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Protests against the alleged desecration of the Qur’an at Guantanamo Bay engulfed the Islamic world, with seven Afghans dying in fresh violence and Palestinians, Pakistanis and Indonesians taking to the streets.
   The worst anti-US demonstrations since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 entered a fourth day in Afghanistan, spreading to new cities across the conservative nation where American troops maintain a heavy presence.
   Afghan troops shot dead three people as protesters tried to storm the governor’s house in southern Ghazni province, bringing the number of people killed since Tuesday to 14, officials said.
   The police chief of Ghazni was shot in the chest and US forces airlifted him to the capital Kabul for medical treatment where his condition was not known, witnesses and doctors said. Eighteen other people were injured.
   Another three died when around 1,000 people took to the streets near Faizabad, capital of the north-eastern province of Badakshan. Twenty-two people, including three policemen, were also injured and protesters torched the offices of three foreign aid agencies, provincial officials said.
   The army also opened fire on some 300 protesters in the south-eastern city of Gardez, killing one and injuring at least three, doctors and officials said. Some protesters were carrying guns, according to the provincial security chief.
   New protests broke out for a second day in the capital Kabul although witnesses said only around 50 people turned out and they ended peacefully.
   Afghan officials have suggested that elements opposed to the US-backed effort to rebuild the war-ravaged country have coordinated the violence.
   The US has promised an inquiry and action against soldiers at the US detention centre at Guantanamo. According to Newsweek magazine they defiled copies of the Muslim holy book by leaving them in toilet cubicles and stuffing one down a lavatory to rattle Muslim prisoners.
   The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, used an appearance before a Senate committee on Thursday to make a special statement to Muslims in America and across the world, and also promised a full investigation.
   Muslims believe that the Qur’an contains the actual words of God.
   In neighbouring Pakistan, a key ally in what the US calls its war on terror, hundreds of Islamic hardliners burned US flags and effigies of the president, George W Bush, witnesses said.
   Demonstrators in several cities, including the capital Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore, chanted ‘Death to America’ while speakers at rallies called by an alliance of religious parties demanded the US government punish those involved in the reported desecration of the Muslim holy book.
   About 6,000 Afghan refugees also staged a demonstration in a camp near the conservative north-western city of Peshawar, before dispersing peacefully.
   Speaking in Sydney, the Pakistani foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, called for severe punishment for any US soldiers proved to have been involved in any abuse of the Qur’an.
   ‘Even the worst enemy of the United States could not harm the image of the United States in the Muslim world as effectively as they’ve done if this is correct,’ he said.
   Jakarta, capital of the world’s most populous Muslim nation Indonesia, saw a rally at a mosque by hundreds of people protesting against the alleged sacrilege.
   Students in the Indonesian city of Makassar on Sulawesi island took to the streets and searched hotels and the airport for any Americans, Detikcom news portal reported. No Americans were found.
   At the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, around 2,000 Palestinian demonstrators held aloft copies of the Qur’an and Hamas flags as they marched through the streets in a protest organised by the radical Islamist group.
   American and Israeli flags were burnt during the demonstration following the main weekly Muslim prayers, while 400 mounted a similar protest in the West Bank city of Hebron.
   Muslim Arabs from Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Iraq also expressed anger, both with Washington and their own leaders for their impotence in the face of the alleged desecration.

North Korea said Saturday it will return to inter-Korean dialogue, raising hopes here that Pyongyang might come back to six-party talks on ending its nuclear weapons programme.
   North Korea’s chief delegate to the high-level inter-Korean talks, senior councillor of the Cabinet Kwon Ho Ung, called for the resumption of the government-to-government talks after a 10-month hiatus.
   In a message sent to his South Korean counterpart unification minister Chung Dong-Young, Kwon suggested the two sides hold talks at the vice ministerial level early next week in the North Korean border town of Kaesong.
   ‘We have the pleasure to notify you that we will send three delegates and three suite members to Kaesong from May 16 to 17 for the working-level talks,’ Kwon was quoted as saying in the message.
   Kwon said the move was ‘prompted by the desire to put relations between the two Koreas on a normal track in the idea of ‘by our nation itself’ at an early date,’ according to Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency.
   The South Korean vice unification minister, Rhee Bong-Jo said he would lead a three-member delegation to the preliminary talks at Kaesong.
   ‘We hope that the resumption of inter-Korean dialogue will help facilitate the efforts to reopen the six-party talks,’ Rhee said, adding that ways of improving inter-Korean relations would also be on the agenda.
   Pyongyang has persistently refused to discuss the nuclear issue at inter-Korean talks, arguing it must be dealt with at talks between Pyongyang and Washington.

