North Korea’s reclusive leader Kim Jong-Il unexpectedly welcomed visiting South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun on Tuesday, raising hopes for a summit aimed at ending half a century of hostility.
   Kim, stiff and unsmiling in his trademark military-style brown jumpsuit, greeted Roh with a handshake in the North’s capital Pyongyang, where tens of thousands of people dressed in their finest lined the streets to cheer.
   ‘Long life! Long life!’ they chanted, waving artificial bouquets of the national flower known as Kimjongilia.
   Roh, paying only the second visit to Pyongyang by a South Korean leader since the peninsula’s division some six decades ago, was originally scheduled to be greeted only by de facto head of state Kim Yong-Nam.
   ‘This is a good sign,’ a South Korean presidential official said in Seoul. ‘With Chairman Kim showing up in person to greet the president, the North side showed its sincerity toward the summit.’
   In a prepared arrival statement, Roh hailed a new mood of reconciliation between the neighbours which remain technically at war from the 1950-53 Korean conflict.
   ‘Our painful history has reminded us of the importance of peace,’ Roh said. ‘Now is the time for the South and North to join hands to establish a new history of peace.’
   North Korean state media said Pyongyang was ‘in a festive mood’ and the summit with its arch-rival was of ‘weighty significance.’
   The summit is aimed at ‘opening up a new phase for achieving peace on the Korean peninsula, prosperity common to the nation and national reunification,’ the state-controlled Korean Central News Agency said.
   However analysts predict the three-day summit will be heavy on symbolism but short on substance. Roh, who leaves office next year, has already said he is unlikely to focus on North Korea’s nuclear programme, fearing to spoil the atmosphere.
   The summit comes amid an upbeat mood in six-nation negotiations on disarming North Korea, which tested an atomic bomb a year ago.
   Unlike his predecessor Kim Dae-Jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for paying the first visit by a South Korean leader to Pyongyang in 2000, Roh travelled by land.
   In a carefully choreographed ceremony broadcast live, Roh walked across a yellow strip in the Demilitarised Zone dividing the two Koreas, stepping over the world’s last Cold War frontier.
   ‘After I return home, many more people will do likewise. Then this line of division will finally be erased and the barrier will break down,’ he said. Tens of thousands of North Koreans waited on roads and waved as Roh’s entourage drove into Pyongyang.
   Hundreds of civilians – men in dark suits and women in colourful hanbok traditional gowns – attended the formal welcoming ceremony, where a military honour guard goose-stepped with fixed bayonets.
   Roh was later Tuesday to hold talks with Kim Yong-Nam before his summit Wednesday with Kim Jong-Il. He was expected to deliver gifts for Kim including giant flat-screen TVs and DVDs made in the vastly more prosperous South.

India’s main communist party issued a fresh warning to the government over a controversial nuclear pact with the United States, urging it be put on hold until parliament convenes at the end of next month.
   The new deadline by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), which has opposed the landmark deal and threatened to withdraw crucial support to the government over it, came at the end of four days of talks among its top leadership.
   The party had last month asked the government not to pursue the deal for six months and warned of a political crisis if it went ahead. But prime minister Manmohan Singh’s government had refused to buckle under that threat.
   The government ‘should not proceed further on the next steps with regard to the nuclear deal till it can be discussed in the winter session of parliament’, a party resolution said.
   CPI(M) chief Prakash Karat said the left parties and the government were making an attempt to ‘grapple’ with the row through a joint panel formed in August.
   ‘Let us make that effort,’ he told a news conference. ‘I am not saying this will achieve anything. But at the same time we are very clear that they should not proceed to the next step without resolving these issues before the committee.
   ‘What we will do next we will tell the country when the time comes,’ he said in the party’s eastern stronghold of Kolkata.
   The nuclear pact, first agreed in principle in 2005, aims to help India meet its soaring energy needs by giving it access to US fuel and reactors even though New Delhi has tested nuclear weapons and not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
   But the left says the deal compromises India’s sovereignty and seeks to weaken New Delhi’s independent foreign policy. With the government refusing to give in, the crisis has raised the prospect of early elections next year.
   After the crisis escalated in August, the government and the left parties formed a panel to study the deal and address communist concerns in what was largely seen as an exercise to buy time.

