Billed as ‘the goddess of sacrifice’, she descended in a helicopter from a cloudless sky, towards an expectant crowd.
   But Sonia Gandhi, India’s most powerful politician, has been short of magic this week as she struggles to strike an emotional chord with voters in her Congress party’s campaign a week ahead of state elections in the key battleground of Gujarat.
   The vote, in which Congress is trying to unseat the Bharatiya Janata Party government, is being closely watched as the countdown begins to national polls due by mid-2009 and could even influence their timing.
   ‘This government believes in its own development and the development of a handful of people,’ Sonia told a listless crowd of thousands in the town of Idar in southeastern Gujarat this week, many of them poor tribal farmers.
   ‘We are committed to throw the cheats, liars and people who make fake promises out of Gujarat,’ she said, speaking in Hindi from a prepared text, to a brief burst of flat applause.
   For a decade Gujarat, one of India’s most prosperous states but also one of its most communally divided, has been a stronghold of the BJP.
   But its controversial chief minister Narendra Modi is more vulnerable than ever before as he heads into the elections, due to be held in two stages on December 11 and 16, analysts say, with several dissident party members defecting to the opposition.
   It would be a major prize for Congress, which heads the national coalition government, to wrest Gujarat from Modi, who has been accused of encouraging communal riots in 2002 in which up to 2,500 people were killed, most minority Muslims.
   A win might encourage Con-gress to advance national elections.
   But many analysts think Modi might just about hang on – partly because Congress has waged an uninspired campaign.
   ‘They started very late, organisationally they are not in good shape, and third you have not seen any focused campaigning by local Congress leaders,’ said Achyut Yagnik, a social scientist in.
   Modi swept the 2002 state elections, held just nine months after the riots, on an overt pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim platform, winning 127 of the state assembly’s 182 seats.
   While he still plays the occasional anti-Muslim card, this time he is selling himself more as a champion of development in one of the fastest growing states in a booming India, boasting of everything from industrial development to rural electrification.
   Congress has tried to fight him on his terms, arguing that electricity has still not reached many households, and promising free televisions to everyone below the poverty line.
   But the party which prides itself on its secular ideals has largely steered clear of attacking Modi for the 2002 riots, for fear of antagonising Hindu voters.
   Its strongest card is Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of assassinated former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who renounced her own chance to become prime minister despite winning national elections in 2004.
   She may have struggled to connect with many people in Idar, but is attracting large crowds, and some, like 18-year-old student Neelam Rathore, were buying her message.
   ‘Modi is a loud and a smart liar. Sonia is simple, honest and is willing to sacrifice her life for the people,’ Rathore said. ‘I like the way she talks, I trust her.’
   Sonia briefly upped the ante on Saturday, lashing out at the ‘peddlers of death’ running the state.
   ‘She is slinging Italian mud at me,’ Modi retorted.
   ‘That kind of mud only makes me and the lotus stronger,’ he said, referring to India’s national flower and his party’s symbol.
   Then a retreat. Sonia, on the back foot, chose her words more carefully, avoiding any direct reference to the riots. Development, she said at one rally, was not possible without social unity, which the BJP had failed to deliver.

Amnesty International on Wednesday joined a growing chorus of protests over the mass arrests of thousands of ethnic Tamils in Colombo by Sri Lankan authorities.
   The arrests came after two bomb attacks blamed on Tamil Tigers, but has left the island’s ethnic Sinhalese-dominated government once again exposed to allegation that it is dealing out collective punishment to the Tamil minority.
   Amnesty said it was ‘deeply concerned that the arrests have been made on arbitrary and discriminatory grounds.’
   ‘Those arrested may be detained in inhumane conditions; denied access to lawyers, courts and family members; and face the risk of torture, other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,’ a statement from the London-based group said.
   Local rights groups have already reacted angrily to the arrests.
   The Centre for Policy Alternatives, a private think-tank in Sri Lanka, filed a lawsuit against the authorities after the spate of arrests of at least 2,200 Tamils were made over the weekend.
   The crackdown came in the wake of two bomb attacks last week that left 21 people dead and more than 40 wounded.
   A senior government minister, Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, has said that 1,800 of those detained had already been freed.
   In June, authorities evicted some 400 minority Tamils out of their low-budget hostels in Colombo and took them to the troubled northern and eastern regions where Tamils are concentrated.

