The European Union on Friday condemned the ‘violent’ seizure of power by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which Britain labelled a ‘coup d’etat’ against beleaguered Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
   The United States, Russia, the EU and the United Nations were to have a ministerial level telephone conference on the crisis, while Arab foreign ministers gathered in Cairo for talks.
   Egypt recalled its diplomatic and security delegations to the Gaza Strip.
   ‘The presidency of the European Union condemns in the strongest terms the violent seizure of power by Hamas militia in the Gaza Strip,’ Martin Jaeger, German foreign ministry spokesman, said on behalf of the EU leadership.
   ‘We condemn the killing of innocent civilians and legitimate security forces,’ the spokesman said.
   Hamas fighters were in full control of the Gaza Strip on Friday, creating an Islamic enclave on Israel’s doorstep and further clouding prospects for peace after routing their secular Fatah rivals in days of vicious gunbattles.
   The radical Islamist group–branded a terror outfit by Israel and the West–overran the territory hours after Abbas sacked the government and declared a state of emergency in a bid to avert all-out civil war.
   Jaeger joined the United States in backing Abbas, insisting that his decision to dismiss the three-month-old Hamas-Fatah unity government was ‘in accordance with the Palestinian constitution.’ Germany holds the EU presidency until the end of the month.
   The British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, stressed it would be wrong for Hamas to benefit from its seizure of power in Gaza.
   EU external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner also expressed ‘extreme concern’ over the Gaza conflict and said in a statement she would hold talks with top Quartet officials on Friday.
   The United States has already given full backing to Abbas.
   The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said: ‘president Abbas has exercised his lawful authority as president of the Palestinian Authority and leader of the Palestinian people,’ Rice told reporters on Wednesday.
   Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov did not take sides in the conflict but said Friday no UN troops could be sent to Gaza unless Hamas and Fatah agreed to such a deployment.
   The Palestinians should halt their ‘fratricidal’ conflict, the Russian foreign ministry said in a separate statement.
   Arab foreign ministers brought forward a Cairo meeting scheduled originally for Saturday to discuss the crisis.
   Egypt had been trying to broker a face-to-face meeting between the two sides after separate talks, but the breakdown of that effort was swiftly followed by the latest fighting in which at least 113 people have been killed.
   Japan also stood by Abbas and called for a restoration of order in the Gaza Strip, a government spokesman said.
   Malaysia, the chair of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference, called on Hamas and Fatah to find a solution to the Gaza crisis.
   But Malaysian foreign minister Sied Halid Akbar said: ‘The OIC is in a state of hopelessness’ over what to do.

A Sri Lankan probe into rights abuses blamed on security forces and Tamil Tiger rebels looks set to end in failure, international experts warned on Friday as Amnesty International demanded an outside monitoring operation.
   Experts nominated by the international community to observe a presidential commission probing abuses - including the massacre of 17 aid workers that Nordic truce monitors blame on the army - are worried at involvement of the Attorney general’s department.
   The damning assessment of the presidential probe comes as president Mahinda Rajapaksa is in Geneva meeting human rights officials amid mounting international pressure on his government to halt any abuses blamed on state security forces.
   ‘We ... are concerned that the conduct of the President’s Commission of Inquiry ... is inconsistent with international norms and standards,’ the 11-person panel said in its second highly critical statement in a week.
   ‘Failure to take corrective action will result in the commission not fulfilling its fact-finding mandate in conformity with those norms and standards.’
   The panel said its concerns that the involvement of members of the Attorney General’s department raised conflicts of interest had been ignored.
   The experts said they had ‘observed examples of a lack of impartiality’, with the counsel from the Attorney General’s department stating ‘as fact matters which are controversial to the case.’
   ‘Furthermore the witness was improperly led ... and information relied on by the witness and the Attorney General’s department was not made available to the (panel),’ they added.
   Only the testimony of one witness and the partial testimony of a second had been taken so far.
   ‘Taking evidence in this manner will not, in our opinion, reveal the information and evidence necessary to identify perpetrators of human rights violations and enable the commission to achieve its mandate in a timely manner,’ the panel said.
   The presidential commission issued a statement of its own, saying it was satisfied its methodology would yield results. It called on the panel to ensure that at least one of its observers was always present to watch proceedings.
   The experts are also worried by what they say are insufficient measures to ensure protection of witnesses, particularly as reports of abductions and disappearances mushroom amid a new chapter in a civil war that has killed nearly 70,000 people since 1983.

