The Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, Monday urged the international community to step up financial aid to the Palestinians or risk a ‘catastrophe’, at the start of a major donors’ conference in Paris.
   Ninety international delegations were gathered for a one-day conference to agree on an aid package worth billions of dollars to stabilise the Palestinian economy and shore up the peace process with Israel, jumpstarted in the US city of Annapolis last month.
   ‘Without this support, without the payment of aid that will allow the Palestinian treasury to fulfil its role, we will be facing a total catastrophe in the West Bank and Gaza,’ Abbas told the opening ceremony, at a conference centre near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
   The Palestinian Authority formally asked for 5.6 billion dollars (3.85 billion euros), expected to include 3.9 billion dollars in direct support to the budget to develop a viable economy and institutions for a future Palestinian state.
   Israel has said it supports the Palestinian reconstruction drive, but it is under pressure to lift restrictions on freedom of movement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to allow the plan to take shape.
   As the conference kicked off, Abbas called on Israel – represented by the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, – to freeze all settlements in the Palestinian territories to allow the newly-relaunched peace process to gain a foothold.
   ‘I expect a complete halt of all settlement activities without exception, the dismantlement of the 127 wildcat settlements set up since 2001, the reopening of Palestinian institutions closed in Jerusalem, the lifting of military barrages, a halt to construction of the separation barrier and the release of prisoners,’ Abbas told the conference.
   Around 70 countries and the world’s major international organisations are attending the one-day Conference of Donors for a Palestinian State, the biggest of its kind since 1996.
   The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and former British prime minister Tony Blair, international envoy for the Middle East Quartet, were all taking part.
   Addressing the opening ceremony, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said ‘the Paris conference must accompany the progressive construction of a modern state.’
   The French president called for the creation of an international force to beef up the Palestinian security services, ‘when the time comes and when the conditions are right’.
   ‘The Palestinian Authority has pledged to uphold law and order... The Palestinian services need to reform, to become more professional. In parallel, Israel must withdraw from the West Bank,’ Sarkozy said.
   ‘The international community must lend its support to meeting this difficult objective,’ he told the assembly.
   Blair said in an interview with The Financial Times Monday he was ‘reasonably confident’ that Palestinian requests for aid would be met.
   According to Rice, the Palestinians are seeking ‘around 1.6 to 1.7 billion’ (dollars) for the coming year.
   Sources in Rice’s delegation said the United States was prepared to provide 550 million dollars in 2008, which they described as ‘an historically large figure.’
   Sarkozy pledged 300 million dollars (210 million euros) on behalf of host country France, between now and 2010.
   He said France would sign an agreement later Monday to supply 25 million euros in budget support ‘tomorrow, so that starting in January the Palestinians can meet their most pressing needs’.

The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, called on the president, Pervez Musharraf, to ensure campaigning ahead of Pakistan’s elections in January was conducted freely and fairly.
   ‘It is extremely important now that there be a very robust and concerted effort to make sure... that the political campaign that needs to take place can take place in an atmosphere conducive to free and fair elections,’ Rice told journalists.
   ‘And that means that the opposition has to be able to gather and mobilise and has to have access to the press,’ she told journalists on the plane to Paris, where she was to attend a Palestinian donors’ conference.
   Pakistan’s election campaign began in earnest on Sunday, a day after Musharraf lifted emergency rule and restored the constitution.
   
   9,000 to contest Pak polls
   Around 9,000 candidates will contest next month’s parliamentary elections in Pakistan, officials said Monday, as the country’s main opposition leaders hit the campaign trail.
   With the January 8 vote three weeks away, the election commission approved the final candidates list, commission official Khurshid Alam said.
   He said more than 3,000 people had either been rejected by the commission or had withdrawn, leaving about 9,000 to contest the 1,070 seats for the federal parliament and four provincial legislatures. Former premier Nawaz Sharif, due to previous criminal conviction, is one of those rejected.

