India deployed aircraft, combat troops and tens of thousands of security forces on the eve Tuesday of its 60th anniversary of independence after new threats by al-Qaeda and separatist rebels, officials said.
   In the federal capital New Delhi, some 70,000 policemen and paramilitary troops were being posted at government buildings, diplomatic enclaves and main intersections.
   The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was to kick off the celebrations Wednesday with a speech from on top of the city’s 16th-century Mughal Red Fort, which has already been sealed off to the public.
   ‘There is nothing specific about the al-Qaeda threat but we are not leaving anything to chance,’ the capital’s police security chief Samsher Deol told the news agency.
   ‘But all the same we are taking this very seriously.’
   ‘Our defence response is the same, whether the threat originates from the al-Qaeda or the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Kashmiri separatist group),’ added Deol, who is in charge of anti-terrorism operations in the city of 14 million people.
   Intelligence officials said al-Qaeda’s threat last week to target India had prompted stepped-up security for Independence Day.
   The threat came in a video on August 5 in which a wanted American member of al-Qaeda warned that US diplomatic missions and other interests were ‘legitimate targets.’
   An unnamed narrator added that ‘the targeting of Tel Aviv, Moscow and Delhi’ is also ‘our legitimate right.’ India was accused of ‘killing more than 100,000 Muslims in Kashmir with US blessing.’
   New Delhi’s borders with adjoining Indian states were to be sealed off on Wednesday and a no-fly zone enforced over the capital. Batteries of anti-aircraft guns and missiles backed by air force gunships have already been deployed, defence ministry officials said.
   State-run express trains, a favourite target of anti-Indian rebels, were being searched for explosives as a precaution, a railways spokesman said.
   India was also stepping up security in the revolt-racked states of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Orissa where outlawed Maoist guerrillas have branded the annual event a symbol of ‘India’s hegemony.’
   ‘We have specific intelligence inputs that Naxalites (Maoists) could try to disrupt the programme’ of celebrations in Raipur, capital of Chhattisgarh state, a senior police officer said by telephone.
   In Assam, 36 people have died in a string of shootings and blasts in the run-up to the celebrations, which separatists boycott to protest New Delhi’s rule over the oil, tea and timber-rich state.
   In Kashmir, a young boy and two men died and 19 people were injured Monday in a grenade blast at a busy market place, which was linked to Independence Day, police said, blaming Muslim militants.
   Kashmiri rebels and separatists observe India’s Independence Day as a ‘Black Day,’ often launching attacks aimed at disrupting celebrations.
   Combat troops armed with heavy weaponry had occupied dozens of buildings in Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar and cordoned off a sports stadium where the celebrations were scheduled to be held Wednesday, officials said.
   ‘We are making foolproof security arrangements to keep militants at bay,’ senior police officer SM Sahai told the news agency in Srinagar, the urban hub of secessionist violence in the Himalayan region.

The president, Pervez Musharraf, marked Pakistan’s 60th anniversary Tuesday saying the battle against terrorism is being waged for his own country’s sake and not America’s.
   Al-Qaeda and other militant organisations using Pakistani border regions as a base for operations posed a threat to Pakistan and it was time they were dealt with, he said in comments marking Independence Day.
   ‘It is time that the entire nation rises against them,’ Musharraf said, referring to Taliban and al-Qaeda cells in the northwestern tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.
   ‘We are not confronting terrorism for America, we are doing it for ourselves,’ he said in remarks quoted by state run Associated Press of Pakistan.
   ‘I see everything from Pakistan’s point of view. Now if that from Pakistan’s point of view suits America, all right,’ he said.
   Musharraf has reacted angrily to accusations that he is not doing enough to deal with terrorist groups, and to threats from the United States that unilateral airstrikes could be launched against the cells in northwest.
   The threats from Washington were sabre-rattling, he was quoted as saying Tuesday, but would not result on attacks on Pakistan’s sovereign territory.
   ‘I am 200 per cent sure that these are neither at official nor at government level,’ he said. With national elections set for later this year or early next, Musharraf issued a call for voters to participate.
   ‘I urge all Pakistani citizens to get involved in the electoral process and become the instruments of enlightened moderation in their beloved country,’ Musharraf said in an address titled ‘To all who care about Pakistan.’
   He said elections would be free and fair, ensure economic stability and be held in a free media environment.
   Musharraf toppled the elected government of prime minister Nawaz Sharif in a coup in October 1999.

