Pakistan’s chief justice resumed his official duties Saturday, a day after this Islamic nation’s powerful military ruler general Pervez Musharraf lost a bid to fire him, the biggest setback to the general’s eight-year rule.
   The reinstatement of Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry on Friday has clouded the political future of a key US ally in the war on terrorism just as the country faces growing violence by Islamic militants.
   In a landmark ruling, Supreme Court judges voted unanimously to restore Chaudhry and 10-3 to quash charges of misconduct that Musharraf had sent to a separate judicial tribunal.
   The surprise verdict on an appeal from Chaudhry – many expected the court to reinstate him while letting the tribunal’s investigation continue – was widely hailed as a democratic breakthrough in a country dominated by the military for most of its 60-year history.
   It also triggered fresh calls for Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 military coup and has been reluctant to restore civilian rule, to step down.
   Cheers from black-suited lawyers, who have led mass protests against Musharraf since he suspended Chaudhry on March 9, reverberated through the high-roofed courtroom after presiding Judge Khalil-ur-Rehman Ramday announced that the judge’s suspension was ‘illegal’ and set aside the charges against him.
   Chaudhry himself has made no comment, and Musharraf has accepted the verdict, although he didn’t give any indication of his next move.
   ‘The president respects the decision of the Supreme Court,’ his spokesman, Rashid Qureshi, was quoted as saying by the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan. ‘The president has stated earlier that any judgment the Supreme Court arrives at will be honoured, respected and adhered to.’
   Washington’s response struck a similar tone.
   State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said the reinstatement ‘respects the rule of law’ and praised the fact the court was ‘capable of making independent decisions.’
   Musharraf’s defeat prompted jubilation among gatherings of hundreds of lawyers in major cities including Karachi, Multan, Faisalabad, Quetta, Peshawar and Rawalpindi.
   On Saturday, hundreds of lawyers again rallied in Islamabad and Lahore, chanting slogans in favour of Chaudhry, and urging Musharraf to resign.
   Pressure has mounted on Musharraf to quit since Friday, with opposition asking him to step down.
   Exiled former prime minister Benazir Bhutto called the Chaudhry ruling one of the most remarkable judgments in the country’s history and said it has weakened Musharraf politically.
   The movement – joined by opposition parties – in support of Chaudhry had turned into a ‘struggle against dictatorship, (for the) restoration of the Constitution and for supremacy of the Parliament,’ she said in a statement.
   Musharraf suspended Chaudhry for allegedly pulling rank to secure a police job for his son and enjoying unwarranted privileges such as the use of government aircraft.

Afghanistan’s Taliban said it had killed two German hostages Saturday, as South Korea’s president urged the militant group to free 18 of his nationals also abducted this week.
   The Islamist rebels have demanded that both countries pull their troops out of the war-torn country where the Germans serve under NATO and the Koreas under US-led command, a spokesman said.
   Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi, speaking by telephone from an undisclosed location, also said the group welcomed South Korea’s decision to pull its troops out of the country by the end of the year, a previously planned withdrawal reiterated in Seoul Saturday.
   ‘We’ll decide the fate of the South Koreans later,’ he said. ‘But we welcome their government’s decision to pull out of our country. I hope their (hostage) problem is solved peacefully.’
   Earlier in the morning, the Taliban spokesman issued two tight deadlines, threatening the killings of the Germans if the group received no calls from the governments in Berlin or Kabul.
   He later announced the killings, which could not be independently verified.
   ‘We executed one of the Germans and will kill the other one unless the government of Germany or the Afghan government contact us for negotiations,’ he said after a noon (0730 GMT) deadline passed. He added that the German was killed by a bullet.
   After the second deadline had passed an hour later, he said in another phone call: ‘Since the governments did not contact us, we killed the second German hostage at 1:10pm.’
   The rebel spokesman offered no evidence but said the Taliban would consider how to hand the bodies over to German or Afghan authorities ‘if they ask for them,’ adding: ‘Otherwise we’ll dump them to somewhere.’
   Germany’s foreign ministry said it was taking ‘very seriously’ the Taliban’s claims but had no independent confirmation.
   ‘We are taking these declarations very seriously and are following the situation closely. But so far we have no independent confirmation that a kidnapped German has been killed,’ ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger.
   The two Germans, whose identities have not been revealed, were kidnapped Wednesday along with five Afghans, provincial officials and police said.
   A day later militants abducted the 18 South Koreans, evangelical Christian aid workers aged in their 20s and 30s, the biggest group of foreigners to be kidnapped in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.
   Both kidnappings took place on the Kabul-Kandahar highway leading to the insurgency-wracked south.
   South Korea’s president Roh Moo-Hyun, speaking before the reported killings, urged the immediate release of his country’s nationals, as Seoul said it would withdraw troops from the war-torn country by the end of 2007.