The United Nations and the United States have expressed concern over the flare-up of violence on the border between Israel and Lebanon, with Washington calling for Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah militia to be disarmed.
   Violence broke out on the border Friday for the first time in four months as preparations quickened for Lebanese parliamentary elections in two weeks’ time.
   The flare-up underlined the dangers of a power vacuum in Lebanon after Syria ended its 29-year troop deployment last month.
   An Israeli military spokeswoman reported no fewer than nine explosions near Israeli positions in the disputed Shebaa Farms district.
   Israeli tanks, artillery and warplanes retaliated, destroying four Hezbollah positions across the border, she added.
   Lebanese police said Israeli gunners began the clashes with heavy machine-gun fire on the village of Kfarshouba early afternoon, which damaged a house but caused no casualties.
   Israel denied the Kfarshouba shooting.
   Hezbollah said it retaliated by firing two shells on Rweissat al-Alam, an Israeli position in the Shebaa Farms.
   Israeli jetfighters launched two successive retaliatory raids while helicopter gunships, tanks and artillery pounded nearby border areas, police said.
   There were no immediate reports of casualties.
   The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, called on ‘all parties to exercise the utmost restraint in a situation that continues to be fragile, not just in Lebanon but also in the wider region,’ his spokesman said.
   ‘The secretary general once again urges all parties to fully respect the Blue Line (border), which was unanimously determined by the Security Council, and reminds them that one violation cannot justify another,’ he said.
   In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the ‘United States is deeply concerned about the recent violence along the Blue Line.
   ‘We call on all parties to immediately cease all attacks and to exercise calm and restraint.
   ‘This is an especially sensitive and critical time for the Lebanese people, who will be voting in parliamentary elections beginning on May 29,’ Boucher said.
   ‘This opportunity for reaffirming democracy in Lebanon must not be undermined by militias pursuing their own agendas.
   ‘All militias in Lebanon, including Hezbollah, must disarm and disband, and the Lebanese government must extend and exercise its sole and exclusive control over all of Lebanese territory,’ Boucher said.
   Resolution 1559, passed by the UN Security Council last September, demanded the disarming of all militia groups in Lebanon.
   The retaliatory raids were the first since air attacks on January 17 wounded two Lebanese civilians, reviving the lingering tension that has prevailed in the region since Israel ended its 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000.
   The foreign minister, Mahmud Hammud, blamed Israel for the rising tension
   and urged the ‘international community and the United Nations to act to secure regional stability.’
   The prime minister, Nagib Miqati, contacted the UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon in a bid to ‘ease tensions’, the official ANI news agency said.
   Tension had been rising for several days, exacerbated by two blasts in 24 hours on the Israeli side that prompted stern warnings from Israel that it held the Lebanese government responsible for maintaining peace in the area.
   ‘Israel holds Lebanon responsible for what happens on its border,’ said the defence minister, Shaul Mofaz.

China struggled through its first ever examination by a UN human rights committee after a panel reviewed evidence of forced labour, forced abortions, exploitation of children, evictions, discrimination against internal migrants, low wages and other violations.
   The UN Committee on Economic and Social Rights, which examines compliance with a treaty China ratified in 2001, urged Beijing to take action to tackle more than 27 major points of concern in its concluding report released here.
   After cross-examining a Chinese government delegation last week, the panel of legal experts welcomed new legislation on labour security, minimum wages, new social security schemes, a rural poverty relief plan and measures to tackle HIV/AIDS.
   But its 30-point list of recommendations urged the Chinese government to abolish the use of forced labour as a punishment, to ‘effectively’ enforce the prohibition of child labour and to tackle discrimination against asylum seekers, Chinese migrants, women and the handicapped.
   The panel also said it was ‘deeply concerned about the high rate of abortion of girl foetuses’ and reports of ‘forced abortions and forced sterilisations imposed on women... by local officials’.
   The report noted ‘the
   persistence of gender inequalities... particularly with
   regard to employment and participation in decision-making’ and the disproportionate impact of redundancies on women
   Child labour in hazardous occupations such as mining was also targeted.
   ‘The committee is also of the view that the ‘Diligent work and economical study’ programme for schoolchildren constitutes exploitative child labour,’ the panel said.

