Pakistan’s government Sunday moved closer to a full-scale assault on al-Qaeda-linked Islamic militants barricaded in an Islamabad mosque, after a senior army commando was shot dead in fierce clashes.
   The military said colonel Haroon Islam died after an operation to blast through part of the wall surrounding the fortified Red Mosque complex in a bid to free women and children allegedly being used as human shields.
   Officials said the government was under pressure to end the six-day siege which has killed at least 24 people, as initial plaudits for its tough stance turned to questions about how long the standoff could be allowed to last.
   ‘The government may have to rethink its strategy in the light of the sad martyrdom of a senior army official and the resistance that has been shown by what appears to be highly trained militants,’ the deputy information minister, Tariq Azeem, said.
   The president, Pervez Musharraf, and the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, spoke by telephone on Sunday morning, after Musharraf attended the soldier’s funeral, to weigh up the government’s options.
   ‘They have discussed how to bring the crisis to a swift end, including possible assault on the compound,’ a top official familiar with the issue said.
   ‘You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It is a very precarious situation.’
   Musharraf, a key US ally, has warned the militants led by firebrand cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi to give up or be killed. The military ruler also told the hardline students late Saturday to immediately free all women and children.
   ‘Intelligence reports indicate the longer the siege goes on the greater the threat posed by the hardliners loyal to the Red Mosque in other parts of the country,’ the top official said.
   Pakistani forces have held back from raiding the now bullet-pocked mosque but moved in closer early Sunday, when the giant blasts to knock down the wall echoed around the city.
   Another three troops were wounded in the clashes and six men who tried to escape the compound after the explosions were arrested, officials said.
   Ghazi told local television that 335 people inside the mosque were killed in Sunday’s latest fighting but the government dismissed the claim as ‘laughable.’
   Concerns grew after security officials said militants from a group linked to al-Qaeda and to the beheading of US journalist Daniel Pearl were now leading the mosque fighters and were putting up ‘fierce resistance’.
   The militant in charge of the armed resistance is called Abu Zubair by his colleagues, the official said citing intelligence intercepts. He added that it was likely a codename.
   Harkatul-Jihad-e-Islami sheltered al-Qaeda militants who fled Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. It has been linked to Pearl’s 2002 beheading and a 2003 attempt to assassinate Musharraf.
   ‘There are fears that the militants may start killing women and children inside and then blame it on the government. They know they have no escape route,’ a government official said.
   Ghazi said he and his followers had enough rations, arms and ammunition inside the compound to ‘fight for another 25 to 30 days and we will do that, God willing.’
   Ghazi, 43, also signalled his defiance by saying that he was telephoned by a man who claimed to have shot at Musharraf’s aircraft on Friday in revenge for the siege.
   Meanwhile, twelve female students at Pakistan's Red Mosque are on hunger strike and have demanded to leave the besieged complex, while several others died in clashes on Sunday, a source at the mosque said.
   The government says dozens of women and children are being held as human shields at the mosque in the capital by Islamic militants defying pressure to surrender.
   'A group of 12 female students have been on hunger strike since Sunday evening demanding that they be allowed to go outside,' the source at the mosque said.
   'The hunger strike women were initially kept in the basement but now they have been shifted to the ground floor,' the source added.

The police in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, home to three suspects held in the British bomb plot, are hunting 12 more people who may be linked to the conspiracy, a newspaper reported.
   The police studied the database at the transport office in the middle-class district of Jayanagar from where they had earlier discovered the driving licence details of a man who rammed a flaming car into Glasgow airport on June 30, the Sunday Times said on Sunday.
   The newspaper said the police were interested in a man it named as Saleem Ahmed, adding investigators were also probing the possibility that fake Bangalore driving licences were used in the bomb plot.
   Three Indians have been arrested in connection with the foiled car bombings in London and Glasgow and they all hailed from Bangalore, India’s software capital.
   They have been identified as Sabeel Ahmed, a doctor, and his brother Kafeel Ahmed, an aeronautical engineer and suspected to be one of the two men who drove the blazing car into Glasgow airport.
   The third has been identified as Mohammed Haneef, a doctor who worked at a hospital in Australia’s Gold Coast where
   he relocated from Britain last year.
   He was held as he attempted to leave the country for India on a one-way ticket.
   Kafeel Ahmed began researching bomb-making techniques weeks before he travelled to Britain on May 5, the Hindu newspaper reported Sunday, citing unnamed intelligence sources with records of his Internet activity.
   Soon after reaching Britain, he acquired the components used to assemble the explosives fitted into the cars that had been intended to explode in central London, the newspaper said.
   Findings by investigators suggest that Kafeel Ahmed acted without training or material assistance from organised groups, it said, adding the police had found no evidence of him being linked to Muslim militant organisations.
   Kafeel Ahmed went to Britain for the supposed purpose of completing his doctoral work in computational fluid dynamics, which involves study of the movement of fluids and gases over objects like aircraft, the Hindu said.

