Thousands of flag-waving protesters rallied at Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Tuesday to urge the president, Pervez Musharraf, to step down for controversially dismissing the country’s top judge.
   More than 2,000 angry lawyers as well as Islamist and secular opposition activists greeted suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry as he attended a third legal hearing into misconduct charges lodged by Musharraf.
   Chanting ‘Go Musharraf, go’ and ‘Musharraf, killer of justice,’ opposition party supporters mobbed the judge’s jeep before baton-wielding riot police drove them back from the gates of the building.
   Military ruler Musharraf, a key US ally in the ‘war on terror’, has faced a wave of protests and the most serious political crisis of his eight years in power since abruptly removing Chaudhry on March 9.
   ‘This movement will win independence for the judiciary and rid the nation of the military dictatorship for ever,’ former president Rafiq Tarar, Musharraf’s predecessor, said outside the court.
   A panel of top judges is examining allegations against Chaudhry, including that he abused his position to obtain a senior police job for his son when he was not qualified.
   Chaudhry’s main lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan said, as he drove the judge to court, that the proceedings should be open. ‘It should be a public trial,’ he said, adding that the chief justice also disputed the membership of the panel.
   The lawyers–who have tried to stick to the judicial issue and avoid politics in recent weeks–seized and stripped a man wearing a lawyers’ outfit of a black suit who began shouting anti-Musharraf slogans, AFP reporters said.
   They accused him of being a government agent trying to foment unrest.
   Opposition parties said police arrested ‘hundreds’ of supporters overnight.
   The chief of the Islamist coalition, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, briefly defied a house arrest order imposed late Monday to address the crowd before returning home.
   The Pakistan People’s Party of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s first female prime minister, and the Pakistan Muslim League of another former premier, Nawaz Sharif, both said their leaders had hidden overnight to avoid arrest.
   In the eastern city of Lahore around 1,500 lawyers shouted slogans at the High Court but they were outnumbered by around 4,000 police.
   Another 300 attorneys rallied in the southern city of Karachi, around 400 in the central city of Multan and 250 in the northwestern city of Peshawar while there was a widespread boycott of court proceedings.
   The United States and the European Union have both expressed concern at the situation in Pakistan following the judge’s dismissal.
   Opponents say Musharraf suspended Chaudhry to weaken the judiciary in a bid to remain army chief past 2007, when the constitution says he is meant to give up the position.

A humanitarian crisis triggered by a huge earthquake and tsunami threatened thousands of homeless people in the Solomon Islands on Tuesday as aid began to trickle in and powerful aftershocks rattled the country.
   After the first disaster teams reached hard-hit Western and Choiseul Provinces, the prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, said aerial patrols had reported ‘massive and widespread’ destruction from Monday’s magnitude 8.0 quake and tsunami.
   Aerial pictures showed flattened homes and twisted iron roofs on the ground all along the remote coastline as people wandered seemingly aimlessly on roads clogged by debris and boats hurled ashore by powerful waves up to 10 meters high.
   The first priority of rescue teams, Sogavare said, would be to restore communications with affected areas amid official estimates that 22 people had been killed and 5,409 left homeless. The death toll was expected to rise.
   ‘We will be needing a mobile hospital facility and I think Australia and New Zealand have kindly offered to come forward on that,’ Sogavare said.
   Australian aid agency Caritas said infection would set in quickly among those injured, with antibiotics in short supply and doctors currently tending to survivors at a hilltop aid station near Gizo, the worst affected town.
   ‘Many water tanks have been damaged, and we also have a problem with food supplies. The gardens have been inundated, so there is a problem with fresh food,’ Caritas spokeswoman Liz Stone told Australian radio.
   Thousands of villagers remained on high ground as more than 27 aftershocks, including a magnitude 6.2 quake, shook the region and scientists warned more tsunamis could follow.
   With a state of emergency in force, a police patrol boat carrying food and emergency supplies arrived in Gizo, where schools and a hospital were damaged, and dozens of houses sucked into the sea. At least 13 villages were feared destroyed.
   ‘There are vast tracts of land, many, many islands and very complicated terrain,’ Deputy Solomons Police Commissioner Peter Marshall told reporters.
   The region around Gizo is popular with international tourists and scuba divers for its corals. A New Zealand resident was among the dead, the New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, said.

A Russian delegation will visit Tehran this week to resolve problems holding up the completion of Iran’s first nuclear power plant, a top Iranian atomic official said on Tuesday.
   The completion of the Bushehr nuclear power plant being built by Russia and the delivery of nuclear fuel–scheduled for this year–have been repeatedly delayed amid mutual accusations of financial problems.
   ‘In the next two or three days the Russians will come to Tehran to sign an agreement to solve the financial problems of Atomstroiexport,’ the Russian firm building the plant, said Gholam Reza Aghazadeh.
   ‘The Russians have told us that since their company does not have money ‘you need to help us financially’.
   A framework has been found to solve their financial problems,’ added Aghazadeh, the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation.
   Under a deal reached between Tehran and Moscow last September, Russia was to deliver nuclear fuel to Iran in March, the power station would begin working in September and it would start producing energy in November.
   Aghazadeh said that Russia’s slowness in delivering nuclear fuel to Iran underlined the importance for Tehran to produce the fuel on its own soil and master the controversial process of uranium enrichment.