Pravin Mahajan, brother of BJP leader Pramod Mahajan who was shot dead last year was found guilty of shooting his brother in a trial that used mobile phone text messages as evidence.
   Pramod Mahajan, a former central minister and high-profile backroom manager of
   the Bharatiya Janata Party, was shot at his home in Mumbai, apparently over a property dispute.
   Mahajan, regarded as a possible future head of the party, died after 12 days in hospital at the age of 56.
   The police had said his younger brother Pravin had confessed to the murder but later retracted the statement in court.
   The prosecution said Pravin, who did not have a steady job, was angry after Pramod refused his demand for a large sum of money.
   A lower court in Mumbai held the accused guilty of murder and reserved sentencing for Tuesday.
   ‘I will apply my mind to say which type of punishment should be asked for him against the heinous crime,’ prosecution counsel Ujjwal Nikam told reporters.
   The trial, held partly behind closed doors, saw the prosecution produce a ‘threatening’ mobile phone text message sent to Pramod as evidence against Pravin.
   The defence had then called in a telecommunications expert to show that messages on mobile phones could be tampered with.

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has pardoned a teenage girl sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes after being gang raped, Al Jazirah newspaper reported on Monday.
   The ruling against the 19-year-old girl in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom had attracted widespread international condemnation, including from human rights groups and the White House.
   The Arabic language daily said it had been informed of the royal pardon from its own unidentified sources.
   But in the same article, the kingdom’s justice minister Abdullah bin Mohammad bin Ibrahim al-Sheikh told the paper the king had the ‘right to overrule court judgements if he considered it benefiting the greater good.’
   The girl, who was 18 at the time she was raped, was attacked at knifepoint by seven men after she was found in a car with a male companion who was not a relative, in breach of strict Saudi law.
   Her identity has not been revealed but she has become known as ‘Qatif girl,’ after the Shia-populated area of Al-Qatif in the Eastern Province from which she comes.
   In October 2006, a judge sentenced her to 90 lashes for being with the man – a taboo in the conservative Muslim kingdom which imposes segregation of the sexes.

More than 30 people, including a couple and their three children, were killed in the latest surge of violence to hit Afghanistan, officials said Monday.
   The family of five were killed when a bomb blew up their motorbike in the troubled southcentral province of Uruzgan on Sunday, the police said.
   They were on their way to a local hospital when the device exploded under the motorbike on which they were riding near the provincial capital Trin Kot, Uruzgan police chief Juma Gul Emat said.
   He said the device had been planted by Taliban rebels.
   The incident took place in an area where a similar device ripped through a civilian mini bus and killed six passengers on Thursday.
   Seven others were injured in the blast, the US-led coalition said Monday.

Iran on Monday defiantly insisted it still wants to enrich uranium on Iranian soil to produce nuclear fuel, despite the delivery of a consignment of fuel from Russia for its first atomic power plant.
   Iran needs to make nuclear fuel for a second plant it is building and will not surrender to the demands of world powers, said the head of its atomic energy organisation, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh.
   Russia announced earlier it had delivered the first consignment of nuclear fuel for Iran’s first atomic power plant, which is being built by a Russian contractor in the southern city of Bushehr.
   ‘We are building a 360 Megawatt nuclear reactor in Darkhoyen’ in the western Khuzestan province, Aghazadeh told state television.
   Officials have in the past said that Iranian engineers had started work on a new 360 MW reactor to produce electricity, but this was the first time its location had been revealed.
   Aghazadeh insisted that the fuel for this plant would have to come from Iran’s uranium enrichment facility in the central city of Natanz, which world powers want Tehran to close.
   ‘The fuel for this power station (Darkhoyen) must come from Natanz,’ he said.
   ‘Several years will be required to build this power station and in parallel we need to develop the enrichment plant in Natanz, where we currently have 3,000 centrifuges,’ Aghazadeh added.
   The dispute over Iran’s right to enrichment and to make its own nuclear fuel is the crux of the four-year nuclear standoff with the West.
   Western powers want Tehran to suspend enrichment, which is a key part of the nuclear fuel cycle. It can also be used to make highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, however.
   Iran vehemently rejects accusations that it is seeking to acquire a nuclear weapon and has vowed never to suspend enrichment. The UN Security Council has already imposed two sets of sanctions on Tehran because of its defiance.
   The publication of a US intelligence report this month that said Iran had halted a nuclear weapons drive in 2003 took the heat out of the crisis although the United States is still pushing hard for a third sanctions resolution.
   Aghazadeh also reaffirmed Iran’s desire to massively ramp up the capacity of the Natanz plant to enrich uranium.
   ‘The current 3,000 centrifuges in Natanz should reach 50,000 so that it could provide fuel for a 1,000-megawatt power plant... this will take a few years,’ he said.
   Russia’s foreign ministry on Monday also called on Iran to suspend enrichment ‘to prove the peaceful nature of its nuclear programme,’ as it currently had no need to make atomic fuel domestically. The agreement Russia signed with Iran in 1995 committed Moscow to providing the nuclear fuel for the Bushehr plant in addition to building the facility.
   Aghazadeh confirmed that the nuclear fuel had arrived in Iran and said Bushehr would soon produce electricity for Iranians, more than three decades after the project began under the deposed shah.
   ‘The first consignment arrived in Iran on Monday. The transfer of the fuel will continue and everything will be given to Iran according to the timetable.’
   ‘Bushehr is now at 95 per cent (completion). And we can give this promise to our people that by summer next year Bushehr’s electricity will enter the national power grid,’ Aghazadeh said.
   He hailed Russia’s delivery of the fuel as a ‘step to develop our nuclear power stations to up to 20,000 megawatts.’

