Pakistan’s ruling party said Thursday that it has buried its rivalry with a group of former supporters of the president, Pervez Musharraf, further isolating the US-backed president.
   However, it was unclear if the Mutahida Quami Movement would join the coalition government that took office this week, or how far it will back plans to cut the president’s powers.
   Asif Ali Zardari, the widower and political successor of slain ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto whose party leads the new government, met late Wednesday with leaders of the MQM.
   Farhatullah Babar, a spokesman for Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party, said the two sides ‘agreed to bury the bitter past in order to start a new era of friendship.’
   Asked whether the MQM could join the coalition government, Babar said only that the two parties had established an eight-member committee to ‘explore how to further enhance cooperation.’
   The MQM controls the southern city of Karachi, Pakistan’s business hub and its main port, and was a key member of the coalition government that supported Musharraf’s military rule.
   It has a long and bitter rivalry with the People’s Party, which dominates the surrounding province of Sindh. Benazir and others implicated the MQM in violence that killed about 40 people during an anti-Musharraf rally in Karachi last May.
   But it has distanced itself from the president and responded to overtures from Zardari since opposition parties swept February parliamentary elections.
   The two parties are exploring cooperation in Sindh, where the People’s Party already holds a slender majority in the provincial assembly. But its inclusion in the federal government appears trickier.
   Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Zardari’s main coalition partner, has already raised doubts about that prospect and is demanding an inquiry into the May 12 carnage in Karachi.
   ‘Our party leadership has already said it has some reservations about working with the MQM at the central level, and I have nothing to add,’ said Sadiq ul-Farooq, a senior member of Sharif’s party.
   Baber Ghauri, a senator for the MQM, said Zardari’s visit to his party’s headquarters in Karachi was a helpful gesture whose ‘impact would also be felt at the federal level.’
   Ghauri refused to comment on whether his party will support the government’s planned moves to strip the president of his power to dissolve parliament and restore Supreme Court judges purged by Musharraf in November.
   Musharraf declared emergency rule to oust the judges, who were about to rule on the legality of his disputed re-election as president the month before.

A Buddhist Chinese dissident outspoken on Tibet and other sensitive topics was jailed for three-and-a-half years on Thursday, a conviction likely to become a focus of rights campaigns ahead of the Beijing Olympics.
   Hu Jia, 34, was found guilty of ‘inciting subversion of state power’ for criticising the ruling Communist Party, a verdict at which the United States expressed dismay.
   ‘In this Olympic year, we urge China to seize the opportunity to put its best face forward and take steps to improve its record on human rights and religious freedom,’ the US Embassy said in a statement.
   The official Xinhua news agency said Hu had made a ‘confession of crime and acceptance of punishment,’ leading the court to issue a relatively light sentence. Hu’s two lawyers said he had acknowledged ‘excesses.’
   ‘In the end, I think that he came to accept that some of his statements were contrary to the law as it stands,’ said defence lawyer Li Jinsong.

The prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has assured Malaysians that he will stay in power, a report said Thursday, as some in his ruling party pressed him to resign after heavy losses in recent polls.
   The opposition trounced Abdullah’s Barisan Nasional coalition in the March 8 ballot, leading some within his United Malays National Organisation party to call for him to step down.
   ‘I am here. I am here. They speculate that I want to run away. Why should I resign?’ Abdullah was quoted as saying by The Star newspaper.
   ‘My government has got a strong majority (although) not the two-third majority. Why must I run away from my entrusted responsibilities,’ he said.
   A three-party opposition alliance led by former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim seized four states along the country’s west coast in the vote, while the Islamic party PAS, part of the alliance, kept control of Kelantan state.
   Since the loss, Abdullah’s arch rival in UMNO, former leader Mahathir Mohamad, has urged UMNO members to rebel against the premier.
   ‘I ask (Abdullah) to resign,’ Mahathir, who ruled Malaysia for 22 years, told a gathering of at least 2,000 UMNO members on Tuesday.
   Abdullah, 68, has claimed a mandate to rule, but observers say he is operating on borrowed time.
   Senior lawmaker Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah has said he may challenge Abdullah’s leadership in the December party election, but some UMNO leaders have called for a special meeting before then to push through a vote of no confidence against the premier.

Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers said Thursday they were resisting a major military thrust into rebel-held territory and claimed to have killed at least 25 government troops in two days of fighting.
   The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam said they pushed back security forces from the Catholic pilgrim area of Madhu in the coastal district of Mannar where heavy fighting has raged in recent weeks.
   ‘The Sri Lanka army adamantly initiated several clashes within 1,500 meters of the church premises,’ a statement said. ‘The LTTE defenders successfully repelled the Sri Lanka army offenders.’
   The separatists added that more than 90 soldiers had been wounded and placed their own losses at one killed and three hurt over the two days.
   The LTTE statement came as the military said they killed 42 Tiger rebels for the loss of one soldier in the same area on Wednesday.
   The latest defence ministry casualty claims bring to at least 2,562 the number of rebels said to have been killed by security forces since January.
   The ministry has reported losing 152 soldiers in the same period.

