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The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, plans to hold a three-way summit with the Palestinian and Israeli leaders within a month in an effort to rekindle the moribund Middle East process, an official said Monday.
   News of the upcoming summit came as Rice arrived in Egypt on the latest leg of a regional tour aimed at shoring up the ailing ‘roadmap’ peace blueprint which has largely remained a dead letter since its launch four years ago.
   Her diplomatic offensive suffered a blow earlier Monday when Israel invited bids for new settlement in the West Bank even as she was exploring solutions for the region in a meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
   The three-way summit with Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, described by a US official as the most ambitious talks in six years, was expected to be held in the region although no date nor venue have yet been decided.
   ‘They have agreed the three of them that they will meet together — Olmert, Abbas and the secretary of state — in a trilateral meeting to have a conversation about the political horizon,’ the official said on condition of anonymity.
   ‘I would expect the meeting to take place let’s say three to four weeks from now,’ he added.
   The summit offered a glimmer of hope but rights groups and Palestinian officials were still seething after Israel issued new tenders for settlements to be built in the Jerusalem area.
   ‘Israel must make a choice between peace and settlements. It cannot have both,’ Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat told AFP. ‘It’s defying the international community and undermining Secretary of State Rice’s peace efforts.’
   Announcing the bids for the settlement as Rice is visiting the region ‘is just spitting in the face of the American government,’ said Yariv Oppenheimer, from Israel’s anti-settlement Peace Now organization.
   When asked to comment on the bids, Rice’s spokesman Sean McCormack said only that there is ‘no change in our policy.’
   The United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations were the authors of the Mideast roadmap, under which Israel was to freeze settlements.
   Rice has said that the roadmap should be accelerated during her meetings with Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian leaders over the past three days following her arrival in the region on Saturday.
   ‘The roadmap needs to be fulfilled,’ she said in an interview with Israeli television late Sunday.
   In Rice’s lightning visit to neighbouring Jordan late Sunday, King Abdullah II told Washington’s top diplomat that concrete progress needed to be made on the blueprint if the region was to be spared fresh bloodshed.
   ‘Without tangible, specific steps to activate the implementation of the roadmap in the near future, the cycle of violence will widen,’ he said.
   In Ramallah on Sunday, Abbas refused ‘any temporary or transitional solutions, including a state with temporary borders, because we do not believe it to be a realistic choice that can be built upon.’

