The Hamas masters of the Gaza Strip called for talks with their defeated rivals Saturday, an appeal swiftly rejected by the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, which set up an inquiry into the rout of its security forces.
   Dismissed Hamas premier Ismail Haniya made the appeal in a telephone conversation with Yemeni president Ali Abullah Saleh, his first public contact with a foreign leader since the Islamists’ bloody seizure of Gaza earlier this month.
   Haniya said he wanted a return to the provisions of the power-sharing accord agreed by president Mahmud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in the Muslim holy city of Mecca in February under the auspices of Yemen’s powerful neighbour Saudi Arabia, his office said.
   ‘The way out of the present crisis is through inter-Palestinian dialogue without preconditions on the basis of no winner, no loser; a government of national unity; and respect for the Mecca agreement,’ his office quoted him as saying.
   But Haniya’s appeal was swiftly rejected by the Palestinian leadership, which said there could be no dialogue without the Islamists’ being held to account for their routing of the security forces in Gaza in a week of ferocious fighting in which more than 110 people were killed.
   ‘Before any return to dialogue, there must be a return to full legality within the framework of the Palestinian Authority and those who carried out a putsch and attacked legal institutions must be held to account,’ Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said.
   The Palestinian president meanwhile set up a commission of inquiry into the defeat of his security forces in Gaza as he sacked a second commander over the debacle.
   ‘(Abbas) today ordered the formation of a commission of inquiry into the shortcomings in the Gaza Strip that failed to prevent the armed revolt by militias of the Hamas movement against Palestinian legitimacy and institutions,’ an official statement said.
   The commission will be headed by Zakariya al-Agha, a Fatah leader from Gaza.
   Abbas also fired colonel Suleiman Khader, a commander in the central Gaza 0Strip, accusing him of ‘cowardice’ after he handed over a base to Hamas forces without a fight, the statement said.
   He was the second commander to face dismissal after the security forces’ defeat to Hamas, who captured control of the entire Gaza Strip on June 15.
   On Friday the president sacked Rashid Abu Shbak, who was for more than a year his director of internal security—an umbrella formation of preventive security, police and civil defence.
   Appointed to the post in April 2006, Abu Shbak had submitted his resignation on May 26 but Abbas refused to accept his departure at the time.
   Hamas meanwhile reacted angrily to recommendations by the Palestine Liberation Organisation that early elections should be held under changed rules that would effectively exclude the Islamists.

Foreign forces in Afghanistan said Saturday they had killed around 80 insurgents in the past 24 hours, most of them in a strike on rebels preparing an attack near the Pakistan border.
   Meanwhile, foreign forces killed 52 civilians in a three-day operation in southern Afghanistan this week, the president, Hamid Karzai, said giving the first civilian casualty toll for the military action.
   NATO and coalition forces had fired artillery on a district in the southern province of Uruzgan in which ‘52 of our countrymen were martyred,’ he told reporters.
   The NATO force said Karzai’s figure for civilians killed in the operation was similar to its own but that it was not clear if they had been killed by security forces or Taliban fighters.
   A group of 45 men and several smaller ones of eight to 10 were spotted just inside the border later Friday preparing to attack a base in the Paktika province, the International Security Assistance Force said.
   ‘They were clearly armed and they were clearly hostile and that is why they were engaged,’ ISAF spokesman major John Thomas said.
   ISAF forces conducted reconnaissance to confirm their suspicions and the insurgents fired on a US-led coalition aircraft, Thomas said.
   Coalition forces then unleashed combined air and artillery strikes as the insurgents tried to escape across the border, he said. The operation was coordinated with Pakistan because the area is close to the border.
   An ISAF spokesman for the east of the country, major Donald Korpi, said ‘up to 60 Taliban were killed.’
   Thomas did not have a figure for the dead but did not dispute this toll, saying such numbers were arrived at through various battle damage assessments.
   Commanders in the area said it was the largest formation of militants there since January, Thomas added.
   On January 11 air and ground strikes on insurgents spotted infiltrating into Afghanistan from Pakistan killed up to 150 of them, ISAF said at the time.
   The Taliban’s leadership is believed to have fled into Pakistan when the coalition drove them from power in 2001.
   The extremist movement and its al-Qaeda allies are said to have training grounds just across the porous border.
   The coalition reported separately that its soldiers working with Afghan troops had killed nearly 20 ‘enemy fighters’ in a seven-hour battle late Friday in the southern province of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban movement.
   The attackers had initiated the battle by opening fire with machine guns, it said in a statement.
   Several more fighters were killed in the adjoining province of Uruzgan when a battle erupted after troops were shot at with multiple rockets.
   The coalition also announced it had detained 20 militants early Saturday in an operation against al-Qaeda militants in Ghazni province.
   At one compound fighters had fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at the soldiers, who returned fire and killed the assailants, a statement said.