India’s biggest communist party, whose support keeps the government in power, said it was working to create an alternative to the nation’s two largest parties.
   The head of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), Prakash Karat, said the ruling Congress party-led coalition had failed to curb rising food prices and was not addressing the ‘agrarian crisis’ while following unpopular economic policies.
   ‘In that situation ... can we formulate a policy platform which is an alternative platform and then rally forces behind it? That is what the left is trying to do,’ Karat said in an interview.
   But he said the left had no plan to withdraw support from the central coalition as it worked for a political alternative.
   ‘We are in touch with many parties to agree to a policy platform and work with us ... on that basis, we can possibly see the emergence of a third alternative,’ Karat said in his spartan office in New Delhi.
   He criticised the United Progressive Alliance government for food price inflation of over seven per cent and failing to help rural people who were suffering from unemployment, sluggish farm output and farmer suicides.
   ‘The UPA government has to pull up its boots and get something done in the next two years,’ said Karat.
   National elections are due in 2009.
   Karat said the government needed to implement an ambitious rural job guarantee plan, which envisages 100 days of employment for one member of a rural family each year.
   He also called for more public investment in agriculture, which has been stagnating at around two per cent for a few years.
   The widely watched Wholesale Price Inflation, which hit a two-year high of 6.7 per cent in January, has been falling in recent weeks but analysts say pressure on food prices remains.
   Public anger against the Congress party over high food prices saw it booted out of power in two northern states this year.
   ‘That is the ground reality ... the government is unable to provide relief to the people and simultaneously they have weakened or dismantled the public distribution system in most parts of the country,’ said the soft-spoken Karat, seen as a Marxist hardliner on economic policies.
   The University of Edinburgh postgraduate said food price inflation continued to hurt the poor and middle classes and government needed first to look at the consumer price index rather than the wholesale price index to determine the correct level of inflation.
   The CPI (M) and three other smaller parties, which generally follow its national line, have a total of 61 MPs in the 545-member Lok Sabha , and shore up the government of reformist prime minister Manmohan Singh. The CPI (M) has 44 MPs in its fold alone.

Israel’s cabinet agreed on Sunday to release 250 Palestinian prisoners in the latest of a series of attempts to strengthen Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas after Hamas’s seizure of the Gaza Strip.
   ‘I think this is a worthy gesture to make ... because we want to use any means that can reinforce moderate elements in the Palestinian Authority,’ the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told the cabinet in broadcast remarks.
   Olmert had pledged to free prisoners of Abbas’s Fatah movement in a June 25 summit with the Palestinian leader as part of a Western campaign to bolster the new administration he named after sacking a unity government with Hamas Islamists.
   A government official said the cabinet voted overwhelmingly in favour of a motion to release 250 prisoners.
   A final release roster will be put together by a committee. Once the list is approved, it could still take days before any prisoners are freed since Israel would allow 48 hours for the releases to be challenged in petitions to the Supreme Court.
   Previous prisoner releases have raised opposition from groups representing families of Israelis harmed in Palestinian attacks. Palestinians regard prisoners held by Israel as heroes of what they call resistance against occupation.
   The United States and European Union have been prodding Olmert to nurture contacts with Abbas’s emergency government in the hope of resuming long-stalled peace talks.
   Olmert told the cabinet that bolstering Palestinian moderates could ‘encourage them to move in the direction we believe can create conditions for the start of substantial dialogue.’

