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Voters in Nepal cast their ballots under threats of violence Wednesday in controversial elections that the king promised would be the first step back to democracy in the troubled Himalayan nation.
   Turnout was thin in the first hours of polling amid a general strike called by Maoist rebels, who threatened anyone taking part in Nepal’s first national election since 1999.
   Newspapers reported that security agencies had been given the green light to shoot people disrupting the local elections.
   King Gyanendra called the election as part of a ‘road map to democracy’ after he sacked the government and seized absolute power a year ago, promising to quell the 10-year-old rebel insurgency that has claimed 12,500 lives.
   But many of his opponents have derided the plan as a sham and insisted that the elections were a bid to try to legitimise the king’s February 2005 power grab.
   Wednesday’s municipal elections were also faced with a shortage of candidates and an AFP correspondent in the capital, Kathmandu, said few voters were seen on the streets amid a heavy presence of police and soldiers.
   In Kathmandu’s historic Durbar Square, voting booths were open but people casting ballots were few and far between.
   ‘I came here because it’s a good thing for democracy,’ said the first person to vote at the site, Makahan Gallaa, who arrived with her husband as polls opened. Only a trickle of voters was seen throughout the morning.
   In other towns voter turnout was also low, according to local journalists and residents reached by telephone.
   In Mahendranagar in far west Nepal, turnout was negligible after a series of blasts shook the main bazaar before polling began, a local journalist said.
   Meanwhile, Maoist rebels are committed to multi-party democracy and willing to keep the monarchy ‘if the people choose,’ the group’s leader Prachanda said in a report published Wednesday.
   The interview with the Maoist leader in India’s The Hindu newspaper came as Nepal staged municipal polls denounced by the rebels and opposition parties as an attempt by King Gyanendra to legitimise his takeover of power a year ago.
   Prachanda, whose Maoist movement has waged a deadly 10-year ‘people’s war’ to topple the monarchy, said he was willing to hold talks with the king if Gyanendra conceded that his army-backed coup in February 2005 was ‘wrong.’
   ‘Let us sit across the table, and then (if) he talks of a free and fair election to a constitutional assembly, then we will be ready to take part,’ said Prachanda, which loosely translates as ‘the fierce one.’
   Prachanda, whose group took up arms to install a communist republic, said it was now committed to multi-party democracy so long as it was under a ‘new constitutional framework.’
   ‘Our decision on multi-party democracy is a strategically, theoretically developed position,’ he said in the wide-ranging interview laying out a roadmap for political change.
   Prachanda’s comments contrast with his warning on the eve of the polls that the struggle to overthrow the monarchy would intensify.
   ‘We don’t see any possibility of achieving democracy and peace as per the aspiration of Nepal and Nepalese people without resorting to decisive struggle against (the) feudalistic autocratic regime,’ he said in a statement Tuesday.
   Fresh violence kill 10
   Troops killed a man after they opened fire Wednesday on a group protesting against Nepal’s local elections while a Maoist rebel planting a landmine to disrupt the vote was shot dead, officials said.
   Seven Maoist rebels and a soldier meanwhile were killed in clashes in various parts of the troubled Himalayan kingdom, officials said.
   The protester died after troops opened fire on demonstrators in Dang district in mid-western Nepal, said an official from army headquarters in Kathmandu.
   ‘While the election was taking place in Tribhuvan municipality this afternoon, some 150 protesters chanting slogans against the election came and threw stones at security forces,’ the official said.
   ‘Security forces asked them to stop. Someone in the crowd fired a gun at soldiers, injuring one. Soldiers returned fire in retaliation and a civilian was killed,’ the official said.
   Separately, security forces gunned down a rebel while he was planting a landmine to prevent polling in Kailali district in western Nepal, the army said in a statement. In other violence, two rebels and a soldier were killed in overnight clashes in eastern Dhankuta district, a police official said.
   The rebels abducted 12 government officials, including the regional deputy administrator, and three police officers, the official said by telephone.