A ferocious storm in Andhra Pradesh has killed at least 45 people and displaced tens of thousands, officials said on Saturday, sparking a major relief operation.
   ‘We have opened up 95 relief camps ... for 56,000 displaced people and also brought in 200 medical teams to contain the spread of water-related diseases,’ said Preeti Sudan, the state’s disaster management commissioner.
   At least 45 people were reported dead and officials said many others, including fishermen out at sea, were missing after the tropical storm hit coastal regions of the state on Friday.
   Coastguard boats were looking for the missing fishermen, who went to sea despite weather warnings, and were distributing food, fresh water and medicine to a huge rural population, some stranded on the roofs of houses and buses or up trees.
   ‘I spent the night on my rooftop along with my family after flood water gushed into my house,’ said Musari Venkateswarlu, a school teacher in Guntur’s Macherla town.
   Hundreds of trees were uprooted, electric poles felled and highways flooded as low-lying villages and small towns in the Kurnool and Guntur districts took the full force of the storm.
   More heavy rains were forecast for at least the next 24 hours, the director of a local cyclone warning centre said.

Students from a radical mosque kidnapped and then released Saturday nine people from an alleged brothel in the Pakistani capital, a mosque leader and officials said.
   Students from the Red Mosque and Jamia Hafsa female seminary early in the day raided an acupuncture clinic, which they said was a brothel, and kidnapped the nine people, including six Chinese women.
   ‘After the administration assured us they would close down the mixed massage parlours in Islamabad, and in view of the Pakistan-China friendship, we are releasing all nine men and women,’ said Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the deputy head of the mosque.
   ‘We will continue to take action against those massage parlours where women would offer their services to men as the business goes beyond massage for extra money,’ Ghazi said.
   The cleric claimed students from an expensive private school in the capital had also participated ‘in a noble task to cleanse the society.’
   Chaudhry Mohammad Ali, Islamabad’s senior administration official, told reporters that all those abducted had left the seminary and said that authorities would shut down all illegal facilities in the capital.
   The abductors, including 10 burqa-clad women, were armed with batons when they broke into the clinic in an upmarket Islamabad neighbourhood at about 1:00am (2000 GMT Friday), a security official said.
   ‘We have not kidnapped anyone, but have brought (in) six foreign girls and three men to convince them,’ the students had said earlier in a statement.
   ‘This is a natural reaction of students against vulgarity and obscenity. Foreign girls at the massage centre were having sinful acts with men,’ it added.
   A member of the pro-Taliban Red Mosque had said the raid by some 30 of their students was part of an anti-vice campaign.
   ‘This place was used as a brothel and despite our warnings the administration failed to take any action, so we decided to take action on our own,’ Ghazi said.
   The senior security official said the students arrived at the clinic in three cars, forced their way into the premises, and then took the captives to their mosque in central Islamabad.

