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New aftershocks have sparked fears of landslides in quake-hit Pakistan, as international donors gathered in Geneva to try to avert a second wave of deaths during the Himalayan winter.
   In reaction to mounting criticism over the world’s response to the catastrophe, the United Nations looked set to raise its appeal for short-term aid to more than half a billion dollars, a Pakistani diplomat said.
   Wretched survivors already homeless and hungry were shaken from their sleep by four tremors measuring up to 5.2 on the Richter Scale, the latest of more than 950 since the October 8 disaster.
   The death toll from the giant quake rose to 54,000 with Pakistani and UN officials again warning that the figure could soar unless more is done to shelter the homeless and reach remote villages.
   ‘With the severe winter approaching in a few weeks, we are racing against time to save people and have asked them to come down from the highlands,’ the interior minister, Aftab Sherpao, said.
   Seismological officials said any aftershock with a magnitude of five or above may trigger landslides, posing a further threat to a relief effort already described as one of the most challenging in history.
   ‘The fear is that landslides will further hamper our operations,’ World Food Programme spokesman David Orr said in Muzaffarabad, the devastated capital of Pakistani Kashmir.
   The situation in Pakistan’s mountains remains dire with winter drawing in, 3.3 million people still without homes, 800,000 without any shelter and predictions that thousands more children could die of cold and disease.
   Donor nations were due to meet in Geneva later Wednesday to try to boost funding, following recent complaints by top UN officials and aid agencies that the world has failed the quake’s victims.
   Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Masood Khan, said the UN was to raise its appeal for aid in the six months after the quake to 549 million dollars, up from 312 million dollars.
   UN officials say just 103 million dollars has been pledged to the appeal so far, although around 600 million dollars more has been donated or pledged bilaterally.
   Pakistan says it needs a further five billion dollars to raise the quake zone from the rubble and rebuild shattered infrastructure including public utilities, schools and hospitals.
   Before the start of the Geneva conference, a Pakistani delegation led by the country’s senate chairman, Muhammad Soomro, was to meet with the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and relief chief Jan Egeland.
   Annan and Egeland have both made emotive appeals to the world’s conscience, warning of a possible second wave of deaths because of the lack of aid and saying the challenge was bigger than after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
   Meanwhile, a suspected case of highly contagious haemorrhagic fever has been isolated in a Pakistani town devastated by the October 8 earthquake, a medical charity said Wednesday.
   Medecins Sans Frontieres said it had not confirmed that the patient in the ruined town of Bagh was definitely suffering from the disease, which can cause death by massive internal bleeding.
   ‘I have just contacted Bagh and there is a first suspected case of haemorrhagic fever,’ Krist Teirlink, the charity’s coordinator for emergency operations in Pakistani Kashmir, told reporters in Islamabad.
   ‘It is still a suspected case, it is not a confirmed case but it is occupying a complete tent because you need to put it in isolation,’ he added.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Wednesday openly called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’.
   ‘The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world,’ the president told a conference in Tehran entitled ‘The World without Zionism’.
   ‘The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land,’ he said.
   ‘As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,’ said Ahmadinejad, referring to Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
   His comments were the first time in years that such a high-ranking Iranian official has called for Israel’s eradication, even though such slogans are still regularly used at regime rallies.
   Addressing some 4,000 students gathered in an interior ministry conference hall, Ahmadinejad also called for Palestinian unity, resistance and a point ‘where the annihilation of the Zionist regime will come’.
   ‘The Islamic umma (community) will not allow its historic enemy to live in its heartland,’ he said in the fiery speech that cantered on an ‘historic war between the oppressor and the world of Islam’.
   The term ‘oppressor’ is used by the clerical regime to refer to the United States.
   ‘We should not settle for a piece of land,’ he said of Israel’s pullout from the Gaza Strip.
   ‘Anyone who signs a treaty which recognises the entity of Israel means he has signed the surrender of the Muslim world,’ Ahmadinejad said.
   ‘Any leaders in the Islamic umma who recognise Israel face the wrath of their own people.’
   Ahmadinejad, a veteran of Iran’s hardline Revolutionary Guards, took office in August after scoring a landslide win in a June presidential election.
   His tone represents a major change from that of former president Mohammad Khatami, whose favoured topic was ‘dialogue among civilisations’ and who led an effort to improve Iran’s relations with the West.
   But Ahmadinejad instead spoke of an ‘historic war’.
   ‘It dates backs hundreds of years. Sometimes Islam has advanced. Sometimes nobody was winning. Unfortunately over the past 300 years, the world of Islam has been in retreat,’ he lamented.
   ‘One hundred years ago the last trench of Islam fell, when the oppressors went towards the creation the Zionist regime. It is using it as a fort to spread its aims in the heart of the Islamic world.’