Security forces in the restive northeast Indian state of Assam on Monday launched an anti-rebel offensive after insurgents killed 36 people in the past week, officials said.
   ‘The operation involving the army, police and the paramilitary has already begun and is aimed at flushing out militants holed up in bases in the eastern Karbi Anglong district,’ a senior police official who did not wish to be named told the news agency.
   The decision to start the crackdown was taken at a meeting of top army, paramilitary and police officers in Assam’s main city of Guwahati on Monday.
   It came after 28 Hindi-speaking migrant workers — mainly from eastern Bihar state and the western desert state of Rajasthan — were shot dead by separatists in separate attacks over the past week in Karbi Anglong district.
   The victims had lived in Assam for decades after moving there in search of work.
   Eight others, most of them Assamese, were also killed in a series of explosions across Assam in the past week in violence linked to Indian Independence Day celebrations on Wednesday.
   Authorities blamed the attacks on the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom and the Karbi Longri National Liberation Front.

The US ambassador to Japan has warned that ending support to US forces in Afghanistan, as advocated by Japan’s resurgent opposition party, would damage relations between the allies.
   In an interview published on Tuesday, ambassador Thomas Schieffer voiced hope the countries’ close ties would not become a ‘political football’ after conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s coalition lost elections last month.
   Main opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa has vowed to use his bloc’s new control of the upper house of parliament to block Japan from continuing logistical support to the Afghanistan mission.
   If Ozawa carries out his threats, it ‘would certainly have a negative impact’ on US-Japan relations, Schieffer told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
   Schieffer, who held a testy meeting with Ozawa last week, said he ‘didn’t hear the US-Japan alliance being debated’ in the election campaign, which focused primarily on domestic scandals.
   ‘I think it would be a sad commentary if that election somehow spilled over into the foreign policy area, into areas that were previously thought to be pretty much above partisan debate,’ said Schieffer.
   ‘We hope that the political debate here will not wind up making the US-Japan alliance a political football,’ he told the newspaper.
   Abe, an outspoken conservative, has supported a greater military role for Japan, which has been officially pacifist since its defeat in the Second World War.
   Japanese ships in the Indian Ocean provide refuelling and other support to US-led forces in Afghanistan under legislation after the September 11, 2001 attacks, allowing Japan to take part in the ‘war on terror.’
   The laws are set to expire November 1. Abe’s coalition still controls the more powerful lower house, but theoretically the upper house could indefinitely stall legislation.
   Ozawa, known as a shrewd tactician, has said Japan should not support ‘American wars.’
   But his stance has already caused ripples in his motley Democratic Party of Japan, which includes both conservatives and socialists.
   Seiji Maehara, Ozawa’s predecessor as party chief, said this weekend that pulling out of the Afghan mission would be against Japan’s national interests.

Two South Korean women freed by Afghanistan’s Taliban began Tuesday to make the long journey home, where their families spoke of their joy but worried over the fate of 19 other hostages.
   Pale, tearful and clutching Muslim headscarves, the women were handed over to international aid agency officials near the southern Afghan town of Ghazni late Monday and sped off to waiting South Korean representatives.
   The pair — Kim Gin-A, 32, and Kim Kyung-Ja, 37 — were at a safe place, a South Korean embassy spokesman told the news agency under cover of anonymity. Details for their departure from Afghanistan had not been finalised.
   A South Korean foreign ministry official who did not want to be named said they would have a medical check-up at the Bagram military base north of Kabul before being flown home.
   Since the mass kidnapping, families had gathered in a basement room at the Saem-Mul Church on the outskirts of Seoul to help each other cope.
   ‘I feel relieved but at the same time I have a heavy heart because of the other hostages who are still in captivity,’ Kim Ji-Ung, brother of Kim Gin-A, said there.
   ‘We will stick together until all of them are freed.’
   For their mother Seon Yeon-Ja, 60, initial joy was marred by sadness. ‘Two have come back home dead and others are still there. I feel really sad for the other hostages.’
   The Taliban abducted the 23-member Christian aid group, including 16 women, on July 19 as they were travelling by bus through insurgency-plagued southern Afghanistan.
   The insurgents killed two of the men to press their demand for the release of jailed colleagues — a demand refused by the Kabul government.
   The women had been reported by their captors to be seriously ill, but one told the news agency in a brief phone conversation that ‘We are OK.’
   The Taliban called the release of the two women a ‘gesture of goodwill’ on the fourth day of direct talks with South Korean officials.
   ‘The talks will continue,’ Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said, though he repeated that the militant group want Taliban prisoners in Afghan jails to be released in return for the remaining captives.
   Authorities have rejected the demand, even after the hardline Islamic group killed a 29-year-old teacher and a 42-year-old pastor who was leading the aid mission.