Hamas could agree to a ‘long-term truce’ with Israel only if it is willing to return to the 1967 borders and recognise the rights of Palestinians to self-determination, its exiled leader told BBC radio Wednesday.
   ‘We now say that if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, there could be peace and security in the region and agreements between the sides until the international community finds a way to solve everybody’s problems,’ Khaled Meshaal said.
   ‘Truce would be long-term but limited, because there’s a Palestinian reality the international community must deal with. There are those kicked out of their land in 1948, the international community must find a solution for those people.’
   The hardline Islamist group won a surprise victory in the January 25 parliamentary elections in the Palestinian Territories but has since come under international pressure to renounce violence against Israel.
   Its refusal to recognise Israel has also led to the threat that vital overseas aid could be withdrawn unless it renounces violence.
   Meshaal, who is based in the Syrian capital Damascus, said Hamas was prepared to take a ‘serious step’ but only when Jerusalem recognises the right of Palestinians to self-determination.
   Meanwhile, an armed Palestinian was killed before dawn Wednesday in an exchange of fire with Israeli troops near the security barrier between the Gaza Strip and Israel at the El-Boureij refugee camp, Palestinian medical sources said.
   Two other armed Palestinians were wounded in the clash, they said.
   The victim was named as Mohammed al-Hur. No details about him were immediately known.

China called the Taiwan president, Chen Shui-bian, a ‘troublemaker’ and ‘destroyer’ of peace Wednesday, following his recent speech that called for the scrapping of unification guidelines with the mainland.
   ‘He is a troublemaker and destroyer of cross-Strait relations and peace and stability in Asia,’ Li Weiyi, spokesman for the cabinet-level Taiwan Affairs Office, told a news conference without mentioning Chen by name.
   ‘The leader of the Taiwan authorities... has publicly gone back on his (stated) commitments and challenged the respect of the international community for the ‘one China principle.’
   Li was commenting on a January 29 Lunar New Year speech in which Chen proposed scrapping Taiwan’s National Unification Council and the guidelines it has established for eventual reunification with the mainland.
   Chen also suggested Taiwan should reapply to join the United Nations in the name of ‘Taiwan’ instead of the island’s official title: ‘Republic of China’. He also called for putting a new constitution to a vote later this year.
   Eliminating the guidelines could fuel Beijing’s suspicions that he is pushing for independence for the island, which China regards as part of its territory. The two split in 1949 after a civil war.
   The speech also caused concern in Washington and prompted the United States to reiterate its opposition to Taiwan independence and its allegiance to the ‘one China policy,’ which states that there is only one China and that Beijing is China’s legal government.
   Li said China remained committed to peaceful reunification, but also said Beijing would in no way permit a separate and independent Taiwan.
   ‘Our adherence to the ‘one China principle’ will never waver, we will never abandon efforts to seek peaceful reunification, we will never change our guiding policy of pinning hopes on Taiwan compatriots and we will never compromise on our opposition to Taiwan separatist activities,’ Li added.

Sri Lanka will seek to amend the ceasefire agreement with Tamil Tiger rebels during negotiations in Geneva later this month despite opposition from the guerrillas, official sources said Wednesday.
   The president, Mahinda Rajapakse, told his negotiators to ensure that promises in his election manifesto titled ‘Mahinda Chinthana’, or Mahinda philosophy, are followed in dealing with the rebels.
   ‘Everyone should take action in accordance with the Mahinda Chinthana which was put forward before the people,’ state television quoted the president as saying while addressing a two-day workshop for his negotiators.
   Tamil Tiger rebels Tuesday ruled out discussing a political solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict during talks in Geneva later this month and said only their faltering truce should be on the agenda.
   But a politician at Rajapakse’s meeting in Colombo Tuesday said the president was keen for the truce deal to be revisited in a bid to strengthen it and halt violence.
   Rajapakse came to power in November promising a new approach to the island’s Norwegian-brokered peace process which has remained deadlocked since the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam pulled out of face-to-face talks in April 2003.
   The impasse was lifted when the Tigers and Colombo agreed to meet in Geneva for two days starting February 22 to discuss implementing their troubled truce, which went into effect on February 23, 2002.
   ‘The ceasefire agreement will be amended so as to ensure that acts of terrorism would not be permitted in any way,’ according to Rajapakse’s election manifesto.
   ‘The ceasefire monitoring mechanism would also be reviewed and new steps taken.’
   The Tigers have said that they will only attend the Geneva talks to discuss the ceasefire and not a political settlement to decades of ethnic bloodshed that has claimed over 60,000 lives.
   ‘The only way to avoid war and create a peaceful environment in the Tamil homeland is to implement the ceasefire agreement in full,’ the LTTE said.