Nepal’s former Maoist rebels and other armed groups are hindering political activity in the countryside, the United Nations said on Friday, raising fears of disturbances ahead of this year’s national elections.
   Nepal is due to vote for a constituent assembly by the end of the year to decide the fate of the monarchy, as part of a peace deal with the Maoists that ended a decade-long civil war which killed thousands.
   Several armed groups have attacked civilians and political activists since the signing of the peace deal in November, which saw the Maoists join the political mainstream after locking up their weapons under UN monitoring.
   The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Nepal said the Maoists were still preventing other political parties from functioning freely outside district capitals.
   Intimidation and violence by other armed groups had also led to obstacles to normal political activity, the UN said.
   In some places, the Maoists and other parties in the ruling alliance had labelled supporters of embattled King Gyanendra as ‘regressive forces’ and disrupted their activities, it added.
   ‘This is a problem which, if not addressed, could worsen as political activities are intensified in the lead-up to the CA election,’ Lena Sundh, OHCHR chief in Nepal, told reporters.
   ‘It is essential that political parties at the central level renew commitments to promote political tolerance, respect pluralism and to conduct activities without intimidation and violence,’ Sundh said in a statement.
   ‘A mechanism is needed at the local level to ensure that the political actors cooperate together to fulfil these commitments.’
   Insec, a local human rights watchdog, says at least 116 people were killed this year in protests by ethnic groups demanding more government jobs and seats in parliament and violence by other armed groups, overshadowing the peace deal with the Maoists.

At least half-a-dozen Indian prisoners in a Pakistani jail are mentally unstable and have no memory of how they got there, a delegation of Indians who met them said on Friday.
   The group went to Pakistan earlier this month on a fact-finding mission to trace the whereabouts of their relatives who went missing while fighting the 1971 India-Pakistan war.
   The families were invited by the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, to look for their loved ones as relations improve between the two countries following a peace process which began in 2004.
   They did not find any of the prisoners of war but said they met 59 Indian prisoners in Lahore who said they were there for at least 10 years and of whom, 6-7 were mentally ill.
   Both countries routinely arrest either country’s nationals on charges of crossing the border–either accidentally or knowingly, as alleged spies. They also hold scores of fishermen who stray into each other’s territorial waters.
   ‘Some of them were insane,’ said GS Gill, who led the delegation. ‘We could make out their state. They were not saying anything. One man kept his eyes closed and was murmuring something.’
   Prison records seen by the delegation said they were Indian nationals.
   ‘They could not speak, remember their names or where they are from in India,’ said Damayanti Vijay Tambay, a member of the group.
   Officials in New Delhi said they can not confirm or deny claims made by the delegation but added they are aware some Indian prisoners in Pakistan have become mentally unstable due to long years of captivity, harassment and poor jail conditions.
   Pakistani officials refused to comment despite repeated interview requests. Pakistan has always denied holding Indian POWs.
   The South Asian arch rivals have fought three wars since they gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
   Relatives said Pakistani authorities did not allow them to see prison records, visit detention facilities and mental asylums and talk to officials involved in the interrogation of Indian prisoners during the 1971 war.
   ‘We got a feeling that while they were not lying, they were also hiding something,’ Gill said. ‘In some jails, we sensed there were a separate category of prison records which were not shown to us.’
   The Indian defence ministry said these issues would be taken up with Pakistan.

Myanmar’s pro-democracy party has asked the military government for permission to meet with its detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a spokesman said Saturday.
   No one from the National League for Democracy has met with the Nobel peace laureate since 2004.
   Spokesman Nyan Win said the party leadership wanted to see her to discuss legal options for appealing for her release from house arrest.
   ‘Our chairman Aung Shwe sent a letter to the cabinet in Naypyidaw on Thursday to ask permission to meet with Ms Aung San Suu Kyi,’ Nyan Win said.
   ‘We want to know what she thinks about a possible appeal to the authorities regarding her detention,’ he said.
   Myanmar’s military government in May extended Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest by another year, defying international demands for her immediate release.
   The 62-year-old has spent more than 11 of the last 18 years under house arrest at her lakeside Yangon home and has little contact with the outside world, apart from her live-in maid and visits from her doctor.