More than 1,000 people, many of them young children, have been forced to work as slaves in a brutal human trafficking ring in China that has shocked and outraged the nation, the police said Friday.
   More than 450 people have already been rescued in recent days from brick yards and coal mines across two provinces in central and northern China that were run with exceptional ruthlessness, they said.
   Media reports described freed workers, some as young as eight, as having been beaten, nearly starved and forced to work long hours under appalling conditions, apparently with the involvement of some local police and officials.
   At least one man was beaten to death, according to a confession by a brickyard boss on television, with other reports saying the slave trade had been going on since at least March–and perhaps for years.
   ‘So far, we have rescued more than 200 people including over 40 children,’ an official with the Henan provincial public security department, who gave only his surname of Dang, said by phone.
   ‘They were abducted and sold to brick kilns in Shanxi and Henan provinces.’
   Li Fulin, vice director of public security in Shanxi, said in a statement that separate police raids there had freed another 251 people. Officials in both provinces said investigations were continuing in a bid to free hundreds more believed to be enslaved.
   ‘It is hard to estimate the number of missing people before the investigation finishes, but there are probably more than 1,000,’ Dang said.
   The scandal has caused alarm among the highest ranks of China’s ruling Communist Party, with president Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao issuing orders on Friday to deal with the situation, the China News Service reported.
   However no comments from the two leaders were immediately released.
   Henan police said at least 120 people had been arrested in the crackdown, which was sparked after distraught parents launched an online plea for help in finding their children.
   Many were abducted off the streets of cities in the region and sold to factories and mines for as little 500 yuan (64 dollars), the Beijing Youth Daily reported.
   Parents said in the Internet statement that they had personally gone to dozens of the brick kilns, finding filthy, starving workers, many with untreated injuries sustained at the hands of their captors or burns caused by dangerous working conditions.
   State television aired disturbing images of abused and emaciated workers living in squalid conditions at a brick factory in the city of Hongtong in Shanxi province.orkers said many of them tried to escape but most were caught and brought back. Vicious dogs were used to stop workers making a break for it.
   A brickyard supervisor, Zhao Yanbing, confessed on camera to beating one worker, a man in his 50s, to death for not working hard enough.

Muslim nations will focus on key areas of child health and vaccine production to eliminate preventable diseases, senior health officials announced Friday in Malaysia.
   Health ministers from the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference met here for an inaugural conference to tackle issues including polio vaccination, bird flu prevention and other infectious diseases plaguing Muslim nations.
   In the final declaration, health ministers urged Muslim states to develop and produce their own vaccines to ensure reliable supply and safety.
   Officials also called on religious leaders to take responsibility to promote polio vaccination among poor and marginalised Muslim populations.
   ‘Polio eradication is an urgent priority for all OIC member states,’ the draft statement said.
   Polio, a preventable disease, has remained endemic in four countries, three of which are OIC members–Afghanistan, parts of Pakistan and Nigeria, health experts have said.
   Although the OIC has widely approved child vaccines as halal and safe, hardline Islamic leaders have argued that western-made vaccines may contain alcohol or be contaminated by non-halal sources.
   Under the concept of halal, pork and its by-products, alcohol and animals not slaughtered according to Koranic procedures are all ‘haram’, or forbidden under Islam.
   ‘We reaffirm our solemn commitment and support the efforts being made ... to expand national immunization services to reach all unvaccinated children with vaccines of assured quality (halal),’ the declaration said.
   Vaccination is key to reducing infant mortality, a major issue for OIC countries, which account for 11 of the 16 highest rates of death in children under five in the world.

