The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Sunday launched a new verbal attack on Israel, saying a ‘countdown’ has begun that will end with Lebanese and Palestinian militants destroying the Jewish state.
   In a speech to mark the 18th anniversary of the death of revolutionary founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the president said last summer’s war between Israel and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah started the process.
   ‘In Lebanon, the corrupt, arrogant powers and the Zionist regime did all they could in an unfair 33-day war? But after 60 years its (Israel’s) greatness fell apart,’ Iranian media quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
   ‘The countdown to this regime’s destruction started through the hands of Hezbollah’s children,’ he said in a speech to visiting foreign guests in Tehran.
   ‘We will witness the destruction of this regime in the near future thanks to the endeavours of all Palestinian and Lebanese fighters,’ he added.
   Ahmadinejad sparked outrage shortly after coming to power in 2005 for saying that Israel should be ‘wiped from the map’ and then repeatedly predicting that the state would disappear.
   Iranian officials have expressed bewilderment over the uproar caused by the comments, saying he was merely restating one of Khomeini’s central beliefs that the Jewish state was doomed to destruction.
   The president went on to court further controversy when he labelled the Holocaust as a ‘myth’ and invited several researchers who have played down the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II to a Tehran conference.
   But in recent months — until now at least — Ahmadinejad has largely avoided rhetorical outbursts against the Jewish state amid public criticism from moderate quarters over his provocative comments.
   Despite having no borders with Israel, Iran has become one of the most vocal backers of militant groups fighting the Jewish state and its leaders pepper their speeches with attacks against the ‘Zionist regime.’
   Iran openly cheered on Hezbollah in it’s battled against Israel’s army in the 2006 war but vehemently denies that it provides military or financial support to the Shiite militant group.
   It maintains a similar position towards Palestinian groups like Hamas, denying that its support for them is anything other than moral in nature.
   But Iran has also helped rebuild bridges in war-ravaged Lebanon and sent millions of dollars in aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian government to help it overcome drastic aid cuts from Western countries.
   Iran’s policy of non-recognition of Israel was a direct result of the Islamic revolution of 1979 that was led by Khomeini.
   Before then, the US-backed regime of the shah was one of the Jewish state’s strongest supporters in the region and there was considerable trade between the two sides.

Israel vowed on Sunday to keep up its strikes on militants in Gaza as a soldier was wounded by mortar shells fired from the lawless territory by the armed wing of Hamas.
   One soldier was moderately wounded and three suffered light injuries when mortar shells near the Erez border crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip, the army said.
   In Gaza City, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, the senior partner in the Palestinian unity
   cabinet, claimed responsibility for the fire, which also struck a kibbutz without causing injuries.
   Prime minister Ehud Olmert vowed the army would continue its strikes on gunmen despite a drop in projectiles fired by militants at the weekend.
   ‘In view of what appears to be a drop in Qassam fire, I would like to make it clear that we are not negotiating,’ Olmert said at the weekly cabinet meeting, referring to the homemade rockets.
   ‘We are not committing ourselves to changing the patterns of our operations,’ he said. ‘We will continue to take action against terrorist elements — in the Gaza region and the West Bank without letting up.’
   ‘These activities are yielding results and will continue as they contribute to protecting Israeli citizens.’
   The violence around Gaza, which has also included deadly factional clashes between rival Fatah and Hamas factions, has sparked international concern and has threatened to torpedo efforts to revive the moribund Mideast peace talks.
   Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhum, denied that two days of relative quiet at the weekend — with a decrease both in rockets and Israeli strikes on Friday and Saturday — represented a ‘change of strategy.’
   ‘We will respond with all necessary force and we will increase the resistance in the face of (Israeli) violations,’ he said, adding that the movement was demanding a ‘general truce’ to apply to both Gaza and the West Bank to stop its fire.