Ignoring laws that ban child marriages, hundreds of children, some as young as seven years old, were married this week in a centuries-old custom across central and western India.
   Held to coincide with ‘Akkha Teej,’ a summer festival believed to be auspicious for weddings, the marriages took place mostly in small towns and villages, where the laws have little effect and officials could do little more than record the names of the children being married.
   Hundreds of children were married this week in Rajgarh, about 65 miles northwest of Bhopal, the capital of the central state of Madhya Pradesh.
   ‘The law to stop child marriage is not powerful enough,’ Girija Mewada, a police constable posted at a Hindu temple in Rajgarh, said Wednesday, as she noted down the names of young couples who went to the temple for wedding blessings.
   India law prohibits marriage for women younger than 18 and men under age 21, and parents who break the law — nearly all such marriages are arranged by parents — can be jailed for up to three months.
   But while the practice is dying out among urban, educated people, child marriages remain common in rural areas. There, it is seen as being beneficial for both families: The bride’s parents don’t have to support her for very long, and the groom’s family gains an unpaid servant, often treated as virtual slave, who usually brings a dowry.
   The children remain in their parents’ houses, though, until the girl reaches puberty, after which she is brought to the groom’s home with great ceremony and the marriage is consummated.
   On Wednesday, 11-year-old Soram Singh peeked shyly from behind her veil a couple of hours after her marriage to Bheeram Singh, 16, a student in the nearby government school. Singh is a common surname in the town, and the two are not related.
   Dressed in a new blue-collared polyester sari and weighed down with heavy silver jewellery, Soram said she was angry with her parents for marrying her to Bheeram, whom she met for the first time that day.
   Something of a tomboy, she loves playing tug-of-war and regularly picks fights with boys, whom she believes to be quarrelsome.
   ‘I know what happens after marriage,’ she said angrily.
   Her new husband, though, was defiant.
   ‘I have got married, I haven’t committed any crime,’ Bheeram said.
   Police and social welfare department officials say they are helpless to prevent such marriages. India’s Child Marriage Restraint law passed in 1978 tightened earlier legislation aimed at stopping child marriages, but does not empower police to make arrests without warrants or magistrates’ orders.
   It can also be dangerous to challenge such weddings, which are deeply rooted in many villages’ traditions.
   Earlier this week, a welfare officer underwent 18 hours of surgery to reattach her arms, which were hacked off by an angry father with whom she had argued. She had urged him not to marry off his young daughter to a teenage boy.
   Political leaders in Madhya Pradesh say a sustained campaign is needed to persuade people to give up their age-old customs.
   ‘Nobody should expect the evil of child marriage to be eradicated overnight or just by launching an awareness drive,’ said Archana Chitnis, state minister for women and child development.

Authorities in China have launched a crackdown on the business operations of recently freed Muslim Uighur dissident Rebiya Kadeer and attempted to detain her son who has gone into hiding, rights groups said Friday.
   Two ethnic Uighur staff at the Rebiya Kadeer Trade Centre in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in northwest China were detained late Wednesday and two employees of a bank involved in providing her a business loan were also taken into custody, they said.
   Chinese security agents have reportedly beaten and detained an unknown number of Kadeer’s family associates.
   The United States has expressed concern to China over the crackdown, a State Department official said.
   ‘We are aware of such reports and have raised our concerns with the Chinese both here in Washington and in Beijing,’ the official said.
   Tom Lantos, ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee and co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, described the Chinese action as ‘brutal’ and ‘obviously in retaliation to Kadeer’s so bravely speaking out on behalf of the Uighur people.
   ‘Under the pretext of enforcing the law, the Chinese authorities are sending the message that anyone who dares to join the struggle against human rights violations will pay a price,’ he said.

