British Muslim leaders urged their communities Monday to help fight extremism after three failed car bombings, amid signs that the new government may be better able to win over their ‘hearts and minds.’
   The prime minister, Gordon Brown has argued that cooperation from Britain’s estimated 1.6 million Muslims is key to defeating the threat from Islamist militants at home and abroad.
   Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, head of the Muslim Parliament of Britain, urged Muslims to support the government and security services, saying ‘all the evidence suggests’ the three failed attacks were carried out by Islamists.
   He assured the ‘government of his support against the forces of anarchy and extremism and called upon the Muslim community to help uproot extremism’ in its midst.
   The British Muslim Initiative, a lobby group which promotes Muslim participation in public life, echoed the remarks.
   ‘Whoever was responsible for planting the devices clearly intended to cause maximum damage and loss of innocent lives.... We urge all British Muslims to fully cooperate with the authorities to apprehend and bring to justice the perpetrators,’ the BMI said.
   Siddiqui said he hoped it would be easier to cooperate with the Brown government than with that of his predecessor Tony Blair.
   ‘I think there is a distinct difference’ between the two governments in reacting to extremist threats, he said.
   The responses so far from ‘Gordon Brown and his home secretary (Jaqui Smith) are more measured that we would have expected from Tony Blair,’ he said without elaborating.
   The Guardian newspaper said Brown shunned the ‘politics of fear’ with his sober responses to the threat, while Blair was more impulsive when he announced ‘the rules of the game’ had changed after the July 2005 bombings on London transport.
   Brown’s spokesman said Monday that the government has been keeping in touch with Muslim organisations, though not the prime minister himself.
   ‘As we urge vigilance on the public, as we increase the security levels, we also have to ensure that we need to do more to win hearts and minds across all communities.
   ‘We are in constant contact with all of those affected by the London incident.’

Pakistan’s top court heavily criticised government lawyers Monday for filing ‘scandalous’ material about the country’s suspended chief justice, in a fresh blow to president Pervez Musharraf.
   A Supreme Court judge also banned intelligence officials from the premises in Islamabad and ordered spy chiefs to sweep not only the building but judges’ houses for surveillance devices.
   Military ruler Musharraf has faced the biggest crisis of his eight years in power since suspending Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on March 9 for alleged misconduct.
   Musharraf originally sent the allegations to be heard by a special panel of five judges, but in May Chaudhry launched a Supreme Court challenge against both his suspension and the powers of the panel.
   In a U-turn last Thursday, the government asked the Supreme Court to deal with the entire case after all, and at the same time filed details of the allegations.
   But on Monday, the government withdrew the application and apologised after complaints from Chaudhry’s lawyer and the Supreme Court judges hearing the case.
   Presiding judge Khalil-ur-Rehman Ramday ordered the government to pay costs of about 1,660 dollars for filing the ‘scandalous and vexatious’ application which he said aimed to damage judges including Chaudhry.

Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels and a breakaway faction seen allied to the government are both still recruiting children as soldiers, despite pledges not to, UNICEF said on Monday.
   The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have vowed their ranks will be free of under-age soldiers by the end of this year, have recruited around 130 children since January, while a breakaway faction called the Karuna group has recruited around 70, the United Nations children agency said.
   ‘The LTTE does still continue to recruit children under the age of 18, despite commitments that they’ve made to stop,’ JoAnna Van Gerpen, head of UNICEF’s Sri Lanka mission, said in an interview.
   ‘We do see that there’s been a reduction, but it’s difficult to say that’s because of the actual reduction in recruitment by the LTTE, or if that is because of an overall prevalence of fear within the community that prevents people from reporting.’
   UNICEF lists 1,591 outstanding cases of Tiger under-age recruitment up to the end of May, and 198 Karuna cases.
   The Tigers argue that children in their ranks have lied about their age to join the fight for an independent state in the north and east of the Indian Ocean island.
   UNICEF has noted a significant drop in Tiger recruitment of children — or youths under the age of 18 – in recent months, and says releases of children from their ranks outstripped reported cases of new recruitment.
   But the agency is worried by the Tigers’ requirement that each family contribute at least one member to their forces, saying such recruitment is not voluntary and could increase pressure on children.