Malaysia’s attorney general Thursday said five detained ethnic Indian activists should not be freed as they are a threat to national security.
   Abdul Gani Patail told the country’s highest court that the prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, had ordered their arrest under the tough Internal Security Act following a comprehensive investigation.
   ‘The prime minister... had ordered their arrest (last December) upon a thorough police investigation which deemed them as a threat to national security,’ he said.
   Gani was responding to arguments by the lawyer of the five, who said Wednesday that their detention was illegal and demanded their immediate release.

North Korea’s military on Thursday threatened unspecified countermeasures after South Korea refused to apologise for remarks by its top general, a news report said, as cross-border tensions escalated.
   ‘We will take military countermeasures,’ the North’s chief delegate to inter-Korean military talks, Lieutenant General Kim Yong-Chol, was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency in a notice sent to the South.
   There was no official response to the comments. Media reports said the North’s powerful military might close the border to cut off exchanges.
   The communist state had demanded an apology for remarks made last week by South Korea’s new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Kim Tae-Young. It interpreted these as hinting at a preemptive military strike.
   Seoul’s defence ministry on Wednesday rejected the apology demand and urged the North to stop raising tensions.
   ‘The South’s reply made yesterday (Wednesday) was nothing but shenanigans,’ Kim Yong-Chol was quoted as saying by Yonhap.
   A defence ministry spokesman confirmed that a message had been received from the North but declined to specify the contents.
   ‘It is not yet clear what the North meant by military countermeasures. Related agencies are now analysing its contents,’ a senior government official was quoted as saying on the website of Seoul’s Dong-A Ilbo newspaper.
   Some officials said Pyongyang may halt all exchanges with Seoul, according to Dong-A. The military controls border crossings.
   The South Korean president, Lee Myung-Bak, a conservative who took office February 25, has angered the North by adopting a tougher line on relations after a decade-long ‘sunshine’ engagement policy under liberal presidents.
   He says he will link economic aid to the North’s progress in nuclear disarmament and will raise its widely-criticised human rights policy.

There was still no official word on the result of Zimbabwe’s presidential election on Thursday as Robert Mugabe fought to survive the biggest crisis of his 28-year rule.
   No results have emerged from last Saturday’s key vote but the electoral commission said Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF had lost control of parliament for the first time in nearly three decades.
   The opposition Movement for Democratic Change said its tallies showed Mugabe had also lost the presidential vote and said he should concede defeat.
   Respected South African financial daily Business Day reported that Mugabe had admitted to family and advisers that he had lost and was weighing up whether to throw in the towel or contest a runoff against MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
   The MDC says Tsvangirai has won the absolute majority needed to avoid a runoff but ZANU-PF and independent projections say he will fall short.
   ‘Mugabe has conceded to his closest advisers, the army, the police and intelligence chiefs. He has also told his family and personal advisers that he has lost the election,’ Business Day quoted an unidentified source as saying.
   The newspaper said hardliners in Mugabe’s government wanted him to see the contest through to the bitter end but personal advisers and his family want Mugabe to quit. Analysts believe he will go down fighting in a runoff.
   Mugabe’s aides have angrily dismissed the MDC’s claim that it had won the presidential poll, hinting the opposition could be punished for publishing its own tallies despite warnings this would be regarded as an attempted coup.
   Mugabe, known for his fierce and defiant rhetoric, has not been seen in public since voting.
   Harare’s UN ambassador said Mugabe had no intention of living outside Zimbabwe.
   Asked by BBC television if he would go to another country to spend his retirement, Boniface Chidyausiku said: ‘Robert Mugabe is Zimbabwean. Born, bred in Zimbabwe. He has lived his life to work for Zimbabwe. Why should he choose another country?’
   Final results of the election for parliament’s lower house showed the MDC won 99 seats. ZANU-PF won 97 and a breakaway MDC faction won 10. One independent candidate won a seat. The outcome of the senate vote will be issued next.
   All the signs are that Mugabe, a liberation war leader still respected in Africa, is in the worst trouble of his rule after facing an unprecedented challenge in the elections.
   Widely blamed for the economic collapse of his once prosperous nation, Mugabe has faced growing discontent with the world’s highest inflation rate of more than 100,000 per cent, a virtually worthless currency and severe food and fuel shortages.

