from May 5 to May 10.
   ‘The special operation was not linked to Victory Day festivities. It was a number of local special operations, mainly in mountainous regions,’ he said by telephone. ‘We are searching for rebels and we kill those who show resistance.’
   The three days of summitry and ceremony passed smoothly in the Russian capital—much of which was sealed off to the public—and the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany was marked across the country without the bloodshed of previous years. A bombing in a Grozny stadium on May 9 last year killed the Moscow-backed leader of Chechnya and six others, while a bombing on the same day in 2002 in the neighbouring region of Dagestan killed 45 people.
   Rebels have fought Russian rule for a decade, with attacks on Russian forces a daily occurrence in Chechnya and often in neighbouring regions on Russia’s southern border. The war has killed thousands of Russian soldiers and tens of thousands of Chechens.

The Iraqi people are suffering from a desperate lack of jobs, housing, health care and electricity, according to a survey by Iraqi authorities and the United Nations released on Thursday.
   The planning minister, Barham Saleh, during a ceremony in Baghdad, blamed the dire living conditions in most of the country on decades of war but also on the shortcomings of the international community.
   ‘The survey, in a nutshell, depicts a rather tragic situation of the quality of life in Iraq,’ Saleh said in English at the event, attended by the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan’s deputy representative in Iraq, Staffan de Mistura.
   The 370-page report entitled ‘Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004’ was conducted over the past year on a representative sample of 22,000 families in all of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
   Eighty-five per cent of Iraqi households lacked stable electricity when the survey was carried out. Only 54 per cent had access to clean water and 37 per cent to sewage.
   ‘If you compare this to the situation in the 1980s, you will see a major deterioration of the situation,’ said the newly-appointed minister, pointing out that 75 per cent of households had clean water two decades ago.
   The report ‘shows a contrast between the potential of Iraq, with all the human and natural resources that we have, and the unfortunate lack of development and lack of quality of life we are suffering from,’ Saleh said.
   The survey put the unemployment figure at 18.4 per cent, but Saleh explained that ‘under-employment’ topped the 50-per cent mark.

Hate crimes against Muslims soared in the United States last year, according to a report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations released Wednesday.
   The number of hate crimes against members of the Muslim community jumped 52 per cent last year, from 93 incidents in 2003 to 141 in 2004. And the number of violent acts, discriminatory incidents and cases of harassment against Muslims rose 49 per cent between 2003 and 2004, to 1,522.
   CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad called the figures alarming and urged President George W Bush—‘whose statements after the (September 11, 2001) attacks were so important in helping to protect the well-being of the American Muslim community—to once again speak out against Islam phobic attitudes.’
   The annual report noted that workplace discrimination against Muslims was less
   prevalent, while incidents involving police were on the rise, in the form of unjustified arrests and searches and
   abusive interrogations.
   Among the factors contributing to the rise in incidents, CAIR said, were the ‘lingering impact’ of fears following the September 11 attacks, heightened awareness of civil rights issues within the Muslim community and a ‘general increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric.’
   ‘These disturbing figures come as no surprise given growing Islam phobic sentiments and a general misperception of Islam and Muslims,’ CAIR’s legal director, Arsalan Iftikhar, who authored the report, said in a statement.

Thirty-four military bases shut down since 1988 are on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list of worst toxic waste sites — most of them for at least 15 years — and not one is completely cleaned up.
   As the latest base-closing commission begins its work, an examination by The Associated Press shows EPA concerned with incomplete pollution cleanups at more than 100 Defence Department facilities. Other military-related cleanups are being led solely by states.
   Of the $23.3 billion in costs from four previous rounds of base closures and realignments, the Pentagon has spent $8.3 billion so far on pollution cleanups and other compliance with environmental laws, congressional investigators say. EPA officials say it will be at least a decade before many are completed — at a cost the government estimates will reach an additional $3.6 billion.
   They anticipate more military facilities will be added to the Superfund list after the newest round of base closings is completed. The Pentagon plans to give a list of recommendations to the Base Realignment and Closure Commission on Friday, the first major step in the process.
   ‘A large majority of these (Superfund) sites will have all the remedies in place by 2015,’ said Jim Woolford, head of EPA’s Federal Facilities Restoration & Reuse Office. ‘It may take longer to remove them from the list because of groundwater contamination or unexploded ordnance.’
   However, it is the cleanups still under way that pose the most frequent obstacles to the Pentagon’s ability to cut costs by converting an installation to other uses.