Hillary Clinton launched a counter-attack Monday against surging rival Barack Obama, hoping to turn around her misfiring campaign just 17 days before the first White House nominating contest.
   Democrat Hillary, on an intense helicopter tour of first-voting state Iowa, blitzed six morning television talk shows, brandishing her credentials as a reformer, as her campaign tried to portray Obama as a risky 2008 choice.
   ‘Campaigns are like life, some days are perfect, some days aren’t,’ the former first lady said on NBC television, after a rocky month for her once dominant political machine.
   But ‘I am a proven leader,’ Hillary argued, days after her husband, ex-president Bill Clinton, warned that an Obama presidency would represent a big risk, owing to his perceived lack of experience in top-level politics.
   Hillary is trying to use a key endorsement from the top newspaper in Iowa this weekend to halt Obama’s momentum, which has seen him turn the race in the state, and also in New Hampshire, which votes on January 8, into a dead-heat.
   ‘I think it is perfectly legitimate for voters to draw differences among us,’ Hillary later told MSNBC, who did not skewer her rival by name, but who aimed several implicit attacks on him.
   ‘The way you can tell what changes I will make is by looking at the changes I have already made,’ she said, arguing she was equipped to become president on ‘day one.’
   Most opinion surveys in key states show Obama rising, and Hillary sliding, suggesting the first-term Illinois senator may be peaking at the right time.
   ‘I really don’t pay a lot of attention to that. I have a much longer view about this campaign,’ Hillary said. ‘I feel really, really good about where my campaign is,’ she told Fox television.

The Pakistan police took a British plane bombing suspect who escaped from custody out for prayers and fast-food before he made his break to freedom at the weekend, a security official said on Monday.
   The latest details of Rashid Rauf’s disappearance on his way from court to jail Saturday came as police pursued a nationwide manhunt for the 26-year-old, suspected in an alleged plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners.
   Rauf had just finished an appearance in an Islamabad court when his uncle asked police escorts if they could all drive back to the jail in his more comfortable van rather than a police vehicle, a senior security official said.
   The two police agreed, said the official.
   On the way back to Adiala jail in the neighbouring city of Rawalpindi, Rauf asked permission to stop at a fast-food restaurant where the uncle, Muhammad Rafiq, bought a meal for all four of them, he said.
   Rauf, whose alleged plot to blow planes out of the sky with liquid explosives led to worldwide restrictions on liquids in carry-on baggage, then asked to be allowed to visit a mosque to pray before going back behind bars.
   While the prayer service was going on, the official said, Rauf and his uncle vanished.
   ‘Rauf’s uncle, who helped him escape from custody, has been arrested and is under interrogation,’ the official said.
   The two police escorts are also being questioned, amid reports that they waited several hours before telling their superiors that Rauf had got away.

