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The White House said on Monday that a Newsweek report based on an anonymous source had damaged the US image overseas by alleging that US interrogators desecrated the Qur’an at Guantanamo Bay.
   Newsweek’s editor, Mark Whitaker, apologised to the victims on Sunday and said the magazine inaccurately reported that US military investigators had confirmed that personnel at the detention facility in Cuba had flushed the Muslim holy book down the toilet.
   ‘It’s puzzling that while Newsweek now acknowledges that they got the facts wrong, they refused to retract the story,’ White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. ‘I think there’s a certain journalistic standard that should be met and in this instance it was not.’
   The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League.
   Muslims in Afghanistan gave Washington three days to offer a response to the story. On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.
   ‘We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the US soldiers caught in its midst,’ Whitaker wrote in the magazine’s latest issue, due to appear on US newsstands on Monday.
   The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the information had come from a ‘knowledgeable government source’ who told Newsweek that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Qur’an down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.
   But Newsweek said the source later told the magazine he could not be certain he had seen an account of the Qur’an incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.
   Whitaker said Newsweek did not know if the reported toilet incident involving the Qur’an ever occurred. ‘As to whether anything like this happened, we just don’t know,’ he said in an interview. ‘We’re not saying it absolutely happened but we can’t say that it absolutely didn’t happen either.’
   The acknowledgment by the magazine came amid heightened scrutiny of the US media, which has seen a rash of news organisations fire reporters and admit that stories were fabricated or plagiarised.
   The Pentagon told the magazine the report was wrong last Friday, saying it had investigated earlier allegations of Qur’an desecration from detainees and found them ‘not credible.’
   Newsweek reported that Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita reacted angrily when the magazine asked about the source’s continued assertion that he had read about the Qur’an incident in an investigative report. ‘People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?’ DiRita told Newsweek.
   The May 9 report, which appeared as a brief item by Michael Isikoff and John Barry in the magazine’s ‘Periscope’ section, had a huge international impact, sparking the protests from Muslims who consider the Qur’an the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence.

Choosing a moment crucial to the future of Iraq, and amid weeks of explosive violence, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, made a surprise visit to Iraq Sunday, encouraging Iraq’s fledgling government to cope with the militancy and to swiftly draft a new, inclusive constitution.
   Sunni Arab leaders called Monday for an independent group—rather than parliament—to write Iraq’s new constitution, said minorities should play a greater role in drafting the basic law.
   The new prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, pledged Sunday to get more Sunnis involved in drafting the constitution after meeting with Rice during her surprise visit to Iraq.
   Parliament has just set
   up a committee to draft the constitution by a deadline of August 15.
   But depending on the results of those and other fault-line issues, the new constitution could also sow the seeds for future conflict among Iraq’s Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish groups.
   ‘The militancy is very violent, but you defeat insurgencies not just militarily - you defeat them by having a political alternative that is strong,’ Rice said. ‘The Iraqis are now going to have to intensify their efforts to demonstrate that, in fact, the political process is the answer for the Iraqi people.’
   The process is being overshadowed by a wave of insurgent attacks that have left more than 430 Iraqis dead since the government was announced little more than two weeks ago.
   Sunday Iraqi police found 34 bodies–many showing signs of torture and then execution–in three cities; five more were killed by a car bomb that targeted the governor of one province.

Sri Lanka’s president told international donors Monday that she will enter into an aid-sharing deal with Tiger rebels despite threats to her life from ‘within and outside’ her government.
   The president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, made the remarks at the opening of a two-day aid meeting attended by more than 125 participants including the World Bank, Japan and the United States aimed at helping the island nation rebuild its economy after two decades of civil war and last December’s tsunami.
   Kumaratunga vowed to the donors that the country would go ahead with a proposed deal to distribute tsunami aid in tandem with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam despite threats from opponents of the plan.
   ‘In the decisions we are called upon to take, the lives of some of us are in extreme danger,’ Chandrika said, adding that most of her coalition government supported the move.
   She said that there is a threat ‘from within’ her government as well, in an apparent reference to opposition to the aid distribution deal from her Marxist ally, the JVP, or People’s Liberation Front.
   The World Bank, speaking on behalf of the donors, said they supported her aim for a deal with the LTTE and noted it could boost the island’s peace hopes.
   ‘Development partners are strongly supportive and wish you success,’ said World Bank official Praful Patel.
   Chandrika assured the international donors, who had pledged two billion dollars for tsunami reconstruction and another billion for budgetary support, that she will also make good on a promise to work with the LTTE and strengthen peace moves.
   ‘Our commitment to this cause will be steadfast despite various objections from extremists, from various groups,’ Chandrika said. ‘I know and can assure all of you that the vast majority of Sri Lankan people stand with us.’
   Shortly after she ended her lengthy address, a Buddhist monk legislator from the opposition National Heritage Party, Athuraliya Ratana, made an impromptu speech denouncing the proposed joint mechanism.
   ‘The president has no right to have any deal with the LTTE,’ the monk said at the tightly-guarded meeting in the central hill resort.
   Chandrika made no reply to the monk, but in her speech delivered minutes earlier vowed that the government will press ahead with a new poverty reduction strategy coupled with peace moves.
   ‘We recognise that no economic development will be sustainable, no poverty reduction will be effective for more than a couple of years, unless there is political stability and peace in the country,’ she stressed.