Australia warned on Sunday of possible imminent terrorist attacks in Indonesia, including on the resort island of Bali, and told its citizens to think twice before travelling there.
   In an upgraded travel advisory, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said terrorists were actively planning attacks that could take place at any time. The advisory says Australians should reconsider their need to travel to Indonesia.
   ‘There have been recent arrests of high-level terrorist operatives in Indonesia, but we assess terrorists are continuing active planning of attacks,’ it said.
   In 2002, bombs ripped through two nightclubs on Bali, a predominately Hindu island.
   Members of the Southeast Asia militant group Jemaah Islamiah were convicted of the blasts, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australian holidaymakers.
   Two years later the Australian embassy in Jakarta was bombed and in October 2005, 23 people, including four Australians, died in suicide attacks on Bali restaurants.
   More attacks ‘could take place at any time and could be imminent,’ DFAT said. ‘Particular care should be taken at this time to avoid known terrorist targets.’
   These included Bali and the capital Jakarta, DFAT said.
   ‘Ask yourself whether, given your own personal circumstances, you’re comfortable travelling to Indonesia including Bali, knowing that there is a very high threat from terrorism and you may be caught up in a terrorist attack,’ the advisory said.
   Asked about the Australian warning, an Indonesian police spokesman, Bambang Kuncoko, said the security situation was ‘favourable.’ ‘So far there’s nothing to worry about,’ he said.
   ‘It is the right of every country to issue a travel advisory. With or without travel advisories, we continue to be pro-active to maintain security,’ he said.

Two Tamil Tigers were killed Sunday in a three-hour sea battle with Sri Lanka’s navy, the guerrillas said, as the military intensified attacks to gain control of the island’s east.
   Amid the escalating conflict, four airmen were seriously injured after a cannon was activated on a jet fighter near the island’s only international airport, officials said.
   The rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam said they lost two of their fighters, but claimed they damaged at least three of the navy’s fast attack craft during an exchange of fire off the northeastern coast of Trincomalee.
   The statement came after the defence ministry said three rebels were shot dead by naval troops in an exchange of fire on the ground in the same region on Saturday.
   More than 60,000 people have been killed since the conflict erupted in 1972.

Nearly 2,000 officials in central China’s Hunan province have been caught breaking China’s strict one-child policy, state media reported Sunday.
   China’s family planning policy, implemented in the late 1970s, limits most urban couples to one child and rural families to two in an attempt to control population growth and conserve natural resources in the world’s most populous country.
   Xinhua said the officials were caught between 2000 and 2005 by the provincial family planning commission and included 21 national and local lawmakers and 24 political advisers.
   Xinhua said some of the officials were discovered breaking the law only when they were being investigated for corruption.
   China has about 1.3 billion people, 20 per cent of the world’s total.
   The government has pledged to keep the population under 1.36 billion in 2010, and under 1.45 billion in 2020.

Thai authorities have arrested two anti-coup activists who were campaigning against military rule and a new constitution that faces a public vote next month, the police and activists said Sunday.
   Sombat Boonngamanong, leader of an activist group formed after a putsch here last September, said that he was detained Friday by the military as he addressed a crowd in the northern city of Chiang Rai.
   The Bangkok-based campaigner was rallying against the junta and the new draft constitution when soldiers took him into custody and held him for 24 hours for violating security laws, he said.
   Chiang Rai is one of 35 Thai provinces still under martial law, which was imposed soon after the ouster of premier Thaksin Shinawatra. Restrictions have been lifted in 41 provinces.
   ‘I want martial law to be revoked in the rest of the 35 provinces because the referendum is coming,’ Sombat said. ‘How can people vote if they don’t have freedom of speech?’
   His arrest came on the day that a military-appointed council approved its final draft of a new constitution, which replaces a 1997 version torn up by the coup makers. The charter faces a referendum on August 19.

The UN’s nuclear agency plans to send a team to North Korea as early as next weekend and keep two staff there to supervise and verify disarmament of the North’s atomic programme, Yonhap News reported on Sunday.
   The International Atomic Energy Agency, which sent officials to North Korea in late June, will likely send another eight-member team on July 14 or 17, South Korea’s Yonhap said, citing several diplomatic sources.
   Two of the inspectors will stay in the North for further monitoring, according to the unnamed sources.
   The IAEA’s board of governors is scheduled to meet on Monday and is expected to authorise a new inspection mission.
   In an aid-for-disarmament deal reached in February, North Korea agreed to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear reactor, the source of its weapons-grade plutonium, in return for fuel oil.
   The North’s foreign ministry said on Friday it was considering suspending operations its nuclear facilities as soon as the first shipment of heavy fuel oil reaches its port. South Korea said on Friday that the first shipment of 6,200 tonnes of fuel oil would set sail on July 12.