The police in Indian Kashmir usually accustomed to fighting separatist militants have a new target in their sights–teenagers canoodling in parks, restaurants and at Internet cafes.
   The crackdown aims to curb ‘immoral activities’, a senior police officer said on Friday, adding that dozens of places had been raided across Srinagar, the main city of the region, and at least 10 couples detained over the last three days.
   Restaurant and Internet cafe owners had also been asked to get rid of cabins and cubicles as they were being ‘misused’ by teenagers in the Muslim-majority region, he said.
   ‘We received a number of complaints from parents that their children, mostly teenagers, would stray into cyber cafes and restaurants instead of schools and colleges,’ Parvez Ahmad said.

International donors will meet in Oslo next week to review Sri Lanka’s worsening bloodshed and look for a way to revive a moribund peace process.
   A quartet of the island’s main financial backers–Japan, the US, the European Union and Norway–will analyse the deteriorating situation for two days starting Monday, officials involved in the process said.
   ‘The meeting will be to take stock of what is going on and for the donors to examine if there is any role left for them to put the peace process back on track,’ a Western diplomat said.
   Retired Sri Lankan diplomat and political commentator Nanda Godage was pessimistic, saying the gathering was likely to result in the ‘usual expression of concern’ but little else.
   Defence analyst Namal Perera believes the international community has no way of convincing either the Sri Lankan government or the Tamil Tigers to re-negotiate, or honour a now-tattered ceasefire they agreed to in 2002.

Hundreds of people showered rose petals on Pakistan’s suspended chief justice Saturday as he embarked on the latest of a series of cross-country processions that have rattled the government of the president, Pervez Musharraf.
   Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry left the eastern city of Lahore early Saturday and was due to reach Multan, 230 kilometres away, later in the evening to address a lawyers’ convention.
   He met briefly with his own lawyers before leaving Lahore in a motorcade of 150 vehicles. Hundreds of people who had gathered to greet him threw red rose petals on his car.
   Musharraf ousted Chaudhry on March 9 over allegations of misconduct, a move that has sparked the biggest threat to his eight-year hold on power since he assumed control in a bloodless coup.
   The opposition says Musharraf dismissed Chaudhry to smooth the path for him to be elected for a second five-year term as president-in-uniform, in defiance of the constitution.

Three Lebanese soldiers were killed on Saturday when a booby trap set by Fatah al-Islam militants exploded in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, an army spokesman said.
   One soldier was killed outright and three more were seriously wounded, two of them fatally, he said on the 35th day of the siege north of Tripoli.
   ‘A fourth soldier badly wounded by the explosion is in critical condition.’
   He corrected an earlier report that the first soldier had been targeted by a sniper, and added that he was unaware of reports that an Islamist suicide bomber had attacked an army patrol.
   The body of one militant had been retrieved from Nahr al-Bared, he added.
   Saturday’s fatalities raised to at least 147 the number of people killed since May 20 in the deadliest internal violence since the 1975-1990 civil war.
   The dead include 79 soldiers–more than twice the number of Lebanese troops killed during last summer’s 34-day Israeli onslaught against the Shia Hezbollah movement. Fatah al-Islam casualties are unknown, but at least 51 militants are believed to have been killed.
   The latest clashes came a day after an Arab League delegation admitted failure in its latest bid to reconcile Lebanon’s deeply divided Western-backed and pro-Syrian political camps.
   Artillery pounded the Islamists as the army sought to end a siege that has lasted nearly five weeks. Extremists entrenched inside the warren-like camp responded with automatic fire, an AFP correspondent said.
   The brutal standoff continued despite defence minister Elias Murr saying on Thursday that the onslaught against Sunni Muslim fighters of the al-Qaeda-inspired Fatah al-Islam group ‘has ended.’
   Fires burned inside Nahr al-Bared and a pall of smoke hung over the southern part of the camp’s single-storey buildings and narrow streets into which the remaining militants have withdrawn.
   Their original stronghold in the ‘new camp’–a high-rise spillover to the north from the original refugee camp whose boundaries were set by the United Nations in 1948 – is now a wasteland of shattered concrete.
   Some 2,000 residents of the camp’s pre-battle population of 31,000 are still inside Nahr Al-Bared, with those who fled now dispersed among other Palestinian camps around the country, mostly at nearby Beddawi.
   Sheikh Mustafa Dawood, who leads Palestinian clerics trying to broker a ceasefire, entered the camp on Friday and met militant spokesman Shahin Shahin who expressed a desire to honour a unilateral truce ‘in the hope of reaching a happy outcome.’