An Indian journalist who secretly filmed right-wing Hindus boasting about the mass murder of Muslims during riots in 2002 in the western state of Gujarat says he now fears for his life.
   Reporter Ashish Khetan is also a ‘very disappointed’ man – saying his sting operation that again highlighted the alleged complicity of state officials in the massacres had failed to result in any action being taken.
   In addition, Hindu nationalists linked to the killings look set to cruise to re-election in state elections this month.
   ‘I got them to speak to me, make self-damning revelations, details of the killings and rapes,’ the 31-year-old, a Hindu, said in an interview.
   During a six-month undercover mission, Khetan tracked down more than a dozen hardline Hindu activists belonging to various groups allied to Gujarat’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party administration.

President Bush on Tuesday expressed his anger about a Saudi Arabian rape victim who was sentenced to prison and 200 lashes for being alone with a man not related to her.
   ‘My first thoughts were these,’ Bush said, when asked about the case at a news conference. ‘What happens if this happens to my daughter? How would I react? And I would have been – I’d of been very emotional, of course. I’d have been angry at those who committed the crime. And I’d be angry at a state that didn’t support the victim.’
   Bush, however, said he has not made his views known directly to Saudi King Abdullah, an ally. But he added: ‘He knows our position loud and clear.’
   The victim, known only as the ‘Girl of Qatif’ after her hometown in eastern Saudi Arabia, was initially sentenced in November 2006 to several months in prison and 90 lashes for being alone in a car with a man she was not related or married to, when the two were attacked by seven men who raped both of them. After the appeal, her sentence was doubled last month to 200 lashes and six months in prison.
   The woman was found to be in violation of the kingdom’s strict segregation of the sexes. Saudi Arabia has faced enormous international criticism about the sentencing.
   On Tuesday, the Amnesty International rights group said a Saudi lawyer should not be punished for defending the rape victim in the case.
   The lawyer, Abdul-Rahman al-Lahem, was barred from representing the victim after he publicly criticised the sentence against her as he launched an appeal and sought heavier sentences against her attackers.