Press freedom in Hong Kong has declined since the former British colony’s return to Chinese rule a decade ago, according to a report by the Hong Kong Journalists Association.
   In a survey by the association, published in the HKJA’s annual report on Sunday, 58 per cent of journalists polled said they believed press freedom had deteriorated since the territory’s return to Chinese rule on July 1, 1997.
   The journalists polled blamed self-censorship and tighter government control on the flow of information.
   The association called on the government to become more robust in protecting media freedom. It said its survey findings were backed up by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, which placed Hong Kong 58th in its press freedom ranking for 2006 out of 168 jurisdictions, down from 18th place in 2002.
   The survey, conducted in January, found 30 per cent of respondents said they had exercised self-censorship in the past year and 40 per cent said they knew a colleague who had done so.
   Hong Kong’s print media is fiercely competitive with nearly 50 daily newspapers and numerous magazines.

With daggers drawn for a weakened White House, congressional Democrats return from a short recess this week plotting to further undermine president George W Bush’s waning political sway.
   Even as Bush’s signature immigration reform bill was strangled in the Senate last month, Democratic leaders were mapping out new misery for a president beset by rock-bottom poll ratings, the three bloodiest months for US troops in Iraq since the war began in 2003 and a fraying Republican support base.
   Nearly half a dozen Republicans Senators recently broke ranks with Bush urging him to change course in Iraq.
   After a six-week hiatus, Democrats plan an new attack on the unpopular war, and have besieged the White House with subpoenas over simmering legal and constitutional showdowns.
   A House of Representatives committee meanwhile is planning on making political hay by probing Bush’s decision to commute a two-and-a-half year sentence imposed on former White House aide Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, over a scandal sparked by the leaking of a CIA spy’s identity.
   ‘Republicans will have the opportunity to not just say the right things on Iraq, but vote the right way, too, so that we can bring the responsible end to this war that the American people demand and deserve,’ said Senate Majority leader Harry Reid.
   But it is unclear whether the new Democratic attacks on Iraq will be any more successful than previous ones.
   Bush forced the Democrats into a climb-down in June on their crusade to insert troop withdrawal guidelines in an emergency war budget.
   House speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to introduce a bill within weeks to authorize troop redeployments to start within four months and to be completed by April 1, 2008, a formula Bush has already blocked once with a presidential veto.
   Senate Democrats will introduce their own attempts to force Bush to accept troop withdrawal timelines, extend rest periods for troops between deployments and curtail his congressional authorisation to wage war.
   Senate sources said veteran Senator Robert Byrd, and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will frame an amendment to a Defence Authorisation bill that would sunset Bush’s authorisation to wage war in Iraq in October – five years after it was granted.
   Meanwhile, senators Carl Levin and Jack Reed will propose an amendment that would require a troop withdrawal to begin within 120 days of becoming law, The New York Times reported Sunday.
   Democratic tactics appear designed to fracture the president’s firewall of Republican support for his Iraq policy.
   Currently, Democrats, who have attracted only a couple of Republican votes on anti-war measures, cannot pile up the needed 60-vote Senate super-majority to force Bush’s hand.
   But his support-base seems to be eroding. Republican Senator Richard Lugar, a reluctant rebel, last month warned the ‘surge’ would not work, and fellow senator George Voinovich recommended a disengagement.
   Thursday, another key Republican Senator Pete Domenici also called for a change of course, and on Saturday senators Lamar Alexander and Judd Gregg joined the growing chorus urging a new strategy.
   All eyes in the next few weeks will be on respected fellow Republican John Warner, whose symbolic weight could buckle the Bush support base in the Senate, and give other senators cover to break with the president.
   Though keen to skewer Bush, Democrats who grabbed control of Congress in last November’s elections have their own political woes.
   Polls show the public is even less happy with lawmakers than with the president.
   Reid admitted last month the party may have set the bar too high by letting supporters think it could end the war.

