Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
Sports National «
Editorial «
Op-Ed «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplement «

Israel pressed on with its month-old offensive against Palestinian militants in Gaza Wednesday as a rocket fired from the territory wounded one person in the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
   The army carried out two raids in the coastal strip Wednesday, with no casualties reported.
   In the first, an air strike destroyed the house of a member of the ruling Islamist Hamas movement in the al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, Palestinian security officials said.
   The army warned the owner of the impending strike an hour beforehand, which it said was aimed at a weapons stockpile.
   In the second strike, the navy fired overnight on Gaza’s port, Palestinian security officials said. The army said it targeted ‘a building and a boat used for arms trafficking.’
   Meanwhile, one person was injured when a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit Ashkelon, a city of 120,000 residents around eight kilometres north of the border.
   Most rockets fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza have landed in Sderot, a town of 20,000 residents that lies a few kilometres east of the territory.
   The Israeli military launched its offensive in Gaza on June 28, three days after Palestinian militants killed two soldiers and seized a third in a cross-border raid.
   The army says it aims to recover the captured serviceman and to stop militants in the strip from firing rockets onto Israeli territory.
   At least 152 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have died since Israel launched the offensive, according to an AFP count.
   At least 5,301 people have been killed since the start of the intifada in September 2000, most of them Palestinians, according to a separate AFP count.

Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra flew Wednesday to neighbouring military-ruled Myanmar where officials said he held a rare meeting with the junta’s reclusive leader, senior general Than Shwe.
   ‘It’s for bilateral talks between two leaders on a variety of issues,’ Thaksin told reporters before leaving.
   Thai officials provided few details of the hastily arranged trip but said the two would meet Wednesday afternoon in Myanmar’s new administrative capital, a place that few outsiders have seen.
   Most of Myanmar’s government and military offices moved in February to the new capital in a jungle compound, which Than Shwe has dubbed the ‘abode of the king,’ outside the central town of Pyinmana.
   An official at Myanmar’s information ministry confirmed that Thaksin met Than Shwe, but neither side would give any indication as to what was discussed.
   Myanmar aviation officials said that Thaksin’s plane arrived around 1:30 pm. He was expected to return home about seven hours later. Thaksin made the trip with his army chief general Sonthi Boonyarataglin, as well as agriculture minister Sudarat Keyuraphan, foreign minister Kantathi Supahmongkhon and environment minister Yongyuth Tiyapairat.
   The visit comes amid growing international pressure on Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
   US president George W Bush on Tuesday renewed economic sanctions on Myanmar over its failure to make democratic reforms and its human rights abuses, including the house arrest of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
   Last week Myanmar was the subject of heated debate at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which also expressed concern over the regime’s failure to move toward democracy.
   While Thailand has also urged Myanmar to free Aung San Suu Kyi and make ‘tangible progress’ toward reforms, it maintains close economic ties.
   Thailand’s largest energy firm PTT said Monday it had joined the race against China and India in a bid for exclusive rights to Myanmar’s northwestern natural gas reserves. Thailand already pipes about one billion cubic feet of gas per day from Myanmar’s offshore reserves in the southeast in the Andaman Sea.
   Energy-hungry Thailand is also financing construction of dams on Myanmar’s rivers near the border to generate electricity for its own needs.

Dozens of Afghan police raided Taliban hideouts in southern Afghanistan, killing 18 militants and injuring four others, the police said Wednesday.
   A policeman was also killed during the day-long raid on Taliban strongholds in Helmand province’s troubled Garmser district on Tuesday, district police chief Mohammad Rasoul Aka said.
   The capital of southernmost Garmser district, bordering Pakistan, was overrun by Taliban rebels for about 48 hours last month and Afghan and coalition security forces have since stepped up action in the area.
   Tuesday’s raid was launched to ‘clear’ Taliban. ‘Our operations will continue,’ the police commander said. He would not give details, citing security reasons.
   The Taliban, unseated from power in a US-led offensive nearly five years ago, are still active mostly in southern and eastern Afghanistan where they carry out regular attacks.
   A US-led coalition made up of thousands of mostly American troops has been hunting down the rebels since the Taliban fell but the insurgency has only grown in strength.
   On Monday NATO’s International Security Assistance Force took over from the coalition in six southern provinces, including Helmand where most of around 4,000 British soldiers in the country are based.
   Three British soldiers were killed in Helmand on Tuesday.
   The coalition will continue its counter-insurgency operations in the south while the 8,000-strong ISAF force in the region intends to put a greater focus on development.
   Troops and police have killed around 1,000 rebels in a major operation in the south over the past few months. More than 60 foreign soldiers and scores of Afghan civilians and security forces have also been killed in combat.