The United States will consider introducing a resolution in the UN Security Council to step up international pressure on military-ruled Myanmar for alleged human rights abuses, the State Department said Tuesday.
   ‘We would look at that option very, very carefully and we would look at all UN options, all UN options,’ the assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, Christopher Hill, told a Congressional hearing after legislators pressed for such a resolution.
   Washington put the international spotlight on Myanmar in December when it successfully pushed the Security Council, despite initial objections from China and Russia, to hold a briefing on human rights and other problems in the Southeast Asian state for the first time.
   Not satisfied with this, US legislators Tuesday pressed Washington, current president of the UN Security Council, to put Myanmar formally on the agenda of the powerful UN panel, a move that could lead to resolutions of condemnation and raise pressure on the military rulers.
   Hill agreed that the Myanmar situation warranted continued UN Security Council attention ‘and we are considering next steps in that body.’
   On the prospect of a Security Council resolution, he said, ‘It is our very strong belief that this is an issue that does require a broad number of players and the Security Council is an appropriate place to be informed and to look very closely what the next step is.’
   The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, ‘has designated 2006 as the year for bringing about a transition to democracy’ in Myanmar ‘and we take the target very seriously,’ Barry Lowenkron, the assistant secretary of state for democracy and human rights, said in his testimony.
   Myanmar’s military junta has been accused of operating a strict police state and restricting basic rights and freedoms.
   Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s democracy icon and Nobel peace prize winner, has been under house arrest for more than 10 of the past 16 years and kept isolated from the outside world.
   Her party won the 1990 elections in a landslide but was never allowed to govern.
   US legislators said a UN Security Council resolution on Myanmar should call for, among others, the immediate release of Aung San Suu Kyi, a timeline for compliance and punitive sanctions if the military junta failed to comply.
   The resolution must be framed ‘in the strongest possible terms,’ said Republican Representative Chris Smith, who chaired the hearing.
   But any US move to haul Myanmar to the UN Security Council could face opposition from permanent council members Russia and China as well as Malaysia, which is playing a central Southeast Asian role to prod Myanmar into embarking on reforms.
   The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, signalling its impatience with fellow member Myanmar, appointed Malaysian foreign minister Syed Hamid Albar to visit the country as an ASEAN envoy to check on the progress of democracy.
   The visit was expected to occur in January but Myanmar said it was too busy to receive Syed Hamid.
   Hill said that the United States was confident that Syed Hamid and the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, also planning a visit Myanmar, would ‘deliver strong messages’ to the military rulers.
   A former Malaysian top diplomat, Razali Ismail, quit in January as UN special envoy to Myanmar after being refused entry for the past two years to the country.
   It is important for Annan to name another special envoy with a broader mandate, including coordination with regional governments and non-governmental organisations, Lowenkron said.
   ‘The mandate also should require access to the regime and leading opposition figures, including those currently detained,’ he said.

India’s Supreme Court has asked a lower court for the details of a murder after it discovered that a man has spent 38 years in jail without a trial because police lost his papers, a lawyer said Wednesday.
   Jagjivan Ram Yadav has never had a court appearance although he has been incarcerated for nearly four decades in Faizabad town, about 150 kilometres south-east of Uttar Pradesh’s capital, Lucknow.
   ‘It is inhuman to see a man languishing in jails because there is no one to pursue his case,’ said IB Singh, convenor of lawyers group, ‘We the Citizens’, which has taken up Yadav’s cause.
   The group decided to pursue the matter after his case came to light in July when a jail official sought from the court information about the status of trials of all inmates.
   ‘This is a unique case as Jagjivan can neither be granted bail nor relieved of all charges because police are unable to present papers,’ judge Lal Chandra Tripathi told a Faizabad court when the matter came up for hearing this week.
   Yadav, 70, is charged with the murder of a married woman in 1968. He was arrested with 20 others from his village.
   The rest were granted bail and they all seemingly forgot about him.
   His family members say he is innocent and say they have been let down not only by the judicial system but also by their relatives.
   ‘After my father was jailed in the false case, my relatives threw my mother and me out of our house. They usurped our property and we were left high and dry,’ said Yadav’s son Kamlesh, who was only one-and-a-half when his father was jailed.
   ‘My mother worked as labourer so that we could survive,’ he said.
   ‘We ran from pillar to post to tell the world that Jagjivan is innocent,’ his son said. ‘Our pleas fell on deaf ears.’
   Even the security officials at the jail are sympathetic to Yadav, who himself is baffled by media attention. He looked on silently after television crews descended on the jail.
   ‘He is suffering without any fault,’ said Rama Shankar Upadhaya, a police official escorting Yadav. ‘The law is blind.’
   A senior official in the state interior ministry said that the government was looking into the case, and may consider giving compensation to Yadav.