The president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Wednesday boasted a US intelligence report on Iran’s nuclear programme was a ‘great victory’ and vowed never to yield to Western pressure to halt the contested drive.
   The report by the US intelligence community said Iran halted a drive for atomic weapons in 2003 – despite years of statements by the US president, George W Bush, accusing Tehran of actively seeking a nuclear bomb.
   ‘This report tries to extract America from its impasse but it also is a declaration of the Iranian people’s victory against the great powers,’ Ahmadinejad told thousands of supporters at a rally in Ilam province.
   ‘With the help of God, our people have resisted, are resisting and will resist until the end. You are victorious in all areas and especially in nuclear,’ he said in the speech, broadcast live on state television.
   He accused Iran’s enemies of wanting to deprive it of civilian energy when fossil fuels run out ‘within the next 50 years’.
   The National Intelligence Estimate said that US allegations about Iran’s atomic goals had been overblown for at least two years, although it could have the capability to make a nuclear weapon by 2015.
   But Bush was adamant that the Islamic republic remained a threat to global security. He refused to rule out military action and called on US allies to step up pressure against Tehran.
   ‘Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,’ he told a White House press conference after the intelligence assessment was published on Monday.
   ‘The best diplomacy, effective diplomacy, is one in which all options are on the table,’ Bush said.
   In October, Bush had raised the spectre of ‘Third World War’ or a ‘nuclear holocaust’ if Iran obtained an atomic arsenal.
   Ahmadinejad said that Iran was prepared to discuss its nuclear programme with the West but only if its foes did so in the spirit of ‘friendship and cooperation’.
   The International Atomic Energy Agency chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, whose inspectors have been investigating Iran’s nuclear drive for four years, called for immediate negotiations between Iran and its Western critics.
   But Western powers urged the UN Security Council to agree a third UN sanctions resolution to punish Iran’s refusal to suspend uranium enrichment, a potential bomb-making process and the key sticking point in the crisis.
   ‘There is time for diplomacy to work, but there isn’t time to stop and say ‘we don’t need the diplomacy,’ said the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
   A diplomat at the UN Security Council, asking to remain anonymous, confirmed six major powers were expecting to begin work soon on drafting a resolution for new sanctions against Tehran to put before the council.
   But China’s UN ambassador Wang Guangya suggested the six powers’ agreement to seek new sanctions could be called into question by the US intelligence assessment.
   ‘I think Council members will have to consider that, because ... now things have changed,’ he told reporters.
   However the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, – who like China has been reluctant in the past to see fresh UN sanctions against Iran – urged Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment.
   He made the call in a meeting Tuesday with Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, the Interfax news agency quoted foreign minister Sergei Lavrov as saying.
   Lavrov also backed Iran’s denial that it had been seeking atomic weapons prior to 2003: ‘We have no information that such a project existed before 2003, although American colleagues stated that the situation was exactly that.’
   The National Intelligence Estimate, the consensus view of all 16 US spy agencies, said Iran appeared ‘less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005’.
   The NIE judged with ‘moderate confidence’ that Iran would be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a weapon ‘sometime during the 2010-2015 timeframe’.
   Ahmadinejad also renewed his scathing attack on political opponents in Iran, who he had previously accused of being ‘traitors’ for pressuring the government in the nuclear standoff.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is surging against frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, a national poll of Republican leaning voters in the White House race out Wednesday found, as another survey gave Mitt Romney the lead in New Hampshire.
   A month before the first US presidential primary vote, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Massachusetts governor Romney, who would be the United States’ first Mormon president, ‘has the edge on most issues and candidate qualities tested in the new poll, and his strength in New Hampshire contrasts with his far shakier position in Iowa.’
   In Iowa, caucuses officially start the presidential nominating whirl on January 3. Then New Hampshire voters head to the ballot box January 8.
   Romney, who led the pack among Republicans in past months in Iowa, now is ‘locked in a competitive race with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’ there, The Washington Post poll found.
   But in New Hampshire Romney now draws the support of 37 per cent of likely primary voters, almost twice the 20 per cent of Arizona senator John McCain. Giuliani was running third in the north-eastern state at 16 per cent, The Washington Post-ABC poll said.
   That contrasts dramatically with the broader national snapshot taken by a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll also released Wednesday.
   Huckabee in that survey surged to 17 per cent support, in the number-two spot and trailing Giuliani’s lead at 23 per cent. Huckabee gained 10 points since a similar October poll while Giuliani lost nine per cent, the Times poll said.
   They were trailed nationally by Fred Thompson (14 per cent), John McCain (11 per cent), Romney (nine per cent), Ron Paul (five per cent), Duncan Hunter (three per cent) and Tom Tancredo (0 per cent).
   On the Democratic side, the Times poll found little dramatic movement. New York senator Hillary Clinton was still holding a solid lead at 45 per cent while Illinois senator Barack Obama drew 21 per cent and John Edwards drew 11 per cent. Lawmaker Joe Biden and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson each had three per cent, and lawmakers Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich
   each one per cent, the survey said.
   Thursday, Romney is due to deliver a speech about his faith, hoping to temper suspicion among crucial Republican evangelical voters.
   Huckabee’s sudden rise, exploiting disaffection with the 2008 Republican field among Christian conservatives, has put Romney in a fix.
   Romney poured millions of dollars into Iowa, knowing he must shine in its caucuses, then in the New Hampshire primary five days later, to challenge the Republicans’ national front-runner Giuliani.

The fourth round of US-Iranian talks on curbing violence in Iraq may take place in the next few days, powerful Iraqi Shia leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim said Tuesday at the end of a US visit.
   ‘I suppose that Iraq should host in the coming few days this fourth round of the dialogue. We are seeking to see a constructive dialogue,’ Hakim said at a news conference.
   The US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, and his Iranian counterpart Hassan Kazemi Qomi are likely to represent their respective governments at the coming talks, Haitham Al-Husseini, a member of Hakim’s delegation, said.
   ‘I think the ambassadors, of course, are going to participate,’ he said. A US State Department spokesman contacted late Friday could not immediately confirm whether the meeting would take place.
   The Iraqi ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaidaie, said he could not confirm whether the talks would take place soon but that Baghdad was working to make the meeting happen.
   ‘We are trying to set that up,’ said Sumaidaie, who attended Hakim’s press conference. Hakim, who met with the US president, George W Bush, last week, said the newly released US intelligence report saying Iran halted its nuclear bomb programme in 2003 would help the dialogue between the two foes.
   ‘We welcome this report and we think that it is going to contribute in preparing a more positive and proper environment to advance forward in the dialogue between the two countries,’ he said through an interpreter.