The Ukrainian prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, on Tuesday defied a presidential order to dissolve parliament, deepening a political crisis that has spawned mass protests in Kiev and concern in Moscow.
   Yanukovych told an emergency session of parliament that the decree by pro-western president Viktor Yushchenko was ‘a fatal mistake’ and urged legislators to keep working.
   He later threatened to force an early presidential election if the dissolution order was not rescinded.
   Russia’s foreign ministry voiced concern over the new crisis in Ukraine and called on all sides to seek a compromise out of the crisis, which is the culmination of a long-running power struggle between the pro-West president and his pro-Russian prime minister.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned Tuesday that severe underfunding could force it to halt food deliveries to some 1.2 million people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who are dependent on aid.
   The agency, UNRWA, launched its largest ever emergency funding appeal last November, asking its mainly western donors for 246 million dollars (184 million euros) to cover aid through 2007.
   ‘The response has been unprecedented, just 11 percent or 28.2 million dollars received–this is one of the lowest responses since 2001,’ said UNRWA spokesman Matthias Burckhardt.
   ‘UNRWA urgently appeals to the international community to provide the funding,’ he told journalists here.
   Emergency cash assistance for the most needy in the Palestinian territories has already been stopped, while the agency’s support for health care and job creation are on the brink of being halted, Burckhardt said.
   UNRWA also needs to conclude contracts next month to secure the continuation of food deliveries to 1.26 million Palestinians after July. Rations have already been cut.
   ‘Unless we receive funding by May... we will not be able to continue this,’ Burckhardt explained.
   ‘In Gaza alone, 80 per cent of the population is dependent on food handouts.’ The funding so far has come from Austria, Belgium, Canada, the European Union, Japan and other non-governmental sources.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi is due in Syria on Tuesday, the most senior US official to visit in years, in defiance of the White House which accuses her of undermining US policy.
   With Damascus seeking a new balance in Washington’s Middle East policies, the leading Democrat said her planned talks with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, were key to renewing dialogue on the troubled Iraq and Lebanon files.
   Pelosi, an ardent opponent of the US president, George W Bush, is expected to meet Assad and other officials on Wednesday before heading to Saudi Arabia on the last leg of her regional fact-finding tour.
   The state media in Damascus hailed her visit as a possible breakthrough, with the Syria Times describing Pelosi as a ‘brave lady’ on an ‘invaluable’ mission.
   ‘American legislators, Democrats as well as Republicans, are aware that US policy in the region, especially the war in Iraq and its ties with Syria, is a fiasco that must be repaired,’ said the government daily Tishrin.
   ‘(Syria) is ready for serious and sincere dialogue with the US officials,’ said Tishrin, which said it saw ‘great hopes of a rebalancing of US policy in the region.’
   Bush’s administration has boycotted Damascus since the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri for which a UN investigation has implicated Syrian intelligence despite Syrian denials.

The US military announced on Tuesday the death of four more troops in Iraq, including one killed in a brutal suicide truck bombing near a school in the oil city of Kirkuk a day ago.
   The soldier died from wounds when struck by the bomb which exploded outside a police centre and a primary school in Kirkuk on Monday, the military said.
   Thirteen Iraqis, including eight schoolgirls and a toddler, were also killed in the blast when the bomber carrying food supplies exploded his vehicle.
   Another 192 Iraqis were treated for injuries after the blast. The military said three more US soldiers were also wounded.
   Another soldier was killed on Monday in a roadside bomb blast next to his vehicle during combat operations near Baghdad, the military said.
   A third soldier and a marine were killed in combat operations in the western Anbar province on Monday, the military reported.
   The latest fatalities brought the US military’s losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,254, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
   
   Nine kidnapped in Iraq
   Nine more people have been abducted in Iraq’s flashpoint province of Diyala, the police said on Tuesday, a day after the bodies of 21 Shia workers snatched in similar circumstances were uncovered.
   The nine workers for a provincial electrical company were kidnapped at gunpoint on their way home from work on Monday near the Shia town of Khalis, often used as a killing ground by presumed Sunni extremists.
   The 21 Shias, whose bodies were found on Monday, were also kidnapped on their way back from work after gunmen ambushed their minibuses on the main road out of Baghdad to Diyala, the most dangerous area in Iraq after Baghdad.
   Police in Diyala also said four insurgents were killed in Khalis on Tuesday when a car bomb they were intending to blow up detonated by accident. Two cars were gutted in the blast, the police said. Elsewhere, attacks killed three Iraqi civilians in Baghdad and three policemen in other cities, security officials said.
   Two students at a pharmacy college travelling in a car through the southwestern Baghdad district of Saydiya were killed when a bomb exploded.
   Another civilian was killed when a second roadside bomb exploded in the heart of the Al-Kubaisi shopping centre in Zafaraniya, in southern Baghdad.
   Gunmen shot dead one policeman in an eastern district of the northern oil city of Kirkuk, another in the city of Tikrit, and a third policeman in Kut, south of Baghdad, separate police sources said.