A top US commander said Friday there was a ‘good potential’ to start reducing US troop levels in Iraq early next year after the full force of a military surge is brought to bear against insurgents.
   Lieutenant general, Raymond Odierno; the number two commander in Iraq, offered the upbeat prognosis at the end of the first week of a major open-ended US campaign to uproot al-Qaeda from sanctuaries around Baghdad.
   Odierno said the possible reduction in US forces will depend on whether Iraqi security forces are able to follow through and replace US troops in holding areas now being fought over.
   ‘If you ask me today, I think, by the spring or earlier, they will be ready to take on a larger portion of their security, which means, I think, potentially, we could have a decision to reduce our forces,’ Odierno said.
   ‘You know, I’m not ready to say that’s true,’ he added. ‘But if you ask me today, and the confidence I think I’m going to have in our success here, I think there’s a good potential for that.’
   Odierno’s comments were the most direct expression yet of commanders’ hopes for the multi-faceted campaign launched seven days ago with the arrival of the last of five additional US combat brigades in Iraq.
   Codenamed Operation Thunder, the campaign was expected to last through the summer, Odierno said.
   ‘We are beyond a surge of forces, and we are now into a surge of operations,’ the general said. ‘We have already begun attacking the enemy from multiple directions in a way that I believe he will not be able to resist.’
   The operation has been unfolding over the past week in Baghdad and in insurgent sanctuaries along the Tigris river south of the capital, in Diyala province to the north and east of it, and in western al-Anbar province.

Britain’s next prime minister Gordon Brown apologised for mistakes in intelligence made in the run-up to the Iraq war in a BBC television interview Friday.
   Brown has stressed that he will push for a new emphasis in Iraq when he takes over from current premier Tony Blair on Wednesday but went further than before in his latest comments.
   ‘We have apologised, and I repeat that, for the mistakes that were made in intelligence,’ he said.
   ‘I think we’ve got to be honest about it that mistakes were made at the point of reconstruction after Saddam Hussein fell – mistakes made by all of us in the reconstruction progress,’ he said.
   Brown also said that there would be clearer boundaries between intelligence and politics when he was in office.
   ‘I’m setting in place what I think are far more rigorous procedures so that the intelligence is seen to be different from, if you like, any decision by a politician,’ he added.
   ‘I want people to know that in future, they can be satisfied that, where public information is provided, it has gone through an authoritative process and it is free of political influence.’
   Brown advocated trying to win ‘hearts and minds’ of Muslims in Britain by supporting moderates and attempting to freeze out extremists.
   ‘It’s a different approach that’s got to be taken from now on,’ he said.
   The finance minister, who voted in favour of the war, had previously accepted that ‘mistakes’ were made in Iraq and called for more focus on political reconciliation and economic development.