Lebanese troops, backed by artillery, tanks and gunship, tightened their grip on al Qaeda-inspired militants at a Palestinian refugee camp on Sunday, the third day of a military assault to crush the gunmen.
   Security sources said Fatah al-Islam militants, who have vowed to fight to the death, were putting up stiff resistance as soldiers pounded Nahr al-Bared camp and consolidated its newly seized positions at its entrances.
   Explosions rocked the camp as the crackle of machinegun fire echoed in the early hours of the morning on Sunday.
   Plumes of smoke rose from the camp as shelling set buildings on fire.
   But the fighting appeared to be less intense than over the past two days, witnesses said.
   The shelling since Friday has devastated large parts of the camp, bringing down buildings used by the gunmen to fire at the troops but also destroying many civilian homes.
   ‘There is no square meter that has not been hit by a shell,’ one camp resident told Reuters by telephone.
   ‘We can’t leave the building we are in, let alone the street, to find out the full extent of the devastation.’
   Most of Nahr al-Bared’s nearly 40,000 populations had fled to other refugee camps in the past two weeks due to increasingly desperate humanitarian conditions.
   A soldier was killed in overnight fighting, security sources said, raising to seven the number of soldiers killed since Friday.
   Palestinian sources said a militant commander, Naim Ghali aka Abu Riyadh, was killed by an army sniper on Saturday.
   More than 16 people — militants and civilians — have died in the camp. Fatah al-Islam said it has lost three fighters.

Pakistan’s top judge, suspended by president Pervez Musharraf, has told thousands of supporters that the country’s people back the struggle for the independence of the judiciary.
   Chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry led a procession from Islamabad to the north western city of Abbottabad on Saturday, greeted by roadside protesters chanting ‘Go Musharraf, go.’ The weight of the crowds periodically halted the motorcade.
   He told the crowd of around 25,000 lawyers and opposition activists in the conservative hill resort that the legal community was not alone.
   ‘The people of Pakistan are with you. In the eyes of the law all citizens are equals,’ he said to his supporters after the 100-kilometre journey.
   ‘It is the basic responsibility of the courts to protect the fundamental rights of the people, especially the higher judiciary,’ he said.
   ‘The courts have rejected human rights violations in the past.’
   Musharraf suspended Chaudhry on allegations of misconduct on March 9, sparking violent protests in the southern city of Karachi that left more than 40 people dead.
   Musharraf is facing the greatest crisis of his eight-year rule. The protest on Saturday was the latest in a series.
   Critics say Musharraf acted to ensure a pliant judiciary if, as expected, he tries to remain as army chief past the end of 2007, when the constitution says he must quit.

India’s first women-only radio has hit the airwaves, promising to play the perfect agony aunt to the modern Indian woman and offer a spot where she can talk, share and gossip in between some film music.
   Called ‘Meow’, the new FM station airs programmes that concern only women’s issues — are it about work, home or marriage or a harmless dose of lighter talk on fashion and movies.
   Instead of a regular hi or hello, the station that opened
   last week greets callers with a catty ‘meow’ as an instant ice-breaker.
   ‘Meow can translate to any emotion, it makes you uninhibited and breaks the ice
   faster,’ said Anil Cravats,
   chief operating officer of Meow radio.
   ‘In real life we all have secrets. We talk about it and bring it into the open. The anonymity of radio allows that.’
   Now available only in New Delhi, Meow radio hopes to eventually target the urban Indian woman — from the
   traditional housewife and career woman to the single mother and the youngster — in all the big Indian cities.
   An auction of around three dozen FM licences in 2000 started what is now being called India’s ‘radio boom’, with the number of stations set to swell by about 245 as the country implements the second phase of its FM expansion plan.
   The deregulation of airwaves has led to intense competition among radio stations, each vying to attract listeners with various programming packages and marketing gimmicks.
   ‘Meow’ radio, whose catch line reads ‘Thud Meath, Thud Catty’ or a little sweet, a little catty, hopes to attract listeners with programmes on family, marriage, kids and adult issues like affairs and sexual taboos and problems.
   Its late-night show ‘Meow between the Sheets’ is already quite popular.
   ‘We are for the women who think and everyone else who think about women,’ said Cravats.
   ‘Every woman wants to let loose and unwind, we provide that platform.’
   But some media analyst doubt if the approach will work for the new station.
   ‘It sounds like a gimmicky channel mainly for the young and trendy,’ said media columnist Seventy Nina.
   The radio station’s other uniqueness is its policy of airing every caller interaction live and unedited.
   ‘We don’t fake, we have real views on real issues,’ said Cravats.
   ‘It’s a real-life drama and everyone wants to be part of it.’

The Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Muallem, on Friday criticised the UN decision to set up an international tribunal to try suspects in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri, the Xinhua reports on Sunday.
   Muallem voiced the country’s rejection to the UN decision at a joint press conference with his Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki, who arrived here on Thursday to discuss with Syrian officials expansion of bilateral ties and regional developments.
   Damascus would not cooperate with the court if it violates Syria’s national sovereignty, Muallem told the reporters, adding ‘the issue of the tribunal concerns Lebanon alone, and Syria will not concede its sovereignty to any party, no matter whom that party is.’
   The 15-member UN Security Council narrowly adopted a resolution, with 10 members voted in favour and five abstained, to set up the Hariri court which invokes Chapter 7 of the UN Charter to enforce its establishment.
   Muallem called the UN decision as ‘hasty’ and warned that it infringes upon Lebanon’s sovereignty.
   ‘The Security Council’s hasty decision to create the tribunal does not enjoy international or Lebanese consensus, aside from being an infringement on Lebanon’s sovereignty,’ he said.
   ‘We believed that it would have been better for late Hariri had there been a criminal court that has a Lebanese consensus and the support of the international community,’ noted the official.
   Muallem noted that Syria would continue to support what the Lebanese agreed upon.
   For his part, Mottaki said that the solution for the Lebanese crisis is ‘in Lebanon alone’, calling for a reconciliation among the Lebanese which is the key to settling the current crisis.
   Some countries are trying to bring closer the views of the different sides in Lebanon, he noted, warning against any attempt to impose a certain view on Lebanon.

The Taliban threatened Sunday to behead an Afghan doctor and three nurses captured two months ago unless the government hands over the body of slain top commander Mullah Dadullah.
   Dadullah was killed three weeks ago in the armed forces’ biggest success against the extremist Taliban that launched an insurgency after being driven from government in 2001.
   His position at the head of fighters in southern Afghanistan was taken by one of his brothers, Mansoor Dadullah, who issued the latest ultimatum through a spokesman.
   ‘If the government does not give us Dadullah’s body in three days, we will behead them,’ spokesman Shohabudin Atal said.
   The ultimatum ended at 10:00am Tuesday, said Atal, who has often spoken to various media on behalf of both the Dadullah brothers.
   The government of Kandahar province showed Dadullah’s body to the media before burying it at an undisclosed location. Governor Assadullah Khalid has said the body would be handed to the militant’s family if they asked for it.

Thailand’s twice-elected Thai Rak Thai party may have been dissolved and its senior members barred from politics, but its leaders have no plans to let the party languish in the political wilderness.
   Days after senior Thai judges found ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai (TRT) guilty of electoral fraud during polls in April 2006, its leaders are already plotting the party’s re emergence.
   ‘We have already set up the new Thai Rak Thai Group with almost 300 members, including those already banned from politics and former party MPs who quit the party earlier,’ said Chaturon Chaisang, TRT’s acting leader.
   Thai Rak Thai, which means Thais Love Thais, was formed less than a decade ago by Thaksin, who led it to two landslide election victories before being ousted in a bloodless coup last September.

A 6.4-magnitude earthquake rattled a mountainous region in southwest China at dawn Sunday, killing three people and injuring about 300, state media and officials said.
   Residents in Pu’er, the centre of a famous tea-producing area in Yunnan province, fled their houses in panic when the tremor struck at 5:34am, the Xinhua news agency reported.
   A five-year-old boy was crushed to death when his family’s home collapsed, state television said. His parents were taken to hospital but were deemed out of danger.
   Local authorities reported more than 290 people injured by mid-afternoon, Xinhua said. The agency earlier said that 15 had sustained serious injuries.
   “We’re still compiling data on the casualties and on material damage,” a local civil affairs official told China News Service. “The numbers will definitely go up.”
   Authorities ordered the evacuation of thousands of people in the tremor-prone region near the border with Laos and Myanmar.