Iran said that India’s vote in the International Atomic Energy Agency criticising its nuclear activities would not affect talks on a major gas project, the oil ministry news agency Shana reported.
   ‘According to Iranian officials, India’s vote in the IAEA has not caused any damage in the process of talks for the gas exports pipeline and the talks will continue,’ deputy oil minister Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian said after the second meeting of a joint working group in Tehran.
   Tehran had expressed disappointment after New Delhi joined 21 countries in voting in favour of an IAEA motion paving the way for Iran’s referral to the UN Security Council.
   Diplomats have said that at least two other countries that backed the resolution—Britain and South Korea—have seen obstacles to their exports since the vote.
   In mid-June, India and Iran signed a memorandum of cooperation over building a gas pipeline between Iran and India via Pakistan.
   ‘India presented a report about its talks with Pakistanis, showing the two sides have reached new agreements about the gas transit fee,’ Nejad-Hosseinian said, adding that he hoped the two sides would reach a final agreement to ‘smoothe the work for Iran’.
   The gas exports agreement sets the framework for discussions on the amount of gas to be transported and on when the more than seven-billion-dollar project to build the 2,600-kilometre link will start.

Pakistan is reconsidering its plan to buy scores of new and used American-made F-16 fighter jets following the devastating earthquake, US and Pakistani sources said on Tuesday.
   The Bush administration was expected to formally notify the US Congress next week of plans to sell the planes but Pakistani sources said the deal was being rethought.
   ‘Pakistan is at this time in a situation where we are trying to assess the damages caused by the earthquake and how are we going to cope with tragedy,’ a Pakistani diplomat said.
   ‘The onus would be more on Pakistan whether to go ahead at this time,’ he said.
   A US official said Pakistan was reconsidering the scope and timing of the transfer out of concern for the political and economic impact of making a multibillion dollar arms deal as it still copes with a devastating earthquake that has killed thousands of people.
   Pakistan is seeking billions of dollars in relief and reconstruction aid.
   The Pakistani diplomat did not suggest the deal would be jettisoned. He said there were many options, including delay. ‘Everything is open to possibility,’ he added.
   Congress has been informally told of plans to provide the South Asian nuclear state with about 55 new Lockheed Martin planes, 25 used aircraft as well as so-called ‘mid-life’ upgrades that would significantly improve the capability of another 32 jets, sources said.
   The secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, is to brief the House of Representatives International Relations Committee in classified session next Wednesday. Congressional sources said they expected her to give formal notification of the sale then or soon after.
   After formal notification, Congress has 30 days to pass a resolution of disapproval if it wants to block the sale.
   India—Pakistan’s South Asia rival—and some of its supporters in America question the sale. The US India Political Action Committee, which promoted Indian Americans’ concerns, said the deal would encourage a regional arms race.
   The group said in a statement that after the earthquake ‘it is very important to concentrate on the aid relief for the affected people rather than the sale of arms.’