Pakistan’s prime minister called Tuesday for more talks with Afghanistan to settle differences between the two neighbours after Kabul accused Islamabad of harbouring the Taliban leader.
   ‘This merely says that we need to engage more and communicate more,’ Shaukat Aziz told a press conference.
   He said he expected to meet president Hamid Karzai on Wednesday during the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation which opened in the Indian capital on Tuesday.
   ‘On the sidelines, we will be talking to each other. We believe that dialogue, discussion interaction... when you are neighbours you have to learn to live together.’

Afghan and foreign troops killed at least 10 militants in southern Afghanistan early Tuesday as two more rebels, a policeman and three nomads were reported killed in other attacks.
   Troops with the Afghan army and the US-led coalition clashed with militants in the southern province of Helmand in an operation aimed at a ‘regional sub-commander’ linked to notorious Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah.
   The force also captured two militants and destroyed a small-arms cache, the coalition said in a statement.
   They had gone to a compound in the Sangin district, which has seen several clashes and is not in full government control, in search of the sub-commander ‘with direct ties to Taliban military commander Mullah Dadullah Lang.’
   Militants hiding in nearby buildings attacked the troops with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades as they arrived.

The president, George W Bush, is expected to remain defiant Tuesday one day after Democrats hardened their position on linking Iraq war funding to a troop pullout deadline.
   Bush is scheduled to make a statement on the over-100 billion dollar Iraq and Afghanistan war budget legislation at around 10:10am (1410 GMT) after weeks of demanding the funding without the Democrat’s added requirement for a timetable to end the US presence in Iraq.
   For weeks Bush has threatened to veto the legislation which has passed the House of Representatives and the Senate in two versions, and now awaits reconciliation into one bill before being forwarded to Bush.

Sri Lankan troops killed at least 12 Tamil Tiger rebels in clashes in the northwestern district of Mannar, the defence ministry said Tuesday.
   The clashes erupted near the Giant’s Tank area late on Sunday, it said in a statement issued after rebels were blamed for the bombing of a bus on Monday which killed 16 people.
   ‘Intercepted LTTE communication confirmed their total losses as 12,’ the ministry said in a statement. ‘No harm was reported to the security forces. A search operation is in progress in the area.’ The police said an investigation was underway over Monday’s bus bombing.
   Passengers were getting off the bus to be checked by troops manning a road block when the blast occurred just outside the town of Ampara, 350 kilometres east of Colombo.

Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks feared he would be shot unless he cooperated with US interrogators in Afghanistan, according to a sworn statement presented to a British court.
   In the affidavit, Hicks said he was slapped, kicked, punched and spat on after being arrested by coalition forces in the Central Asian country in 2001.
   Hicks also said that he had heard other detainees screaming in pain, had seen evidence of beatings on fellow prisoners and had a shotgun trained on him during questioning.
   ‘I realised that if I did not cooperate with US interrogators, I might be shot,’ he said in the document handed to British authorities and obtained by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Families of South Koreans kidnapped by the communist North will be offered financial help under a new law passed by the Seoul parliament, government officials said Tuesday.
   Seoul says 485 of its citizens, mostly fishermen, have been abducted since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
   The new law, approved Monday, allows the South Korean government to give citizens financial help to trace, reunite or bring home relatives held in the North.
   It also authorises compensation for relatives if abductees are found to have died in the North, said the unification ministry, which handles relations with North Korea.
   North Korea has recently allowed some abductees to have temporary family reunions with South Korean relatives as part of a broader reunion programme.

The recent battles in Mogadishu pitting Ethiopian and Somali troops against insurgents killed 381 civilians and wounded another 565, a local human rights group said on Tuesday.
   The toll, from the Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation, was the first comprehensive count of casualties from what aid agencies are calling the worst fighting in the Somali capital for 15 years.
   Elman chairman Sudan Ali Ahmed said the toll would rise. ‘There are still some wounded as well as dead bodies stuck in their houses where no one can go,’ he said.
   Added to the civilian casualties, scores of fighters died in an offensive by Somalia’s interim government forces and their Ethiopian allies against the rebels between Thursday and Sunday. Fighting subsided after a truce was negotiated.