Army chiefs from 19 countries, including the United States, Japan and India, met secretly in Sydney ahead of an Asia-Pacific summit in the city next month, the country’s army chief revealed Tuesday.
   The presence of the military leaders in Sydney, including US General George Casey, at the same time and at the same venue last week was considered too risky to publicise, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation said.
   Australia’s chief of army, Lieutenant General Peter Leahy, told the ABC it had been judged better not to disclose the meeting, the fifth Pacific Armies Chiefs Conference, at the time.
   ‘We were aware that there’s a lot going on in Sydney and we didn’t want to make a fuss,’ Leahy said, in a reference to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in the city on September 8-9.
   The summit will be attended by leaders of the 21 members of APEC, including the US, Russia, China and Japan, and Australia is preparing unprecedented security measures to protect them.
   But Leahy said the security of the summit was not a particular item on the agenda of the army chiefs’ meeting.
   ‘No, it was an internal conference and we were just sitting around in one of the nice hotels in Sydney, discussing issues,’ he said.
   The officers had discussed some of the challenges facing modern armies, such as how to prepare for disaster relief, peacekeeping and counter-terrorism operations, he said.

Thai police have arrested seven North Koreans, including two children, who slipped into Thailand after a long journey from their impoverished homeland, local police said Tuesday.
   One man, four women and two girls aged six and seven were detained in northern Chiang Rai province, 90 kilometres from the notorious Golden Triangle region where Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet.
   The migrants from the communist state failed to show ID cards when police stopped a bus for security checks, a police officer in Chiang Rai told the news agency, and the group are currently being questioned by authorities.

North Korea has asked the UN’s food relief agency for help in the wake of ‘massive’ floods, a spokesman for the World Food Programme said on Tuesday.
   North Korean authorities said the floods are worse than those that reportedly left hundreds dead or missing and tens of thousands homeless in central and southern regions last year, WFP spokesman Simon Pluess told the news agency.
   ‘Pyongyang has made a preliminary request for the WFP’s assistance,’ Pluess said.
   ‘The floods are apparently massive, with a greater impact than those that occurred last year,’ he added. The WFP was unable to give any figures on the scale of the latest flooding.
   A United Nations assessment team is to travel from the North Korean capital Pyongyang to the stricken areas in the next day or so, Pluess said.

The powerful head of India’s ruling Congress party stood firm behind a controversial nuclear deal with the United States on Tuesday as fresh efforts were launched to convince communist allies who have rejected it.
   Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born chief of the party, called opposition to the deal ‘sloganeering’, a day after some allies and opposition parties shouted down the prime minister’s statement defending it in parliament.
   The unrelenting opposition by four communist parties, whose support is critical for the survival of prime minister Manmohan Singh’s coalition, has sparked fears that it could destabilise the government nearly two years before national polls are due.
   ‘Our government has entered into this agreement after tough negotiations,’ Gandhi told Congress party MPs. ‘The agreement fulfils all the assurances that the prime minister has given repeatedly in parliament.’
   ‘The objectives of technological self-reliance and national sovereignty have been and will continue to be fully protected,’ she said of the deal which governments in New Delhi and Washington have hailed as historic.
   ‘We are a democracy and differences in views are inevitable but informed debate and discussion are the answer.’

The United Nations resumed checks on Tuesday to determine if thousands of Maoists confined to camps are genuine fighters, a spokesman said, six weeks after a row about status halted the process.
   Critics have accused the former rebels of boosting their number of combatants in order to exercise more clout.
   The former rebels have said all 31,000 people registered in 28 UN-monitored camps are ex-fighters but analysts say the real number is about a third.
   ‘Verification started in Sindhuli on Tuesday morning,’ Kieran Dwyer, spokesman for the United Nations Mission in Nepal told the news agency, referring to a district 80 kilometres east of Kathmandu.
   The Maoists have been confined to the camps as part of a landmark peace deal reached with the government late last year ending a decade-long civil war.
   Analysts say during the conflict the Maoist army totalled about 10,000 and that the ex-rebels packed their ranks with new recruits to bolster their position as the peace deal was being struck.
   The UN disqualified around 900 people from a camp containing 3,000 at the end of June, because they were either under-age or joined the Maoist army after a May 2006 deadline, local media reported.