Kuwait’s new Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah on Tuesday appointed his brother Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Sabah as the new crown prince and heir of the US-allied Gulf Arab oil producer.
   State news agency KUNA and state television said Sheikh Sabah also appointed a nephew, Sheikh Nasser al-Mohammad al-Ahmad al-Sabah, a minister in charge of emiri diwan (royal court), as the
   The latest move effectively does away with a political tradition that the position of the emir and other top posts should rotate between the family’s two wings. Sheikh Sabah, Sheikh Nawaf and Sheikh Nasser are all members of the Jaber clan of the Sabah dynasty.
   ‘We have issued a decree nominating His Highness Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah to assume the post of crown prince,’ Sheikh Sabah said in a decree read on state television.
   Nawaf, 69, had been acting prime minister since the former premier Sheikh Sabah was named emir late last month following the removal by parliament of ailing Emir Sheikh Saad al-Abdulla al-Sabah, who hails from the Salem branch.

The Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, signalled Wednesday he may put off plans to introduce female succession to the imperial throne after a princess became pregnant.
   Koizumi said he wanted to spend ‘enough time’ on the debate as public opinion is divided over allowing a female monarch in the world’s longest-running royal line.
   ‘I want to proceed cautiously so as not to make this a political tool,’ he said in parliament amid divisions on the issue within his Liberal Democratic Party.
   ‘It would be desirable that the bill to revise the imperial house law be enacted after cautious discussions and in a manner to convince everybody that this is a desirable revision,’ he said.
   Koizumi had earlier pledged to propose female succession to parliament by June.
   Asked whether he was keeping to the timeline, Koizumi avoided a clear-cut answer, saying: ‘The question is not whether I would stick to it or not.’
   The imperial household said Tuesday that Princess Kiko, the 39-year-old wife of the emperor’s second son, is pregnant, a development hoped for by opponents of female succession.
   No boy has been born to the imperial family since 1965.

The Turkish and Indian embassies were preparing Wednesday to repatriate the bodies of their nationals killed in a bomb blast in western Afghanistan, in which a Nepalese guard and an Afghan also died.
   The four were killed Tuesday when a bomb struck their vehicle in western Farah province. A purported spokesman for remnants of the ousted Taliban regime now waging an anti-government insurgency claimed responsibility for the blast.
   The bodies were to be flown to the US air base at Bagram, north of Kabul, an official in the Turkish embassy said. ‘Today they’ll be brought to Bagram Air Base. Then he will be taken to Turkey, maybe on Thursday,’ the official said.
   He identified the Turkish national as Opuk Aydin, an engineer for the Kolin road construction company.
   Meanwhile, India is sending paramilitary police to Afghanistan to protect civilian workers after an engineer was killed by the Taliban militia last year and another national died in a blast, an official said on Wednesday.
   The government official said about 40 armed police from the Indo-Tibetan Border Police were already in Afghanistan, mainly to guard the Indian mission in Kabul and its consulates around the country.
   The extra police were being sent to guard Indian engineers and support staff working on various development projects, especially a key highway project, around the war-torn country.
   ‘It has been decided to upgrade the level to about 250 in the coming weeks,’ the government official said.
   In the latest violence, a roadside blast killed a Turk, an Indian and their Afghan driver in the west of Afghanistan on Tuesday, a provincial governor said.
   The victims were working on a road construction project in Farah province, said the governor, Izatullah Wasifi.
   Last November, Indian engineer Maniyappan Raman Kutty was kidnapped and beheaded by the Taliban militia, who want the withdrawal of all Indian workers from Afghanistan.