Saddam Hussein rewarded two veteran European politicians by allowing them to collect profits as middlemen in oil sales, a new US Senate report claims.
   The Senate names British MP George Galloway and former French minister Charles Pasqua, but gives no evidence either actually received money.
   Saddam Hussein ‘used the programme to reward his political allies like Pasqua and Galloway,’ a leading senator said.
   Galloway and Pasqua both deny being involved in Iraqi oil sales.
   ‘I have never profited from anything related to Iraq,’ said Galloway, formerly a Labour member of parliament but re-elected as a MP for his own Respect party last week after campaigning against the Iraq war.
   Saddam Hussein misused the oil-for-food programme to reward people he hoped would work against UN sanctions
   He told the BBC it was ‘patently absurd’ to think that, as an MP being closely watched by UK security services, he could have become an ‘oil billionaire’ on the sly.
   And he blasted the Senate investigation, which he said had never written to him, spoken to him, or responded to his offers to testify.
   ‘This cannot possibly be called an investigation,’ he said.
   ‘This is a lickspittle Republican committee, acting on the wishes of George W Bush.’
   Both Republican and Democrat senators signed off on the report, which followed a year of inquiries by the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations.
   Pasqua – a French senator who served as interior minister in the 1980s and 1990s – rejected the allegations afresh after the report was published.
   ‘I deny them one more time,’ he said in a statement.

The military has reprimanded and fined Army Colonel, Thomas Pappas, a key figure in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, but will not bring criminal charges against him, a US Army official said on Wednesday.
   Pappas, the former top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, became the second senior officer to be disciplined in the scandal over the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the jail on the outskirts of Baghdad.
   Following an administrative disciplinary proceeding in Germany on Monday, Pappas was given a letter of reprimand by major general, Bennie Williams and was docked $8,000 for committing dereliction of duty at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and early 2004, said the Army official, who asked not to be named.
   The official said no criminal charges will be brought against Pappas in light of the administrative punishment.
   The Army found Pappas committed dereliction of duty in two ways, the official said, but was not specifically found to have ordered prisoner abuse.

CNG vehicles to protect Taj Mahal
India will launch gas-powered vehicles to reduce pollution in Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, and Lucknow, a statement from the country’s top energy companies said on Thursday. The white marble of the onion-domed Taj Mahal, India’s most famous monument, has turned yellow over the years due to pollution from vehicle fumes, factories, an oil refinery near Agra and funeral pyres at a nearby cremation ground. The use of compressed natural gas for vehicles is expected to reduce pollution and cut petrol and diesel consumption as it has done in Delhi and Bombay where buses and taxis use gas-powered engines.
— Reuters

Two dead, 50 hurt in Kashmir attack
Two women died and at least 50 people, including 20 children, were hurt Thursday in a grenade attack by Islamic rebels outside a missionary school in Indian Kashmir’s summer capital, police said. The blast near the school in Srinagar’s commercial heart was the second rebel attack in two days in the city, the urban centre of a 15-year revolt against Indian rule. ‘Two women have died of their injuries in hospital and at least 50 people, of whom 20 are school children, have been hurt in the grenade attack by rebels,’ said a police spokesman.
— AFP

Al-Qaeda suspect to face trial in Pakistan
An alleged terrorist reputed to be al-Qaeda’s No 3 will face trial in Pakistan before Islamabad considers handing him to the United States, Pakistan’s foreign minister said Thursday. Pakistani intelligence agents captured Libyan Abu Farraj al-Libbi last week after a shootout. He is suspected of being behind two bombings targeting Pakistan’s president and was also allegedly involved in a plot to kill its prime minister. The Pakistan foreign minister, Khursheed Kasuri, said there was no chance of al-Libbi being handed to the Americans before he is prosecuted in Pakistan.
— AFP

Thailand moves to end martial law in south
Thailand’s government moved Thursday toward ending martial law in southern provinces wracked by an Islamic insurgency, proposing draft legislation that would boost civilian powers to respond to the unrest. Martial law has been enforced in most districts of the southern provinces of Songkhla, Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani since January 5, 2004, one day after a raid on an army depot triggered more than 16 months of unrest that has claimed more than 670 lives.
— AFP

Taiwan opposition leader, Hu meet
A visiting Taiwanese opposition leader said Thursday that Chinese communist leaders agreed that military conflict with Taiwan can be ‘effectively avoided’ so long as the self-ruled island doesn’t pursue formal independence. James Soong made the comment after becoming the second Taiwanese opposition figure in a month to meet with the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, whose government is trying to discourage Taiwan from trying to make its independence permanent. Soong and Hu also issued a joint statement pledging to work together to promote an end to hostilities between the two sides, which split in 1949 amid civil war.
— AP