At least 1,000 people picked up when security forces in Myanmar cracked down on mass protests have been detained on a campus in Yangon, UN and regime officials said Tuesday.
   A senior UN official said he was concerned about reports that the detainees, including some 500 Buddhist monks who have reportedly stopped eating, were being moved to another location, heightening fears for their well-being.
   A Myanmar official said up to 1,700 people were detained in a windowless building on the campus of the Government Technical Institute.
   The group included about 200 women, and at least one Buddhist novice monk believed to be 10 years old, he added.
   They were being kept on the campus inside a warehouse, where the monks have been disrobed and many of them were refusing to eat, he added.
   Some have simply refused to accept food from the military, or rejected it because the food arrives in the afternoon when monks are barred by religious oath from eating, the official said.
   Tony Banbury, Asia regional director for the UN World Food Programme, said the United Nations was concerned by reports that the detainees were being moved to a new and unknown location.
   He said in Bangkok that the United Nations in Myanmar had received confirmation that about 1,000 people were detained at the institute, held in what Banbury described as military barracks.
   ‘There are reports now that those people – numbering perhaps around 1,000, including monks, students, etc – have been moved outside those barracks to an undetermined location,’ he said.
   ‘Of course there is some concern by UN agencies about what has happened to these people, what is the condition they are now being held in – do they have access for instance by the Red Cross,’ he added.
   ‘The United Nations inside Myanmar did receive reports that the conditions in this Government Technical Institute were very difficult for the detainees – no sanitary facilities, etc.
   ‘And so there are of course concerns about the conditions that the detainees were being kept in,’ he added.

Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto said on Monday that she might allow a US military strike inside Pakistan to eliminate al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden if she were the country’s leader.
   ‘I would hope that I would be able to take Osama bin Laden myself without depending on the Americans.
   But if I couldn’t do it, of course we are fighting this war together and (I) would seek their cooperation in eliminating him,’ Bhutto said in an interview on BBC World News America.
   Bhutto, who has vowed to return to Pakistan on October 18 after eight years of exile, was speaking less than a week before an October 6 election that president Pervez Musharraf is expected to win despite his slumping popularity.
   She has been in talks with Musharraf about a post-election power-sharing deal that would shore up his position, which has become more precarious amid violent clashes with Islamist militants.
   US intelligence officials believe bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders are being protected by tribal leaders in an area of northwestern Pakistan near the Afghanistan border that is largely inaccessible even to Pakistani forces.
   Bush administration officials fear that unilateral US action against the al-Qaeda safe haven could destabilise Pakistan and jeopardise the government of Musharraf, a key US ally in Washington’s struggle against militants.
   Asked by the BBC whether she would agree to let the Americans take action against bin Laden in Pakistan, Bhutto said her decision would depend on the strength of the evidence.

An audit of Cambodia’s genocide tribunal has highlighted serious hiring flaws and suggests that the UN’s development agency UNDP, which oversees millions in donor funding, should quit the court.
   The audit was commissioned by the UNDP last year following allegations that some Cambodian staff had paid for their positions on the UN-backed court, which was established to try former leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime. But it was only made public late Monday amid growing pressure for its release.
   The audit details a tangled bureaucracy inside the Cambodian side of the joint-court, rife with unqualified staff, bloated salaries and the creation of dozens of unnecessary jobs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
   ‘If the Cambodian side does not agree to the essential measures that are, from UNDP perspective, necessary to ensure the integrity and success of the project, then serious considerations should be given to withdrawing from participation in the project altogether,’ the audit said.
   It goes on to recommend that all Cambodian contracts be nullified, and new employees hired under closer UNDP supervision.
   The UNDP says the audit is a private document and would not comment, but tribunal staff maintain that they have nothing to hide and have responded to most of the findings.
   One official said the court, which posted the audit on its web site, had always wanted the findings to be made public.
   But the official also dismissed the audit’s recommendation that the UNDP withdraw from the court.
   ‘Imagine if they were to leave this late in the game, 18 months on. It would be disastrous,’ the official said.
   The court is currently investigating five people for crimes committed during the communist Khmer Rouge’s 1975-79 rule over Cambodia, during which up to two million people died.
   So far two suspects, former prison chief Duch and regime ideologue Nuon Chea, have been detained.