Pakistan’s prime minister firmly rejected US complaints that al-Qaeda leaders had found safe haven in his country.
   But Shaukat Aziz admitted his government was struggling to stop insurgents loyal to Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime moving in and out of Pakistan border areas that house some three million Afghan refugees.
   In unusually frank criticism of a key ally in the US war on terrorism, top intelligence adviser of the president, George W Bush, John Negroponte, and other US officials last week said senior al-Qaeda leaders were continuing to operate from ‘secure hideouts’ in Pakistan.
   ‘We totally reject this charge,’ Aziz said Sunday in an interview on CNN.
   ‘Pakistan is a country in the world which has done more for fighting terrorism than anybody else,’ he said.
   ‘This is because of conviction by our government and our people that terrorism is no solution to any problem,’ he said.
   Aziz said his government had no information indicating that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants were hiding in unruly tribal areas along the Afghan border.
   ‘The truth is that if any of these or other individuals are in our territory, we will go after them,’ he said.
   ‘In fact, if the world knew where these people are, they would collectively come and go after them wherever they are,’ he said.
   Aziz also insisted his government was committed to securing the border with Afghanistan so that Taliban elements could not set up bases from which to launch attacks on Afghan government forces or the NATO troops supporting them.
   ‘The policy of the government is not to encourage, not to give safe haven’ to the Taliban, he said.
   But Aziz said the presence of some three million Afghan refugees inside Pakistan made it very difficult to seal the border entirely and he renewed a call for the camps to be closed and their residents be returned home.
   ‘Today, we do have three million people and you know, they all look alike, so if somebody is having a different political view, or is a member of the Taliban, that is possible,’ he said.
   ‘That’s why we want these camps to go and the refugees to leave,’ he said.
   Pakistan’s foreign ministry earlier this week lamented Negroponte’s remarks, made in testimony to a Senate committee, as ‘questionable criticism’.
   Pakistan says it has arrested more than 700 al-Qaeda operatives since the movement carried out the September 11, 2002, attacks on the United States.
   It has also deployed around 80,000 troops to hunt down al-Qaeda fugitives who sneaked across the border after the ouster of the fundamentalist Taliban in late 2001.
   Pakistan has recently floated a controversial proposal to mine the porous border, after mounting allegations militants were using tribal areas to launch attacks on foreign and Afghan forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah charged in an interview published Monday that the United States was blocking efforts to form a national unity government in Lebanon.
   ‘The United States is preventing the formation of a national unity government in Lebanon. This is the core of the crisis,’ said the chief of the Shia militant movement in an interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Anbaa.
   ‘The aim (of the US) is to strengthen the government of (prime minister) Fuad Siniora because in reality it is their government. It is the government of the US ambassador in Beirut,’ Nasrallah said. The Hezbollah-led opposition has been campaigning to topple the Western-backed government of Siniora who has rejected their demands for a national unity government in which they would have veto power.
   ‘The current government–accepts all demands by the US administration without discussion. Any demand by the United States is approved by the current government within 10 minutes,’ Nasrallah said.
   ‘That’s why I called it the government of (US ambassador Jeffrey) Feltman. Whatever he asks for is given. All Lebanese know that Feltman visits the government headquarters daily or almost daily,’ he said.
   The opposition is demanding a national unity government that should include 10 of their ministers and an eleventh approved by them to be able to block major decisions that require a two-thirds majority in an expanded 30-member cabinet.
   Meanwhile, The United Nations has approved South Korea’s plan to send up to 350 peacekeeping troops to Lebanon, officials said Monday.
   The UN secretariat sent a letter on January 10 allowing a South Korean contingent to take part in peacekeeping operations in southern Lebanon, officials at

Over 115,000 Malaysians have been forced to flee their homes as floods worsen in the south and on Borneo island, officials said Monday as relief workers struggled to feed and shelter victims.
   The national flood operations centre said the situation was expected to deteriorate in the worst-hit state of Johor in Malaysia’s south, where nearly 110,000 have abandoned their homes.
   ‘We expect it to get worse –I think there will be more relief centres opened,’ an official told AFP, adding that 343 evacuation centres were currently operational.
   Rains have also forced the evacuation of some 2,500 people in central Pahang state and more than 4,260 in Sabah state on Borneo island, he said.
   Eighteen people have been killed so far in two rounds of floods that started last month, which officials say are the worst Johor has seen in a century.
   Health officials have warned of the risk of disease, particularly leptospirosis, which is spread by animal urine, after a report that two evacuees had died of the disease.
   Non-government organisation, Mercy Malaysia, said it was distributing hygiene kits and water purification sachets in cooperation with UNICEF.
   ‘If food is not prepared with safe water, then diarrhoea sets in and that’s why we are very concerned,’ Mercy Malaysia’s chief operating officer, Shareen Abdul Ghani, said.