The Palestinian leader, Mahmud Abbas, told militants Wednesday to ‘stop giving Israel excuses’ to carry out attacks after it announced a zero tolerance policy and launched air strikes on the Gaza Strip.
   Artillery batteries and aircraft bombarded open fields in the northern part of the territory after Gaza-based militants fired a lone rocket into the southern Israeli town of Sderot, causing no casualties.
   The military said the target spot was a launch site for rockets into Israel. Warplanes broke the sound barrier over Gaza City unleashing deafening booms for a second night running, an AFP correspondent said.
   One week after White House talks with the US president, George W Bush, Abbas told militants not to give Israel a pretext to attack.
   ‘We have to understand that we must not give Israel the excuse to hit back,’ the embattled leader told the Palestinian parliament, refusing a demand from MPs for a new government better able to bring security chaos to heel.
   ‘It is so easy for someone to say the occupation is the cause of problem but we should not give them the excuse to attack us,’ he said, warning that those who take the law into their own hands ‘should be confronted with an iron fist’.
   There was no immediate claim for the Sderot rocket, 24 hours after militants from Islamic Jihad launched a barrage of rocket attacks.
   The flareup marked the first Gaza-based strikes on Israel since September 27 when militants announced they would stop attacks following an earlier cycle of unrest after Israel’s historic pullout from the territory.
   The army warned it would show zero tolerance to attacks, as the Israeli defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, held talks in Egypt on securing Gaza’s borders, an issue unresolved since the Israeli pullout last month.
   ‘We have absolutely no tolerance to rocket fire and we will react in keeping with the situation and orders from political echelon,’ a spokesman said.
   Security officials were quoted by public radio as saying the army would show a tougher response should rocket attacks continue, particularly if they cause casualties.
   The officials blamed Islamic Jihad, charging that Gaza-based activists of the group were acting on ‘orders from Damascus’.
   The radical faction fired a salvo of rockets into Israel Monday to avenge the killing of its West Bank military commander, Louai Saadi.
   On Tuesday, five Palestinians were wounded in a retaliatory Israeli air raid against an Islamic Jihad office in Rafah.
   Separately, the larger Islamist movement Hamas threatened to step up efforts to kidnap Israelis unless more Palestinian prisoners are released.
   ‘If they are not released, kidnappings will increase,’ Mahmud Zahar, head of Hamas in Gaza, told the Haaretz newspaper.
   Israel has freed around 900 prisoners since a peace summit in February but the Palestinian government wants far more to be let out.
   After talks in Cairo, the Israeli defence minister said an agreement had been reached on the issue of border crossings with the Gaza Strip.
   ‘We adopted the Egyptian proposal about the Rafah passage. It means passengers will be able to move from Gaza to Egypt and from Egypt to Gaza through the Rafah passage,’ Mofaz said.
   When the agreement comes into effect in one month, trucks and goods will be processed further east where the Gaza, Israeli and Egyptian borders converge.
   The Rafah crossing—the only exit from Gaza that bypasses Israel—was closed on September 7 ahead of Israel’s pullout.
   The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, had stepped up pressure on Israel to resolve the issue.
   In Jerusalem, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was meeting his Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom before talks with Abbas that Palestinian officials have said will focus on efforts to bolster the peace process.
   Moscow, along with the European Union, the United Nations and United States drafted a peace blueprint known as the roadmap, which has made little progress since its 2003 launch.

The Indian army stopped work on a footbridge that would allow Pakistani earthquake victims to cross over into Indian Kashmir for relief after Pakistani soldiers objected, an army spokesman said Wednesday.
   ‘We have stopped work on the footbridge after objections from Pakistani soldiers,’ Indian army spokesman Vijay Batra said.
   He said the bridge was being laid across the Kishan-Ganga river in the northern Teetwal sector of Indian Kashmir to facilitate the passage of people from the Pakistani zone to one of three relief points being set up by India on the Line of Control, which divides Kashmir between the two countries.
   Pakistan has proposed that Kashmiris be allowed to cross in either direction at five points along the heavily-militarised LoC to give assistance to their relatives affected by the disaster.
   Officials from the two sides are due to meet in Islamabad on Friday to discuss the various proposals.
   Batra said the work on the footbridge was in its initial stage when Pakistani soldiers approached Indian soldiers and asked them not to proceed as no official clearance had been given.
   As the bridge would span the LoC, its construction needs approval from both sides.
   Teetwal, which is situated right on the LoC, was also badly damaged in the quake, which left more than three million people homeless ahead of the approaching bitter winter.