Pakistan is expected Wednesday to propose amending Islamic rape laws that currently place an almost impossible burden of proof on women and expose victims to adultery charges, officials said.
   The move would end years of outrage by rights groups who say that president Pervez Musharraf has failed to tackle widespread discrimination against women in this Islamic republic.
   The cabinet of prime minister Shaukat Aziz met Wednesday and was due to discuss draft legislation that would change the 27-year-old laws, an official at the ministry for women’s development said.
   If the cabinet approves the draft the government will formally table a bill in parliament next week, the official said.
   Under Islamic laws imposed by military dictator Zia-ul-Haq in 1979, a woman must produce four adult Muslim male witnesses to prove an act of rape.
   Women who fail to prove rape charges can be locked up or even sentenced to death for adultery.
   The amendment is likely to propose removing the requirement for four witnesses for rape, and make it necessary to have four people testify to any alleged act of adultery.
   The Islamic legal system, known as the ‘Hudood Ordinances’, runs parallel to Pakistan’s British-influenced secular penal code.
   Aziz last week said the government would change laws where necessary ‘to ensure justice and security for women’ and to bring the legislation more in line with Islamic teaching.
   Campaigner Mukhtar Mai, who was gang-raped on the orders of a tribal council and later brought her attackers to justice, has focused international attention on the plight of Pakistani women.
   Musharraf was criticised last year when he said that getting raped had become a ‘money making’ concern and that many Pakistani women felt it was an easy way to get a foreign visa.
   Last month however the military ruler and key US ally changed Pakistani law to allow women detained on charges of adultery and other minor crimes to be released on bail. Hundreds of women were later freed.
   Human Rights Watch said in a report in January that violence against women remained rampant in Pakistan and slammed the government for not tackling the problem.

Indonesian immigration authorities on Wednesday deported five Saudi men for engaging in short-term marriages, an immigration official said.
   Yeyet Oking, the head of Bogor district’s immigration office, said the five were deported via Jakarta while another man was released for lack of evidence.
   Short-term marriages usually involve local Islamic clerics blessing unions between foreigners and local women.
   The couples live together briefly before the men leave to return home. The women are materially compensated when the unions end.
   The marriages are not recognised by the state.
   Oking said that the six men were arrested on Monday during a police raid in Cisarua, a hill resort just southeast of Bogor, after tip-offs from local residents.
   The immigration official said that the five deported men were deemed guilty of ‘not respecting Indonesia’s law on marriage and of violating public order.’
   The women were detained by police and would be released after being given ‘moral guidance’ so that they do not repeat their offence, a detective from Bogor police headquarters, who identified himself as Jeffry, said.
   Vice president Yusuf Kalla recently joked that short-term marriages could be economically beneficial to local women.