Nishat Hussain’s green eyes flash angrily as she talks about the day years ago when she stopped wearing the burqa because of the discrimination and hostility she faced for putting on the head-to-toe garment.
   ‘Once I was stopped from entering a hospital by a peon because I was wearing the burqa while other women who were not dressed like me were allowed in,’ said the 53-year-old Muslim woman from the western Indian city of Jaipur.
   Things have not changed today for Muslim women who wear headscarves or burqas in officially secular India, according to Hussain, a social worker with the National Muslim Women’s Welfare Society who attended a conference of Muslim women’s groups in New Delhi this week.
   ‘From A to Z, whether dealing with schools or the administration or hospitals, there is hostility for women wearing the burqa and the hijab,’ said Hussain, dressed in a salwar-kameez (loose pyjamas and kurta) with her head uncovered.
   In November, a federal government-appointed panel said women wearing the head-covering hijab found it difficult to get jobs while Muslim women dressed in a burqa complained of rude treatment at markets, hospitals, schools and on public transport.
   Muslims make up around 13 percent of mainly Hindu India’s 1 billion populations and are the country’s poorest religious community. They lag behind in literacy and in higher education, with the gap wider for Muslim women, according to the panel.
   Activists say that prejudice against the community has risen since the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s, the September 11 attacks and the spread of global Islamist militancy, which has led to attacks in Indian cities as well.
   This has added to the traditional prejudice Muslims face, including suspicions among some majority Hindus that they are secretly supportive of Pakistan, India’s Islamic neighbour.
   Muslims are free to practise their religion openly and India’s ceremonial president is a Muslim. But many in the world’s third-largest Islamic community complain of discrimination because of their names or dress.
   Like 23-year-old Afreen Mirza, who stitches and sells mobile phone covers in Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat.
   Mirza’s husband is in jail and she earns a living for her two small children by selling the phone covers to shops and non-governmental organisations.
   ‘The NGOs sometimes ask me to take off the hijab if I come into their offices. They are uneasy with me wearing it, saying I could get them in trouble,’ said Mirza, her hair and neck covered by a black hijab, speaking on the sidelines of the conference.
   ‘When I wear the full burqa in Ahmedabad, some people seem to think I am a terrorist or will cause trouble,’ Mirza said, a sad smile flitting across her face.
   The government report on Muslims said many in the community felt the need to prove they were not ‘terrorists’ or ‘anti-national’.

Federal detectives Monday removed nine plastic bags filled with human bones found in a new search near a bungalow dubbed the ‘House of Horrors’, and admitted there may now be more than 20 murder victims.
   ‘It now looks (as though) the number of those killed may exceed 20,’ a detective for the Central Bureau of Investigation told AFP in Noida.
   The polythene bags were stashed in sewage drains that had not been searched previously, the CBI detective said on condition of anonymity.
   Previously it had been confirmed at least 17 people, mostly children, were murdered in the past three years. Their remains were found last month.
   ‘Today, we will search drainage to the trunk (sewage) line here, the CBI detective said.
   Excavators were being brought in for a second wave of searches around the house where the main suspects–a businessman and his domestic help–lived.
   Noida police chief RKS Rathore said he and his team had failed earlier to find the torsos or the bundles located on Sunday.

About 2,000 ethnic Pashtun tribesmen rallied in this Pakistani border town near Afghanistan on Monday to condemn the Pakistani government for new border control measures.
   Chanting slogans against Pakistan, the protesters also asked the government to abandon its plan to plant mines and build a fence along parts of its frontier with Afghanistan.
   ‘These measures are not meant to stop Taliban from entering into Pakistan. These steps are aimed at dividing Pashtuns, who live on both
   sides of the border,’ said
   Sardar Gillani, a leader of the nationalist Awami National
   Party.
   ‘Don’t divide us. Don’t stop us from going to Afghanistan. Don’s stop Afghans from coming here because they are our brothers and sisters,’ he said. The rally came a week after Pakistan opened its first biometrics control system to screen travellers as part of its efforts to check cross-border movement by militants.

Government forces killed at least five Tamil Tiger rebels during long-range artillery exchanges in Sri Lanka where six civilians were also shot dead, military officials said Monday.
   The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam targeted army positions in the eastern district of Batticaloa on Sunday and troops retaliated killing three guerrillas, a military official said.
   He said another two Tiger rebels died during clashes in the same region later in the day.
   The fighting came a day after the Tigers killed five Sri Lankan soldiers in the same district. Six civilians were also found shot dead at five locations elsewhere in the island during the weekend, police said. More than 60,000 people have been killed in Sri Lanka’s Tamil separatist conflict during the past 35 years.
   More than 3,800 people have been killed in the past year, despite a now moribund truce agreed in February 2002.