Indian archaeological authorities have given police permission to install security cameras at the Taj Mahal because of concerns it could be targeted by terrorists, an official said Tuesday.
   Thirty-one cameras will be installed around the 17th-century monument to love, said Rajendra Shah of the Archaeological Survey of India.
   The Archaeological Survey of India is responsible for the upkeep of the UN-designated world heritage monument, and had expressed concerns that installing the cameras could damage the white marble structure, located in Agra, 130 miles east of New Delhi.
   Shah said archaeological authorities decided to let police put in the cameras after they ‘allotted specific locations where these cameras should be installed,’ he told The Associated Press from Agra.

Paramilitary troops shot dead a man in a scuffle near a voting booth Wednesday as security swarmed polling points in state assembly elections in the lawless Indian state of Bihar, the police said.
   The killing came as federal and state officials posted about 90,000 police and paramilitary troops in the eastern state with orders to shoot troublemakers after threats by Maoist rebels to disrupt the second phase of the elections.
   ‘We have a message for (troublemakers) and anti-socials: Don’t (disrupt polling) or we will shoot’, said GS Kang, the state chief secretary.
   No other violence was reported though police said that several people were detained during the voting, which ended at around 4:30pm (1100 GMT).

Iraqi Sunni leaders said on Wednesday they would focus on pressing US forces to pull out after failing to block a controversial constitution, hoping a US death toll of 2,000 will encourage Washington to withdraw.
   ‘Our political programme will focus more on getting the Americans out of Iraq,’ Hussein al-Falluji, a prominent Sunni who took part in talks on the constitution said.
   ‘Our message to the American administration is clear: get out of Iraq or set a timetable for withdrawal or the resistance will keep slaughtering your soldiers until judgment day.’
   The death of an army sergeant pushed the US military death toll in Iraq to the symbolic figure of 2,000 on Tuesday, but the president, George W Bush, warned more sacrifices were needed before US troops could come home.
   The news cast a shadow over the final results of the Iraqi referendum, which showed that voters had ratified a new constitution despite bitter opposition in Sunni Arab areas where guerrillas are battling to topple the Baghdad government.
   Passage of the constitution paves the way for elections on December 15 that Washington hopes will mark Iraq’s emergence as a stable, federal democracy and open the way for the US military to hand over security to Iraqi forces and pull out its troops.
   Prominent Sunni Arab leaders rejected the referendum as a fraud, warning it could fuel militant violence and discourage Sunnis from participating in future elections.
   UN and Iraqi election officials said the vote, which was largely peaceful despite widespread fears of a surge in militant violence, was fair.
   With a Friday deadline looming for parties and electoral coalitions to register on the ballot paper for the December 15 vote, Sunni leaders face growing pressure to form a united strategy.
   Sunni Arabs, once dominant under Saddam Hussein, mostly boycotted January elections which swept Shias and Kurds to power after decades of oppression.
   Increasingly isolated since Iraq’s political process began moving forward, they lack a united leadership and it is not clear how much sway Sunni leaders have over guerrillas bent on toppling the US-backed government.
   Some Sunni leaders have said they may boycott the December vote if there are no international monitors, leaving them even more isolated.
   The Pentagon said Staff Sergeant George Alexander, 34, died on Saturday of injuries sustained eight days ago when a roadside bomb blew up near his vehicle in the town of Samarra. It was the 2,000th US death announced by the Pentagon.
   The toll was a reminder that although some progress has been made on Iraq’s political front, the fight against determined guerrillas could drag on for years.
   Guerrillas have resumed deadly attacks again after a relative lull in violence during the referendum and the trial of Saddam Hussein last week.
   Gunmen opened fire on a convoy of bodyguards for Iraq’s minister of water resources in western Baghdad on Wednesday, wounding two people. Police said that the minister, Abdul Latif Rasheed, was not present.
   Gunmen also killed an official at Iraq’s Ministry of Culture, Nabil Moussawi, and seriously wounded his driver in southern Baghdad.

