The Turkish parliament met Wednesday to vote on authorising the government to order military strikes against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, as Baghdad pleaded for time and promised to purge the militants.
   Scrambling to dissuade Ankara from military action, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, said he was determined to act against the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which attacks Turkey from its bases in northern Iraq, the Anatolia news agency reported.
   Maliki told his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the telephone that Baghdad ‘is absolutely determined to end the activities and the presence’ of the PKK in Iraq, the semi-official agency said, quoting unnamed sources.
   He said he had given orders to the autonomous Kurdish administration in northern Iraq to take action against the PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community, the report said.
   Maliki asked for ‘a new opportunity’ to resolve the issue through diplomatic means and proposed talks.
   Erdogan responded he would welcome talks with Iraqi officials, but warned that Ankara cannot tolerate any ‘further waste of time,’ Anatolia said.
   Turkish lawmakers were expected Wednesday to authorise the government to order one or multiple cross-border raids into northern Iraq within a period of one year.
   Erdogan has said the parliamentary authorisation would not mean immediate military action.
   Turkey says the PKK enjoys free movement in northern Iraq, is tolerated by the region’s Kurdish leaders and obtains weapons and explosives there for attacks across the border in Turkey.
   The Iraqi vice president, Tareq al-Hashemi, who held emergency talks with Turkish leaders here Tuesday, said Baghdad should be given time to curb the PKK under an agreement the two countries signed last month.
   ‘Give us time to join forces with Turkey to tackle this problem,’ he said Wednesday before he left Ankara.
   Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, urged Turkey to give up plans of military action and and called on the PKK to end violence.
   The Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq warned that a Turkish incursion would be ‘illegal and a violation of international law.’
   The PKK problem is a ‘Turkish internal problem,’ spokesman Jamal Abdullah insisted.
   Wary of the prospect of fresh turmoil in the conflict-torn country the United States too has repeatedly urged Turkey against any unilateral military action in Iraq.

Former US vice president Al Gore said Wednesday that his Nobel Peace Prize triumph had not altered his intention to stay out of the 2008 presidential race.
   But Gore could still shake up the Democratic Party nomination by endorsing a candidate other than front-runner Hillary Clinton.
   Speculation following the peace prize announcement last week that Gore would run was quashed he told Norwegian broadcaster NRK: ‘I don’t have plans to be a candidate again, so I don’t really see it in that context at all.’
   He added: ‘I’m involved in another kind of campaign. It’s a global campaign to change the way people think about the climate crisis.’ Last month, Gore, 59, said he would likely endorse a Democrat for president before the primary season was over, the Washington Post reported.
   Gore has already met with at least three Democratic hopefuls – senators Barack Obama and Christopher Dodd, and former senator John Edwards, according to the Post. The paper noted that he has not met with Clinton, nor with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a member of president Bill Clinton’s cabinet.
   Gore has been on shaky terms with the Clinton clan for years, starting in the 2000 election when he distanced himself from president Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.
   Gore went on to win the popular vote, but lose the election to Republican George W Bush. Sev-eral US publications at the time reported that Gore privately blam-ed Clinton for losing the election because of Lewinsky and other sc-andals. ‘It seems safe to predict that Gore will not be endorsing the bid of the senator from New York,’ the Post wrote in the weeks before Go-re won the Nobel on October 12.
   ‘A more open question might be whether he would throw his support to Obama – the only candidate in the top tier who, like Gore, opposed the war in Iraq from the start – or another surging contender at a critical moment to try to derail Hillary Clinton’s quest for the nomination.’

Dissidents on the run in military-ruled Myanmar called on the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday to impose a blanket arms and investment ban on the junta to try to force it towards democratic reform.
   In a letter written from hiding to the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, three members of the ‘88 Generation Students Group’ said the generals were duping the international community into thinking they were serious about relaxing their grip.
   ‘This may be the last letter we send to you before our own arrest and torture and we send it with the utmost urgency,’ the trio – Tun Myint Aung, Nilar Thein and Soe Htun – wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters in Bangkok.
   The ‘88 Generation’ was a group of student activists who led a major anti-junta uprising in 1988 eventually crushed by the army with the loss of an estimated 3,000 lives.
   They were also behind the small fuel price protests that snowballed into last month’s monk-led demonstrations against 45 years of military rule in the former Burma. At least 10 people were killed when soldiers were sent in to end the protests.
   Nearly all the leading lights in the group, most of whom spent years behind bars after the 1988 uprising was crushed, have already been arrested in the latest crackdown, still going on despite the international clamour for it to end immediately.
   The official New Light of Myanmar newspaper said 2,927 people had been detained across the country, but only 468 remained in custody, a figure opposition, human rights and exile groups suspect is probably too low.
   The opposition party that won a 1990 election landslide under the leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi only to be denied power by the army, says more than 200 of its members have been rounded up.

Who will lead Russia after president Vladimir Putin steps down next year? Easy, the speaker of parliament said Thursday: Vladimir Putin.
   ‘Vladimir Putin will remain national leader, regardless of the post that he holds,’ wrote Boris Gryzlov, head of the ruling United Russia party, in the government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
   ‘Modern Russia: this is Putin. Russia without Putin: this is a Russia without leadership,’ Gryzlov wrote.
   Russia and foreign capitals around the world have for months been wondering who will succeed Putin after the March 2008 presidential elections. He is barred by the constitution from seeking re-election at the end of his second term.
   Putin is expected to address the issue in some way during an annual televised phone-in with Russians scheduled for Thursday.

Iran on Wednesday said the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, put forward a proposal to break the deadlock over its nuclear programme during his landmark visit to the Islamic republic.
   Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani said Putin had proposed the idea, details of which were not given, during his talks on Tuesday with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. ‘Putin put forward a particular suggestion during his meeting with the supreme leader,’ said Larijani, adding the details would be given at a later date.
   ‘One of the questions evoked in this suggestion are the nuclear activities that we are currently in the process of examining,’ said Larijani, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, plunged Wednesday into a second round of talks with the Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, in an effort to advance preparations for a Middle East summit.
   Shuttling between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in a bid to galvanise the peace process after nearly seven years of deadlock, Rice swept back into the West Bank political of Ramallah to meet Abbas after praying in Bethlehem.
   She is then scheduled to meet the head of Israel’s negotiating team for a forthcoming US-sponsored summit, foreign minister Tzipi Livni, before holding a working dinner with the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, in Jerusalem.
   Rice is seeking to use a five-day visit, her seventh to the Middle East this year, to broker agreement between Israel and the Palestinians on the outlines of a peace deal that the two sides will negotiate after the summit in Annapolis, Maryland, later this autumn.

India’s top national security official has accused Pakistan of trying to stir up Sikh militancy in northern Punjab state, striking a sour note ahead of direct talks this week between the rivals.
   The accusation by national security advisor MK Narayanan came in the wake of a bomb blast Sunday in a packed cinema in the state’s industrial city of Ludhiana that killed six people and injured 32 others.
   ‘There has been a manifest attempt in Pakistan to build up a radical Sikh environment,’ Narayanan was quoted as saying by the Indian Express daily.