US military authorities in South Korea have apologised over the alleged rape of a 67-year-old local woman by a US soldier, saying the case was ‘an affront’ to all servicemen, officials said Monday.
   The apology came hours after South Korean police arrested a 23-year-old US soldier for allegedly raping and beating the woman in an alley in Seoul.
   Major general John Morgan, the acting US 8th Army commander, said in a statement posted on the US military website late Sunday that the case tainted the reputation of US soldiers.
   ‘I deeply regret and personally apologise for this terrible incident that has resulted in grave injury to a Korean civilian,’ Morgan said.
   ‘This vicious act is an affront to all soldiers.’
   The arrested soldier initially refused to cooperate with police pending the arrival of US legal officers, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.
   Morgan said the US military was ‘cooperating fully with Korean authorities’ over the case and a joint investigation was underway.
   Police want to obtain court permission to detain the soldier in South Korean rather than US military custody.

A delegation of US senators led by former first lady Hillary Clinton met the Pakistan president, Pervez Musharraf, and discussed with him the regional situation, bilateral relations and Indo-Pak dialogue process.
   Musharraf briefed the delegation about Pakistan’s view on the situation in Afghanistan and told the senators that a stable and strong Kabul was in the interest of the region.
   He expressed Pakistan’s commitment to continue its support and cooperation to the world community in the fight against terrorism and to ensure peace and stability in Afghanistan; state-run APP quoted him as saying today.
   Musharraf also briefed the US senators about the Indo-Pak dialogue process, saying that a peaceful solution to the Kashmir issue would ensure a durable peace in South Asia.

Indonesian rescue workers scouring the seas for a commercial airliner that went missing two weeks ago have found a fuel spill believed to be from the doomed jet, an official said on Monday.
   Small pieces of the Adam Air Boeing 737-400 that vanished from radar screens on New Year’s Day with 102 people aboard have been found in the past few days floating in the sea or washed up on beaches off the west coast of Sulawesi island.
   The jet fuel was found in the sea off Majene on Sulawesi, said First Air Marshal Eddy Suyanto, commander of the airbase in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province, where the search is being coordinated.
   ‘This gives us a clear idea where the bigger pieces of the plane such as wings are located,’ he told Reuters.
   Officials have suggested the plane might have crashed into the sea off Sulawesi, disintegrating into small pieces.
   Fragments of human hair and scalp that might come from passengers were found on Sunday, an official said.
   Muslimin, a rescue official in Makassar, said by telephone that the remains had been sent for DNA testing. The process could take two or three days.
   A fragment of one of the plane’s wings was also found on Saturday night.
   After finding no trace of the plane for more than a week, a fisherman found the tail stabiliser of the Boeing last Tuesday snared in his nets off Lojie Beach on the west coast of Sulawesi.

A US failure in Iraq would empower Iran and threaten world peace, the president, George W Bush, said Sunday, warning Tehran that if any Iranians are caught in Iraq ‘we will deal with them.’
   Bush’s tough language during an interview with CBS television echoed his the vice president, Dick Cheney, who earlier told Fox network Iran should ‘keep their folks at home’ and not try to destabilise Iraq.
   His decision last week to ‘surge’ US forces in Iraq by 21,500 troops, Bush said, was reached after considering other options like ‘doing nothing’ and getting out of Iraq, both of which he ruled out, he said, because ‘we’d have a crisis on our hands in Iraq.’
   ‘Failure in Iraq would empower Iran, which poses a significant threat to world peace,’ Bush said in an interview aired on CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ on Sunday.
   Asked if he agreed with US military officers that Iranian agents were killing US troops in Iraq, Bush said: ‘I think what they’re saying–is that the Iranians are providing equipment that is killing Americans, and therefore, either way its’ unacceptable.’
   And to the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bush offered a warning: ‘If we catch your people inside (Iraq) harming US citizens or Iraqi citizens you know we will deal with them.’
   
   Iran says working with Iraq over US arrests
   Iran said on Monday it was working with Iraqi officials on securing the release of five Iranians arrested by US forces in Iraq last week and accused of running arms and money to Iraqi militants.
   Tehran has said the five Iranians, who were seized from an Iranian government office in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Arbil on Thursday, were diplomats and has demanded their release.
   ‘We are trying to release the diplomats and sorting out the issue with the Iraqi government. This was an attack on the Iraqi government as well,’ government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham told a weekly news conference.
   The Iranian intelligence minister, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, held talks with Shirwan al-Waili, Iraq’s state secretary for national security, on Sunday evening. Waili said afterwards he hoped the issue would be resolved soon.
   