The vice president, Dick Cheney, on Tuesday resisted bipartisan appeals for changes in a hotly disputed warrantless eavesdropping programme, saying he believed ‘we have all the legal authority we need.’
   Democrats and some Republicans have urged the Bush administration to work with Congress to revise a law already on the books in order to end questions about whether the spy programme, initiated after the September 11, 2001 attacks, was constitutional.
   In an interview on PBS’ ‘Newshour,’ Cheney was asked whether President Bush was willing to work with Congress to settle some of the legal questions about the spy programme.
   ‘We believe ... that we have all the legal authority we need,’ Cheney said.
   He said Bush had indicated he was willing to listen to ideas from Congress and that members of Congress certainly have the right to suggest changes.
   ‘We’d have to make a decision, as the administration, whether or not we think it would help and would enhance our capabilities,’ he said.
   A House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency, which conducted the eavesdropping, broke ranks with the White House and called for a full congressional inquiry into the programme, The New York Times reported.
   Rep Heather Wilson of New Mexico, chairwoman of a House Intelligence subcommittee, said in an interview with the paper that she had ‘serious concerns’ about the surveillance programme.
   By withholding information about its operations from many lawmakers, she said, the administration has deepened her apprehension about whom the agency is monitoring and why.
   Wilson is the first Republican on either the House or Senate intelligence committees to call for a full congressional investigation into the programme.
   The NSA programme was exposed in December by The New York Times. It monitors telephone calls and e-mail exchanges between people in the United States and abroad when one party is suspected of links to al-Qaeda.
   A 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, makes it illegal to spy on US citizens in the United States without the approval of a special security court.
   Cheney said he was concerned that additional legislation on the issue would disclose the programme in a way that would possibly damage it.
   ‘I think it’s important for us if we’re going to proceed legislatively to keep in mind that there’s a price to be paid for that and it might well in fact do irreparable damage to our capacity to collect this information,’ he said.
   Cheney also said some congressional critics were changing their tune on the programme now that it was public. When they were briefed privately on the classified programme, they had been supportive, he said.
   ‘I presided over most of those briefings, there was no great concern expressed that somehow we needed to come get additional legislative authority,’ he said.

Vote counting began in Haiti Tuesday, in some areas by candlelight, after presidential elections that were free of the political violence many had feared but were marked by stampedes that left four dead.
   As the counting was underway in some centres late Tuesday, voters elsewhere still waited their turn to fill ballots out at the small cardboard voting booths. Results were not expected before Friday.
   International observers hailed Haitians’ determination to participate in the election for a successor to Jean Bertrand Aristide, the last elected president, who fled the turmoil-torn Caribbean country two years ago.
   Throngs of people walked for hours in the general absence of public transportation, only to find massive lines outside voting centres.
   Hours long delays in opening numerous voting stations stirred widespread anger, after vote officials failed to show up in time.
   A policeman and a civilian died of gunshot wounds and four others were injured when a crowd rushed the gates of a voting centre in the northwestern town of Gros Mornes, a local radio station reported.
   In Port-au-Prince, one man was asphyxiated, another died of a heart attack and several more were wounded during similar stampedes, officials said.
   More people were reported wounded in other parts of the country, including a Chilean peacekeeper who was stabbed as he intervened in a fight outside a voting centre.
   Officials of the 9,500-strong UN military and police force in Haiti also said 22 people were wounded, four of them seriously, when the wall of a voting centre collapsed in St Louis du Nord.
   The situation calmed down later in the day.
   Electoral authorities ordered voting offices to remain open as long as people were still in line, but some voting centres did not get the message and shut at 4 p.m. (2100 GMT) as initially scheduled.
   At a school in the Bel Air shantytown near the presidential palace, about 16 people seated at two rickety tables counted ballots, as an observer from the US embassy watched on. The only light came from candles supplied as part of the electoral kit.
   Despite problems during the elections, which had been postponed four times since November, international observers hailed the very fact that the voting could be held in a country terrorized by armed gangs, plagued by rampant poverty, and with a history of fraudulent elections and military coups.
   A team of EU electoral observers however criticized the long delays in opening the voting centres.
   ‘A population that was so motivated deserved well-prepared and well-organized elections,’ said Johan Van Hecke, the European deputy who led the 61-strong team.
   But he said ‘technical and logistical problems created considerable delays in opening the polls.’
   Van Hecke, a Belgian, said everything should have been in place on the eve of the voting.
   But he hailed the fact that while ‘there were minor incidents, one cannot say there was a lot of violence.
   UN forces kept a close watch on the election.
   Armored personnel carriers were positioned in key areas of the capital, particularly near the notoriously violent Cite Soleil slum.
   Thousands of people staged a protest march, decrying the delays and the fact that residents of Cite Soleil were forced to cast ballots in neighboring areas due to security concerns.
   The protesters also chanted the name of former president Rene Preval, the front runner in opinion polls.
   In the dirt-poor slums of the capital that have been hotbeds of violence, many back Preval, 63, a former ally of Aristide.
   ‘All here are voting for the same candidate,’ said Wishick Dagrin, 45, an office employee who stood in a long line outside a voting centre for Cite Soleil.
   Dozens of others immediately cheered, chanting ‘Preval, Preval.’
   Better-off Haitians seem to have little sympathy for Preval, and generally favor industrialist Charles Henry Baker, 50 or former president Leslie Manigat, 75.
   ‘We should not be afraid of change, we should not return to the old ideas,’ said businessman Alex Turner, 53, who said he would vote for Baker, but would wait till the crowds thin out.
   Opinion polls ahead of the election gave Preval a lead of at least 27 per cent over Baker and Manigat.
   Should no candidate obtain 50 per cent of the vote, the front runner would face off in March with his closest rival.
   Officials said it could take about three days to compile the results.