Even in death, Americans want a say. With wedding planners already big across the United States, the latest trend in the mighty burial business is funeral pre-planning – helping the living organise their final event on earth.
   According to funeral planner Mark Duffey, the trend is driven by the baby-boom generation born in the aftermath of Second World War, many of them recently faced with the overwhelming task of arranging their parents’ funerals.
   Death for them is no longer a taboo subject and they are determined to do things their way, down to the last detail.
   ‘They don’t want to go slowly, quietly into the night. They want to go out loud, kicking and screaming,’ said Duffey, whose company Everest, billed as ‘the first nationwide funeral planning and concierge service,’ has helped organise some 65,000 made-to-measure funerals.
   ‘They may not want a big fancy casket, but a rock band playing at a restaurant. They may not buy a huge monument in a cemetery, but they may make a very large donation for the wing of a hospital.
   ‘Boomers want to have a personalised and thematic funeral that has some meaning to the person. They want to be remembered. They don’t want to be forgotten, unlike their parents, the GI generation, who are much more conservative, and don’t want to be a bother.’
   Honey Leveen agrees. She’s only 48 and in good health, but has already set down in writing every detail of her funeral, from the type of urn for her ashes to the music she wants and even the caterers.
   ‘We want to have a nice party. It’ll be so pretty. It’ll be held in a public park with fountains with a tent, and very good catering,’ said the insurance agent from Houston, Texas. And the music must have a water theme, she said, such as the Beatles hit ‘The Yellow Submarine’.
   Why was she going to such trouble? ‘I love my family; I don’t want them to have any stress.’
   Communication coordinator for the National Funeral Directors’ Association, Jessica Koth, said many people wanted to spare family and friends the trauma of having to sort out funeral arrangements when already grieving their loss.
   ‘There has been a dramatic increase in the number of individuals choosing to preplan their own funeral,’ said Koth. ‘This trend can be credited to aging baby boomers, known for their desire to control all aspects of their life and developing their own ideas.’
   The increasing flexibility in funeral options is being helped by the growing trend for cremations, rather than burials. In 2005, 32 per cent of the 2.4 million funerals in the United States were cremations, compared with 17 per cent in 1990.
   ‘It’s much easier if you don’t have to have the body there. You are not tied with a casket. You can do anything you want,’ said funeral planner Duffey.
   Negotiating every detail early and discarding some of the traditional aspects of funerals can bring down the cost below the average 10,000 to 20,000-dollar price tag, he said.
   And sombre traditional funerals are increasingly being replaced by more personal celebrations of the deceased’s life.
   ‘It’s about a shift in our perception, a shift in the way we approach funeral services. It’s a celebration of the life, especially a long life and well-lived,’ agreed Lynn Isenberg, founder of Lights Out Enterprises.
   The choices would seem to be endless.
   ‘It may be a motorcycle rally through the woods, a fishing theme on a boat. You can do a party and it could be at a favourite restaurant, a park, a stadium where you played college football,’ Duffey said.
   Internet and video cameras are also popular. And online condolence books are now almost an obligatory part of every funeral.

The police made more than a dozen arrests Friday after tribal militants shot dead 10 security personnel in southwest Pakistan, hours after a visit by a top US diplomat, officials said.
   The US assistant secretary of state, Richard Boucher,
   stopped in Quetta, the capital of gas-rich Baluchistan province, on Thursday afternoon for
   talks on improving security along the border with Afghanistan.
   The outlawed Baluchistan Liberation Army claimed responsibility for the ambush on Thursday night. The group wants more autonomy for ethnic Baluch people and a bigger share of the region’s natural resources.
   The attackers pumped bullets into the back of an open van carrying soldiers returning from home leave in other parts of the country, leaving bodies piled up in a blood-stained heap, an AFP photographer said.
   Eight soldiers and one policeman were killed instantly and four people were wounded. One of the injured died in hospital overnight, said doctor Ghulam Haider of the Quetta Civil Hospital.

Indian women activists hailed on Friday the possibility of the country getting its first woman president even as some commentators said the choice of a low-profile politician could weaken the position.
   India’s Congress-led ruling coalition chose veteran politician Pratibha Patil late on Thursday to run for what is largely a ceremonial position, elections for which will be held next month if the opposition puts up a candidate as planned.
   Patil, 72, is the governor of Rajasthan and was a surprise choice. She was picked after Congress and its leftist allies failed to agree on other names.
   ‘This is a matter of pride for a country like India that a woman could become president,’ said Pramila Pandhe, vice-president of the All India Democratic Women’s Association, an umbrella group.
   ‘This will send a strong signal about the progress of women within the country as well as internationally when even a country like the United States has not had a woman president,’ she said.
   Indira Gandhi was one of the world’s first woman prime ministers, ruling for most of the period from 1966 to 1984, while her daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi is one of the country’s most powerful figures, as head of the ruling Congress Party.