New questions over the alleged role vice president, Dick Cheney, in a CIA leak scandal bombarded the White House, as it braced Wednesday for a special prosecutor to decide whether to indict trusted Bush administration aides.
   With Washington gripped by anticipation over prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s next move, expected by Friday, a New York Times report put the powerful vice president closer than ever to the drama.
   Cheney told his chief of staff, I Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, about CIA spy Valerie Plame, whose cover was later blown during the political firestorm sparked by claims the Bush administration exaggerated the case for war with Iraq in 2003, the paper said.
   After Plame’s name later found its way into news reports, her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, claimed senior Bush aides exposed his wife in revenge for his criticism of the intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
   Outing an covert operative is a crime in the United States—but only if it is proven the person responsible knew the operative was under cover. Bush ignored a reporter’s shouted question on the Times report and his spokesman Scott McClellan refused to confirm or deny it, but warned: ‘Just because I’m not commenting on it doesn’t mean you should read anything into that one way or the other.’

UN Security Council members Wednesday discussed a tough-worded, US-French draft resolution threatening sanctions if Syria does not fully cooperate in a UN probe into the murder of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri.
   Co-sponsored by Britain and circulated late Tuesday, the draft demands the arrest of any Syrian national suspected of involvement in the assassination, and greater leeway for UN investigators.
   The draft, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, was worked out by the US and French UN envoys—John Bolton and Jean-Marc de la Sabliere—after the Security Council heard a briefing by UN chief investigator Detlev Mehlis on his damning report implicating senior Syrian and Lebanese security officials in the February 14 slaying.
   Damascus has denied any role in the car bombing.
   The draft resolution called on Syria to detain ‘Syrian officials or individuals’ the UN probe considered suspects in the car bombing ‘and make them fully and unconditionally available to the commission.’
   It demanded that the Mehlis commission be allowed ‘to interview Syrian officials or other individuals that the commission deems relevant to the inquiry outside Syria and/or outside the presence of any other Syrian official if the commission so requests.’

With the threat of UN sanctions looming large, Syria is scrambling to assure the international community it is cooperating with the UN probe into the murder of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri.
   Embattled the president, Bashar al-Assad, has pledged to bring to justice any Syrian linked to the February murder, following a damning UN report which directly implicated Damascus in the attack.
   ‘I have declared that Syria is innocent of this crime, and I am ready to follow up action to bring to trial any Syrian who could be proved by concrete evidence to have had connection with this crime,’ Assad said in a letter sent to Washington, London and Paris, the Washington Post reported.
   Assad also warned that any international pressure brought to bear on Syria would have ‘serious repercussions’ in the region.