Nepal’s Maoists were Tuesday facing fresh allegations of using strong-arm tactics against the press after trade union loyalists forced the closure of the country’s two largest newspapers.
   The Kantipur newspaper and its English-language sister paper the Kathmandu Post have not been published for the past two days after trade unionists allied to the ex-rebels damaged printing presses in Kathmandu and the central town of Chitwan.
   ‘This is an attack on press freedom,’ Kantipur’s senior editor Gunaraj Luitel said.
   The Maoists ‘want a totalitarian state and the free press is a hurdle for them,’ he said, adding the All Nepal Communication, Printing and Publication Workers’ Union had also threatened to beat up the paper’s director.
   The Maoist-allied ANCPPWU is making a list of demands including veto-power over all newspaper appointments and better facilities for its members.
   But Ameet Dhakal, a senior editor with the Kathmandu Post, said the industrial action was political.
   ‘They have started to put the pressure on because the media houses do not carry news that favours them,’ he said of the ex-rebels.
   Nepal’s Maoists have been accused of using mafia-like intimidation tactics in Kathmandu since they signed up for peace in November 2006 and formally ended their decade-long civil war.
   Critics of the former insurgents say they have merely changed from being jungle rebels to urban thugs. The Maoists themselves insist the reports of their loyalists using violence are either isolated or exaggerated.

A suicide bomber blew up a police bus in Kabul on Tuesday, killing 13 people including a mother and her two children in a new Taliban attack just days after another claimed 30 lives in the Afghan capital.
   The rush-hour suicide blast in the west of the city ripped off the sides and roof of the bus, which was smeared in blood and flesh. Parts of seats were flung into the trees. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed said the militia was responsible for the carnage. It also claimed Friday’s attack on a defence ministry bus that killed 30 – one of the bloodiest bombings of the insurgency.
   The attacker, strapped with explosives, had tried to board the bus but a policeman on the vehicle became suspicious and shot him, interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said.

The Nepali government is to withdraw half of the 2,000 soldiers guarding King Gyanendra’s sprawling palace after his controversial trip to a temple to seek blessings from a ‘living goddess,’ a minister said on Tuesday.
   The move came two days after the 60-year-old monarch sought the blessings of Kumari, who some believe to be a ‘living goddess,’ in an annual ritual considered important to preserving the king’s power.
   The surprise gesture by the king, who has been stripped of almost all powers since being forced to end his absolute rule last year, has sparked criticism from political parties including the Maoists who want immediate abolition of the monarchy.
   The government says the king had provoked a political confrontation by undertaking the unauthorised visit to the temple. The prime minister, Girija Prasad Koirala, had already performed the ritual and replaced the monarch at the ceremony.
   ‘The number of remaining soldiers will also be reduced gradually,’ the peace and reconstruction minister, Ram Chandra Poudel, said.

The private security firm Blackwater USA has been involved in nearly 200 shootings in Iraq since 2005, according to a US Congress report that depicts the company’s employees as dangerously out of control.
   The report, released Monday, says Blackwater has covered up fatal shootings involving its staff, is the first to shoot in most incidents, and has joined in the US military force tactical operations.
   It is also highly critical of the US State Department for failing to restrain Blackwater’s activities and helping cover up some of its wrongdoings-even protecting a drunken Blackwater employee who shot dead a guard of Iraqi vice president, Adil Abd-al-Mahdi.
   The report was issued Monday by the house of representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform ahead of hearings to be held into Blackwater’s work in Iraq and in particular a September 16 shooting incident in a crowded Baghdad square that killed at least 10 Iraqis.
   Nearly two weeks after the bloody shootout, the circumstances remain unclear, with Iraqis angry and indignant and the country’s leader having demanded Blackwater’s expulsion.
   The largest private security firm operating in Iraq, Blackwater has received more than one billion dollars in US government contracts since 2001.
   The report quotes the US military commanders as saying that Blackwater staff, ‘act like cowboys’ with ‘very quick trigger fingers’.
   Citing company information, it says Blackwater has been involved in at least 195 ‘escalation of force’ incidents since 2005 and that use of force is ‘frequent and extensive, resulting in significant casualties and property damage.’
   ‘Blackwater’s contract to provide protective services to the State Department provides that Blackwater can engage in only defensive use of force. In over 80 per cent of the shooting incidents, however, Blackwater reports that its forces fired the first shots,’ the report says.
   It noted that because Blackwater guards are usually shooting from moving vehicles and do not stop to count casualties, the company itself has reported only 16 casualties in all the incidents since 2005, and 162 cases of property damage.
   But it says there are multiple incidents in which Iraqi casualties went unreported, including one in which a bystander was shot in the head, and another in which a Blackwater team driving on the wrong side of the road caused a red Opel to crash and left the car behind ‘in a ball of flames.’
   The report cites two incidents in 2004 when Blackwater contractors joined in military actions, including a firefight in Najaf alongside US and Spanish forces, and another when a Blackwater helicopter team helped a US military unit take control of a mosque, firing at ground targets from the helicopter.
   The document criticizes the State Department, which paid Blackwater more than 832 million dollars from 2004-2006, for helping mask problems sparked by Blackwater activities and for not keeping the firm under a tighter leash.
   ‘Even in cases involving the death of Iraqis, it appears that the State Department’s primary response was to ask Blackwater to make monetary payments to ‘put the matter behind us,’ rather that to insist upon accountability or to investigate Blackwater personnel for potential criminal liability,’ the Congressional report says.
   It cited the case of the drunken Blackwater employee who shot a guard of al-Mahdi in the International Zone in Baghdad on December 24, 2006.