French newspapers reported Monday that the president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is romancing supermodel-turned-pop singer Carla Bruni, just two months after his divorce.
   Sarkozy, 52, and Bruni, 38, were photographed together at the Disneyland theme park near Paris on Saturday.
   They made little apparent attempt to hide the fact that they were there together, though none of the photos showed them any closer than shoulder-to-shoulder.
   The Elysee Palace would not comment to AFP on the pictures. But L’Express magazine editor Christophe Barbier told French television that Bruni – who has in the past dated rock stars Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton – confirmed to him that she is romantically involved with Sarkozy.
   ‘She told me that the publicity surrounding this story did not bother her and that from now on, it would become an affair, a public love story,’ he told LCI television.
   ‘We must now wait and see how far the president will go in presenting Carla Bruni officially’ as his companion, Barbier added.
   Bruni, who will be 39 on Sunday, was born in Italy and is the heiress to a tyre manufacturing fortune. An elegant brunette, she was a top fashion model before turning to pop music. She has a young son from a marriage to a philosopher.
   Sarkozy has two sons from his first marriage and one son from his 11-year marriage to Cecilia Sarkozy, which ended in a much publicised divorce in October.
   He is the first French president to divorce while in office.
   ‘Carla Bruni and Sarkozy are out in the open,’ wrote the popular Le Parisien newspaper on its front page that featured one of the photos of the couple.
   The rightwing newspaper Le Figaro ran a photo of Bruni under the headline ‘Carla Bruni, the president’s companion’.
   Le Figaro said ‘the presence of Sarkozy and Carla Bruni in such a public place suggests that they do not intend to specifically hide themselves.’
   The leftwing Liberation wrote that the couple had brought their ‘fairy tale’ romance to Disneyland.
   L’Express said about 10 photographers were present at the park to take the pictures and that the couple seemed ‘very much at ease’ with the attention paid to them.
   The photos are to be published this week in the popular celebrity magazines Closer, Paris Match and Point de Vue, which splashed the headline: ‘Carla Bruni: the president’s queen of hearts.’
   ‘Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni wanted their relationship to be known, otherwise I do not see why they would have gone to EuroDisney to watch the Mickey Mouse parade,’ said Point de Vue editor Colombe Pringle.
   Pringle told France Info radio she considered that that the photos ‘were not stolen but in fact given, in that this was a way to make something official.’

Lebanon’s presidential election was postponed for a ninth time Monday, to December 22, despite intense international efforts to convince rival parties to srike a deal and end a dangerous political vacuum.
   ‘The parliament session that was scheduled today (Monday) has been postponed to Saturday December 22 at 12:30pm (1030GMT),’ Mohamed Ballout, spokesman for parliament speaker Nabih Berri, told reporters.
   The delay, the ninth since September, comes amid intense efforts by the United States and other countries to convince Lebanon’s pro- and anti-Syrian factions to proceed to a vote and avoid plunging the country into further chaos.
   Lebanon has been without a president since November 23, when Emile Lahoud stepped down at the end of his term with no elected successor.
   Washington at the weekend dispatched one of its top envoys to the country to meet with the rival leaders and press them to end their standoff, which marks the country’s worst political crisis since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war.
   ‘The United States believes that it is time now to elect a new president,’ said David Welch, the US assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs. ‘There is no reason for any further delay.
   France, Lebanon’s former colonial power which has been at the forefront of international efforts to mediate the crisis, also warned that time was running out for a solution and that Monday’s session was crucial.
   ‘Monday is really the last chance, and France calls on all parties, inside and outside, to ensure that Lebanon can have a president,’ president Nicolas Sarkozy said.
   ‘Those (who) would take the risk of killing off that chance would cut themselves off from a number of countries, first among them France,’ said Sarkozy.