As bird flu is spread continent-to-continent by wild birds, the seasonal migration that is normally one of nature’s wonders is becoming something scary.
   Could bird flu reach North America through migrating birds? Biologists in Alaska and Canada are keeping an eye out and say it’s possible by next year.
   Scientists from several agencies have been monitoring large flocks in the northern part of this continent since last summer, collecting both live birds and thousands of samples from bird droppings. The results of those tests are pending, but so far scientists have not found the virus that is spreading across Asia.
   Of course, the bigger fear is that bird flu will mutate into a flu that is both contagious and deadly to people and which would quickly spread around the globe through international travel. The current bird flu is not easily spread to people.
   But scientists are studying the virus’ transmission among birds as well. In the United States, a consortium of government agencies is seeking $5 million over the next three years to test birds along their migratory routes in the Lower 48 states beginning next spring.
   ‘The patterns (of the virus) in Asia right now would not suggest that it would come over to North America this fall,’ said Christopher Brand, chief of field and lab research for the US Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Centre in Madison, Wis.
   Here’s why: Bird flu was observed spreading from domestic poultry to wild birds in Asia last summer in northern breeding grounds in Siberia. Most of those birds now are migrating south — along their distinctive routes called flyways — to India and Bangladesh; others follow south-western routes to the eastern Mediterranean and even Africa.
   So far, bird flu has been detected in both wild and domestic birds as far east as the Danube Delta in Romania. The virus was reported in poultry in Turkey, Romania and Russia.
   ‘There has been a shift in the susceptibility of wild fowl to H5N1,’ acknowledged David Nabarro, chief UN coordinator for avian and human influenza.
   Brand says that if those birds maintain the virus over the winter, they would have the opportunity to bring it back to northern nesting grounds in Siberia next spring and summer.

The British prime minister, Tony Blair, confronts hostile European Union lawmakers Wednesday ahead of the bloc’s summit, accused of letting Europe down by failing to address key issues facing the bloc.
   Blair returns to the European Parliament four months after winning over the sceptical assembly with his vision for Europe, having achieved little yet of real substance as EU president since the failed summit in June threw the EU into crisis.
   Luxembourg, which held the EU’s presidency at the time, had striven to get a deal with a carefully drafted compromise proposal aimed at being suitable to big member states wanting to keep spending down and the European Commission wanting more money for ambitious projects.
   The Luxembourg prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, is sceptical that Britain will be able to do much better that he did.
   ‘Any solution will be only millimetres away from my last proposals,’ he said Monday in the French newspaper Les Echos.
   ‘But the British government will try to dress it up differently. It’s only human.’ Blair will face questioning from an assembly demanding to know what he has done to resolve the bitter row over the EU’s long-term budget, blocked notably by Britain’s refusal to surrender its jealously guarded rebate.

The European Food Safety Authority said Wednesday that people should not fear being infected with bird flu by eating chicken or eggs.
   ‘At the present time there is no proof suggesting that avian flu can be transmitted to human beings through the consumption of food, and in particular chicken and eggs,’ the agency, based in Parma in northern Italy said.

Pacific Island leaders endorsed an ambitious ‘Pacific Plan’ for closer regional integration Wednesday but were disappointed Australia and New Zealand refused to budge on allowing temporary work permits for their poorer neighbours.
   Leaders of the region’s two developed nations and 14 mainly poor and tiny island states met for the Pacific Island Forum’s annual summit to put their seal of approval on the plan which aims to improve living standards in a region which includes some of the world’s poorest states.
   After the retreat day in a resort in the tropical seaside town of Madang, the host prime minister, Sir Michael Somare, declared the meeting a success, despite the sidelining of the plan’s proposed freeing up of labour movement in the region.
   Somare put a brave face on the impasse, saying the idea could be back on the table at next year’s forum meeting.
   ‘Australia has got its immigration rules they have to sort out before they can raise the question again,’ he told reporters at the end of the retreat. The Fijian prime minister, Laisenia Qarase, was more blunt.
   ‘That was the biggest disappointment for me. We have been raising this issue for quite some years now without any success,’ he said.
   ‘We know there is a demand in those two countries for temporary labour, for seasonal labour.

Talks to form a coalition government in Poland were on shaky ground Wednesday with the two would-be partners bitterly divided on who should hold the key posts of interior minister and parliamentary speaker.
   ‘PO will not bow to the dictatorial tendencies represented by the Kaczynski brothers,’ Donald Tusk, the leader of the liberal Civic Platform, said as he entered parliament for the resumption of its opening session, which had been delayed by one week after Law and Justice forced an adjournment to avoid a vote on the speaker.