Thailand’s cabinet on Tuesday approved a 13-member panel tasked with investigating deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s ‘war on drugs,’ which rights groups say left 2,500 dead.
   Retired attorney general Khanit Na Nakhon will lead the team of lawyers and legal experts, who will examine Thaksin’s culpability in the crackdown.
   ‘The commission’s duty is to investigate and analyse to find the facts concerning the process of mapping out the drugs policy and implementation of the crackdown, which resulted in loss of lives and people’s property, and to find accountable people,’ a cabinet statement said.
   The panel could also recommend compensation for victims and their relatives.
   Human rights groups say that at least 2,500 people died in extrajudicial killings in 2003 and 2004 during Thaksin’s get-tough campaign.
   The police and security officers were accused of murdering suspected drug dealers, but an investigation by Thaksin’s government claimed that security forces were acting in self-defence.

The Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, a former Islamist, announced on Tuesday he will stand again for the presidency, risking a fresh government showdown with army-backed secularist forces.
   ‘My presidential candidacy is supported by my colleagues’ in Turkey’s Islamist-rooted ruling party, the Justice and Development Party, Gul told reporters.
   He was speaking after a meeting with leaders of the right-wing opposition Nationalist Action Party aimed at drumming up support for his bid when parliament votes on the next head of state later this month.
   ‘I explained to them how I will act if parliament elects me as president,’ Gul said, adding that he was planning to meet with other opposition parties.
   The AKP decided late Monday to re-nominate Gul, whose candidacy earlier this year had plunged Turkey into political turmoil and prompted snap legislative elections.
   The polls handed the AKP a solid parliamentary majority that can easily secure Gul’s election.
   His nomination in April had prompted an opposition boycott as well as a warning from the military that it stood ready to protect the Muslim country’s secular system.
   Millions of Turks demonstrated against the prospect of a president from the AKP, the conservative offshoot of a now-banned Islamist party which secularists accuse of harbouring Islamist ambitions.
   Hardline secularists also hate the idea of a veiled first lady — Gul’s wife wears the Islamic headscarf which they see as a symbol of political Islam.
   The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was forced to call early elections on July 22, in which his party won a strong second five-year mandate with 46.58 per cent of the vote.
   Gul portrayed the AKP’s victory as a popular vindication of his presidential bid, but opposition to the foreign minister’s candidacy remains strong.
   ‘If Gul is elected, Turkey’s political balances will change... Turkey will be transformed into a country with an overbearing religious and Middle Eastern identity,’ Deniz Baykal, head of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, was quoted as saying in the Radikal newspaper.
   ‘The headscarf is on its way to the presidential palace,’ the secularist Cumhuriyet daily warned.
   Other newspapers argued that the election result had legitimised the AKP nominee.
   ‘Half of this country has approved Gul’s presidency and the other half must respect that,’ the popular Vatan wrote.
   ‘No matter how upset we may be seeing Mrs. Gul in the presidential palace, the essential thing is how Mr. Gul does his job,’ it added.
   The first round of voting is scheduled for August 20, the second for August 24, the third for August 28 and the final and fourth round for September 1. Candidates can apply until midnight August 19.
   In the first two rounds, a candidate requires a two-thirds majority, or 367 votes, to be elected.
   With 341 seats in the 550-member house, the AKP can be sure of electing Gul on the third ballot when an absolute majority of 276 votes is required.
   The MHP, which returned to parliament with 70 MPs after a five-year absence, has promised not to boycott the sessions, a move that eradicates the risk of parliament failing again to reach the quorum required to hold a vote.