Living in miserable camps not far from the glittering Petronas Twin Towers, Myanmar refugees in Malaysia are some of the most wretched of the hundreds of thousands who have fled their homeland.
   ‘We are living here like prisoners, we cannot go out anywhere because we are frightened,’ says 35-year-old James Munerlian, a Christian pastor from Myanmar’s Chin state who fled persecution by the military regime.
   Munerlian is the leader of a 100-strong group of men, women and children who live a precarious existence in a secret encampment in one of the patches of jungle that still remain among Kuala Lumpur’s suburbs.
   The half-hour trek there takes a visitor past an almost completed luxury housing project, over hilly and mosquito-infested terrain, through an illegal rubbish damp and across a riverbed reeking with sewage. In a clearing, the Chin refugees huddle into eight huts made with sheets of zinc and cardboard, and draped with pieces of plastic.
   They escaped Myanmar on foot in the hope of finding a better life, but instead are exploited by unscrupulous employers and harassed by Malaysia’s controversial volunteer security corps which hunts down illegal migrants.
   Michael Boak Tun Thang, a 26-year-old farmer from northern Chin state, came to Malaysia in early 2006 and has been hiding in various jungle camps ever since.
   ‘The junta came to my village with rifles. Because there were only a few men, they ordered all the boys and also the women to become porters and carry their foods and boxes,’ he says.
   ‘They raped all the women, even my sister, but I could not do anything. We carried the heavy things but they never paid us or gave us any meals.’
   Late one night, Tun Thang was freed by men from a nearby village, but the last time he saw his sister she was a walking skeleton and he has not heard from her since.
   Refugee advocates say the camp is just one of hundreds in the capital and around the country that have sprung up in patches of jungles, near agricultural plantations and on the fringes of coastal villages.
   Some luckier ones have managed to find cheap housing, and live packed a dozen to a room.
   ‘Malaysia has become one of the worst places for Burmese asylum seekers because of the way the government and its enforcers have brutalised and abused refugees,’ says Debbie Stothard from human rights group Altsean Burma.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said Monday he is ready to become prime minister next year if his ally Dmitry Medvedev succeeds him in winning a March presidential election.
   ‘If the people give their trust to Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev and he is elected president, then I would be ready to continue my work as head of government,’ Putin told a congress of the ruling United Russia party in Moscow.
   Putin’s statement appeared to confirm a plan first unveiled last week in which first deputy prime minister Medvedev would take over the Kremlin in 2008, while Putin would retain major influence as prime minister.
   Medvedev is expected to face no real opposition in the March 2 election, clearing the way for his longtime boss Putin to shift from the presidency to premiership, and retain a big role in running the world’s biggest country and leading energy exporter.

Russia’s nuclear weapons chief threatened Monday to target a planned US missile defence shield in central Europe if Washington fails to take into account Moscow’s worries, the Interfax news agency reported.
   General Nikolai Solovtsov, head of strategic missile forces, said that such a decision could be taken if the US shield is seen to ‘undermine the Russian nuclear deterrent capability.’
   In that case, ‘I do not exclude... the missile defence shield sites in Poland and the Czech Republic being chosen as targets for some of our intercontinental ballistic missiles,’ Solovtsov said, according to Interfax.
   Washington says the plans to install radar in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor rockets in Poland would guard against theoretical missile strikes from ‘rogue’ nations such as Iran, without denting Russia’s massive nuclear offensive arsenal.
   But Moscow claims the United States is exaggerating the threat from Iran and describes the shield as the thin end of a wedge aimed at changing the current balance of military power.
   On Saturday, the Russian chief of staff, General Yury Baluyevsky, warned that the launch of US interceptor missiles could accidentally trigger a Russian retaliatory strike.
   The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, denounced the comments as ‘unacceptable’ and said that ‘no declaration of this kind will influence Polish-American negotiations.’

Record numbers of journalists have been killed around the world this year, with at least 110 dying in 27 countries, the media defence group Press Emblem Campaign said Monday.
   ‘This year’s tally represents a 14 per cent increase over the 2006 figure,’ said secretary general Blaise Lempen. ‘It is unacceptable. We strongly condemn these acts of violence.’
   About two thirds of the deaths this year took place in major conflict zones, such as Iraq, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the PEC study.
   For the fifth straight year Iraq ranked as the most dangerous place for the media, with 50 journalists killed this year.
   At least 250 journalists have died since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, said Lempen.
   ‘The situation in Iraq represents an unprecedented situation of collective slaughter and punishment of members of the media profession,’ said a PEC statement.
   It added: ‘Somalia comes second to Iraq which witnesses a brutal deterioration in the security conditions for the profession, 8 journalists killed this year against one last year.’

Bangladesh officials and experts were elected in four different UN Climate Change Convention and Kyoto Protocol committees at the just concluded two-week climate conference at Indonesian island resort city of Bali.
   As a single country, Bangladesh won the highest four seats at one conference attended over 10,000 participants including government delegates from more than 180 countries.
   At the height of most efficient and skilled negotiation side by side with strong lobbying, Bangladesh won an alternate seat in the newly created 16-member Adaptation Fund Board when her candidate Mohammad Qamar Munir, joint secretary of ministry of environment and forest and coordinator of the Bangladesh delegation was unanimously elected from the least developed countries group of 50 nations after withdrawal of the candidates from Maldives, Nepal and Bhutan.