NATO leaders sought ways to console Ukraine and Georgia at a summit on Thursday after failing to agree to open the door of the Western military alliance to the two former Soviet republics.
   A new era beckoned for the alliance after the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said he wanted a decision by the end of this year on France’s reintegration into the NATO military structures it left in 1966.
   ‘At the end of the French presidency the moment will have come to conclude this process and to take the necessary decisions for France to take its full place in NATO’s structures,’ Sarkozy said, according to the text of a speech circulated by his office on the summit’s second day.
   France holds the EU presidency in the second half of this year. It has said it wants a strengthening of European defence integration as a condition for rejoining the integrated military command from which General Charles de Gaulle withdrew it more than four decades ago in a row over command arrangements.
   France has remained a major contributor to NATO operations, but the step would be a potent symbol of what Washington hopes will be a new rapprochement with France on a range of security matters.
   The 26 leaders also faced concerns about stability in the Balkans after Greece blocked an invitation to Macedonia to join NATO because of a row over the former Yugoslav republic’s name.
   The double setback for the US president, George W Bush, on the first day of his final NATO summit overshadowed agreement to invite two other Balkan countries – Croatia and Albania – to join the 26-nation defence alliance, and progress on extra troops for Afghanistan.
   ‘It’s not a question of defeat. I think the question will be if the alliance can come together and show that the door remains open,’ a senior US official said after the leaders failed to reach consensus on admitting Ukraine and Georgia to NATO’s Membership Action Plan – a gateway to eventual entry.
   Opening the second day of the summit, the NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said the door of the alliance remained open to European democracies.
   ‘That hasn’t changed,’ he said. ‘We have confirmed here in Bucharest that the NATO family will continue to enlarge.’
   Germany and France had led opposition to the move, saying it was premature when public support for NATO was barely 30 per cent in Ukraine, and Georgia did not control all of its territory because of frozen conflicts with Russian-backed separatists.
   NATO spokesman James Appathurai played down any impression that Russia had succeeded in blocking the decision, saying the allies were united in rejecting any outside veto or influence.
   NATO leaders haggled on Thursday over the precise language of what to offer the two aspirants, with one option being a decision to fix a date to review their MAP requests, one NATO diplomat said.
   Although France combined to deflect Bush’s drive to extend the eastern borders of NATO right up to Russia’s frontiers, it already delivered a boost for the alliance in its most challenging security mission in Afghanistan.
   Sarkozy confirmed that France confirmed at a NATO summit on Thursday that France would send a battalion of troops to the east of Afghanistan as part of efforts to bolster the 47,000-strong peacekeeping force.
   ‘I have decided to reinforce the French military presence with one battalion deployed in the east region,’ he said.
   A NATO spokesman said that would enable the United States to redeploy forces to the south, in turn meeting Canada’s conditions to keep troops in Afghanistan, where they have suffered heavy casualties at the hands of Islamist guerrillas.

A crossing point symbolising the decades-old division of Cyprus opened to great fanfare in the heart of the capital Nicosia on Thursday, underscoring a new drive to reunify the Mediterranean island.
   Coloured balloons were released into the sky to mark the opening of Ledra Street, a key thoroughfare in the world’s last divided capital, that has been sealed since intercommunal violence erupted in 1963.
   Nicosia mayor Eleni Mavrou, a Greek Cypriot, described the move as a ‘first step’ towards the reunification of the island, which has been partitioned along ethnic lines since Turkey invaded in 1974.
   ‘This 70 metres remained frozen in time, reminding us of the conflict on this divided island, but there is a renewed sense of hope that this opening will lead to progress,’ she said.
   There was a carnival atmosphere as crowds of people wanting to cross massed in the heart of Nicosia’s Old Town on both sides of the UN-patrolled buffer zone. that divides the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities.

The Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern, one of Europe’s longest serving leaders, announced Wednesday that he will resign next month amid growing pressure over alleged financial irregularities.
   The 56-year-old, re-elected for a record third term last year after overseeing a decade-long economic boom, denied any wrongdoing but said he did not want the charges to distract the focus of government.
   ‘It is my intention to tender my resignation to president Mary McAleese by Tuesday 6 May,’ Ahern, nicknamed the ‘Teflon Taoiseach’ for his ability to survive scandals until now, told a hastily-arranged press conference.
   ‘I know in my heart of hearts that I’ve done no wrong and wronged no-one,’ he said.

Barack Obama tried his hand at bowling, bottle-fed a calf at a dairy farm and toured a chocolate factory as he sought to connect with voters in Pennsylvania, a crucial state in the fight for the Democratic US presidential nomination.
   Ending a six-day bus tour on Wednesday in a state where his rival Hillary Clinton is heavily favoured, the Illinois senator hoped to erode her advantages, especially with white working-class voters who have been slower to warm up to him than the young people and more affluent voters who have flocked to his rallies.
   The Columbia University and Harvard-educated Obama, known for his sweeping oratory, sought to show a more down-to-earth side of himself, talking of his upbringing by a single mother and his early career as a community organiser in Chicago helping laid-off steelworkers.
   Obama, who would be the first black president, leads in a tight national race with Hillary, who would be the first woman to win the White House, for the right to represent the party against presumed Republican nominee John McCain in the November presidential election.
   But publicly, at least, he’s not raising expectations of a win in the state’s April 22 nominating contest. Most recent polls have put him behind Hillary, although the race has tightened.
   ‘We are the underdog in Pennsylvania,’ Obama told voters in Johnstown. ‘We may not be able to win.’