   Iraq asks US to release Iranian detainees
   Iraq has asked the United States to release five Iranians arrested last week Iraq on suspicion they were involved in Iraq’s militancy, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told CNN on Sunday.
   ‘We have communicated with the US Embassy and the command of the multinational forces seeking their release if they are found not guilty,’ Zebari told CNN’s ‘Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.’
   He stressed, however, that Iraq was ‘not a party’ to the investigation of the detainees by US forces.

At least three people were killed when Somali gunmen battled government and Ethiopian troops in the heaviest fighting in Mogadishu since the ouster of hardline Islamists last month, residents said Monday.
   At least two people died in a gun battle between forces and rebels in southern Mogadishu, the Islamists’ traditional stronghold, while a policeman was gunned down when a gang raided a cache of weapons he was guarding.
   The deaths underscored the scale of the task facing the Somali president, Abdullahi Yusuf, Ahmed’s weak interim government, which was only able to supplant the Islamists with the aid of the Ethiopians.
   As many Somalis seethe at the presence of Ethiopian troops on their streets, Addis Adaba tried to explain its intervention to other African states and urge them to help make a planned peacekeeping force a reality.
   Witnesses said rockets and mortar shells as well as machine-gun and anti-aircraft fire were used in the overnight battle.
   ‘After the fighting, I saw two bodies, both of them men killed near a pasta factory,’ said Munina Ismail.
   ‘An explosive that was thrown at the vehicle left many causalities, but I do not know how many,’ said Mohamoud Aden, said another local resident in the area which has been the scene of a number of ambushes of troops in recent days.
   The exchanges dragged on for up to an hour before a joint force of government troops and Ethiopian soldiers brought the situation under control.
   In the second incident, gunmen raided a nearby police station in Huriwa neighbourhood, gunning down an officer and stealing three rifles.
   Ethiopian troops and tanks then arrived, sealing off the area and searching houses for weapons.
   Member of parliament approved the imposition of martial law at the weekend, giving the security forces wide-ranging powers.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad headed to Ecuador Sunday for the inauguration of the leftist president, Rafael Correa, after striking closer ties with Nicaragua’s one-time anti-US president Daniel Ortega.
   On a Latin American tour to cultivate Washington’s critics and rally backing for Tehran’s nuclear programme, the Iranian leader was officially seen off by Ortega at Managua’s central Noal square after both signed several bilateral cooperation agreements.
   ‘I thank God for the opportunity of having visited this nation and the Nicaraguan government,’ Ahmadinejad said before boarding his flight to Ecuador for Monday’s swearing-in ceremony.
   During his brief 20-hour visit to Nicaragua, Ahmadinejad and Ortega announced the restoration of full diplomatic relations and the re-opening of embassies in each other’s capitals.
   ‘Rest assured that we will improve our relations to the point of fulfilling every wish and thing that we desire. It is our will to walk hand in hand,’ Ahmadinejad said through a translator after meeting Ortega.
   Ortega said Ahmadinejad’s visit was ‘not merely a matter of protocol.’
   The Iranian president came to Nicaragua from Venezuela, where he signed commercial agreements with President Hugo Chavez, an outspoken critic of US President George W Bush and advocate for Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme. Each proclaimed the other an ideological ‘brother.’
   Ahmadinejad plans to burnish relations with other leftist Latin American critics of the Bush administration when he attends the inauguration of Correa, who has pledged to forge stronger ties with Venezuela and allow a lease for a US military airbase on the country’s Pacific Coast to expire.
   The Iranian president in Ecuador will also meet other South American presidents including Bolivia’s Evo Morales on the sidelines of the ceremony in Ecuador, before finishing his tour on Tuesday.
   Ortega, who was the Marxist leader of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front that ousted US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, was sworn in as president last week, promising generous anti-poverty programmes.
   Analysts said that Iran, flush with oil money, is in a position to help Ortega with his ambitious plans.