A crowd of 6,000 protesters rallied Saturday, police said, to demand an end to the military-installed government in the biggest protest against the junta since last year’s coup.
   ‘The crowd is around 6,000,’ an official from the police’s special branch said, declining to be identified.
   More than 1,000 security forces were deployed near Sanam Luang plaza in central Bangkok, the police official said, adding authorities had banned the protesters from moving anywhere beyond the plaza.
   The crowd of mostly middle-aged men and women gathered at Bangkok’s Sanam Luang plaza to denounce the junta, which calls itself the Council for National Security, and call for the return of deposed premier Thaksin Shinawatra.
   ‘I came today to protest against the junta. I want Thaksin to come back. I hate the CNS,’ Srida Singha, a 60-year-old retired government official, said.
   Some protesters waved red-and-white flags which read ‘CNS, Get Out’ at the rally organised by allies of Thaksin, who was ousted by the military in a bloodless coup in September 2006.

Poisoned Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko was no spy for Britain, and such claims are no more than an attempt by the man accused of his murder to shield himself from justice, Litvinenko’s widow said in an interview.
   Marina Litvinenko, who has co-authored a new book about her murdered husband, said she had taken solace in the apparent determination of British authorities to bring her husband’s killer to justice.
   Her husband, a former agent of Russia’s FSB security service who became a critic of Russian President
   Vladimir Putin, died last November of poisoning with the rare radioactive isotope Polonium 210, shortly after receiving British citizenship.

At least 12 Islamist fighters, including foreigners, were killed in US naval shelling and fighting with regional forces in Somalia’s semi-autonomous region of Puntland, officials said Sunday.
   The Puntland government said its forces crushed the fighters in the hilly areas around the town of Bargal, about 1,250 kilometres northeast of the Somali capital Mogadishu, before a US Navy warship shelled the area.
   ‘Their bodies are lying in the mountainous area and we hope to show them to the media. They (Islamists) have lost in the battle and we killed 12 of them,’ said a Puntland military commander who requested anonymity.
   ‘We surrounded the whole area and we expected that none of them would flee,’ the commander added by satellite phone from the corpse-strewn scene of the clashes.
   Puntland finance minister Mohamed Ali Yusuf meanwhile told reporters in the northern Somali town of Bosasso: ‘Our forces defeated the Islamist fighters consisting of Somali and foreign fighters, most of them are dead now and some of them have fled the area. Our forces are fully controlling Bargal.’
   Citing documents recovered, Yusuf said the ‘terrorists (were) from America, Britain, Sweden, Morocco, Pakistan and Yemen.’
   ‘Five of our own fighters were wounded in the fighting in Bargar,’ he added.
   There was no independent confirmation of the claims on the deaths of the foreigners who arrived in Bargal on Wednesday, but terrified residents reported fatalities.
   Residents said at least 15 people were wounded when a US Navy destroyer on Friday fired on several targets in the mountainous terrain, where al-Qaeda operatives and Somali Islamists are believed to have bases.
   ‘The casualty (number) could be far higher than we think. But so far, we have been told that 15 people were injured in the attack and some of them are nomad civilians,’ Mohamed Gure, another resident in a village, some 30 kilometres from Bargal, told AFP.
   Gure said the injured were taken to Bosasso Township for treatment.
   Duale Hussein Mohamed, an elder in the township, said the US warships also hit a civilian village near the remote fishing outpost.
   ‘The American warships hit nomadic residential areas. We think there are more casualties,’ Duale told AFP.
   According to a CNN report, the US naval destroyer from a Djibouti-based anti-terrorism coalition called Combined Task Force 150 was targeting a suspected al-Qaeda operative linked to the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, mainly Africans.
   The vessel fired missiles overnight Friday after Puntland forces chased the Islamists fighters into the hilly areas, residents said.
   In January, a US gunship targeted positions in southern Somalia after Ethiopia-backed government forces ousted Islamists from the country’s southern and central regions, where they had started imposing Sharia law.
   Local elders said more than 100 civilians were killed in the January attacks, which targeted al-Qaeda operatives blamed both for the 1998 US embassy bombings and the 2002 suicide attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan Indian Ocean city of Mombasa that killed 15 people.