Democrats celebrated the resignation of their one-time nemesis Karl Rove, bidding ‘good riddance’ to the master White House strategist and claiming he was leaving under a cloud of scandal.
   Rove was the latest key aide to leave president George W Bush’s side, reflecting the US leader’s waning powers in the twilight of his second term.
   The architect of Bush’s 2000 and 2004 election triumphs, and the Republican rout in 2002 congressional polls, said he would quit as deputy White House chief of staff on August 31, and hailed his boss’s ‘far-sighted courage.’
   Democrats, who avenged their string of defeats to Rove only by seizing control of both chambers of Congress last year, cheered his departure.
   ‘Goodbye, good riddance,’ said Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards in a terse statement.
   Another 2008 Democratic hopeful, Senator Barack Obama, was also scathing.
   ‘Karl Rove was an architect of a political strategy that has left the country more divided, the special interests more powerful, and the American people more shut out from their government than any time in memory,’ he said.
   Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, who subpoenaed Rove in a row over the firing of federal prosecutors which critics say was for political ends, accused Rove of putting himself above the law.
   ‘There is a cloud over this White House, and a gathering storm. A similar cloud envelopes Rove, even as he leaves the White House,’ Leahy said.
   Rove delivered his bombshell in an interview with the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, then appeared before the cameras with Bush.
   ‘I’m grateful to have been witness to history,’ said Rove, revered as a genius by Republicans.
   ‘I’ve seen a man of farsighted courage put America on a war footing and protect us against a brutal enemy in a dangerous conflict that will shape this new century,’ Rove said.

Sierra Leone police were on high alert Tuesday ahead of the release of results from only the second elections since the west African country emerged from a brutal civil war six years ago.
   Tensions escalated after results from a tiny fraction of votes counted showed a lead for the opposition All People’s Congress and opposition radio called on supporters late Monday to take to the streets in celebration.
   ‘We are still on high alert. We are vigorously patrolling all four corners of the country in case of any reprisals,’ police chief Inspector-General Brima Acha Kamara told the news agency.
   The president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, has ordered security forces to maintain a high state of readiness amid signs of public frustration at the slow vote count and allegations of vote-rigging and intimidation from the main parties.
   The police were reinforced with prison guards and paramilitary forces during the election Saturday to pick Kabbah’s successor and a fresh set of lawmakers to fill the 112-seat parliament.
   ‘Everything went well and we are ready for any eventuality,’ Kabbah said.
   Kabbah, who ran the country for 10 years and helped lift it out of the civil war, is not seeking re-election after completing the two terms allowed by the country’s constitution.
   The polls have been closely watched as a test of whether the country had put the violence of its 1991-2001 conflict behind it and embraced democracy. The war, funded by ‘blood diamonds,’ claimed around 120,000 lives and left many more Sierra Leoneans mutilated and traumatised.
   Most observers have said Sunday’s voting went smoothly, however the European Union has said it will withhold judgement until the results are released and the country’s political leaders accept them peacefully.
   The National Electoral Commission was widely expected to publish significant partial results on Monday but only released less than one percent and gave no date for publishing complete results.

The UN Security Council will hold back on sending forces to keep the peace in war-scarred Somalia, diplomats said Monday, but is looking to boost support for African peacekeepers there.
   Britain is due this week to submit a draft resolution approving a six-month extension of the current African Union peacekeeping force, Amisom, United Nations diplomats said after talks with Somalia.
   ‘The objective is to adopt a resolution enabling the United Nations to be much more present in Somalia,’ said Pascal Gayama, Congo’s ambassador to the UN who is chairman of the Security Council in August.
   ‘In Somalia, we have to move from unilateralism ... to multilateral support in a much more coherent and heavy way,’ he said.
   ‘It will not be proper to give the impression that the international community is not interested in Somalia.’

It has been a year since Rasmiyeh Mokdad’s home was leveled by Israeli warplanes. And it has been a year she has desperately waited to see it rebuilt.
   Like thousands of villagers across southern Lebanon displaced by the month-long war between Israel and Hezbollah which ended on August 14 last year, Mokdad has all but given up hope of recovering her home in time for winter.
   ‘Four months ago they began the first phase of reconstruction but I think it will take at least another year before it is finished,’ laments the 53-year-old. ‘In the meantime, I have to live with my elderly parents in conditions not fit for a dog.’
   Her village of Frun, located about 75 kilometres southeast of Beirut, endured heavy shelling during the war with about 95 of the 160 homes destroyed.
   The houses or buildings that suffered lesser damage have for the most part been refurbished.
   But bureaucratic red tape, de-mining operations and a prolonged political crisis in Lebanon have left people like Mokdad out in the cold.