A group of Indian families who returned from a trip to Pakistan to search for relatives who went missing in a war 36 years ago said Friday they were disappointed with the visit.
   The 14 Indians returned to India Thursday after a two-week visit to Pakistan, where they visited about a dozen jails to find clues to the men they believe may still be held in Pakistan.
   ‘We are not satisfied at all because we were shown only 10 to 12 prisons, all of them housing civilians,’ said Reshma Advani, whose airforce officer husband went missing in the 1971 war between the South Asian arch-rivals.
   Pakistan has repeatedly denied that it holds any Indian prisoners of war, but some families say they have heard of their relatives in jail from other Indian civilians who had been imprisoned there.
   Islamabad said it allowed the families to visit jails following the repeated requests from the Indian government. Ties between India and Pakistan have also improved since a peace process was launched in 2004.

Two suicide attackers blew themselves up near NATO convoys in southern Afghanistan Friday, killing five Afghan children, four young men and a foreign soldier, officials said.
   The dead all lost their lives in the first blast, which was a car bomb that ripped through a residential area of the town of Tirin Kot, the deputy governor of Uruzgan province governor Mohammad Nabi said.
   ‘Nine Afghan nationals including adults and children have been martyred,’ provincial police chief general Mohammad Qasim said. Five were children, aged around 12, and the rest were young men, he said.
   ‘Seven other Afghans have been wounded including one woman,’ he said.
   NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said one of its soldiers was killed and three wounded.
   The 37-country ISAF gave no details of the attack and does not release the nationalities of its casualties, leaving this to the home nations of its soldiers.
   Most of the ISAF soldiers in Uruzgan are Australian and Dutch nationals.

Twelve million illegal immigrants in the United States gained new hope over their status when US lawmakers agreed to revive an overhaul of US immigration laws blocked by the Senate last week.
   Senate Democrats and Republicans agreed Thursday to give the bill another chance after heavy lobbying on its behalf by President George W Bush, who is bucking the sentiment of many in his Republican Party in hopes of adding successful immigration reform to his legacy as president.
   ‘We met this evening with several of the senators involved in the immigration bill negotiations,’ Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and his Republican counterpart senator Mitch McConnell said in a joint statement.
   ‘Based on that discussion, the immigration bill will return to the Senate floor after completion of the energy bill.’
   That timeline would mean the bill would be unlikely to return to the Senate before the end of next week at the earliest.
   The deal was reached after hours of intense talks between senators who framed the original ‘grand bargain’ to grant a path to legal status to illegal immigrants, strengthen border enforcement and initiate a low wage guest worker programme.
   The sweeping overhaul would also replace the current family-dominated immigration system with a merit-based point’s formula and attempt to cut a huge backlog for permanent resident green card applicants.
   But last week conservatives blast the bill as an ‘amnesty’ for people who blatantly broke the law prevented it from proceeding to a final vote, handing Bush a setback in his hopes for a signature domestic achievement in his second term in the White House.
   The breakthrough Thursday came hours after Bush backed a 4.4-billion-dollar burst of immediate spending to secure US borders, in answer to critics of the bill who said its security component was inadequate.
   ‘This funding will come from the fines and penalties that we collect from those who have come to our country illegally,’ Bush said.
   The two Senate leaders did not provide any details of how the new bill would look, but sources close to the negotiators earlier said that it would include the chance for members to offer up to 20 amendments to the legislation.
   It was not clear if the deal would be sufficient to appease conservative Republicans who have vowed to bring the measure down.
   But Democratic senator Ted Kennedy, one of the key authors of the legislation, said it was imperative to deal with the problem.
   ‘Doing nothing is not an alternative,’ he said Thursday.
   Reid pulled the legislation from the Senate floor last week, when it failed to attract the 60 votes needed to end debate and move to a final vote.
   He said he would only bring it back when Republicans provided assurances that they had the required votes to force the measure through, pointing out that 80 per cent of Democrats in the chamber already backed it.
   Currently, Democrats have 49 members in the 100-seat Senate, and can usually count on the votes of two independent senators.
   Even if the bill passes the Senate, it is assured of a rocky welcome in the House of Representatives, where members face re-election every two years, and so may be more prey to pressure from lobby groups outside Congress.
   Republican representative Duncan Hunter said Thursday that Bush’s latest move would do nothing to garner conservative support for the bill.
   ‘The security of American borders should not be conditional on amnesty,’ said Hunter, who is mounting a long-shot campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.
   ‘I am hoping and I am optimistic that the bill will fail in the US Senate. If it should make it through the US Senate, once again, the people’s House, the House of Representatives hopefully will stop this bill,’ he said.