Indian Ocean nations will make it a priority to get tsunami warnings to coastal areas, a senior official from the UN’s science body said after a regional meeting on Wednesday.
   Work on a regional warning system began after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed some 220,000 people, with the latest meeting on its progress coming just weeks after another tsunami lashed Indonesia and claimed 628 lives.
   ‘The main outcome is a very clear strengthening of commitment of governments to give first priority to the downstream flow of information from the centre to populations at risk,’ UNESCO assistant director general Patricio Bernal said.
   ‘This was certainly demonstrated by the dramatic events on July 17, that you need to increase preparedness at the local levels.’
   The US Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre dispatched a warning to Indonesian officials 19 minutes after a 7.7-magnitude quake rocked Java last month and triggered a tsunami that lashed some 200 kilometres of coastline.
   Separately, Indonesia’s own meteorological agency sent out hundreds of text message warnings to officials but they only contained the quake’s longitude and latitude and no specific tsunami warning.
   The archipelago nation, which bore the brunt of the 2004 tsunami, still lacks a system to get an official warning to local populations, but since the most recent tsunami has said it will install sirens on hundreds of mobile phone towers.
   Vice president Yusuf Kalla has also said authorities were preparing a system in which mosques, present in every village in this world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, may also help relay the warnings.
   Speaking by telephone from Bali, Bernal said member states had also committed to making their national plans public and integrated into the common regional plan at the meeting.
   ‘This creates a mutual accountability and this is a very important development. It also helps the international aid community to identify gaps in financing,’ he said.

More than 1,000 South Korean Christians are in Afghanistan for a ‘peace rally’ in the capital, officials said Wednesday, raising concern in a strictly Islamic country where proselytising is banned.
   The South Koreans arrived ahead of the event this weekend on tourist visas despite their government’s recommendation against their visit and some attempts to stop them at the borders, embassy and Western officials said. The South Korean embassy in Kabul has suggested the roughly 200 South Koreans who live in Afghanistan, most of them in the capital, take their holidays abroad until the event is over, an embassy official said.

North Korea’s Red Cross has rejected an offer from its South Korean counterpart for aid to flood victims, a South Korean official said Wednesday, as an aid group claimed the disaster left about 10,000 people dead or missing.
   North Korea ‘expressed thanks for Seoul’s offer’ but said ‘it will handle the recovery efforts from recent floods by itself,’ a senior North Korean Red Cross official said, according to the South Korean Red Cross.
   Floods caused by heavy rains in mid-July killed at least 154 North Koreans and left another 127 or more missing, according to the United Nations. North Korea’s official media has said the disaster caused hundreds of casualties and cut off roads, bridges, railroads and communications.

Up to 10,000 North Koreans were believed dead or missing in what Pyongyang’s official media is describing as the worst flooding in a century, a respected South Korean humanitarian group said Wednesday.
   ‘About 4,000 people are now listed as missing, and we expect the final toll of dead and missing to reach 10,000,’ said the independent aid group Good Friends.
   North Korea’s official media has so far admitted that hundreds of people were dead or missing after heavy rainfall battered the country for nearly two weeks from July 10.
   Seoul-based Good Friends said the media was now terming the flooding the worst to hit the impoverished country in a century and that a massive relief operation was now under way.
   In a statement, the group said that despite the urgency of the disaster, North Korean solders were ordered to stay in their barracks and not to help with relief operations because of tension with the outside world over North Korea’s recent missile tests.

Rescue workers evacuated 130 children from the top floor of their school hostel in Gujarat, the police said on Wednesday, three days after floodwaters surrounded the building.
   Food and water had been supplied to the children, who could not be rescued earlier due to heavy rains in Bhalada village, 80 km south of Ahmedabad.
   ‘We are moving them to safer areas,’ local administrator RR Vasani said. TV channels showed the children being carried to safety on the shoulders of rescuers.
   Fifty-eight people have died in Gujarat since annual monsoon rains began in June, with some drowning and others being electrocuted or killed as houses collapsed.

Taiwan’s defence ministry has denied a press report Taipei is to sell rifles, machine guns and military telecommunications equipment to Libya.
   Wu Chi-fang, a ministry spokesman, said ‘there is no such thing’ after the Taipei-based Apple Daily reported that Taiwan had agreed to supply the items to Libya following President Chen Shui-bian’s surprise visit there earlier this year.
   The paper, citing unidentified national security sources, said on Wednesday that Taiwan had invited ‘important Libyan military personnel’ to observe a live-fire war game last month after resuming military exchanges with Tripoli following Chen’s trip.
   The Libyan visitors later listed some 20 types of military items they wanted to buy, including rifles, machine guns and military telecommunications equipment, the paper said.

Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen vowed Wednesday to bring surviving Khmer Rouge leaders to justice, and took a swipe at the United Nations for its role in giving legitimacy to the brutal regime.
   ‘We were fighting with (Khmer Rouge leader) Pol Pot but we were blamed, and they allowed the Khmer Rouge to sit in the United Nations,’ Hun Sen said, referring to the UN’s decision not to recognise the Vietnamese-led government that overthrew Pol Pot in 1979.
   ‘Therefore, we must prosecute Khmer Rouge leaders,’ he told a ceremony in southwestern seaport of Sihanoukville.

An Iranian official said Wednesday the Islamic republic was losing confidence in the international community after the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding it stop sensitive nuclear work , reports AFP.
   The vice president, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, met in Tokyo with the Japanese foreign minister, Taro Aso, who urged Iran to regain the world’s trust.
   But Mashaie repeated Iran’s stance that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, a Japanese foreign ministry statement said.
   It quoted the vice president as saying Iran was ‘seriously considering’ the comprehensive package of incentives drafted largely by European powers for Tehran to back down on the nuclear issue.
   But Mashaie reportedly said that ‘the Security Council resolution heightens mistrust and strengthens the belief that Western countries are attempting to take away Iran’s rights through pressure rather than dialogue.’
   Mashaie, who is the head of Iran’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organisation, is visiting Japan to open a major display of Persian historical relics.
   The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has refused to back down on the nuclear issue or to give a prompt reply to the package of incentives.
   The UN Security Council voted 14-1 on Monday to demand that Iran give up sensitive nuclear activities including uranium enrichment by August 31 or face possible sanctions.
   Japan supported the resolution, despite close commercial ties with Iran where Tokyo has invested heavily in the oil sector.
   
   Syria, Iran risk
   confrontation: Blair
   The British prime minister, Tony Blair, warned Syria and Iran on Tuesday that they risked a confrontation if they continued to support terrorism and export instability to Iraq and elsewhere, reports Reuters.
   In a speech urging a rethink of the West’s strategy to defeat extremism in the Middle East, Blair accused Iran and Syria of helping extreme factions in Iraq and backing militant groups in Lebanon and Palestine.
   Blair said the international community should tell Syria and Iran that they should either play by the same rules as the rest of the world ‘or be confronted.’
   ‘Their support of terrorism, their deliberate export of instability, their desire to see wrecked the democratic prospect in Iraq, is utterly unjustifiable, dangerous and wrong.
   ‘If they keep raising the stakes, they will find they have miscalculated,’ Blair said in a speech to the World Affairs Council, a nonprofits organisation in Los Angeles.
   Blair, who has been heavily criticised at home for siding with the United States over the war between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, was asked after his speech whether NATO should take the lead in providing a multinational force in Lebanon.
   Blair said it was too early to be clear what was most helpful for the situation, adding that whatever force was deployed should be capable of ensuring that the Lebanese people ‘vote in a democracy without outside interference from Syria or anyone else and without inside interference from armed militias.’
   Blair said the West must win the battle of democratic values if it is to defeat global extremism. It also needed to work relentlessly ‘week in, week out’ to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
   ‘Unless we reappraise our strategy, unless we revitalise the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade, and ... bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win,’ he said.

A heat wave that claimed more than 130 lives in California reached the US east coast Tuesday, settling over the US capital and forcing New York City to declare a state of emergency for the first time.
   New York mayor Michael Bloomberg signed an order for city agencies ‘to take whatever steps necessary to protect the well-being and safety of city residents in the face of excessive heat’ as the city baked under the sun.
   Temperatures were expected to climb to around 100 degrees F (38 C ) in New York this week while the heat index, which takes moisture readings into account, could reach 110 F (43 C), the weather service said.
   The mayor’s office urged city residents to conserve on their electricity use to avoid the power outages that paralysed a part of the borough of Queens last month for more than one week.
   Bloomberg’s office said any individual who ‘knowingly’ violates the request to conserve energy—for example by running their air conditioner while no one is at home—could be charged with a misdemeanour.
   The city said it was also setting up 383 cooling centres in senior’s centres and community facilities across New York’s five boroughs, and ordering its public pools to stay open into the late evening so that New Yorkers could cool off after work.
   The rules apply through Friday unless the temperatures suddenly drop.
   The temperature in Washington, DC was forecast to top off at 101 degrees F (38 C) on Tuesday and reach similar heights the following day, as city authorities used television announcements to urge people with respiratory problems not to venture outdoors.