The Palestinian emergency cabinet will meet Monday to discuss how to spend nearly 120 million dollars in taxes transferred by Israel to ease a financial crisis after a 17-month boycott.
   Western-backed prime minister Salam Fayyad was to chair a cabinet meeting in his West Bank base of Ramallah one day after Israel started to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in customs duties denied to Hamas governments.
   A first instalment of 118 million dollars was paid into Palestinian coffers on Sunday, to be followed by payments of around 400 million dollars split over the next six months, together with monthly transfers of new duties.
   ‘The money will be used to pay the salaries and other budgets, and settle the debts of the Palestinian Authority,’ Palestinian prisoners, sports and youth minister Ashraf al-Ajrami said late on Sunday.
   Israel’s monthly transfers of 50 to 60 million dollars worth of customs duties, which are levied on goods destined for Palestinian markets that transit through Israeli ports, constitute around a third of the Palestinian budget.
   Releasing the money is a centrepiece of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s policy of boosting Abbas’s moderate emergency government, which has received broad international support, while further isolating Hamas in its Gaza bastion.
   Last month, Abbas appointed internationally respected economist Fayyad as premier and sacked the previous Hamas-led administration after Hamas gunmen violently seized the Gaza Strip.
   The end of the economic siege provides a badly needed injection of cash to Abbas’s new government and will allow thousands of Palestinian civil servants to be paid for the first time in months.
   The withholding of the tax receipts from governments led by Hamas — which Israel boycotts as a terrorist organisation — sparked a Palestinian economic meltdown that exacerbated the political tensions between Abbas and Hamas.

Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama raked in at least 32.5 million dollars in the last three months, throwing down a formidable fundraising challenge to party pace-setter Hillary Clinton.
   Obama declared Sunday his stunning campaign cash windfall was ‘just the beginning’ of a movement to transform America, as he became the top Democratic fundraiser in a single quarter in the year before a presidential election.
   His campaign cash blitz sent momentum through his campaign to become America’s first black president, the day before Clinton was due to roll out one of her most powerful political weapons—former president Bill Clinton.
   Clinton’s campaign said last week that she would raise around 27 million dollars in the three-month accounting period which ended Saturday, but admitted she would fail to surpass Obama’s amount.
   The former first lady is topping polls of the Democratic race, and has put up strong performances in a clutch of campaign debates among rivals for her party’s presidential nomination.
   This week, she is due to launch a campaign swing in the crucial early-voting state of Iowa with her husband.
   Obama’s funds came from 154,000 individual donors in the last three months alone. More than a quarter of a million people have offered him cash so far this year. He has now raised a total of 55.7 million dollars in funding for next year’s primary and caucus nominating contests, his campaign said.
   ‘We have built the largest grassroots campaign in history for this stage of a presidential race,’ Obama said in a statement on Sunday.
   ‘That’s the kind of movement that can change the special interest-driven politics in Washington and transform our country, and it’s just the beginning.’
   Political consultants had been watching second quarter figures closely to see whether Obama, a charismatic first-term Illinois senator, could keep pace with Clinton — in the end he surpassed her.
   In the first quarter of 2007, Clinton raised 26 million dollars for her White House bid, a few hundred thousand dollars more than Obama.

The United Nations and other agencies offered aid and helicopters to Pakistan Monday after floods unleashed by a cyclone and days of torrential rain devastated 1.5 million people.
   More than 600 have been killed across South Asia as the annual summer monsoon brings downpours and extreme weather, with at least 117 deaths in southwestern Pakistan during the past week.
   In India, at least 43 people died over the weekend and nearly 5,000 were evacuated as heavy monsoon rains accompanied by fierce winds lashed western India’s Maharashtra state and left some areas badly flooded, officials said. Half the victims were washed away by floods while the rest died in house collapses or were electrocuted.

Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe sternly rebuked his defence minister Monday for sugges-
   ting that the US atomic bombings of Japan were the inevitable way of ending Second World War.
   Survivors of the bombings also told defence minister Fumio Kyuma to stay away
   from future memorial ceremonies in Nagasaki after his suggestion Saturday that the nuclear attacks on Japan by the United States ‘couldn’t be helped.’
   The gaffe-prone defence minister was summoned by Abe and reprimanded for his controversial remarks.

A Spanish court on Monday held the final session of the trial of 28 mainly Moroccans accused of supporting al-Qaeda and carrying out the March 2004 deadly Madrid train bombings.
   The final defence statements began with the lawyer representing Rabai Osman Sayed Ahmed, known as ‘Mohamed the Egyptian’, one of the three suspected masterminds of Spain’s worst ever attack that killed 191 people and injured 1,841 more.
   The prosecution has blamed the attack on radical Muslims sympathetic to al-Qaeda, which claimed responsibility in a video found days after the blasts on four suburban trains.
   There were originally 29 people on trial but prosecutors dropped all charges against defendant Brahim Moussaten last month for lack of evidence.
   All the accused have pleaded not guilty to what was the deadliest attack in Europe since a airline exploded over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988 killing 270 people.
   Chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza said during the trial that ‘the worst attack in Spain’s history was the work of a cell linked to jihad and al-Qaeda, the terrorist organisation which is behind the majority of attacks carried out in the world.’

Terminal 3 at London’s Heathrow Airport was briefly closed after a ‘suspect package’ was found on Sunday, an airport spokesman said.
   ‘BAA can confirm that the incident involving a suspect package in Terminal 3 has now been cleared,’ the spokesman for airports operator BAA said.
   ‘Passengers are being allowed back into the terminal building.’
   The spokesman had earlier said that police were on site, and were working with airport staff to get the terminal re-opened.
   He said that the package was discovered at 7:41pm (1841 GMT), and was not sure how many flights had been disrupted by the terminal’s closure.

If US president George W Bush hopes fresh lobster and scenic boat rides will sway Russia’s Vladimir Putin, he’ll find out on Monday when they try to mend relations now at a post-Cold War low.
   The leaders will hold talks at the end of Putin’s overnight visit to the Bush family’s New England estate in a bid to find common ground on thorny issues, such as a planned US missile shield and how to deal with Iran’s nuclear defiance.
   Both sides advised against expecting breakthroughs.
   Instead, they portray the meeting on the rugged Maine coast as a chance for Bush and Putin to revive the rapport they once enjoyed and to salvage US-Russia ties that have frayed badly as both near the final stages of their presidencies.
   ‘I really don’t think that either of them want, as part of their legacy, a trashed US-Russian relationship,’ said Andrew Kuchins, a Russia expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
   Bush’s invitation to his family’s century-old Kennebunkport compound was seen by analysts as a sign that Washington is serious about trying to get the relationship back on track. Townspeople have dubbed it the ‘lobster summit.’
   Greeting Putin on Sunday like a long-lost family member, Bush and his father, former president George HW Bush, treated him to a quick tour of the area in a high-powered speedboat before sitting down for a traditional lobster dinner.

Palestinian groups worked on Monday to end the six-week-old battle in a besieged refugee camp of northern Lebanon, as aid workers continued to seek access to trapped civilians.
   The factions, in an initiative led by the mainstream Fatah, were trying to assemble a force to restore security to the once sleepy seafront camp of Nahr al-Bared turned into a war zone between Arab Islamists and Lebanese soldiers.
   Mesbah al-Ahdab, a pro-government MP for the nearby port city of Tripoli, called on any such force to hand over the Fatah al-Islam holdouts to the army, which is demanding their surrender to Lebanese authorities to face trial.
   'No compromise is acceptable,' said Ahdab. 'The only solution is one of the two choices: either the legitimate Palestinian forces or the Lebanese state.'
   In the south Lebanon refugee camp of Ain al-Helweh, Fatah official Munir Maqdah said a 300-strong Palestinian force was to be formed to restore security in Nahr al-Bared where the clashes broke out on May 20.