Iran on Monday defiantly stuck by its ambition to massively crank up uranium enrichment capacity amid spiralling tensions with the United States over its role in the Middle East.
   Government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham said Iran wanted to install ‘even more’ than 3,000 centrifuges to enrich uranium at a key nuclear plant in defiance of Western warnings to freeze the sensitive activity.
   ‘We are heading towards a production of nuclear fuel that needs 3,000 and even more centrifuges,’ Elham told reporters. ‘Our aim is to ensure our industrial needs.’
   Elham confirmed that Iran would be making a major announcement on the ‘completion’ of Iran’s nuclear programme during the 10-day anniversary celebrations
   for the Islamic revolution in February. He did not go into details.
   It remains unclear how far Iran has advanced with the plan to install 3,000 centrifuges and Elham only said the UN nuclear inspectors had been kept informed of ‘completed work’.
   The Islamic republic has
   so far declared the installation of two cascades of 164 centrifuges at the plant in Natanz and the installation of 3,000 centrifuges would mark a major step towards industrial enrichment.
   It has so far shown no sign of caving into a Security Council resolution that imposed the first ever UN sanctions against Iran over its failure to suspend enrichment, which can be used to fuel power stations or to make nuclear bombs.
   The United States accuses Iran of seeking a nuclear weapon, a charge fiercely rejected by Tehran which insists it only wants to provide energy for a growing population.
   The previous day, foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini had dismissed speculation that Iran had slowed down its activities in Natanz, saying the enrichment work was continuing.
   Its defiance comes amid mounting accusations from the United States that Iran is using its influence to meddle in the region, especially in Lebanon and Shiite-majority Iraq.

The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, played down Monday suggestions of a rift with Britain over its plan to cut troop numbers in Iraq, after a visit to NATO headquarters focused on Afghanistan and Kosovo.
   Gates acknowledged that Britain was talking of reducing numbers around the southern Iraqi city of Basra; just after US President George W. Bush announced an increase of more than 21,000 US troops, for the Iraqi capital Baghdad.
   ‘They are making a drawdown, planning a drawdown at some point this year,’ Gates said at NATO headquarters in Brussels after his first talks with Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.
   ‘The situation in the south and particularly Basra is different from the situation in Baghdad. Our increase in forces is aimed very much and in particular at the violence in Baghdad,’ he said.
   ‘We think that the situation is a different situation than what prevails in the south and therefore there are different responses,’ he told reporters. The new defence chief’s remarks came a day after he held talks in London with the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and defence secretary Des Browne at the start of a trip that will also take him to Afghanistan.
   Gates and Browne reaffirmed the importance of the US-British security relationship during a break in the talks but said little of substance about their discussions.
   ‘We had a good conversation about Iraq, and I look forward to talking further about Afghanistan today,’ Gates said Sunday, calling Britain ‘our most important international partner in both Iraq and Afghanistan.’

The execution of Saddam Hussein was rushed to prevent the former Iraqi leader from revealing facts that could compromise the United States, former Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov said Sunday.
   Saddam was executed in an ‘unexpected’ way so ‘he could not have the last word’ and reveal compromising information on the relationship between the United States and his former regime, the veteran diplomat said on Rossiya television channel.
   If Saddam Hussein ‘had said everything (he knew), the current US president (George W Bush) would have been greatly embarrassed,’ said Primakov, a Middle East expert formerly on good terms with Saddam.
   Primakov highlighted the military cooperation between Washington and Baghdad during the 1980s when the United States was fighting the fundamentalist threat from Iran.
   He also alleged that Saddam made a deal with Washington before the 2003 invasion of Iraq to allow the United States to occupy the country without meeting any opposition.
   Primakov made two confidential visits to Iraq at the request of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, shortly before the US-led invasion of the country.
   Saddam was executed for crimes against humanity on December 30, which coincided with the first day of the Eid al-Adha feast and drew widespread Muslim condemnation.