Tony Blair wanted to resign as British prime minister without fighting a third general election, his former communications director Alastair Campbell told the Sunday Times.
   Campbell, whose long-awaited diaries are published Monday, told the newspaper that Blair wanted to announce his decision in mid-2002, nine months before the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
   But Campbell said he warned Blair that he would become a ‘lame duck’ prime minister, even if he reasoned it would allow him to make unpopular decisions without worrying that he would be voted out at the ballot box.
   ‘We had been going through a lot of crap,’ he explained, adding the idea was abandoned because of the pressure of events and the impending military action in the Gulf.
   Blair eventually announced in September 2004 that he would not contest a fourth general election as leader of the governing Labour Party but said he would serve a full third term of office.
   Many political commentators have said that this ‘pre-announcement’ to resign did make him a ‘lame duck’ after the 2005 general election as the media focused increasingly on when he would step down, as he did not specify a date.
   In September last year amid heightened disquiet over the war in Iraq, British foreign policy and Labour’s future direction, supporters of Blair’s finance minister Gordon Brown forced Blair into saying he would be gone within 12 months.
   He finally named the date on May 10 and handed over the Labour leadership to Brown on June 24 and the premiership three days later.
   Campbell told the Sunday Times that his diaries, which he kept from mid-1994 when Blair became Labour leader to 2003 when he quit as press chief, chart Blair’s increasing imperviousness to criticism.
   ‘What you get as the book goes on is Tony caring less about what people say about him,’ he added.
   Blair was well aware of the personal consequences of his stance on Iraq, and accusations that he could be viewed as US president George W Bush’s ‘poodle,’ he said.
   ‘He was just prepared to live with that,’ he added.
   Campbell’s diaries also go into his row with the BBC in 2004 after it reported that the government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – the basis for war – had been exaggerated.
   He said he felt ‘absolutely sick’ and wanted to resign on hearing that British government scientist and weapons expert David Kelly – ousted as one of the BBC’s sources for the story – had gone missing and was later found dead.

A suicide truck bomber killed 23 new Iraqi army recruits when he rammed into their vehicle south of Baghdad on Sunday, the police said, a day after a huge truck bomb killed 150 people in the north of the country.
   The police and army officials said the bomber drove into a truck carrying the Sunni Arab recruits to Baghdad just after they had joined the army in western Anbar province. They said 27 recruits were wounded in the attack near the town of Haswa.
   Sunni Arab tribal leaders in Anbar have rounded up thousands of men to join local security forces to fight Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda, partly in anger over the militant group’s indiscriminate killing of civilians and harsh interpretation of Islam.
   Two car bombs killed eight people in Baghdad, the police added.
   In the northern Shia town of Tuz Khurmato, the police and residents used heavy machines and shovels to search for more bodies under the rubble of nearly 100 shops and homes in the wake of Saturday’s massive truck bomb blast.
   Across the town, relatives mourned and buried their dead.
   ‘I can’t comprehend what has happened. My entire family was killed in one moment,’ said Abbas Kadhim, who said the blast levelled his house, killing his wife, his two sons aged 6 and 8, his parents and also a brother.
   ‘There is no value left in my life ... I have asked God why I didn’t just die with them so I wouldn’t have to go through this torture.’
   The death toll of 150 made it the second deadliest insurgent bombing in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. In March, a truck bomb attack also blamed on al-Qaeda killed 152 people in the northern town of Tal Afar.
   The surge in bombings comes despite a major U.S. and Iraqi military offensive that has focused largely on Baghdad and the beltways around the capital, where U.S. commanders believe a lot of car bombs are put together.
   The offensive has driven many militants out of Baghdad to areas where the troop presence is not as heavy.
   US officials blame most big car bombings on al-Qaeda, which they say is trying to trigger civil war between Iraq’s majority Shias and minority Sunni Arabs.

Pop stars, politicians and Hollywood celebrities drummed home the dangers of global warming in a series of Live Earth concerts spanning the globe and urging people to go green.
   ‘You are Live Earth!’ eco-crusader and former US vice president Al Gore told the world’s viewers, which promoters hoped would top two billion via Internet and television for the events in nine major cities.
   Star-studded concerts in New York and Rio de Janeiro were the last to get under way, after a day-long global music fest that kicked off Saturday in Sydney before moving to Tokyo, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Hamburg, London and Washington.
   Gore, via satellite, urged audiences at venues around the globe to take a seven-point green pledge to reduce their own ‘carbon footprints’ on the planet and to lobby governments and industries to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.
   ‘Our actions from this day forward will help determine just what sort of future we pass on to our children and to their children,’ said US film star Leonardo DiCaprio as he introduced Gore in New York.
   ‘As we all face this together, we cannot afford to fail those future generations, or to fail ourselves. What once seemed like science-fiction is now an inconvenient, if undeniable, truth.’
   The Live Earth event faced a slew of organisational problems, however, and has taken fire from commentators, a minority of environmentalists and several influential pop stars.
   In London, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica and the Beastie boys played Wembley Stadium, which went dark for a symbolic few minutes at 10:00 pm, prior to Madonna, the final act in the nine-hour concert.
   Recently reformed 1980s punk group the Police and rapper Kanye West performed at Giants Stadium outside New York City, along with country acts Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood.
   Musicians and entertainers urged the crowds to pledge to take personal responsibility for more sustainable lifestyles.
   ‘You know, sometimes, walking away from situations or old habits is a hard thing to do. But that’s because it’s the right thing to do,’ Stacy ‘Fergie’ Ferguson of the Black Eyed Peas said in London.
   ‘It’s a concert of our generation,’ said Senegalese Fatou Salle, 25, at the New York concert. ‘I like what Al Gore is doing. He’s changing things,’ she added.
   Former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters told reporters that voters ‘must make clear to the politicians that we will not vote for them unless they have a clear policy on environment.’
   However, critics pointed out that pollution caused by the concerts makes them part of the problem as well as the solution.
   ‘Live Earth is a planet killer,’ read one poster in Washington.
   Gore made his first appearance from Washington via satellite to the Sydney concert, the first to open at 0200 GMT on the auspicious 7/7/07 date.
   ‘In America, we’re big offenders’ when it comes to global warming, said government worker Fran Majestic. A dozen Code Pink protesters chanted ‘No warming, no war, no more.’
   Gore took a train from Washington to New York, but some stars flew private jets to the venues and some corporate sponsors raised eyebrows.