Fidel Castro sought to reassure Cubans after intestinal surgery forced him to temporarily cede power to his brother for the first time in 47 years, releasing a statement saying his health is stable, his spirits good and the defence of the island guaranteed, reports Reuters.
   Raul Castro, meanwhile, has remained silent and out of sight, issuing no statements of his own.
   ‘The important thing is that in the country everything is going perfectly well, and will continue to do so,’ said the statement by the elder Castro, who temporarily handed power to his brother on Monday night after surgery.
   Castro, 79, did acknowledge the operation was serious, saying ‘I cannot make up positive news.’ But he said his health was ‘stable’ and ‘as for my spirits, I feel perfectly fine,’ according to the statement read on government television Tuesday night.
   He apologised for not giving more details, but said the threat posed to his government by the US means his health must be treated as ‘a state secret.’ No images of the leader were shown.
   Castro expressed his gratitude for the good wishes he received from leaders and supporters around the world and called on Cubans to remain calm as they carried out their daily routines.
   ‘The country is prepared for its defence,’ he said, apparently to assure Cubans the island was safe from potential US attack.
   
   US faces urgent task of
   revising Cuba policy
   The United States for nearly half a century has enacted a crazy quilt of restrictions and sanctions to weaken the regime of Fidel Castro—laws which likely will have to been urgently rewritten after the Cuban leader’s demise, reports AP.
   As officials in Washington took in the news Tuesday that Castro had relinquished power temporarily due to surgery to stem intestinal bleeding, some began to examine how the US-Cuba relationship would need to be reshaped in a post-Fidel world.
   Some said the current anti-Castro laws leave Washington ill-prepared to be a relevant player if the communist leader, nearly 80, leaves the stage after 47 years in power.
   ‘Whether Castro is sick or dead or just testing the reaction in Cuba, the United States is in no position to help,’ said Republican Representative Jeff Flake, a long time critic of the current administration’s Cuba policy.
   ‘We are more distant now than we ever have been from the Cubans, who could pursue the kind of change that we would like to see,’ Flake said.
   US law states that Washington can provide support only to a transition government which does not include Fidel Castro or his brother Raul, Cuba’s defence chief, who has provisionally taken power. Any support also must meet conditions including holding free elections and releasing political prisoners.
   While there is a large and vocal contingent in Congress which supports these and other restrictions, there is also growing support for liberalizing ties as the best way to support democracy.
   ‘There is a widespread misconception that, as soon as Castro is gone, the US will be able to aid and assist a transition,’ Flake said.
   ‘But with Castro’s brother in place and several unreasonable conditions in US law to be met, the US will be on the sidelines while the rest of the democratic world engages in reform efforts.’

The Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, faces a deadline to either name a new prime minister—probably his arch-rival Viktor Yanukovych—or dissolve parliament, as a four-month political crisis came to a head.
   Yushchenko’s office had promised he would nominate a prime minister by Wednesday as the constitution gives him 15 days to make a decision after receiving a formal coalition proposal.
   Yanukovych’s Regions party made such a proposal on July 18.
   Rival pro-Western and pro-Russian leaders have been jockeying for position since parliamentary elections on March 26, presenting sharply different visions of where this country of nearly 47 million people should be headed.
   At the elections, Regions won the most parliamentary seats but failed to gain an overall majority.
   Yushchenko held talks Tuesday with key political figures, at which he stressed ‘the importance of finding a compromise’, his office said, adding that dissolving parliament was seen as a last resort. But a number of newspapers said that dissolution of parliament and fresh elections looked the most likely outcome.
   ‘The longer this show goes on ... the stronger the impression gets that it will end up with a new election,’ the Gazeta Po-kievski daily said Wednesday.
   The Ukrainian leader has baulked at appointing Yanukovych, having faced down the pro-Russian politician in a 2004 popular uprising known as the ‘orange revolution’.
   Hundreds of thousands of people participated in the 2004 peaceful protests that eventually overturned a presidential election result that had given Yanukovych the presidency, a result that independent observers said had been falsified.