Tough new laws aimed at regulating foreign workers came into force in Russia on Monday, their immediate effect visible in markets where stalls usually manned by migrant vendors stood empty.
   The president, Vladimir Putin, last year called for more Russian citizens to be given jobs in the country’s food markets, where many stallholders come from the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
   Russians often complain about the high number of foreigners in the country and anti-immigrant movements, as well as violent racist groups, have gained large followings in recent years.
   The laws impose quotas for immigrants from former Soviet republics and set fines for employers of around 30,000 dollars (23,000 euros) for each illegal immigrant hired.
   Illegal immigrants often work as builders, vendors and cleaners in Russia, taking on relatively poorly paid menial jobs that some experts say many Russians would not be willing to accept.
   The laws ‘will regulate the situation with around 12 million foreigners working illegally in Russia and so will offer more jobs to Russian citizens,’ said Denis Soldatikov, a spokesman for the federal migration service.
   Russia has one of the highest illegal immigration rates in the world. The federal migration service estimates there were between 10 and 12 million illegal immigrants, many of them seasonal workers, in Russia in 2006.
   Around 700,000 legal migrants were registered in 2006, officials said.
   A government order limiting the proportion of foreigners working at retail markets to 40 percent comes into force in April. That figure is then due to be reduced to zero by the end of the year.
   Another law that went into effect on Monday theoretically should ease the compulsory registration procedure for immigrants.
   However, experts say new arrivals will continue to face difficulties in gaining legal status because there is little proper housing available and that makes registering to a fixed address, as required, nearly impossible.

The political future of Edmund Stoiber, the head of Germany’s Christian Social Union and a strategic ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, was hanging in the balance on Monday amid party crisis talks.
   Stoiber, who has also been the premier of the rich southern state of Bavaria for the past 14 years, met with two key CSU officials after a power struggle in the party heated up at the weekend.
   The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said a chorus of calls for Stoiber to stand aside and let a new leader unite the CSU before the next elections in Bavaria in 2008 has put the party before ‘an acid test’.
   ‘It is not clear whether the trial of Stoiber will be long or short but it is certain that Stoiber has become ripe for phasing out,’ the conservative daily said.
   ‘He is not entirely innocent as far as the reasons for this are concerned.’ Stoiber is facing the fallout from a case of alleged spying on Gabriele Pauli, a key member of the regional parliament for the CSU who has been critical of his leadership.
   It triggered a scandal that forced his chief of staff to resign.
   Stoiber, who vowed at the weekend to fight for his job, on Monday met with the speaker of the Bavarian parliament, Alois Glueck, and the leader of the CSU group in the state legislature, Joachim Herrmann.

Talk of divorce is clouding the anniversary this coming week of the union between England and Scotland.
   Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, tipped to become the next British prime minister, warned Saturday against a ‘Balkanisation of Britain’ beset by separatist leanings within not only its national but also its new immigrant communities.
   Such sentiments have long stirred in Scotland and Wales as well as in the complex sectarian case of Northern Ireland but they are now spreading to England, the union’s political and economic anchor.

Three killed in Thailand’s restive Muslim south
Suspected Islamic militants have killed three people in Thailand’s restive Muslim-majority south, police said Monday, including one soldier who died in a roadside bomb blast. The 21-year-old soldier was killed late Sunday when the pick-up truck he was travelling in hit a bomb in Pattani, one of three southern provinces beset by a three-year separatist insurgency. Five other soldiers were injured in the blast, one critically, said local police colonel Piyapong Pholvanitch. Militants opened fire on soldiers and police who came to the aid of the stricken troops, and a 10-minute gun fight ensued, Piyapong said. Also in Pattani Sunday, suspected separatists shot dead a 31-year-old Muslim man at his home. In neighbouring Yala, a 21-year-old Muslim man was shot dead as he drove his two-year-old daughter on a motorcycle. The child was unharmed.
— AFP

Heavy rain, floods kill 23 in Philippines
Floods and landslides in the central and southern Philippines in the past two weeks have killed 23 people and displaced thousands, the Office of Civil Defence said Monday. Seventeen people were killed in Samar and Southern Leyte provinces on Visayas islands from floods and landslides triggered by heavy rains, the office said. Six deaths were recorded in Agusan province on the main southern island of Mindanao. Road networks in Leyte and Davao del Sur provinces remain barely passable to light vehicles, while floods have washed out bridges and sealed highways in Surigao province, it said.
— AP