Ukraine slid toward renewed political turmoil Tuesday as Moscow-backed and pro-western rivals both claimed victory in the country’s parliamentary election.
   The counting of final votes turned the focus to small parties that could hold the key to who forms a ruling coalition.
   The pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, and reformist firebrand Yulia Tymoshenko, who wants the premier’s post, both claimed victory in Sunday’s election.
   In a sign of rising nerves, Yanukovych’s Regions Party bolstered its presence on Kiev’s central square, the scene of countless demonstrations over the last three years in this ex-Soviet republic.
   Their blue tents were dotted across the historic plaza known as the Maidan, apparently in a bid to control the territory.
   Pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko, who led the 2004 pro-democracy Orange Revolution with Tymoshenko, ordered a police investigation into possible ballot fraud in the east of the country, Yanukovych’s stronghold.
   ‘Those committing fraud will be punished,’ Yushchenko said.
   With 94 per cent of ballots counted Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, who promised before the election to renew their Orange coalition, saw their combined parties gather 45 per cent of the vote.
   Yanukovych’s Regions Party was set to be the biggest in parliament with 34.2 per cent, but even if he managed to link up with two smaller parties his coalition would only control 43.5 per cent of the vote-still 1.5 percentage points behind the Orange coalition.
   The close result meant that every vote counted, with the outcome potentially depending on whether one more small party, the Socialists, managed to enter parliament.

Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced in Baghdad on Tuesday that 1,000 British troops could be home from Iraq by Christmas and Iraqi forces could take control of Basra within two months.
   ‘I believe that by the end of the year the British forces which have been 5,500 can be reduced to 4,500 and by Christmas 1,000 of our troops can be brought back to the UK for other purposes,’ Brown said on his maiden visit to Iraq as prime minister.
   Asked if there would be a further reduction in early 2008, Brown replied that there would be no further announcement for the time being.
   ‘We will make our decisions in the future based on our assessment on the ground,’ he told reporters outside the British embassy in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone.
   He was upbeat about prospects of the Iraqi forces taking control of the southern province of Basra, where British troops have been deployed since the US-led invasion in 2003.
   ‘I believe that within the next two months we can move to provincial Iraqi control, that is Iraqis taking responsibility of their own security,’ the prime minister said.
   The visit, Brown’s first to Iraq since taking over as prime minister from Tony Blair on June 27, comes one month after Britain pulled its force of 500 troops from Basra and handed over the southern city to Iraqi control.
   On arriving in the Iraqi capital early Tuesday, Brown went immediately into talks with Iraqi counterpart Nuri al-Maliki and then vice-president, Tareq al-Hashemi.
   He said afterwards he had spoken to Maliki about political reconciliation and had told him Britain was looking for further efforts to be made by all parties in Iraq to come together.
   The reconstruction of Iraq, he added, was ‘vital’ and Britain was proposing a Basra investment and development agency to boost employment and increase security.
   Brown later went into talks with top US general in Iraq David Petraeus, American ambassador, Ryan Crocker, and Britain’s General Bill Rollo.
   He said he would later fly to Basra to meet British troops.
   The British military said on Tuesday that Britain expects to hand control of Basra over to Iraqi forces this autumn, hopefully by the end of November.