A young US army private told a military hearing on Wednesday that fellow soldiers shot dead three Iraqi prisoners then threatened to kill him if he told investigators about the crime.
   The trial of four enlisted men from the famed ‘Rakkasans’ — the 3rd Combat Brigade of the 101st Airborne — is expected to focus a critical light in the US military’s controversial and opaque rules of engagement in Iraq.
   Civilian lawyers representing the defendants have said that orders from the Rakkasans’ commander, colonel Michael Steele, called for troops to ‘kill all military age males’ during a raid on May 9 on a suspected al-Qaeda base.
   Steele is a controversial figure following his leading role in a bungled 1993 raid in the Somali capital Mogadishu — made famous by the book and film ‘Blackhawk Down’ — in which 18 US soldiers and hundreds of Somalis died.
   Private Bradley Mason was testifying on the second day of a pre-trial hearing at the US military base Camp Speicher near Tikrit, in central Iraq, being held to decide whether to charge four troops with pre-meditated murder.
   Mason told the hearing that he had been with the defendants Private Corey Clagett, staff sergeant Raymond Girouard, Specialist William Hunsaker and Specialist Juston Graber during the operation.
   The US troops arrived at a suspect house by helicopter, shot one man at the window and captured three more hiding inside with two women, he said. A pistol, an AK-47 rifle, ammunition and gun parts were found in the house.
   Mason testified that Girouard told him that Clagett and Hunsacker were going to kill the prisoners. ‘They just smiled,’ he added, describing his comrades’ reaction to the alleged instruction.
   ‘I told him that I’m not down with it. It’s murder,’ Mason said.
   The 20-year-old private said he then heard gunshots ring out, and left the house to find the detainees dead. After the mission, he said, Girouard and Hunsaker threatened to kill him if he reported what had happened.
   According to Mason, his non-commissioned superior Girouard said: ‘If you say anything, I’ll kill you.’
   ‘I took them pretty seriously,’ Mason said of Girouard and Hunsaker’s alleged threats.
   Under cross-examination from Clagett’s defence lawyer Paul Bergrin, Mason said that Steele had ordered before the mission that if troop encountered Iraqi men they were to ‘kill all of them.’

Street protests led by the leftist candidate in Mexico’s presidential election plunged the capital into chaos for a second day on Tuesday, raising fears of a long and increasingly nasty fight over vote fraud claims, reports Reuters.
   The mass demonstrations called by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to protest alleged vote-rigging in his close defeat by conservative rival Felipe Calderon have turned Mexico City’s swanky business district into a sprawling campsite.
   On Tuesday evening the leftist asked supporters to remain peaceful but keep the protest camps going.
   ‘We are not here because we want to be, it’s because we need to be, because we want there to be democracy,’ he said in the Zocalo square, where hundreds were camped out.
   ‘I ask you to keep going. We’ve barely been going two days, I ask you to make the effort, the sacrifice to be in the camps day and night.’
   European Union observers say they found no evidence of fraud in the July 2 election, but Mexico’s long history of voting irregularities has left many leftists suspicious. Lopez Obrador says he has evidence vote returns were tampered with.
   
   Official calls protest illegal
   Mexico’s interior secretary on Tuesday said the supporters of a leftist presidential candidate who are occupying a central part of the capital have set up an ‘illegal blockade’ and it was up to the mayor to guarantee order, reports AFP.
   Carlos Abascal, the top-ranking member of outgoing president Vicente Fox’s Cabinet, stopped short of ordering Mexico City Mayor Alejandro Encinas to force the protesters to leave Reforma Avenue, which transverses the financial and cultural heart of this city of 20 million.
   But he said he had ‘implored him, in accordance with his responsibilities, to guarantee the order and liberty of all citizens in the face of the illegal blockade.’
   Supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who finished an agonisingly close second place in the official but still uncertified vote count from the July 2 election.