NATO effectively endorsed Thursday a US move to expand its missile shield into Europe, in the face of Russian opposition, agreeing to study its implications for the alliance’s more modest missile defence efforts.
   The Russian defence minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, was quoted by the Russian news agency Interfax as warning NATO defence ministers here that the deployment of a US radar and interceptor missiles in the Czech Republic and Poland would be an ‘unfriendly step.’
   ‘We see such a decision as a step aimed at destroying the existing security system, creating new dividing lines on the European continent,’ he was quoted as saying.
   But a senior US official said Serdyukov did not repeat recent Russian threats to target Europe and did not place conditions on a counter-proposal proposal by Russian President Vladimir Putin for a joint US-Russian radar in Gabala, Azerbaijan.
   The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, made clear that ‘we intend to continue our talks with Poland and the Czech Republic,’ the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
   ‘What he has said today is that we want to work with Russia on what role Gabala might play. We also simultaneously need to continue the work at NATO and we need to continue the negotiations with Poland and the Czech Republic.’
   NATO defence ministers agreed to assess the political and military implications of the US missile defence plan with an eye to what NATO would have to do to defend areas in southern Europe not under its umbrella.
   The assessment is to be completed by February 2008 ahead of a NATO summit in Bucharest to inform allied deliberations on fielding a theatre missile defence system that could be ‘bolted on’ to the US system, NATO officials said.
   The study was ‘a recognition that the US discussion and proposals with Poland and the Czech Republic are A: a fact. B: that they are moving forward, and C: that NATO work ... on missile defence needs to take that into account,’ said NATO spokesman James Appathurai.
   Appathurai said none of the 26 member countries had opposed the US plans.
   ‘NATO will now move forward to assess the political and military implications of the US missile system proposals,’ he said.
   NATO ministers then met in a separate session with Serdyukov in what one NATO diplomat described as ‘calm and cold.’
   ‘Each side simply restated its own arguments. There were no harsh words, but then there was no progress either,’ the diplomat said.
   The US official described it as a ‘very workmanlike session.’

An indefinite curfew has been imposed in the southern Iraqi Shiite city of Basra after a Sunni shrine was bombed in a nearby town on Friday, the prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s office said.
   The curfew came into effect from 4:00pm after the bombing of the Talha bin Obeidallah shrine in the town of Zubair, west of Basra, the southern city where British forces are based.
   ‘The terrorist act which targeted the shrine came as part of a series of crimes aimed at inflaming sectarian passions among the sons of the country,’ the statement quoted Maliki as saying.
   ‘Those who have committed it are enemies of Allah, the country and the people,’ Maliki said.
   Meanwhile, five more US soldiers have died in Iraq, four of them killed by insurgents, the US military announced on Friday, taking its losses to 36 for this month alone.
   Three soldiers were killed from wounds received in an explosion near their vehicle in the northern oil hub of Kirkuk on Thursday.
   Another soldier died of injuries from small arms fire during security operations the same day in the restive province of Diyala, northeast of Baghdad.
   A soldier also died in a ‘non-combat’ related incident on Wednesday, the military said.
   The latest fatalities took the military’s losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,512, according to Pentagon figures as of Thursday.