Hardline anti-terror laws are to be proposed by Gordon Brown - including an extension of the 28-day limit on detention without charge - as the Chancellor sends a powerful signal that he will take a harder line on terrorism than Tony Blair, the British Newspaper Guardian reports on Sunday.
   In an intensification of Brown’s plans for Number 10, which follows criticism that he has failed to flesh out his thoughts on terrorism, he will call this week for a series of measures that will infuriate his party’s left wing.
   An extension of the 28-day limit on detention without charge. Blair had wanted to extend this to 90 days, but had to limit it to 28 after a Commons revolt.
   Making terrorism an aggravating factor in sentencing, giving judges greater powers to punish terrorism within the framework of the existing criminal law.
   Ending the ban on questioning by police after a terrorist suspect has been charged. This would be subject to judicial oversight to ensure that it is correctly and sparingly used.
   Moving towards allowing evidence from telephone-tapping to be admissible as evidence in court by holding a Privy Council review into whether the law should be changed.
   Increasing the security budget, which has already doubled to more than £2bn a year after 11 September 2001, in the forthcoming spending review when a single security budget will be unveiled?

The man who led coalition forces in Iraq during the first year of the occupation says the United States can forget about winning the war.
   ‘I think if we do the right things politically and economically with the right Iraqi leadership we could still salvage at least a stalemate, if you will — not a stalemate but at least stave off defeat,’ retired army lieutenant general Ricardo Sanchez said in an interview.
   Sanchez, in his first interview since he retired last year, is the highest-ranking former military leader yet to suggest the Bush administration fell short in Iraq.
   ‘I am absolutely convinced that America has a crisis in leadership at this time,’ Sanchez said after a recent speech in San Antonio, Texas.
   ‘We’ve got to do whatever we can to help the next generation of leaders do better than we have done over the past five years, better than what this cohort of political and military leaders have done,’ adding that he was ‘referring to our national political leadership in its entirety’ - not just president George W Bush.
   Sanchez called the situation in Iraq bleak and blamed it on ‘the abysmal performance in the early stages and the transition of sovereignty.’ He included himself among those who erred in Iraq’s crucial first year after Saddam.
   Sanchez took command in the summer of 2003 and oversaw the occupation force amid an insurgency that has sparked a low-grade civil war in Iraq.
   He was in the middle of some of the most momentous events of the war, among them the dissolution of the Iraqi army and barring millions of Baath Party members from government jobs: two actions seen as triggering the rebellion among Sunni Moslems, who fell from power with Saddam Hussein.
   Sanchez is also most closely identified with the Abu Ghraib scandal, which occurred on his watch.

Fidel Castro appeared more vigorous on Sunday in the first television images of the Cuban leader to be broadcast in Cuba in four months, adding weight to reports that he has put his health crisis behind him.
   Castro appeared talking animatedly, standing in a track suit during a meeting on Saturday afternoon with Vietnamese Communist Party chief Nong Duc Manh.
   Castro, 80, has not appeared in public since emergency bowel surgery forced him to hand over power 10 months ago to his brother Raul Castro for the first time since coming to power in a 1959 revolution.
   But he looked healthier and more alert than in the last video images shown of him in Cuba on January 30 during a visit by his leftist ally Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
   He hugged Manh warmly at the end of the two-hour meeting.

Persistent smokers appear to be at increased risk for becoming depressed compared to never smokers, results of a long-term study of Finnish twins suggest.
   On the other hand, this association was not seen in individuals who stopped smoking many years ago.
   ‘Although nicotine in cigarettes has some mood-elevating properties, in the long-run chronic exposure to cigarette smoke may have a more important role in the etiology of depressive symptoms,’ lead author Tellervo Korhonen from the University of Helsinki told Reuters Health.
   The results are based on 4,000 male and 5,000 female Finnish twins, whose health and health behaviour were monitored for 15 years.
   The results suggest that persistent chronic smoking predicts the development of depressive symptoms.
   However, when adjusted for other factors associated with depression, the elevated risk of depression with persistent smoking remained significant only among men. There was also evidence that smokers who had quit were also at increased risk of depression, but only in the short term.
   Smokers who quit and remained off cigarettes in the long run did not have an increased risk for depression compared with never smokers. ‘This may reflect a relatively long recovery process from the adverse effects of cigarette smoking,’ Korhonen said in a statement.
   Because addiction to nicotine is as strong as an addiction to heroin, abstinence is difficult. ‘Smokers who are vulnerable to depression may need specific pharmacological treatment and behavioural support to overcome the earlier phase of abstinence,’ Korhonen said. After that, ‘their chances to quit successfully improve.’