Three officials sacked in China after coal mine blast kills 13
Three government officials in northern China have been sacked for lax supervision after a coal mine explosion killed 13 people and injured nine others, state press said Monday. The three unnamed officials were blamed for the blast that took place on Friday at the Niuxinhui Coal Mine in Shanxi province, the China Daily said. Around 30 miners were working underground at the licenced pit when the explosion struck, reports said. The death rate in China’s coal mines fell 20 per cent last year but an average of 13 people a day were still killed in what remains a ‘grim’ industry, state press said on Thursday, citing a senior official.
— AFP

3 killed in Thai
train wreck
Two passenger trains collided near a beach resort town south of Bangkok early Sunday, killing three people and injuring more than 100 others, officials said. The accident occurred before dawn when a Bangkok-bound train took the wrong track and hit an oncoming train head-on just outside the station in Hua Hin, said Wichai Choochumporn, a rail official. All three victims were rail employees, according to officials at Hua Hin Hospital, one of three facilities that provided treatment. Foreigners were among the 107 injured passengers, including an Italian man and a German woman, both of whom were treated for minor injuries, Wichai said.
— AP

Two Kurdish rebels killed in Turkey clash
Two militants from the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party have been killed in fighting with Turkish soldiers in the country’s southeast, military sources said Monday. The shootout occurred late Sunday in a rural area near Diyarbakir, the largest city of the mainly Kurdish southeast, they said. The PKK called a unilateral ceasefire on October 1, saying it hoped to pave the way for a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish conflict. The truce, like previous ones called by the rebels, was rejected by Turkey, but fighting has decreased markedly since then. The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed more than 37,000 lives since 1984 when the PKK, considered a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community, took up arms for Kurdish self-rule in the southeast.
— AFP

Storm in Sweden leaves 3 dead
Falling trees killed at least three people as hurricane-strength winds whipped across southwestern Sweden on Sunday, leaving more than 260,000 households without power. Winds of up to 84 mph also caused major disruptions in train and boat traffic across Scandinavia, and police in Norway and Sweden urged people to stay indoors to avoid what was described as the biggest storm in two years. Police said a 9-year-old boy was killed by a falling tree in Motala, about 150 miles southwest of Stockholm. A 60-year-old man in the city of Jonkoping and a 25-year-old man in Ullared, near the southwestern coast, also died when their vehicles were struck by trees.
— AP

Iran clears teenage woman sentenced
to death
An Iranian court has cleared of murder charges a 19-year-old woman who was originally sentenced to death for killing a man she said tried to rape her, the press reported Monday. Mahabad Fatehi, known as Nazanin, was cleared by a Tehran provincial court of premeditated murder but still ordered to pay blood money of 23,660 euros to the victim’s family, the Etemad newspaper reported. Fatahi, whose case achieved international notoriety when it was taken up by a Canadian beauty queen of Iranian origin, said she stabbed the man in an act of self defence after he tried to rape her and her niece in March 2005.
— AFP

Oklahoma car crash kills 7 Mexicans
Seven Mexican nationals were killed early on Sunday in Oklahoma when their minivan skidded into a tractor-trailer truck in icy conditions; police said.The accident raised the death toll on the state’s highways to 11 since an ice storm began lashing it early on Friday. The powerful front has dumped rain and ice elsewhere in the central and southwest parts of the United States, disrupting air traffic and leaving tens of thousands without power.’ It’s a mess out there. You can’t go anywhere,’ said Oklahoma highway patrol spokesman Pete Norwood.He said Sunday’s accident occurred in the early morning hours in the western part of the state. The van was carrying 12 Mexican nationals.
— AP

Guatemalan leader refuses to read speech
Guatemala’s president declined to read his state-of-the nation speech to Congress, instead sending a written version to lawmakers after violent clashes erupted between protesting teachers and police outside the legislative building. ‘To say that he was not coming for safety reasons only demonstrates that they haven’t been able to make the country a secure place,’ Crespo said. Hundreds of members of the nation’s teachers union and other labour groups that oppose Berger’s administration came to blows with police outside the Congress after the protesters tried to break through a police cordon. Four police and five demonstrators were slightly injured in the clashes, in which protesters hurled rocks and club-wielding police fired rubber bullets.
— Reuters/ bdnews24.com