The plains of solidified lava that give the Moon its quirky human-like face as seen from Earth were created more than four billion years ago, according to a paper appea ring on Thursday in Nature, the British science weekly.
   The evidence comes from an unearthly silvery-grey stone that was blasted off from the face of the Moon, perhaps by an impacting asteroid, and was then captured by Earth’s gravity, prompting it to fall to ground in Botswana.
   In 1999, the 13.5-kilo remnant of this roving rock was found by local people near the village of Kuke, in the grasslands of the Kalahari Nature Reserve, who then sold it to meteorite hunters.
   The lunar heritage of the rock, named Kalahari 009, has been confirmed by a telltale signature of oxygen isotopes and ratio of iron to manganese in two volcanic minerals, olivine and pyroxene.
   The nature of these chemicals puts the rock into the category of a mare basalt – a lava that flowed out smoothly onto the lunar surface before solidifying, forming dark plains that early skywatchers mistakenly took for seas, ‘Mare’ in Latin.
   A new analysis of fragments of phosphate in Kalahari 009 puts the rocks at the whopping old age of 4.35 billion years, give or take 150 million years, the Nature study says.
   This implies that mare-type volcanism must have occurred at least as early as this date, just after the first stage of lunar crust formation, say the authors, led by Kentaro Terada of Hiroshima University in Japan and Mahesh Anand of Britain’s Open University.
   Mare volcanism overlapped with a later stage of volcanism, evidence of which was found in rocks picked up by the Apollo missions.
   The ‘Man in the Moon’ comprises eyes made of the Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis, a nose consisting of Sinus Aestuum, while the Mare Nubium and Mare Cognitum provide its mouth.
   These and other mare account for nearly a sixth of the lunar surface, mostly on the side visible from Earth.

A US F-16 fighter used an air-to-air missile to destroy a sounding rocket in its boost phase for the first time this week in a test of a new missile defence concept, US spokesmen said Tuesday.
   The system – named the Net-Centric Airborne Defence Element – breaks new ground in that it would arm fighter aircraft or drones with missiles fast enough to intercept a ballistic missile as it lifts into space.
   The aircraft would have to get to within a 100 miles of the launch site to catch the ascending missile in the first two to three minutes after launch.
   But it could be very useful in a short range combat situation against short and medium range missiles, said Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the US Missile Defence Agency.
   The Pentagon has two other better known boost phase intercept systems under development – the Airborne Laser and the Kinetic Energy Interceptor – but those are still years away from being ready, he said.
   ‘So it does give us an initial boost phase capability even though it is a much shorter range missile, and you have to be in the area of the missile launch to be effective,’ Lehner said.

The UN envoy for Darfur said Tuesday a hard task lies ahead in bringing peace to the western Sudanese region, as a proliferation of armed groups jeopardises relief efforts for the two million displaced.
   ‘It is a very difficult task,’ Jan Eliasson said. ‘The military escalation on the ground, in Darfur, and outside Darfur, and outside Sudan continues. We have clashes, we have a very very fragile humanitarian situation.’
   Eliasson was speaking after he and the envoy from the African Union, Salim Ahmed Salim, met in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh with regional officials for talks aimed at ending the nearly five-year-old conflict in Darfur.
   The talks, which included the foreign ministers of Egypt, Chad, Eritrea and Libya, are a new attempt at ending the bloodshed in Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have been killed and two million displaced, according to UN figures. Khartoum says only 9,000 people died.
   ‘It is a very difficult task,’ Eliasson said. ‘For the peacekeepers to do a good job they have to have a peace to keep.’
   He added that he was ‘very fearful of the explosive situation inside the camps. We have to end this misery.’
   For his part, Salim said ‘we are hoping that those who are not involved in the current process of negotiations will come and join the negotiations.

More than 100,000 people lined the streets around Bangkok’s glittering Grand Palace Wednesday to cheer Thailand’s revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej as he celebrated his 80th birthday.
   The crowds, dressed in yellow shirts and waving flags emblazoned with a royal emblem, lined the broad tree-fringed avenues leading to the palace as the king drove by in a pale yellow Rolls Royce.
   Yellow is the colour that Thais associate with Mondays, the day of the week when the king was born.
   Millions of people across the country have worn yellow shirts every Monday since last year, when the king marked his 60th year on the throne as the world’s longest-serving monarch.
   Many people on the streets also wore pink to symbolise their wish for the king’s good health, inspired by a pink blazer worn by the king as he was discharged from hospital last month after nearly four weeks in bed to treat problems with the blood flow to his brain.
   The king’s motorcade drove him through a five-kilometre stretch of Bangkok’s historic district to the Grand Palace, a sprawling compound of gilded castles and temples on the banks of the Chao Phraya River.
   The police said more than 100,000 people lined the streets, while 20,000 of the nation’s elite gathered inside the palace compound where the king sat on the balcony of his throne hall, dressed in full regalia, before members of his family, senior government officials and all of the military’s top brass.
   After a 21-gun salute, the nation’s top government officials and the king’s only son Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn delivered speeches praising the monarch’s work to develop the country.