Baghdad was under tight security Wednesday on the eve of the Shiite mourning ceremony of Ashura, with roads closed to cars and additional checkpoints set up throughout the Iraqi capital.
   Police announced they have closed bridges leading to the south of the country in effort to block a squad of suicide bombers reported to be headed south to disrupt the ceremonies being held in the holy city of Karbala.
   As the holiest of Shiite festivals, whose celebration was banned under ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, Ashura has often been the target of Sunni extremists, prompting stringent security measures in Baghdad and Karbala.
   The mournful thump of a drum announced parades of black-clad men moving across the city’s car-less bridges, bearing colourful flags and remembering the seventh century death of one of Shiite Muslims’ holiest figures, the imam Hussein.
   Shots rang out across the city as police warned cars to stop before checkpoints.
   Sunni politician Saleh al-Mutlak, leader of the National Conference for Dialogue which holds 11 seats in the new parliament, reported being fired on by a nervous military checkpoint Tuesday night.
   In Karbala, the focus of the ceremony, security is incredibly tight, with police everywhere conducting random checks, but so far there have been no incidents.
   Around 8,000 security personnel have been deployed in and around Karbala for smooth passage of the Shiite ceremony Thursday, while the government has declared a two-day holiday from Wednesday.
   The eve of the commemoration is expected to see large parades and believers performing the ritual flagellations with chains to invoke the suffering of the martyr Hussein.

Speakers seized on the presence of president Bush to attack his policies on Tuesday at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, the first lady of the US civil rights movement.
   Jimmy Carter, one of four presidents to speak, took a jab at Bush’s domestic eavesdropping programme during six hours of sermons, speeches and song for the late widow of Nobel peace laureate Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated in 1968.
   The 10,000 mourners also heard the Rev Joseph Lowery, a civil-rights leader, cite Mrs King’s legacy as a champion of racial equality while launching barbs at Bush administration policies on Iraq and health care.
   Mrs King, 78, died on January 30 of complications from ovarian cancer. Her funeral at a Baptist church in Lithonia, Georgia, drew a ‘who’s who’ of the political and entertainment worlds and the US civil rights community.
   She was due to be buried alongside her husband at the Martin Luther King Jr Centre for Nonviolent Social Change she founded in nearby Atlanta.
   With Washington debating the legality of Bush’s domestic eavesdropping on Americans suspected of ties to al-Qaeda, Carter drew spirited applause with comments on federal efforts to spy on the Kings decades ago.
   ‘It was difficult for them personally with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated, and they became the targets of secret government wiretapping and other surveillance,’ Carter said.
   Former president Bill Clinton, a favourite among mainstream civil rights leaders, offered a teasing hint of the possible presidential candidacy of his wife, New York Democratic senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who stood smiling at his side.
   ‘I’m honoured to be here with my president and my former presidents and ...,’ he trailed off, motioning in his wife’s direction to loud and sustained applause.
   Speaking first, ahead of his critics, Bush said: ‘I’ve come today to offer the sympathy of our entire nation at the passing of a woman who worked to make our nation whole.

A commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards lashed out at the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on Wednesday over her remarks on Tehran’s nuclear programmeme, saying she ‘thinks she’s Hitler.’
   ‘In her childish dreams, Merkel imagines she’s Hitler and thinks that now she occupies the chancellor’s seat she can dictate orders to the world and to free countries,’ Commander Seyyed Massoud Jazayeri was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.
   ‘We cannot expect anything else from people with a Zionist past,’ added Jazayeri, the head of the public relations department of the guards, one of Iran’s most powerful institutions.
   Merkel on Saturday charged that Iran had ‘overstepped the mark’ with its nuclear programmeme after the International Atomic Energy Agency voted to report Tehran to the UN Security Council, paving the way for possible sanctions.
   Iran, which denies Western allegations it is seeking nuclear weapons, retaliated by saying it would begin full-scale uranium enrichment and limit inspections by IAEA officials.

A total of 12 people were killed when a military barracks collapsed in Russia’s turbulent Chechnya region on Tuesday after what appeared to be a domestic gas explosion, local officials said on Wednesday.
   Valery Kuznetsov, a top local justice official, was quoted by RIA news agency as saying 22 people were injured when the two-storey building at Kurchaloi, about 60 miles from the regional capital Grozny, came down after the blast.
   Many of the dead were soldiers but they included one woman.
   A fire that followed the explosion was brought under control, and the scene of the blast was cordoned off. Soldiers helped emergency services well into the night to remove chunks of rubble trapping colleagues.
   ‘We have now finished recovering dead and injured from the ruins. The figures we now have are the final ones,’ Kuznetsov said.

Four churches caught fire and two were destroyed in the southern state of Alabama early Tuesday, just days after another five burned in what authorities suspect was arson, local officials said.
   State and federal officials were investigating the four rural west Alabama fires as intentional, the state fire marshal’s office said in a statement.
   All four churches torched were Baptist, like the five churches burned in the central part of the state late Thursday, three of which were completely destroyed. ‘The fires are being investigated as suspected arson,’ Ray Zicarelli, spokesman for the Birmingham, Alabama office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told CNN television.
   Authorities said they found evidence that at least three of the earlier fires were deliberate, but that they had not made any arrests in the cases.
   In the 1950s-1960s US civil rights battle, a number of Baptist churches with black congregations in Alabama and neighbouring states were targets of arson by opponents of equal rights for African-Americans.
   During 1995-1996, more than 30 mostly black-congregation churches across the US southeast were set on fire
   in a series of arson attacks. While many were considered racially motivated, investigators found no direct link between them.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has accepted an invitation to visit Cuba from president Fidel Castro, in gratitude for Cuba’s support of Iran’s nuclear programme, the official Granma newspaper said Tuesday.
   Ahmadinejad accepted the invitation in Tehran from Cuban Ambassador Felipe Perez Roque. During his visit here, the Iranian leader will attend the September 11-16 Non-Aligned Summit in Havana, the daily said.
   On Saturday in Vienna, Cuba, Venezuela and Syria voted against a resolution of the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran to the UN Security Council over a nuclear programme the West suspects is weapons-oriented.
   The Iranian president recently publicly thanked Cuba for its ‘dignified and principled’ position during the IAEA’s special meeting, which ended in a 27-3 vote in favor of reporting Iran to the UN council.

One killed in Pakistan nuclear facility blast
A technician was killed in an explosion at a top Pakistani nuclear research facility founded by disgraced atomic scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, a military spokesman said Wednesday. Tuesday’s blast at the Khan Research Laboratory near Islamabad involved only conventional explosives and not nuclear material, major general Shaukat Sultan said. ‘The technician was handling normal, conventional material,’ Sultan said. ‘It was an accident and the cause of the explosion is being looked into.’ KRL, founded by AQ Khan in the 1970s, played a key role in uranium enrichment leading to Pakistan’s nuclear weapon tests in May 1998, which were in reaction to similar detonations by rival India.
— AFP

Manila sees peace deal with MILF
The Philippine government could sign a peace deal with Muslim militants as early as September, Manila’s chief negotiator Silvestre Afable said on Wednesday after returning from the latest round of talks in Malaysia. Negotiators from the two sides said on Tuesday they had agreed to a preliminary deal on land claims, the key to ending a nearly four-decade revolt that has cost more than 120,000 lives. ‘We’re working toward a peace deal, hopefully by September,’ Afable told reporters in Manila. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front has been fighting for an independent state for Muslims on the southern island of Mindanao.
— Reuters