By bus and charter flights, thousands of tourists streamed out of this Caribbean resort city that was pounded by Hurricane Wilma, but thousands more remained stranded Wednesday.
   Clyde Wiseman, a petrochemical supervisor from Godfrey, Ill., said he didn’t know when he would be able to leave, but ‘I’m happy to be among the living.’
   ‘But to the travel agents, the airlines, I want to say, ‘I don’t want to be among the forgotten.’
   Tourism officials estimated that about 6,000 people flew out of Cancun airport Tuesday, five days after Wilma roared through, while thousands more were bussed to planes in Merida, a 170-mile trip over partly flooded roads with heavy traffic.
   ‘Enough’s enough,’ Paul Bracey, 45, of Wales, said at a hotel serving as a shelter in downtown Cancun as he waited for a bus to Merida late Tuesday night. ‘We’re still stranded, and have been told six days of lies.’
   Officials said about 22,000 foreign tourists remained in the area Tuesday afternoon, down from almost 40,000 during the storm that lashed the coast Friday and Saturday, wiping out the heart of Mexico’s $11 billion foreign tourism industry.

Cindy Sheehan, mother of a US soldier killed in Iraq, said she planned to be arrested outside the White House Wednesday to protest US troops presence in Iraq as US military deaths hit 2,000.
   ‘We’ve identified the problem and it’s not going away. What I think it’s going to take now is non-violent, peaceful civil disobedience all over the country,’ Sheehan told reporters across the street from the White House.
   Sheehan said she planned to lie down on the street in front of the White House grounds on Wednesday, knowing she would likely be arrested.
   ‘And when they let me out I will come back and do the same thing (again) if I get arrested,’ she said.
   With the number of US military dead at 2,000, Sheehan urged opponents of the war to demand their elected representatives in Washington to call for the withdrawal of the 140,000 US troops deployed in Iraq.
   ‘Go to your senators’ offices, to federal buildings. Sit down and say enough is enough. The killing has to stop sometime,’ she said.

The Bush administration is abandoning its push to develop a ‘bunker-buster’ nuclear warhead and instead will pursue a conventional weapon that can penetrate hardened underground targets.
   Senator Pete Domenici, R-NM, said Tuesday that lawmakers had agreed drop funding for the proposed nuclear bunker-buster from the Energy Department’s budget for the 12 months beginning Oct 1. He said the Energy Department had requested the move because it no longer planned to pursue a nuclear bunker-buster.
   The decision was hailed by opponents of new nuclear weapons.
   Development of such a warhead has been the subject of intense debate in Congress for several years, although lawmakers have been cool to the proposal.
   Administration officials had argued they needed a tactical nuclear warhead that could destroy deeply buried targets including bunkers tunnelled into solid rock. Potential adversaries increasingly are building hardened retreats deep beneath the earth, immune to conventional weapons, the officials said.

Eight dead in China school stampede
Eight children were killed and 45 injured when students yelling ‘ghost’ sparked a stampede on a darkened elementary school staircase in China’s Sichuan province. The accident occurred Tuesday evening in the school in Guangna township when someone shouted ‘ghosts are coming’ as students filed out of their evening classes. ‘Eight died and 45 were injured. Five are in serious condition,’ a spokesman surnamed Xiang at the Tongjiang county government, which oversees the town, said. ‘We are sure that there were some management problems at the school. You can’t let so many classes out at one time because that is when things become crowded.’
— AFP

Monsoon floods
hit Bangalore
The police in India’s technology capital, Bangalore, have urged motorists to stay off the city’s roads as storms caused flooding and uprooted trees, but business was largely unaffected, officials said on Wednesday. At least six people have been killed in accidents related to the heavy monsoon rains, authorities said. Major technology companies said their work was not adversely affected, but moved staff between locations or sent them home early. The city’s 59.3-cm rainfall so far in October had surpassed the previous record of 52.2 cm for the month set in 1956, said AL Koppar, director of the Indian Meteorological Department in Bangalore.
— Reuters