The US government won an appeal on Tuesday allowing it to seek phone records of New York Times reporters investigating government probes into Islamic charities shortly before the September 11 attacks.
   The US Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favour of the government, which wants to know the identity of government sources who might have given information to two
   New York Times reporters, including former reporter Judith Miller.
   The decision is the latest episode in the free speech battle that has pitted US prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald against the Times and Miller.
   Miller spent 85 days in jail last year for resisting Fitzgerald’s requests to reveal her sources in a separate case that led to the indictment of vice president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby.
   The case decided on Tuesday involves Fitzgerald heading a grand jury investigation into how Miller and fellow reporter Philip Shenon learned of government plans to search the premises of two Islamic charities, and sought comment from them before the search took place.
   The Times filed a lawsuit and successfully blocked a threatened subpoena being sought by Fitzgerald to seek the phone records of the two reporters after the newspaper refused to identify their sources.
   A spokesman for Fitzgerald’s office declined to comment.

Undercover investigators ente-red the United States using fake documents repeatedly this year — including some cases in which Homeland Security Department agents didn’t ask for identification.
   At nine border crossings on the Mexico and Canadian borders, agents ‘never questioned the authenticity of the counterfeit documents,’ according to Government Accountability Office testimony to be released Wednesday.
   ‘This vulnerability potentially allows terrorists or others involved in criminal activity to pass freely into the United States from Canada or Mexico with little or no chance of being detected,’ concluded the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, in testimony obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.
   The findings, to be presented to the `Senate Finance Committee, come as Congress considers delaying a 2007 deadline requiring passports or a small number of previously approved tamperproof ID cards from all who enter the United States.
   Homeland Security spokesman Jarrod Agen said agents are trained to identify false birth certificates, driver’s licenses and other documents. But he conceded that agents sometimes cannot verify more than 8,000 different kinds of currently acceptable IDs without significantly slowing border traffic.
   ‘This creates a security vulnerability we were hoping to close’ with the deadline at the end of next year, Agen said.
   The GAO probe follows a similar inquiry in 2003 and 2004 when undercover investigators crossed unhindered into the United States at least 14 times using counterfeit drivers’ licenses and, in one case, an expired, altered US diplomatic passport. During that investigation, however, border agents in New York and Florida stopped three undercover officials who were using expired and forged passports, drivers’ licenses or birth certificates.

US actor and film director Mel Gibson apologised to the Jewish community Tuesday for anti-Semitic remarks he uttered while being arrested for drunken driving and asked to meet Jewish leaders to make amends.
   In his first confirmation of using slurs against Jews originally reported on the Internet and picked up by media throughout the United States, Gibson said in a statement that he had no excuses for what he had done.

Fresh fighting kills six in Kashmir
Five Muslim militants and an Indian soldier died in clashes Wednesday in revolt-hit Kashmir where violence has been escalating in recent months, the police said. The police said two militants and a soldier were killed in a pre-dawn gunfight in Doda, south of Srinagar, summer capital of Indian Kashmir where an Islamic separatist insurgency has raged against New Delhi’s rule since 1989. ‘The fighting erupted when rebels raided a militant hideout in the forest area of Mughal Maidan,’ a police spokesman said. He said troops also shot dead three militants in separate early morning clashes near Tral town, south of Srinagar and in northern Bandipora town. Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan each hold part of the Himalayan region of Kashmir but claim it in full.

Jealous man kills eight in China
A man consumed by jealousy is suspected of murdering eight members of his wife’s family before committing suicide in China, state press said Wednesday. Wang Changyi is believed to have murdered his brother-in-law and his wife and their four children, as well as his sister-in-law and her mother early Tuesday, the Chuncheng Evening News reported. Following the killings, Wang committed suicide by ingesting poison, it said. The police said the crime scene at Bailujiao village in Yunnan province was ‘full of blood’ but refused to say how the murders had been carried out, according to the paper. Among the children killed the oldest was 17 and the youngest was five, it said.