Suspected Maoist rebels shot dead a former mayor in Nepal’s Itahari district southeast of the capital, police said Saturday.
   ‘Unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead Gitanidhi Rayamajhi in the Itahari market in front of his residence at around 6:45 pm Friday evening,’ police said.
   Rayamajhi, 32, was rushed to a local hospital in the district 540 kilometres of Kathmandu but later died of his injuries.
   Rayamajhi, a pro-Royal National Democratic Party supporter, was appointed as mayor of the Itahari municipality by the former Surya Bahadur Thapa-led government. He served as mayor for about six months until around a year ago.
   Though no one has claimed responsibility for the killing, police suspect Maoist rebels were behind the incident.
   However, the Maoists have yet to comment on the shooting.
   Nepal’s Maoist rebels last year shot dead two incumbent mayors in western and southern Nepal.
   The rebels have been fighting for a communist republic in Nepal since 1996 and so far the insurgency has already claimed more than 11,000 lives.

A military crackdown in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan left dozens dead as hardline president, Islam Karimov, blamed Islamic extremists Saturday for the violence and denied responsibility for the bloodshed.
   At least 40 to 50 bodies littered the streets and troops roamed the city in armoured vehicles, backed by helicopters, in search of gunmen, while witnesses spoke of up to 300 dead and accused soldiers of firing indiscriminately.
   On the main square, epicentre of the two-day bloodshed, an AFP journalist saw 20 bodies covered in sheets. Near a central cinema, the bodies of 20 to 30 men, both young and old, lay gathered together.
   Hundreds of people braved sporadic gunfire to gather in protest. ‘Down with Karimov who fires on his own people,’ the crowd shouted.
   Although no independent verification was immediately possible, several witnesses referred to seeing hundreds of corpses.
   A member of the Apelyatsiya human rights group in Andijan, Lutfula Shamsutdinov, said he had witnessed soldiers ‘loading 300 bodies into three trucks and a bus in the street opposite the cinema.’
   The claim was impossible to verify and access to the hospital blocked.
   ‘I have seen 200 bodies. It’s a real war,’ Abdul-Vakhid Gasurov said , while another resident, who only gave his first name, Bakhodir, claimed to have seen more than 300 bodies near the mayor’s office.
   A doctor earlier said there were ‘at least 50 dead’ and 96 wounded.
   In the capital Tashkent, Karimov said only about 30 people had died. He described the turmoil as part of a plot by the outlawed Hizb ut-Tahrir Islamic group to seize power in the ex-Soviet republic, which hosts a US airbase, and elsewhere in Central Asia.
   ‘Their aim is to unite the Muslims and establish a caliphate. Their aim is to overthrow the constitutional regime,’ Karimov, who has ruled Uzbekistan with an iron fist since the collapse of the Soviet Union, told journalists.
   ‘No one gave government forces the order to fire,’ he said in his first public comments since the violence.
   The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, told Karimov by telephone of his ‘serious concern’ over the risk of ‘destabilisation’ in Central Asia, the Kremlin said.
   The bloodshed started early Friday when between 60 and 100 armed men stormed the local prison to free 23 inmates accused of belonging to an illegal group related to Hizb ut-Tahrir. They also released some 2,000 other prisoners.
   Thousands of people in the city, located in the impoverished and densely populated Ferghana valley, had been demonstrating against the trial, which they said was based on charges trumped up by the government.
   After the prison break-out, the gunmen seized public buildings, while a crowd of about 5,000 supporters demonstrated outside against the government.
   Security forces began their counterattack by scattering that rally with gunfire, killing at least one person and wounding others, an AFP correspondent witnessed. Soldiers then fought to retake control of the centre.
   According to witnesses, soldiers also fired from armoured personnel carriers and military lorries at civilians demonstrating or fleeing the area.
   Witnesses said the bodies of 20 to 30 people seen by AFP near the central cinema were those of people trying to escape.
   ‘Soldiers started shooting from an APC. They finished off people who were lying on the ground,’ said Azim Karimov, 53, himself wounded in the legs.
   The crisis is one of the most serious to shake the authoritarian government in Uzbekistan since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
   Karimov’s government says it faces a danger of Islamic revolution. However, human rights groups and Western diplomats say he uses the issue to justify locking up thousands of ordinary Muslims. His regime is also widely accused of practising torture.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s national assembly adopted the country’s draft constitution as part of a process aimed at restoring stability in the central African nation.
   The text, which will later be put to a national referendum, was adopted with 348 deputies voting for it and five against, with eight abstentions among the 361 deputies present.
   The constitution, which has already been approved by the DRC senate, gives the president the authority to appoint and remove from office the prime minister, to dissolve the assembly, and to legislate by decree.
   The constitution seeks to lay the bases of a democratic regime in which there will be free elections for the first time in 40 years.There will be a large degree of decentralisation in a unitary state with a semi-presidential regime.
   Its adoption was a precondition for legislation making it possible to set a date for general elections.
   The draft replaces a transitional constitution which emerged from a peace deal reached in Pretoria in December 2002 by Congolese politicians. This provided for a transition period following a civil war lasting almost five years (1998-2003) which drew in half a dozen neighbouring states and caused, directly or indirectly, some three million deaths.
   The terms of the new constitution provide for the election by universal suffrage of a president for a five-year term renewable once.
   The minimum age for a presidential candidate is 30, opening the way for the current president, Joseph Kabila, 33, to run.
   The government will ‘define the nation’s policy acting in concert with the president.’
   The DRC will be split into 26 provinces instead of the present 11. This is seen as a concession to supporters of a greater degree of federalisation.
   The lower house introduced a number of amendments to the senate version, limiting presidential power and abolishing the death penalty.
   International observers had warned that an earlier draft gave the president too much power and gave the parliament insufficient ability to hold him to account.
   The version adopted Friday is aimed at appeasing the European Union, chief source of the DRC’s funding, which would be unhappy with a text that did not take account of its financial support and advice.

The Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, whose rule is being challenged by protesters in the eastern city of Andijan, is a Communist-era strongman who has run a repressive regime in this impoverished former Soviet republic for more than a decade.
   Dour and round-faced, the 67-year-old Karimov is considered to be one of the most autocratic leaders in the former Soviet Central Asian region.
   In a country of 24 million people which gained independence after the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, Karimov banned opposition parties from taking part in parliamentary election in December.
   The 67-year-old leader, an ally of Washington in the US-led war on terror who also enjoys unequivocal backing from Moscow, has succeeded in shutting down most independent media in a country where ‘making offensive statements’ about him leads to a prison term.
   Being found in possession of a simple tract of the outlawed Islamic Hizb ut-Tahrir, which seeks to create an Islamic state out of the Central Asian former Soviet republics, is also punishable with prison.
   Karimov is regularly accused of cautioning torture and police brutality, which the New York-based Human Rights Watch says is widespread here. Critics say Karimov uses his crackdown on Islamic extremism to silence any opposition to his rule.
   The former head of the Uzbek Communist Party and president of the Soviet Republic, Karimov was first elected in 1991 in a vote that most observers slammed as being neither free nor fair.
   Karimov, a mechanical engineering and economy graduate, had his stay in office extended a 1995 referendum and was re-elected in 2000.
   The presidential term has since been extended again from five to seven years.
   This mainly Muslim state looked set to become a regional leader due to its size, population, resources and location, but under Karimov’s strongly secular leadership it has retained much of its Soviet legacy.
   Soviet-style policies have contributed to poverty in rural regions, especially in the Ferghana Valley where Andijan is located, where women and children labour in the fields picking Uzbekistan’s white gold, cotton.
   A secretive leader who rarely smiles in public, Karimov’s hardline policies have also created friction between Uzbekistan and neighbouring Central Asian states.
   In a bid to ward off extremists, Uzbekistan unilaterally mined its borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, causing the deaths of both Kyrgyz and Tajik civilians.

Lebanon began the countdown Saturday for legislative polls, with 51 candidates, including the son of slain former premier Rafiq Hariri, competing for 19 seats in Beirut in the first phase of the vote, the interior ministry said.
   The vote in Beirut’s three districts will be held on May 29, and will continue over the rest of the country on the following three Sundays to choose a 128-seat parliament—the first since a Syrian troop pullout last month ended 29 years of domination.
   Individual candidates in Beirut had until midnight Friday to register and political party leaders are now expected to announce their electoral lists following consultations.
   The anti-Syrian opposition has been fractured amid last-minute bickering over the constituency boundaries for the elections. Opposition leaders agreed Thursday to draw up common lists of candidates for the elections.
   The Christians, led by the head of the Maronite Church, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, have flatly rejected polls being based on the Syrian-tailored 2000 electoral law, which they say favours Muslims and would return a pro-Syrian parliament.
   Meanwhile, the UN’s envoy for Lebanon, Terje Roed-Larsen, sent Sfeir a message ‘focussing on the importance of holding elections on time’, UN spokesman, Nejib Friji said.
   The international community fears that a delay in the polls would create a political vacuum in the aftermath of the Syrian troop pullout.