Australia said Sunday it has fast-tracked the introduction of tough new border controls as police investigate a possible local connection to failed car bombings in Britain last weekend.
   The prime minister, John Howard, said the investigation prompted authorities to bring forward the introduction of a hi-tech system that examines visitors’ financial data and travel movements to identify potential terrorists.
   ‘I think in the past two weeks, without making any judgements as to the guilt or innocence of any particular individuals, we have seen the global reach and potential of terrorism,’ Howard told reporters.
   Australian police have questioned seven foreign doctors over the failed attacks in London and Glasgow, with one of them, Indian national Mohammed Haneef, 27, still in custody in Brisbane.
   Howard said the new system, to be introduced in September, would allow authorities to more thoroughly examine the background of visa applicants before they reach Australia.
   ‘These new resources give us extraordinary additional capacity to drill down into the backgrounds of people who seek to come to Australia,’ Howard said.
   ‘This system I am told is better than any border control system of its kind elsewhere.

With time running short, Lebanon’s presidential election now tops the list of priorities in international and regional efforts to pull the country back from the brink of political chaos.
   Arab League chief Amr Mussa is this week visiting Riyadh and Damascus, both key players in Lebanese politics, to try to break a deadlock in Beirut on electing a new president, an Arab diplomat said. The subject will also be at the core of an Lebanese inter-party dialogue to be hosted by Paris on July 14-16.
   ‘Now the priority is the presidential election, given fears of an institutional crisis if it doesn’t take place,’ explained a Western diplomat based in Beirut.
   Salim Sayegh, a political science professor and delegate to the talks near the French capital, said the aim would be to narrow the gulf between the anti- and pro-Syrian camps at the heart of Lebanon’s political crisis.
   ‘The main aim of the meeting is to create a climate which allows for the holding of a presidential election while taking into account the regional and Western players,’ he said.
   ‘Everyone knows that if there’s no presidential election, everyone comes out a loser,’ said Sayegh, who will be representing former president Amin Gemayel.
   In 1988, Gemayel left office without agreement on a successor and named general Michel Aoun as prime minister, leaving the country with two rival administrations.

Senior Iraqi politicians, with possible tacit backing from the US vice president, Richard Cheney, are planning to ask soon for a no-confidence parliamentary vote against prime minister Nouri al-Maliki as a step toward bringing him down, CBS News reported Saturday.
   The report said the no-confidence vote will be requested on July 15 by the largest block of Sunni politicians, who are part of a broad political alliance called the Iraq Project.
   The group wants a new government run by ministers who are appointed for their expertise, not their party loyalty, the television network said.
   The Iraq Project is known to the highest levels of the US government. Its plan, CBS News said, was discussed in detail during vice president Cheney’s most recent visit to Baghdad, when he met with the Iraqi vice president Tariq al-Hashimi.

In a town of fairytale Hollywood weddings that often end in divorce, officials reported a surge in marriage license requests from couples seeking to wed on Saturday’s mystical ‘7/7/7’ date.
   The Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk office in Los Angeles said demand for marriage licenses was up 15 to 20 per cent this week as couples hoped marrying on July 7, 2007, would help guarantee the vow ‘till death do us part.’
   About 200 marriage licenses are issued on a typical day in July in Los Angeles County, said Kathy Treggs, division manager of marriage licenses and ceremonies.
   Las Vegas, known as the wedding capital of the world, was also expecting a record number of ceremonies as thousands of lovers gambled on lucky number 7.