Japan aims for manned moon station in 2030
Japan’s space agency has set a goal of constructing a manned lunar base in 2030, an official said Wednesday. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency revealed its ambition to an international conference in Tokyo this week but has not yet been allotted the budget for the ambitious project. JAXA hopes to launch a satellite into lunar orbit next year, followed by an unmanned spacecraft that will land on the moon and a probe ship that will collect samples from the moon. Under the plan, the astronauts will be sent to the moon by around 2020 so that they will start construction of the base to be completed by 2030, the agency said.

Top China official hopes to visit Taiwan
China said Wednesday one of its top officials in charge of Taiwan policy hoped to visit the island in October, although he had apparently not cleared his plans with the intended host yet. ‘Taiwan Affairs Office director Chen Yunlin will lead a delegation attending a forum on agricultural cooperation,’ an unnamed spokesman said on the office’s website. The Taiwan government, however, said Chen had not applied for permission to visit. ‘As we have not received the application, we do not comment on the report,’ said Wei Shu-chuan, spokeswoman for the Mainland Affairs Council, the island’s main policymaking agency for China issues. If the visit were to go ahead, Chen would become the highest-level communist Chinese official ever to go to Taiwan.
— AFP

World powers urge caution as Congo counts votes
UN powers on Wednesday warned rivals in the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo not to sow unease among voters as they await results of the first multiparty election in 46 years. Politicians and the media should avoid ‘mispresentation’ of early counting in the July 30 vote, said the International Committee supporting the Transition in the DRC. ‘Such misrepresentation sows unease among the people and could threaten public order,’ said CIAT, whose members include permanent UN Security Council powers Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States. The warning came as some private television stations owned by candidates–in particular President Joseph Kabila and his arch rival Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba–broadcast results in towns or villages, presenting them as an indication of a national trend.
— AFP

Ugandan rebel leader Kony appears in public
Joseph Kony, the leader of Uganda’s notoriously brutal rebel Lord’s Resistance Army and one of the world’s most wanted men, on Tuesday made a rare public appearance and flatly denied he had committed any atrocities. But he did, according to witnesses, ask forgiveness for atrocities against civilians committed both by the militants under his command and Ugandan forces. Dressed in a white shirt, white trousers and black shoes, the elusive Kony emerged from the jungle on Sudan’s southern border with the Democratic Republic of Congo to give his first news conference in nearly 20 years of war.
— AFP

Tropical storm passes Caribbean islands
Tropical Storm Chris brushed past islands in the eastern Caribbean early Wednesday, and forecasters said the third named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season could strengthen into a hurricane later in the day. The storm had top sustained winds of nearly 60 mph as it passed over the northernmost Leeward Islands and was expected to gather strength as it moved west-northwest in the direction of the Virgin Islands, according to the US National Hurricane Centre in Miami. Long-range forecasts put the storm anywhere from south of Cuba to Florida by late in the weekend. To be a hurricane, the storm must reach sustained winds of at least 74 mph, a strengthening forecasters said could happen late Wednesday or Thursday.
— AP

Annan for strong AU force in Darfur
The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, urged the Security Council to strengthen African Union forces in the Sudan’s violence-wracked Darfur region and more than double it if a UN takeover of peacekeeping duties is approved. In a 30-page report to the council circulated Tuesday, Annan laid out proposals for a much more muscular UN operation to protect civilians and support a peace agreement signed by the government and one rebel group in May. The three options envision a UN force of between 15,300 and 18,600 troops, depending on the number of aircraft and rapid reaction troops. Annan also proposed more than tripling the 1,560-strong African Union police contingent to about 5,300 UN officers.
—AFP

Australian man charged in penis killing
An Australian man appeared in court Wednesday accused of stabbing his ex-wife’s lover to death, severing his penis and leaving it in her bedside drawer. Garbor Ziha, 56, allegedly attacked Barry Corbett, 58, after letting himself into the man’s apartment and finding him in bed with his former wife Marija Ziha, 54.
— AFP