India’s growing economy has turned a local debate global as foreign tourists arrive in greater numbers and investment in call centres grows – is it Mumbai or Bombay? Chennai or Madras? Kolkata or Calcutta?
   Since independence in 1947, regional advocates in India have called for a change in many place names to reflect the wide linguistic and ethnic variations in the country of one-billion-plus people that spans the Himalayas in the north to the meeting of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea in the south.
   Those moves gained speed in 1995 when the right-wing Hindu Shiv Sena party in Maharastra state officially altered the name of India’s financial and entertainment capital from Bombay to Mumbai.
   Still, many reference
   sources outside of India have been slow to pickup on the change; others mix the old and the new.
   ‘When there are conflicting or variant names, National Geographic does not purport to be the arbiter or determiner of a single name,’ a spokeswoman for the society Cindy, Beidel, said in an e-mailed note.
   ‘For example, when a commonly recognised form of a well-known place-name, such as Bombay, differs from the official national form—Mumbai—the conventional form is listed in parenthesis: Mumbai (Bombay).’
   The Washington, DC-based National Geographic Society, famed for detailed maps of the world, said the rule of thumb for adopting a new name is whether it is widely accepted.
   The city name change, however, has not been totally endorsed locally.
   Jai Medh, manager with Tata-AIG Life Insurance, says he is comfortable using Bombay, though in official correspondence he calls the city Mumbai.
   ‘Whenever I am with friends or engaged in some informal talks, I end up saying Bombay as it is natural and there is history to it,’ he says.

Archaeologists at a dig on a farm in western Iran have uncovered a skeleton with a solid gold mask in a bronze coffin in what could be the first of a fresh wave of Parthian-era discoveries.
   ‘This finding is without precedence in our province,’ the head of the Lorestan cultural heritage organisation, Sirous Ebrahimi, said.
   ‘We were told by locals that some people were searching the area with metal detectors, so we rushed to the area, and sealed it off,’ he explained.
   He said the coffin dates back between 1,700 and 2,200 years.
   The Parthian Empire occupied all of modern Iran, Iraq and Armenia and parts of modern Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan from 247 BC to 224 AD.
   However, archaeologists have said little in terms of written primary sources have been uncovered, adding weight to the fresh discovery of artifacts.

Ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has decided to write his memoirs from an Iraqi jail where he is awaiting trial for more than 20 years of abuses, a British newspaper reported, quoting one of his lawyers.
   Giovanni di Stefano, a member of Hussein’s legal team,
   said Saddam decided recently to start writing about his childhood in Iraq, his early exile to Egypt and his military adventures in Iran and Kuwait, the Financial Times reported.
   He will try to embarrass the great powers that once saw him as a useful buffer against the expansionist ambitions of Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution; di Stefano was quoted as saying.
   He will tell how France and Britain betrayed him by also helping Iran’s Islamic republic during the 1980-1988 war with Iraq.
   ‘There will be quite considerable detail,’ di Stefano was quoted as saying.
   ‘The Americans (holding him) are relaxed about it and we’ve seen some of the translation.’
   Saddam faces a number of charges of crimes against humanity for his regime’s campaign against the Kurds and the brutal suppression of a Shia Muslim uprising in 1991.
   No date has been set for his trial.

Chen wins poll, boosts on
China stance
The Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan president, Chen Shui-bian, won an election on Saturday, securing a fresh mandate to pursue an independence-leaning policy toward rival China. Although the National Assembly poll was held for the sole purpose of ratifying constitutional reforms already approved by parliament, relations with China dominated the agenda as the vote followed bridge-building visits by opposition leaders to the mainland. The DPP won 42.52 per cent of votes to affirm its standing as Taiwan’s largest political party, figures from the Central Election Commission showed. The main opposition Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) finished with 38.92 per cent. ‘It helps ease pressure on Chen to improve relations with China,’ said Philip Yang, a professor of political science at National Taiwan University. ‘Chen can breathe a sign of relief.’