Indonesia to host regional religious meeting
Indonesia will host a three-day conference for religious leaders from 18 Asia-Pacific countries this weekend, organisers said Wednesday. The meeting, starting on Saturday, will be attended by 150 religious leaders from countries including Australia, China, East Timor, India, Japan, New Zealand, Pakistan and South Korea, said chief organiser Din Syamsuddin. The conference is aimed at ‘creating an East Asia which is free from poverty, ignorance, instability and terrorism,’ said Syamsuddin, who is a deputy chairman of the Indonesian Council of Ulemas, the country’s highest authority on Islam. Participants want to share ways to solve social and political problems in their respective countries, he said at a press conference.
— AFP

Thai govt drops ban on new protest
Thailand’s government on Wednesday caved in to critics of the prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who are planning a second mass rally at a royal square this weekend, saying it could go ahead as planned. Thaksin had ruled out a repeat of last weekend’s demonstration at the Royal Plaza, which drew 50,000 people calling for his resignation, saying another huge protest would cause traffic jams and would have to be held elsewhere. But government spokes-man said it would no longer object if organisers obtain the necessary permission to hold the rally in the square, which is closely identified with Thailand’s revered monarch.
— AFP

BHP wheat deal
‘soft bribe’
A wheat shipment to Iraq funded by mining giant BHP Billiton and described by the company as a humanitarian gesture was a ‘soft bribe’ to obtain a foothold in Iraq’s lucrative oil industry, the head of an Australian corruption inquiry suggested. The inquiry, headed by former judge Terence Cole, is investigating Australian monopoly wheat exporter AWB’s payment of 220 million US dollars to the Iraq under the United Nations oil-for-food programmeme. The inquiry was broadened Monday to allow investigation of BHP Billiton, and a related company Tigris Petroleum, over a 20,000 tonne shipment of wheat to Iraq in 1996 which was then worth 5.0 million US dollars.
— AFP

UN sanctions on 3 of leaders Cote d’Ivoire
The United Nations imposed sanctions on Tuesday on three political leaders accused of blocking a peace process in war-divided Cote d’Ivoire, where 12 villagers were massacred in fresh violence this week. Military and hospital officials said the victims were shot and hacked to death on Monday in an apparent grudge attack over a pay dispute, not far from the western town of Guiglo, from where UN peacekeeping troops were evacuated last month. The UN Security Council imposed travel and asset freezes on Charles Ble Goude and Eugene Djue, who led young supporters of president Laurent Gbagbo in four days of riots last month against UN bases and personnel in the government-held south.
— Reuters

Violence down
after drink law
change in UK
Violent crime in England and Wales fell by 11 per cent at the end of last year amid a blitz by police on alcohol-related offences and despite a predicted surge following the introduction of extended drinking laws. The Home Office said as well in the fall in violent crime, serious violence also dropped 21 per cent in the last three months of 2005 compared with the same period the previous year. The figures included a six-week period starting in November when police targeted alcohol-related crime through a 2.5 million pound government scheme. Much of the media had predicted the new law would fuel binge-drinking ‘anarchy’ on Britain’s streets and other booze-related crime problems.
— Reuters

Prosecutors charge former Romanian PM
Romania’s ex-prime minister and current parliamentary speaker, Adrian Nastase, has been charged with corruption. Romania’s anti-corruption bureau gave no details of the charges, but it is thought they relate to property deals. Nastase, 55, prime minister from 2000 to 2004, denied any wrongdoing and said the charges were political. The European Union has made it clear that progress on tackling corruption will be crucial to whether Romania can join the EU on schedule next year. Nastase and five other people were charged by prosecutors on Tuesday. Speaking afterwards, Nastase said he ‘was the victim of the political police established by president Traian Basescu’.
— BBC

Argentina protest turns violent
Protesters in southern Argentina have stormed a police station, killing an officer and injuring 14 others. The clashes took place in the city of Las Heras, as more than 200 oil workers tried to free one of their leaders who had been detained on Monday. The officers were said to have been unarmed. The federal government has sent police reinforcements to the area. The oil workers have been protesting for the past two weeks, setting up roadblocks to demand salary increases. Local media said they surrounded the station early Tuesday morning and threw stones at it.
— BBC