The United States and India finalised Friday an implementing agreement for their landmark civilian nuclear deal after extensive talks in Washington, officials said.
   The draft accord allowing the United States to provide atomic technology and fuel to India will still require a final nod by the leaders of the two countries, the officials said.
   ‘The agreement has been finalised but it awaits review by both governments,’ Rahul Chhabra, the spokesman for the Indian embassy, said at the end of four days of talks late Friday.
   The talks were led by the US under secretary of state, Nicholas Burns, and the Indian foreign secretary, Shivshankar Menon.
   ‘The discussions were constructive and positive, and both under secretary Burns and foreign secretary Menon are pleased with the substantial progress made on the outstanding issues in the 123 agreement,’ a joint statement said.
   ‘We will now refer the issue to our governments for final review,’ the statement.
   The implementation agreement, or ‘123 agreement,’ is intended to capture all operational aspects of the nuclear deal, which was agreed upon by the US president, George W Bush, and the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, two years ago to highlight strategic ties between the world’s two biggest democracies.
   After government approval, the pact will have to be cleared by the Democratic-controlled US Congress, where lawmakers have vowed tight scrutiny.
   The US Congress already approved the nuclear deal in principle last year and a bill to that effect was signed into law by Bush.
   But the law requires a comprehensive implementation agreement that has to be approved again by the Democratic-controlled Congress.
   India also needs to sign an additional protocol with the International Atomic Energy Agency and get the approval of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group.

North Korea’s top nuclear envoy said Saturday it wanted a light-water reactor as compensation for shutting down its nuclear programmes, while accusing Japan of causing a political crisis.
   ‘For the shutdown, disabling, and eventual dismantlement (of North Korean nuclear facilities), the light-water nuclear reactor should come in,’ Kim Kye-Gwan told reporters at Beijing airport before leaving for Pyongyang.
   Kim’s comments follow nuclear disarmament talks in Beijing that ended Friday with the communist state reiterating its intentions to declare and disable all its nuclear programmes in return for fuel aid and diplomatic concessions under a February deal.
   No deadline was agreed during three days of talks involving China, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia, but discussions are to resume in September, following working-level talks to decide terms of the ‘declare and disable’ agreement.
   Talks began in 2003 to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions but the reclusive regime conducted its first atomic test in October last year. The North is an energy-starved state which experiences frequent power shortages and wants the light-water reactor to generate electricity.
   The six nations agreed in September 2005 to discuss furnishing North Korea with light-water reactors ‘at an appropriate time,’ with Washington insisting that Pyongyang must first disable all its current nuclear programmes.
   North Korea, has demanded the reactors – reportedly designed so that spent fuel cannot be reprocessed into weapons-grade material – to replace its Yongbyon reactor, which it shut down last week.
   But Kim also Saturday accused Japan of causing a political crisis that could lead to ‘disaster’.
   ‘They (Japan) are creating a political crisis worse than the financial sanctions, a crisis that infringes on our national sovereignty,’ Kim said. He said he expressed his concerns to his Japanese counterpart, Kenichiro Sasae, during a rare bilateral meeting on Thursday in Beijing.
   ‘I warned that if they take one more step forward, a disaster would come,’ Kim said.
   He refused to elaborate, but his comments came amid strong criticism from North Korea over Japan’s recent forced auction of the headquarters of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or Chongryon.
   They also appeared to be aimed at Japan’s insistence that a long-standing row over the abduction of Japanese nationals by the North Korean regime be settled before Tokyo participates in supplying energy and other aid.
   Despite his strong words on Japan, Kim said the just concluded round of talks had been held in a ‘sincere, constructive and business-like’ manner. They had gone ‘alright,’ he added.