A British teenager who was banned from wearing a so-called ‘purity ring’ by her school appealed the decision at London’s High Court on Friday.
   Lydia Playfoot, 16, argues that the ban breaches the European Convention on Human Rights, adding that Muslim and Sikh pupils at the school have been allowed to wear headscarves and bracelets as part of their faith.
   In a written statement to the court, she said that the ban ‘does not afford equal rights to Christians.’
   Her school, the Millais School in Horsham, south-east England, denies infringing her human rights, saying that the ring is not an integral part of the Christian faith and violates its uniform policy.
   Headmaster Leon Nettley said in his own statement that the ring ‘is not a Christian symbol and is not required to be worn by any branch within Christianity.’
   Judgement in the case has been reserved to an unspecified later date. The teenager’s legal action is the latest instalment in a long-running debate in Britain over the right to wear religious clothing or symbols in public.
   The father of a 12-year-old girl fought and lost at the same court earlier this year for the right of his daughter to wear the full-face Muslim veil or niqab at her school.
   Playfoot is part of a US-based programme–‘Silver Ring Thing’–in which young people wear a ring engraved with a Biblical verse to show their decision to abstain from sex before marriage.

The US administration is mulling the possibility of closing down the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison camp, but faces major hurdles in deciding what to do with the 375 inmates.
   A White House spokeswoman said on Friday that the US president, George W Bush, himself wanted the closure of the detention facility, located on a sprawling US military enclave in south eastern Cuba.
   ‘This president has been on record over the years as saying he wants to close Guantanamo Bay. He has directed his administration to work towards that end,’ Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said on Friday.
   But she stressed a decision was not imminent, and the White House cancelled a planned meeting on the issue after US media reported the administration was nearing a decision.
   The US government established the camp in the months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, to interrogate prisoners rounded up in Afghanistan and elsewhere as part of the US ‘war on terror.’
   In all, some 800 prisoners have passed through the camp since it opened. About 375 inmates are still held at the naval base, some having spent as long as five years there without being charged.
   ‘I think we’ve got 80 out of 375 that are about to leave – we’re trying to ratchet it down,’ Perino said, adding she was not ‘aware’ of plans to transfer to other detention facilities on US soil any prisoners who could not be extradited.
   Ever since it was first set up, the camp has faced a storm of international and domestic criticism.
   ‘Guantanamo, along with several other American detention facilities abroad, is not only a problem but an international disgrace that every day continues to sully this great nation’s good reputation,’ said US House majority leader Steny Hoyer, a Democrat.
   In June, former US secretary of state Colin Powell said that if it were up to him, the Guantanamo prison camp would be shut down ‘not tomorrow but this afternoon.’
   That, says State Department advisor John Bellinger, is easier said than done.
   The administration would have to find a country willing to accept some 80 detainees it doesn’t intend to keep, determine what kind of trials to hold for another 60 to 80 inmates, and decide what to do with a further 220 it currently doesn’t want to release or put on trial.
   In some cases, discussions with the countries of origin of the prisoners US authorities want to repatriate have been going on for years.
   ‘Countries are willing to criticise and complain about Guantanamo, but few have been willing to help to close it. Many countries are not willing to take their nationals back,’ said Bellinger.
   In the case of members of China’s Uighur ethnic minority, who fear persecution at home, talks have been held with third countries, but Bellinger said only Albania has agreed to accept them.