The risk of abstention looms large in Sunday’s parliamentary election, with many French voters saying President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservatives will win regardless of their vote.
   ‘Voting doesn’t really matter now—it’s all been settled,’ said student Laura Polet, shopping with lunchtime crowds near the Galeries Lafayette department store on Paris’s Right Bank.
   Like 40 percent of the French electorate, Polet did not vote in last weekend’s first round of legislative elections, and says she will not be voting in Sunday’s second round either.
   The drop in participation has been huge since 84 percent of voters turned out for the presidential run-off vote on May 6.
   Although turnout is traditionally lower in legislative polls, the 40 percent abstention last Sunday was a new record.
   Despite, or perhaps because of the figures, pollsters expect Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement party to convert its political lead into an overwhelming parliamentary majority in Sunday’s second round.
   The opposition Socialists have been torn by internal division since their candidate Segolene Royal lost the presidential run-off against Sarkozy, and surveys show the left-wing party is set to hold on to just over 100 seats compared to some 400 for the UMP.
   ‘People who voted against Sarkozy are depressed,’ said Helene Jacquelot, a volunteer fund raiser outside the Sorbonne University building in the picturesque Latin Quarter. ‘They know who’s in charge now, regardless, so why should they vote again?’
   Passing on her way to exams, literature student Louise Mezel agreed: ‘The majority of the country voted for Sarkozy, so it’s clear he’ll have a majority.’
   As the fourth weekend vote in two months approaches, analysts say French voters are tiring.
   ‘Of course voter interest drops the fourth time around, especially after the main choice has been made,’ said writer Michael Smadja from behind his laptop in a smoke-filled cafe near the place de la Republique in eastern Paris.
   Parliamentary elections were once scheduled to fall two years before the presidential vote but that changed in 2000, when the government of Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin reduced presidential terms to five years from seven.
   Some voters say under the new system, the newly elected president is likely to win a parliamentary majority regardless—reducing the excitement of the legislative poll.
   ‘I wouldn’t call it voter fatigue,’ said researcher Gilles Laferte from a shady bench in the Sorbonne courtyard.

A grenade attack killed four people and wounded six others watching a foreign film in the western town of Baidoa in the latest flare-up in chaotic Somalia, residents said on Friday.
   Militant Islamists, who have been fighting the Horn of Africa nation’s government, are opposed to western and Indian films which they say promote immorality in the mainly Muslim nation of 10 million people.
   During their six-month rule of most of south Somalia last year, they frequently broke up public viewings of films.
   ‘The hand grenade was thrown at a video show in Baidoa late last night,’ said resident Mohamed Ali. He did not know who the attackers were.
   ‘Four people died and six were wounded. The video show was full of people watching an Indian movie at the time.’
   Thursday night’s grenade attack was the latest in a wave of violence, which also included a major attack on Ethiopian troops in Mogadishu, since the postponement of a national peace conference that had been scheduled to start on Thursday.

The US Senate’s Democratic leader on Thursday fired off unusually frank criticism of the generals running the Iraq war, in the latest escalation of a showdown with the White House.
   Majority leader Harry Reid said he had lost confidence in General Peter Pace, outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said he was waiting for general David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq, to be more candid.
   Reid did not confirm that he had used even more damning language about Pace, after the Politico newspaper reported that he had earlier branded the top US military officer ‘incompetent.’
   Reid said he had previously made clear to Pace he was not happy with his performance.
   ‘I told him how I felt, that he had not done a very good job in speaking out for some obvious things that weren’t going right in Iraq. I told him that to his face.’
   Moving to Petraeus, Reid said he had high regard for the general, but suggested his past assessments of the US effort to build the Iraqi army appeared to have been too rosy.
   ‘He told us it was going great. As we’ve looked back, it didn’t go so well,’ Reid told reporters.
   Reid also expressed disappointment on Thursday at a newspaper interview, in which Petraeus said there were ‘astonishing signs of normalcy’ in two-thirds of Baghdad.

Romania Thursday challenged a Council of Europe investigator to prove his allegation that both Romania and Poland knowingly hosted secret CIA prisons to interrogate top terror suspects.
   ‘For the moment we haven’t any direct and precise proof of the existence of (those) presumed CIA centres in Romania. We are ready to discuss any proof that he can provide,’ Romanian Foreign Minister Adrian Cioroianu told reporters.
   The investigator for the pan-European democracy and human rights group, Dick Marty, said in a report last Friday that Poland and Romania allowed the CIA-run ‘secret detention facilities’ on their soil from 2003 to 2005.
   ‘We have sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories,’ the report said.
   In Romania, Marty named a clutch of top officials as being aware of the facilities including president Traian Basescu and his predecessor as head of state, Ion Iliescu.
   Cioroianu endorsed denials made by Romania’s former government, and said it was ‘impossible’ that the Central Intelligence Agency could have run such facilities in the country without the knowledge of authorities.
   ‘But I’m ready to discuss any evidence provided by Dick Marty,’ he said.
   Cioroianu on Wednesday held talks here with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Pentagon officials. He said the CIA controversy ‘wasn’t a topic’ of the meetings.