The speculation has burned for decades. Were Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of the last Viceroy of India, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first post-independence prime minister, lovers?
   Now Edwina’s daughter, Pamela Mountbatten, says in a new book that while ‘love blossomed’ between the ‘lonely’ widowed prime minister and her British socialite mother, the relationship was purely platonic.
   She says she knows because she often played ‘gooseberry,’ chaperoning Edwina and Nehru when they were together in India.
   Pamela was 17 when she was taken out of school to accompany her father, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and her mother to India.
   She spent the next 15 months recording the birth of India and Pakistan, and her own transition to adulthood, in a gossipy account of the dramatic days of the subcontinent’s independence and partition.
   Edwina and Nehru were deeply in love but ‘the relationship remained platonic,’ Pamela writes in the book, ‘India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power.’
   Pamela recounts that her mother, who was 44 at the time, had already had many lovers but her father ‘was inured to it’ and was delighted to see her mother ‘so happy with Jawaharlal.’
   Mountbatten wrote in 1948 to Pamela’s elder sister that, ‘She and Jawaharlal are so sweet together, they really dote on each other in the nicest way... Mummy (Edwina) has been incredibly sweet lately and we’ve been such a happy family.’ Pamela says in the book, based on her own personal diary entries and family letters, that the relationship with Nehru transformed Edwina.
   ‘It made my mother, who could be quite difficult at times, as many very extraordinary women can be... lovely to be with. There were no prickles,’ she told Indian television network CNN-IBN.
   Edwina became Nehru’s confidante, says Pamela, the youngest of the Mountbattens’ two daughters.
   She quotes from a 1957 letter from Nehru to Edwina, in which he wrote: ‘I suddenly realised and perhaps you did also that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force of which I was dimly aware drew us to one another.’ ‘Although it was not physical, it was no less binding for that. It would last until death,’ writes Pamela, who now is 78.
   She also says that Mountbatten found the relationship useful as he used Edwina to influence Nehru on policy matters during the transition from British colonial rule to independence.
   ‘If things were particularly tricky my father would say to my mother, ‘Do try to get Jawaharlal to see that this is terribly important...’’ she says in the book.
   ‘There existed a happy threesome,’ writes Pamela, referring to her mother, father and Nehru, who had been raised in an affluent, westernised family and who ‘spoke and wrote beautiful English (much better than our own).’
   Edwina and Nehru met about twice a year after the Mountbattens left India in 1948, usually once in London and then her mother would include a visit to India in her overseas charity tours. ‘We had been on an incredible journey with India which had changed the subcontinent,’ writes Pamela.
   Edwina was on a visit abroad and had just left India to carry out a heavy programme of engagements in Borneo when she died in her sleep aged 58.
   A packet of letters from Nehru was found by her bedside.
   The letters during this 12-year correspondence ‘were a diary of everything he had been doing and the people he had seen, his hopes and fears,’ Pamela writes.

A gun battle left 25 Taliban and four security guards dead after the insurgents ambushed a convoy in western Afghanistan overnight, the police said Saturday.
   An Afghan civilian was also killed and five more wounded Friday when an artillery round fired during a NATO-led exercise hit their home in Sarkano district in eastern Kunar province, the police said.
   Taliban militants late Friday attacked a convoy of a private Afghan security firm in the Bakwa district of the insurgency-wracked western province of Farah, police official Juma Khan said. ‘Four security guards and 25 Taliban were killed in the exchange,’ he said.
   The battle ended when police sent reinforcements, Khan said.
   The Taliban insurgency – launched months after their 2001 ouster by US forces – has intensified recently, having already claimed thousands of lives, mainly of militants.