A majority of Americans do not want to give the president, George W Bush, the 190-billion-dollar he has requested for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll out Tuesday.
   While 27 per cent said they would give a green light to the funding, a hefty 43 per cent of those surveyed said they wanted the budget for those conflicts reduced sharply; and another 23 per cent said they wanted the funding lowered somewhat. Three per cent said no funding should be approved and three per cent had no opinion, the poll found.
   The survey also shed light on US voters’ discontent with Bush and Congress.
   Bush’s approval rating stands at 33 per cent, equal to his career low in Post-ABC polls.
   ‘And just 29 per cent approve of the job Congress is doing, its lowest approval rating in this poll since November 1995, when Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. It also represents a 14-point drop since Democrats took control in January,’ the Post added.
   The US Senate Monday passed a mammoth 648 billion dollar defence policy bill, shorn of attempts by disappointed anti-war Democrats to dictate Bush’s Iraq strategy.
   The bill included around 128 billion dollars for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate.
   The legislation passed by 92 votes to three after Democrats lost several attempts to dictate US troop levels in Iraq.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said on Monday he would run for parliament and had a ‘realistic’ chance of becoming prime minister, in a shock announcement that could herald fundamental change in the way Russia is governed.
   ‘I gratefully accept your proposal to head the United Russia list,’ Putin told a pre-election congress of the party of power, United Russia, bringing hundreds of delegates to their feet with a roar of applause.
   Putin said that if the party triumphed in the December 2 vote and a worthy successor took his place as president in 2008, he could become prime minister.
   ‘Heading the government is a completely realistic idea, but it would require at least two conditions,’ he said.
   The first condition is that United Russia wins a majority in the State Duma is almost guaranteed, pollsters say. Putin said the second condition was the election of an ‘orderly, capable and effective’ president in March 2008.
   His announcement stunned political observers in Moscow and came after years of speculation about what the Russian leader, who enjoys approval ratings over 80 per cent, would do after his second presidential term ends next year.
   Kremlin-linked political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky said that Putin’s assuming the post of prime minister would be ‘the most politically logical solution’ to how to use his authority after he lays down the reins of the presidency.
   The resulting split in power between the president and the prime minister would be ‘a radical advance in pluralism’ for Russia, where there has been no power centre outside the Kremlin since Boris Yeltsin challenged then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, said Pavlovsky.
   ‘We can forget our favourite cliche that in Russia, the president is the tsar,’ Pavlovsky said, speaking on the sidelines of the congress after Putin’s announcement. The United States, which has criticised of the state of democracy in Russia, issued a guarded response to Putin’s announcement.
   ‘We saw the reports and this is ultimately a matter for the people of Russia to decide,’ white house spokeswoman Dana Perino said, adding that Washington hoped Russia’s December 2 election would be ‘free, fair and democratic.’
   Many questions remained about how Putin could become prime minister, which under current Russian law would require his successor to appoint him to the post.
   Putin’s preferred successor is all but guaranteed to win the March presidential vote, though the question of whom he will choose is as hotly debated as his future role is.
   The prospect of Putin heading the government was raised by party delegate Gennady Kotelnikov, rector of a regional medical university, after a series of other delegates implored Putin to somehow retain power after March 2008.
   Meanwhile, Putin’s decision to lead the United Russia into parliamentary elections continues a relationship of mutual support that began with the party’s formation in 2001.
   The Kremlin formed the party to support Putin after he took power in 2000. It won a vast majority in 2003 State Duma elections and has unwaveringly backed him since.

An Iranian university has invited the US president, George W Bush, to talk on campus, a week after his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was given a frosty reception at a US institute, the press reported on Monday.
   The head of Ferdowsi University in Iran’s second city of Mashhad, one of the oldest universities in the country, said Bush should visit to answer questions from students and lecturers on human rights and terrorism.
   ‘President Bush is invited to give a speech and respond to numerous questions, must notably about human rights, terrorism and the Holocaust,’ said university president, Alireza Afshour, according to the government daily Iran.
   ‘This is what president Ahmadinejad did, despite the lack of respect shown towards him,’ he added.