The Pakistani leader general, Pervez Musharraf, has warned that ‘soft borders’ in Kashmir are a confidence-building measure but not a solution to the conflict, a report said Monday.
   ‘Soft borders are not a solution,’ Musharraf was quoted as telling Britain’s Financial Times. ‘Many magazines and articles I read from the Indian side, some of them misrepresent this soft as meaning a solution.’
   ‘I don’t see this as a solution at all. This may be a step towards confidence building, which could facilitate a solution,’ he said.
   Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars since independence from Britain in 1947 over the disputed Himalayan territory.
   Amid ongoing peace talks, both countries in April resumed bus services across the de facto border, the Line of Control.
   Musharraf at the time said the opening of the bus route represented a step toward a ‘soft border’ in Kashmir, picking up a phrase previously used by the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh.
   The soft border concept has since been seized upon by commentators on both sides and suggests the easing of border controls, although the term has not been precisely defined.

The violence in eastern Uzbekistan has thrown a spotlight on a little-known Islamic group called Akromiya, which critics charge is bent on violent revolt but others contend is simply an informal charitable network.
   The Uzbek crackdown, which has left dozens dead in the eastern city of Andijan, erupted after weeks of protests over a trial there of 23 local businessmen accused of membership in the group boiled over.
   Supporters of the defendants broke into a prison on Friday to free them along with 2,000 other prisoners. Soldiers moved against a subsequent mass rally in central Andijan, with witnesses accusing the troops of firing indiscriminately into the crowd.
   Akromiya is named after Akram Yuldashev, a former maths teacher who is now serving a 17-year jail term for alleged involvement in a spate of bombings in Uzbekistan’s capital Tashkent in 1999 that killed some 18 people.
   It is the latest in a series of Islamic groups that this Central Asian nation’s hardline regime has accused of trying to overthrow the government, accusations refuted by Akromiya followers.
   Akromiya sprouted after Yuldashev published a pamphlet in 1992 titled ‘The Way to Truth.’ The pamphlet says that Islam should peacefully and naturally return to being the way of life in Uzbekistan, according to human rights officials in Uzbekistan and university officials in France.
   The pamphlet also calls for people to provide charitable contributions as proscribed by the Qur’an, they said. But Uzbekistan’s autocratic leader Islam Karimov on Saturday claimed that Akromiya is an off-shoot of the better-known Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that advocates the creation of a caliphate, or Islamic state, by non-violent means in Central Asia.
   Karimov dismissed the claims of non-violence by Akromiya and Hizb ut-Tahrir.
   ‘Their aim is to overthrow the constitutional order,’ he said. Like Hizb ut-Tahrir, Akromiya aims to ‘unite Muslims and establish a caliphate following Sharia law.’
   He repeated oft-stated claims that the groups receive much of their backing from abroad and said that his security forces had intercepted telephone calls from neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan to insurgents in Andijan, which proved Akromiya’s foreign backing.
   But critics say the government’s claims about Akromiya do not stand up.
   ‘There’s nothing in (Yuldashev’s) book about using violence or challenging the constitutional order,’ said Talib Yakubov, a leading human rights campaigner in Tashkent.
   ‘These days people just laugh when they hear terms like ‘Wahhabism’ or ‘Hizb ut-Tahrir’—they don’t believe in them,’ Yakubov said.
   The current tensions gripping Uzbekistan flared last Friday, when the trial of the 23 local businessmen accused of Akromiya membership was due to reconvene amid expectations that the group would be sentenced.