Hardline separatists in revolt-hit Indian Kashmir appealed for violence in Pakistan to end while simultaneously attacking the ‘unwise policies’ of president Pervez Musharraf.
   The statement came amid a dramatic rise in Islamist violence and political turmoil in Pakistan, where a series of suicide blasts, most directed at the army, since last week’s siege and raid on the pro-Taliban Red Mosque.
   The week-long siege left more than 100 dead, but the subsequent Islamist backlash has seen more than 200 killed in less than a week.
   ‘Every Pakistani soldier is an asset to the whole Muslim world and attacks on them sadden us deeply,’ Syed Ali Geelani, the head of the region’s separatist political alliance, said in a statement.
   Geelani supports the integration into Pakistan of Indian Kashmir, which has been racked by a near two-decade insurgency against New Delhi’s rule.
   India has long accused Pakistan of funding and arming the insurgency in Kashmir that has left more than 42,000 dead, according to official figures, but Pakistan refutes the charge.

Eleven people were killed and three wounded in battles between security forces and Tamil Tiger rebels across Sri Lanka’s north and eastern regions, the defence ministry said on Saturday.
   Suspected rebels clashed with police commandos in the eastern town of Ampara Saturday, with troops killing six rebels, the ministry said, adding there were no casualties among security forces.
   Two foot patrol soldiers were wounded when rebels set off a Claymore mine in the northern district of Vavuniya on Saturday, the ministry said.
   In the same area, an airforce camp came under rebel attack early Saturday, wounding an airman, police said.
   The military claimed they also killed five Tamil Tiger rebels, when they clashed in the northern district of Jaffna late on Friday.
   There was no immediate comment from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam who have been fighting for an independent homeland for minority Tamils in a bitter ethnic conflict that has claimed more than 60,000 lives since 1972.
   The fresh clashes come two days after the government celebrated the capture of the last bastion of the LTTE in the east of the island with a victory parade.

The United Arab Emirates is planning to send troops to Afghanistan to fight alongside Canadians, at Ottawa’s behest to put a ‘Muslim face’ on the NATO-led coalition, media reported Friday.
   The Toronto Star, citing unnamed sources, said prime minister Stephen Harper’s government had been urging the tiny Arab nation to contribute soldiers and equipment to help stabilise war-torn Afghanistan.
   Canadian authorities were not immediately available to comment. If the report is accurate, the Afghanistan deployment is believed to be a first for an Arab nation and a diplomatic coup for Canada.
   The UAE was one of only three countries that recognised the hard-line Taliban government that took control of most of Afghanistan in 1996 and was forced out in a US-led invasion in late 2001.
   The Toronto daily said the UAE tactical force would be small and mostly symbolic, and serve under Canadian commanders in the field.