Taiwan reestablishes ties with Nauru
Taiwan Saturday re-established diplomatic ties with the South Pacific island of Nauru in a move likely to irritate China which regards Taiwan as part of its territory and attempts to exclude it from the international arena. The two sides signed a communique to formally resume relations, the foreign minister, Chen Tan-sun, told a press conference. Nauru president Ludwig Scotty met with his Taiwan counterpart Chen Shui-bian after the signing. Scotty’s predecessor, Rene Harris, had switched recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

Meningitis kills
21 in Delhi
At least 21 people have died from an outbreak of rare bacterial meningitis in the Indian capital, a health official said Saturday. The number of infections reported in and around New Delhi this month rose to 278 with the addition of 17 new cases Friday, said a municipal health office spokesman, who declined to be named. On Tuesday, the Indian health minister, A Ramadoss, said 16 people had died but there was no threat of a meningitis and meningococcemia epidemic. He assured parliament that efforts were under way to check any further spread of the illness.

Quake rocks
Sumatra island
An earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale rocked parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra island Saturday, renewing fears of a tsunami but there were no immediate reports of casualties or damage. The quake prompted residents in Nias island, where about 900 people were killed in a powerful quake on March 28, to run out of their homes in panic, said an AFP reporter in the island’s main town Gunung Sitoli. Rinto Mardiono, of the Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, said the quake struck at 12:05pm (0505 GMT), with its epicentre in the Indian Ocean 50 kilometres northwest of Padang, the capital of West Sumatra province. ‘It’s a deep earthquake so it won’t likely cause a tsunami,’ Mardiono said.
— AFP

300 African boys missing in London
Police have been unable to trace hundreds of young African boys who have disappeared from schools in London. The figures arose from a Metropolitan Police murder investigation sparked by the discovery of the torso of a young boy in the River Thames following a suspected ritualistic killing. In an attempt to identify the body, police asked every education authority in London how many black boys aged between four and seven had gone missing. In one three-month period between July and September 2001, some 300 children were found to have disappeared. There was nothing to suggest that they had been murdered, but a lack of immigration records made it impossible to trace them.
— AFP

Registration ends for Iran presidential
race
Candidates wishing to stand in Iran’s presidential election next month had their last chance Saturday to register for a battle likely to pit top hardliners against the more pragmatic conservative cleric and race favourite Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Among around 800 would-be presidents to sign up was hardliner Ali Larijani, a former state broadcast boss and advisor to the Islamic republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. ‘Hashemi Rafsanjani has made the situation different, but my presence and my registering means that I am here to stay,’ a dour-looking Larijani told reporters at the interior ministry, which closes its doors to prospective candidates later Saturday.
— AFP

Nine rebels killed in southeast Turkey
Turkish soldiers killed nine Kurdish rebels, two of them women, in an anti-rebel operation involving some 10,000 troops in eastern Turkey overnight, military officials said on Saturday. ‘Nine terrorists were killed last night in the village of Yaylagunu–in Tunceli province,’ one official said. The troops, backed up by helicopters, have been combing a wide, mountainous region for rebels for the past five days. Three soldiers were killed and four wounded on Friday in the nearby province of Bingol in an ambush by the Kurdistan Workers Party guerrillas. The operation has coincided with a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in the French city of Strasbourg which said the 1999 treason trial of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was unfair.
— Reuters

Brazil landless march on capital, US embassy
Thousands of landless Brazilian peasants marched toward the capital on Friday to protest against the president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s slow land reforms and US plans for Americas-wide free trade. The 12,000 Landless Workers Movement activists have occupied eight ranches on their 14-day trek from the city of Goiania and are now within 24 miles of the capital. Protesters will target the US embassy, Brazil’s central bank and finance ministry on Tuesday in a call for ‘social revolution’ against Lula’s market-driven economic policies and ‘US imperialism,’ leaders said.
— AFP

China legislator sentenced to death
A Chinese provincial legislator was sentenced to death after he murdered a pedestrian in a drunken rage by running him down with his sports utility vehicle, state press said Saturday. Hou Jianjun, 43, was sentenced to death by the Fushun intermediate court on Friday and ordered to pay 155,000 yuan (18,800 dollars) to the family of the murdered victim, Xinhua news agency reported. Hou was found guilty of running down Qiu Ji, 55, with his vehicle in northeastern Liaoning province in the wee hours of March 28 after Qiu had apparently brushed by the rear view mirror of the car and tried to run away, the report said. Qiu was run down on a sidewalk and later died due to a skull fracture and hemorrhaging, it said.
— AFP