North Korea held senior level talks with South Korea on Monday for the first time in nearly a year as cautious officials hoped the move could prompt a return to six-party talks on the nuclear standoff.
   North Korea called for the inter-Korean dialogue over the weekend, breaking a 10-month freeze in relations with
   South Korea, while at the same time ratchetting up its propaganda offensive on the United States.
   US and South Korea officials were encouraged by the move, but cautioned North Korea has a history of using improved ties with South Korea as a ploy to strengthen its bargaining position by driving a wedge between Seoul and Washington.
   Traditionally North Korea refuses to discuss the nuclear standoff at inter-Korean talks, saying the matter it is between Pyongyang and Washington.
   However, impoverished North Korea has asked for 500,000 tonnes of urgently  needed fertilizer from South Korea and that may induce them to listen with care to South Korea’s demand for new six-party talks.
   Christopher Hill, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was cautious about hopes for a major breakthrough from Kaesong, the town just over the border in North Korea where two days of talks began earlier Monday.
   ‘Of course, if it can help the six-party process, it will be very good. But we just don’t know,’ Hill said at the Foreign
   Ministry where he held separate talks with his South Korean counterpart, the deputy foreign minister, Song Min-Soon, and the foreign minister, Ban Ki-Moon.

Iran warned Monday that an emergency meeting next week with the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany may have little chance of resolving mounting tensions over its nuclear programme.
   The Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, said the May 23 talks may prove to be the ‘last round of negotiations’ between Iran and the so-called EU-3, insisting that Iran has already decided to resume controversial uranium activities.
   ‘The meeting will be held on May 23’ and involve the three European foreign ministers and Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani, Kharazi told reporters.
   ‘It will take place in a European capital. We are still in discussions on the venue.’
   Britain, France and Germany called a crisis meeting with Iran after Tehran announced it would resume uranium conversion work, a move that would have violated a November 2004 accord on freezing nuclear fuel work and opening long-term talks.
   Iran was also warned that breaking the deal would spark its referral to the UN Security Council.

A Swedish study is poised to sharpen debate about the safety of mobile phones, for it contends that users of digital phones in rural areas may be at greater risk of brain cancer.
   Incidence of brain tumours in rural zones of Sweden was found to be far higher among users of the Global System for Mobile Communication network than among rural non-users and also among GSM users in urban areas, the study says.
   Its authors say the link is troubling, although they acknowledge that the amount of data is low and wider research is needed to amplify the findings.
   As for the possible cause, the study suggests that mobile handsets in rural areas deliver a higher dose of electromagnetic radiation because they have to transmit a stronger signal to distant transmission masts.
   Transmission masts in urban areas are closer together, which means the phone’s signal and thus radiation level are correspondingly weaker, it says.
   The study, headed by Lennart Hardell, a professor of oncology at University Hospital in Orebro, is published on Tuesday in a specialist British journal, Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Bad weather kills
24 in China
At least 24 people have died in China after a blizzard in the northwest and torrential rains in the southeast of the country, state media reported Monday. At least nine people were killed, eight were missing and over 700 others were injured after torrential rains devastated parts of the southeastern province of Fujian, the official Xinhua news agency said. The rains hit the northern and central parts of Fujian over the weekend, damaging thousands of houses and destroying farmland in several regions, Xinhua said, adding that more bad weather was forecast in the coming days. Meanwhile, 15 people were killed and 13 others were injured when a blizzard struck northwestern China, according to the same source.
— AFP

Three killed in southern Kashmir
Indian troops shot dead three Islamic militants Monday who infiltrated into Indian Kashmir from the Pakistani zone of the divided Himalayan state, a defence ministry spokesman said. The militants were killed in the mountainous southern district of Rajouri near the line-of-control which acts a de facto border, 179 kilometres northwest of the winter capital Jammu, the spokesman said. Rajouri’s senior police officer said 25 militants attempting to cross into Indian-controlled Kashmir had been killed by security forces in the past three weeks. Infiltration attempts from Pakistan had increased over alpine passes that are now open after the winter snow melt, he said.
— AFP

Musharraf to visit
NZ in June
The Pakistan president, Pervez Musharraf, will visit New Zealand in June, the New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, said Monday. The June 17-19 visit would be the first bilateral visit to New Zealand by a president of the South Asian nation. ‘Under President Musharraf, Pakistan has played an important role in global counter-terrorism,’ Clark said at a press conference. ‘In addition, the president’s support for improved relations with India has helped to ease tensions between these two neighbours over the past year. New Zealand strongly supports this peace process.’ Clark said she looked forward to discussing these issues with Musharraf, as well as Commonwealth matters, nuclear non-proliferation and United Nations reform.
— AFP

US bases closings plan criticised
The US retired army general, Wesley Clark, said Saturday that the Pentagon’s plan to close military bases around the country and reorganise troops will isolate the military from the American people and the rest of the world. Clark said the plan to pull US forces back home from abroad and centralise bases takes jobs away from smaller towns. ‘We’re losing influence abroad when we bring those troops home, and we lose the interaction with America when we create these super bases,’ Clark said.
— AP