Russia played down its mounting row with Britain on Friday while for the first time identifying the ex-KGB officer at the centre of the dispute as a possible murder suspect.
   Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow was ‘interested in normalising relations with Britain’ amid a stand-off sparked by the London murder last year of a former Russian agent.
   ‘We are ready for it,’ Russian news agencies quoted Lavrov as saying.
   Tensions since the November poisoning murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence agent turned Kremlin critic, spiked on Monday when London expelled four Russian diplomats and imposed other sanctions on Moscow.
   London was retaliating for Moscow’s refusal to extradite ex-KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi, whom British prosecutors accuse of poisoning Litvinenko. Russia responded with tit-for-tat measures on Thursday.
   Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Lugovoi is ‘one of the suspects’ in the murder of Litvinenko.
   ‘The important thing is that we haven’t received the British side’s argumentation as to why they think he is a suspect,’ Peskov said.
   ‘For our prosecutor, this would be extremely important,’ he added.
   Lugovoi himself said in an interview broadcast on Echo of Moscow radio that he would be willing to stand trial in Russia if prosecutors there charged him with murdering Litvinenko.
   Russia has sought to play down the conflict in recent days, while the European Union and the United States have thrown their weight behind London.
   ‘In the latest stage of this conflict, Russia has truly projected a fairly moderate image,’ Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, said.
   Russia has insisted in the dispute that its constitution forbids it from extraditing its own citizens, while Britain says an international convention Russia has signed would allow it.
   British foreign secretary David Miliband suggested this week that Russia should change its constitution to allow the extradition.
   Aside from the parallel expulsions of diplomats, each side has hit the other with visa restrictions on government officials. Moscow has also suspended counter-terrorism cooperation with London.
   Friday also brought a bit of Cold War-style drama, as British and Norwegian fighter jets scrambled over the North Sea after Russian bombers were spotted flying at ‘unusual’ latitudes overnight.
   The two Russian bombers were detected in international airspace between Norway and Scotland. The bombers turned back, before two more Russian bombers were observed, again prompting Norway to dispatch jets.
   The murder of Litvinenko with the radioactive isotope polonium-210 sent shockwaves through British society, and raised an international outcry when Litvinenko’s friends blamed Russian president Vladimir Putin for his death.
   The Kremlin has fiercely denied any participation.
   Lugovoi, who is now a Moscow businessman, met with Litvinenko on November 1 at a central London hotel, where British investigators believe he put polonium-210 in Litvinenko’s tea.
   Litvinenko died in agony in a London hospital 22 days after the meeting.

The United Nations has suspended one of its peacekeeping units in Cote’d Ivory after an internal investigation revealed allegations of widespread ‘sexual exploitation and abuse’ against some of its soldiers there.
   A full probe has been launched into the claims, which centre on a 732-strong Moroccan contingent based in Bouake in the rebel-held north of the divided west African country, the UN said in a statement Saturday.
   ‘The Moroccan contingent serving with the United Nations Operation in Cote d’Ivoire has been suspended following allegations of numerous cases of sexual exploitation and abuse against some of its soldiers based in Bouake,’ the statement said.
   Further investigations were being carried out at UN headquarters in New York but the ‘seriousness’ of the allegations had prompted the UN to suspend the peacekeepers involved and confine them to their camps, it added.
   In a statement late Friday, the UN reiterated its ‘zero tolerance policy towards sexual exploitation and abuse and stresses its determination to work with our troop - and police-contributing countries to ensure that all United Nations personnel are held accountable to the highest standards of behaviour.’
   The UN has 8,000 peacekeepers in Cote’d Ivory, backed by more than 3,000 French troops. They were deployed in 2003 to oversee a ceasefire between the rebels, who held the north of the former French colony following an attempted 2002 coup against president Laurent Gbagbo, and the government troops who held the south.

US president George W Bush on Friday forbid the CIA to torture suspected terrorists in its once-secret detention and interrogation program but was criticized for his vague, ‘trust us’ approach.
   Human rights groups said the executive order left out critical details, such as controversial tactics that administration official often describe as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’
   The order says that the CIA programme, whose existence was confirmed in September 2006, must abide by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on wartime detainees and directs the CIA director to enforce that standard.
   It lists no specific practices that are affected, or punishments for violations, and does not describe in any further detail a secret CIA prison network that has drawn outrage from US allies in Europe.
   Bush spokesman Tony Snow said the order barred ‘cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment’ and ‘acts of violence serious enough to be considered comparable to murder, torture, mutilation, and cruel and inhuman treatment.’