EU to monitor
Sri Lanka vote
The European Union announced Wednesday it would monitor next month’s presidential election in Sri Lanka in an effort to protect the island’s fragile peace process and guarantee the vote is credible. A former member of the European parliament, John Cushnahan, will lead a 72-member team to observe the November 17 election, the European Commission said in a statement released here. Cushnahan has led three monitoring missions to Sri Lanka in recent years and accused political parties of abusing state resources during campaigns. He demanded the national identity card be made mandatory to ensure no impersonation at future elections, a recommendation yet to be implemented by the authorities. — AFP

Japan, North
Korea to resume
talks on Nov 3
Japan and North Korea will resume bilateral talks on November 3 in Beijing following a one-year suspension, the Japanese foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura, said Wednesday. Bilateral discussions at government level have been held up since late last year when Japan accused North Korea of lying over the fate of Japanese nationals kidnapped by Pyongyang agents. But Japanese and North Korean delegates agreed to resume talks in their joint effort to take steps to normalise relations when they met last month on the sidelines of talks in Beijing on the North’s nuclear programme. ‘Japan and North Korea will hold bilateral talks on November 3 in Beijing,’ Machimura told a news conference Wednesday.
— AFP

Cuban group, Nigerian lawyer and media watchdog win rights prize
The Cuban protest group ‘Ladies in White’, Nigerian lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim and Reporters without Borders won the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov Prize on Wednesday. In an unusual step, the 50,000-euro prize, which will be handed over in December in the assembly, was awarded to all three finalists. The Cuban group was formed after the crackdown on political dissidents in May 2003 which saw 75 men put in prison. Many of them are still there. Dressed in white to symbolise innocence and purity, the ‘Damas de blanco’ have met every Sunday since then in protest against the imprisonment of their husbands and sons, regularly facing abuse and sometimes
violence.
— AFP

Rice pays tribute to civil rights hero
Rosa Parks
The UN secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, the highest ranking black woman in government, paid tribute Tuesday to Rosa Parks, the seamstress who paved the way for Rice’s rise by sparking the civil rights movement 50 years ago. At a news conference here, Rice tipped her hat to Parks, who died Monday at the age of 92 after watching the rights cause blossom from her refusal to give up her seat on the whites-only part of a bus in 1955. The chief US diplomat hailed Parks as ‘a pioneer in the civil rights movement who one day was just sick and tired of being sick and tired, and refused to give up her seat and inspired a whole generation of people to fight for freedom.’
— AFP

Abuse claims prompt care review
A health watchdog is to investigate the care of people with learning disabilities across England, after allegations of abuse at one NHS trust. The Healthcare Commission said early stages of an investigation at Cornwall Partnership NHS Trust found ‘significant failings’. Regional health chiefs have sent in an external team to improve services. The Healthcare Commission said it wants to ensure the problems seen in Cornwall are not occurring elsewhere. It has written to Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt to outline the initial findings of their Cornwall investigation, which began in June.
— BBC

Australian immigration minister urged to resign
Australian Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone was under renewed pressure to resign Wednesday after it was revealed her department may have wrongly imprisoned people for years, including one person who spent between six and seven years locked up before being released. Officials told a parliamentary committee late Tuesday that one person were possibly wrongly detained for as long as seven years, in what would be the worst case of mistaken imprisonment by the embattled immigration department to date. Two other people may have also been wrongly held for up to four and six years while a further 12 people placed in detention for up to three years were also later found to be lawful residents.
— AFP

Tories delaying
terror laws fight
The Conservatives say they will back proposed new anti-terrorism laws as MPs debate them for the first time, before opposing some aspects at later stages. The party is particularly against plans to allow terrorism suspects to be held for up to 90 days without charge. The Liberal Democrats are expected to formally vote against the Terrorism Bill at Wednesday’s second reading. The bill would outlaw ‘glorifying’ terrorism and make it an offence to commit acts ‘preparatory to terrorism’. The Conservatives’ decision to back the government at this stage of the bill’s progress through Parliament signals an end to the previously united approach on the issue by both opposition parties.
— BBC