Despite campaigns to protect civilians in war zones, progress is gradual and failure too obvious in many places in the world, the UN emergency relief coordinator said on Friday.
   John Holmes told the UN Security Council that in many areas, such as Sudan’s Darfur region, Somalia or Afghanistan, ‘We are still failing to make a real and timely difference for the victims on the ground.’
   ‘Lip service is easy. Effective action is much harder,’ Holmes told the council, which devotes a full session twice a year to the issue of protecting civilians.
   Holmes said there were improvements that would have an effect over time, including indictments against killers by the International Criminal Court as well as more robust peacekeeping missions to help protect civilians.
   But the statistics were still horrific, Holmes said.
   In Somalia, fierce fighting in Mogadishu involving heavy weapons between March and early May resulted in the killing of over 400 civilians and the wounding of 700 more, including women, children and the aged. In Afghanistan, 18 children died as a result of attacks by insurgent and multinational forces.
   In Iraq, the United Nations estimates 94 civilians died violently every day through 2006. In the first three months of 2007, 700 civilians were killed and more than 1,200 injured. This week, the bombing of a mosque in Baghdad resulted in the death and injury of over 200 civilians, Holmes said.
   Not all the killing is accidental. Civilians are too often deliberately targeted to create a climate of fear.
   ‘We see this in calculated attacks by Janjaweed and other militias on innocent villagers in Darfur and Chad; in brutal sectarian, ethnic and political violence in Iraq; in large-scale killing and abduction of civilians, particularly women and girls, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,’ Holmes said.
   Too often rape is a weapon of war – documented in Bosnia in the 1990s, in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, in Liberia in the 1990s and now in the Congo and in Darfur.
   ‘Survivors are left with horrific physical and psychological scars,’ Holmes said. In the South Kivu province of the Congo, 27,000 cases of sexual violence were reported in 2005 and 2006 and in March and April this year, 6,000 cases were reported in the eastern region of Ituri.
   The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, reported 9.9 million refugees at the end of 2006, the first increase since 2002, primarily because of people leaving Iraq. A further 24.5 million lost their homes without crossing borders.
   ‘Life in a camp, even when basic needs are met, is a life of misery: inactivity and boredom are profoundly debilitating, and commonly lead to increasing politicisation and militarisation of those concerned,’ Holmes said.
   Jackie Sanders, a US deputy ambassador, drew attention to Myanmar, formerly Burma, where ‘there are widespread reports of serious human rights abuses, including rape, by Burmese military personnel in conflict areas and other ethnic minority areas.’

A top Iranian security official said on Saturday that there was ‘zero chance’ of a US attack on Iran to thwart its nuclear ambitions, the state IRNA news agency reported.
   ‘There is about zero possibility of a US military attack on Iran,’ deputy interior minister Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr said.
   The United States has never ruled out a military option to halt Iran’s controversial nuclear drive, which it claims is a cover for efforts to build the atomic bomb.
   Iran insists it has a right to uranium enrichment to make nuclear fuel as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and says its atomic programme is solely aimed at energy generation.
   An Israeli press report said on Friday that the Jewish state’s army was in training for long distance missions, after agreeing a timetable with the United States for sanctions against Iran’s nuclear programme to work.
   Israel, which considers Iran its number one enemy, is believed to be the only nuclear-armed nation in the Middle East although it has always refused to confirm or deny its nuclear capability.

British premier Tony Blair and his successor Gordon Brown had a furious row after a reference to ‘undistorted competition’ in an EU document was removed at France’s request, media reported Saturday.
   Brown, seen as more Eurosceptic than Blair, went ‘ballistic’ when Blair told him the phrase had been wiped from the preamble of the new European Union treaty, the Daily Telegraph reported.
   The finance minister, who will take over from Blair on Wednesday, called him three times to demand the phrase, removed at the request of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, be reinstated, the paper added.
   A ‘chastened’ Blair was forced to return to the negotiating table and demand a new protocol guaranteeing powers to regulate cartels and anti-trust issues were not affected, the Guardian said.
   Some 13 references to competition remain in the treaty, though.

Russia on Friday stuck to its opposition to a new Security Council draft resolution offering new talks on Kosovo’s future over the next 120 days before a UN plan to grant independence to the Serbian province is implemented.
   US deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff told reporters that the council’s 15 members held a ‘good discussion’ earlier Friday on the revised draft and agreed to have their experts pore over it Monday.
   Wednesday Britain, France and the United States circulated an amended text among council members that offered the 120-day pause to allow Belgrade and Kosovo’s Albanian majority to resume talks for a mutually acceptable solution.
   Several diplomats said a council vote on the text was unlikely before a scheduled meeting between the US president, George W Bush, and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine early next month.