More than 2,000 people woke up Saturday in make-shift shelters in southern and west central England after abandoning their cars on flooded highways or leaving trains disrupted by torrential rains.
   Flooding provoked by exceptionally heavy rains on Friday forced dozens of people to climb to rooftops and wait to be rescued by helicopter, deprived hundreds of homes without electricity and caused flight cancellations.
   Three Royal Air Force helicopters have rescued more than 40 people but still have to evacuate another dozen, including a man clinging to a lamppost in flood water and people stuck on roofs, emergency services said.
   The RAF base at Kinloss, in Scotland, helped evacuate 60 people from Sedgeberrow in Worcestershire, in western England bordering Wales, who were stranded after the River Isbourne burst its banks.
   Holidaymakers were also airlifted to safety from caravan parks near the river in Evesham, between Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, where many motorists were also stranded.
   Some were forced to remain in their vehicles overnight and others chose to abandon their cars.
   In Gloucestershire, around 2,000 people spent Friday night in emergency shelters after being forced from their cars or homes due to the flooding.
   Police said that people were now starting to leave the centres run by the county council as the waters receded.
   Passengers were on Friday night asked to leave trains at Oxford and Banbury, with many of them forced to sleep at a school in north Oxford. Trains were unable to stop at Didcot station because of flooding.

The wait was finally over for Harry Potter fans Saturday who flooded bookshops worldwide to grab the series finale and
   find out whether author JK Rowling slays or spares the boy wizard.
   After months of hype and hearsay, ‘Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows’, the seventh volume in a decade-long saga, went on sale at 2301 GMT in most countries internationally, with London the focus of festivities.
   Rowling, Potter’s rags-to-riches British creator, was hosting an overnight reading for hundreds of fans at a London museum, while Waterstone’s bookshop on Piccadilly, one of Europe’s biggest, attracted 5,000 from around the world.
   Dressed up as characters from the book, Potter buffs mobbed the store as the clock struck midnight local time after a countdown from a mock professor Dumbledore, head of Harry’s school Hogwarts, where the books are set.
   The first fan to get hold of ‘Deathly Hallows’, 19-year-old Amber de Jager from the Netherlands, had queued since Wednesday despite rainy British weather and said she now planned to stay up all night reading.
   ‘I’m shivering with excitement. We’ve been waiting for two years and I am going to be one of the first ones to read it legally,’ she said.
   Another fan, Stefanie Van Gompel, 16, also from the Netherlands, said: ‘I am going to start hyperventilating, I am so excited.’
   Across Britain, Waterstone’s said it was expecting to sell three million copies of the book in the first 24 hours on sale, while online retailer Amazon has recorded over two million presales worldwide.
   Fans are itching to discover which of the book’s characters die – Rowling has announced the demise of two, both unnamed, while a New York Times review of the book Thursday said the figure would be six.
   An AFP correspondent who received an early copy of the 607-page book said that Harry kills evil Lord Voldemort, his nemesis, and survives to the end.
   One of Harry’s teachers also dies.
   ‘I’ve had enough trouble for a lifetime,’ is the last sentence of the book, spoken by Harry.

Sunni Insurgents bombed a minibus on Saturday near Baghdad’s Shia slum of Sadr City, killing five people, while troops raided a prominent Sunni mosque compound in Baghdad and captured 18 suspected militants.
   The bomb in the minibus, which exploded in the capital’s eastern Baladiyat neighbourhood, also wounded 11 people, a medic and a security official said.
   Insurgent bomb attacks have continued in Baghdad despite a massive US and Iraqi military crackdown since February aimed at reining in the bloodshed in the capital.
   Alleged Sunni extremists regularly target Sadr City, the impoverished Shiite slum loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and areas around it in
   the ongoing brutal sectarian conflict that has engulfed Baghdad.
   Meanwhile, Iraqi and US forces Saturday detained 18 suspected militants linked to al-Qaeda in a raid on the compound of Baghdad’s prominent Sunni mosque Um al-Qura mosque, the US military said.
   In a pre-dawn sweep, troops raided the mosque complex in Baghdad’s western Ghazaliyah neighbourhood to capture a suspected al-Qaeda in Iraq operative ‘believed to be operating a terrorist media cell,’ the military said.
   ‘The ground forces surrounded several outer buildings in the compound and secured them, capturing the targeted individual and 17 other suspected terrorists,’ it added.
   US forces did not enter the compound.