Israel was tightlipped on Wednesday over the arrest in the United States of an 84-year-old American suspected of providing it with US military secrets in the 1980s, a new case that has opened old wounds.
   ‘We received an official update from the Americans. We are following the developments,’ the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Arye Mekel, said, a day after suspect Ben-Ami Kadish made an initial appearance in a federal court in New York.
   The case, linked to the Jonathan Pollard spy scandal that has been an irritant in the US-Israel alliance, raised fears in Israel it would cast a pall over president George W Bush’s visit next month to celebrate the Jewish state’s 60th birthday.
   Officials with inside knowledge in Israel of the country’s intelligence services were not denying it may have had a second spy operating in the United States in parallel with Pollard – but they were insisting such espionage ceased long ago.
   ‘The Americans know ... that since Pollard was exposed in 1985, Israel doesn’t recruit agents or receive classified material (in) the United States,’ said Yuval Steinitz, a former chairman of the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee.
   But Danny Yatom, a legislator and a former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said the current affair had touched a nerve with Washington.
   ‘I think what primarily bothers the Americans is the feeling that Israel didn’t tell them the whole truth two decades ago, in 1985, when the Pollard affair exploded,’ Yatom told Israeli Army Radio.
   ‘The Americans asked if there are additional people that Israel ran or are running in the United States. The answer, to the best of my knowledge, was always no,’ Yatom said. Ben-Ami, who was released on $300,000 bail, is a Connecticut-born US citizen who worked as a mechanical engineer at the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, New Jersey.
   He was accused of giving Israel, from 1979 to 1985, secrets about nuclear weapons, fighter jets and missiles.
   According to a federal complaint, Ben-Ami reported to the same Israeli handler who was also a main contact for Pollard, a US naval intelligence analyst arrested in 1985 and sentenced in 1987 to life imprisonment for spying for Israel.
   Israel has said Pollard was recruited in a rogue operation by the since-disbanded Bureau of Scientific Relations, then headed by Rafi Eitan, who now serves as pensioners minister.
   US authorities did not disclose what led to their discovery of Ben-Ami’s suspected espionage.

Malaysia’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim Wednesday confidently predicted he would be prime minister within three years, sketching out the first rough timetable for his dramatic political comeback.
   ‘I don’t think we have established a definite, clear time-frame when I will take over (as prime minister) but it certainly wouldn’t reach three years ... much earlier than that,’ the former deputy premier said. ‘But I am not in a rush,’ he added.
   Anwar, heir-apparent to long-time former premier Mahathir Mohamad before being sacked and jailed a decade ago, has emerged as a serious threat to the ruling coalition after the opposition’s strong showing in parliamentary polls.
   He became free to run for office again last week, when a five-year ban stemming from his corruption conviction expired, and claims he has the support of enough defectors to topple the government.
   The Barisan Nasional coalition has ruled Malaysia for more than half-a-century since the former colony gained independence from Britain but has been rocked by its unprecedented electoral setback in March.
   The Pakatan Rakyat opposition alliance claimed more than a third of parliamentary seats and five states in the polls, putting Mahathir’s successor, the prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, under heavy pressure.
   Anwar, 60, pledged more effective governance and to wipe out corruption and promote racial equality, addressing some of the public’s major concerns.
   ‘Our reform programme will certainly be more secure. We will push for a market economy, judicial independence and equality for all Malaysians,’ he said.
   Anwar also repeated his claim that lawmakers from Sabah and Sarawak states had indicated interest in defecting from the ruling coalition to the opposition. He spoke to AFP at Kuala Lumpur airport on his way to Sabah.

China and France sought Wednesday to cool tempers over Tibet and the Olympics, with a former French premier heading Beijing for top-level talks criticising a decision to honour the Dalai Lama.
   Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who arrives Thursday bearing a message from the president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said Paris city council had contradicted official policy by conferring honorary citizenship on the Tibetan spiritual leader.
   Raffarin is one of three senior French figures visiting Beijing this week, all carrying letters from Sarkozy as the president tries to repair relations damaged by pro-Tibet protests in France and hurt pride in China.
   At the same time, the Chinese commerce ministry warned against an ongoing boycott of French supermarket giant Carrefour, noting that it employs 40,000 workers here and that up to 95 per cent of its products are made in China.
   Carrefour has been the focus of Chinese angered by what they see as biased coverage of China’s crackdown in Tibet, chaotic protests that marred the Paris leg of the Olympic torch relay, and hints Sarkozy could boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in August.
   Raffarin characterised the honour by Paris city council as ‘a very serious political mistake,’ according to an interview published Wednesday in the China Youth Daily.

Relatives of an Indian prisoner due to be hanged in Pakistan over a deadly bombing crossed the border between the rival nations Wednesday hoping to visit him in prison.
   The members of Sarabjit Singh’s family given Pakistani visas to make the week-long trip included his wife Sukhpreet Kaur, daughters Swapandeep and Poonam and his sister Dalbir Kaur.
   ‘I have not given up hope that he will come back to us safe and sound,’ Dalbir said before crossing the Wagah border, the main land crossing between the two countries, in India’s northern Punjab state.
   In Pakistan, Dalbir, who comes from Punjab’s Bikhiwind village, close to the border, said her first priority would be to get permission to visit her brother.
   Sarabjit is due to be hanged on April 30 after being convicted of involvement in blasts in 1990 that killed four people in the Pakistani city of Lahore. But he insists he is the victim of mistaken identity and his family say he inadvertently crossed the border in a state of inebriation.
   Last week, the Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, had appealed to Islamabad to spare Sarabjit. Hopes of his release brightened last month when Pakistan pardoned and set free another Indian prisoner, Kashmir Singh, who had been languishing on death row for 35 years over suspected espionage.

Indian classical singer Shanti Sharma died in mysterious circumstances after she fell from the second storey of her south Delhi home, the family said Wednesday. Sharma was 52.
   News agency IANS quoted her husband Dinesh Sharma as saying: ‘Shanti jumped to death from our Malviya Nagar home Tuesday morning.’ ‘I am not in a position to say whether she was depressed.
   I rated her very highly among the singers of her age group. My teenaged son is taking it very badly,’ he said.
   Contrary to the reports that she was disturbed after her daughter’s death in an accident a few years ago, Shobha Deepak Singh, a close friend and director of the Bharatiya Kala Kendra, said: ‘Shanti was in a fine frame of mind.’

A unity government led by the president, Robert Mugabe, may be the best way to break Zimbabwe’s post-election deadlock, state media said Wednesday, as the first result from a recount of votes was declared.
   While Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party triumphed in the first of 23 constituencies holding a recount from the March 29 polls, the state-run Herald newspaper said it was clear no side would win a majority in the presidential election and the best way forward therefore was to form a government of national unity.
   ‘The Zimbabwe government and independent international observers are agreed that the just-ended harmonised elections did not produce an outright winner in the presidential race. It is unlikely the ongoing recount will substantively alter that position,’ said an opinion piece in the government mouthpiece.
   ‘Accordingly, it stands to reason that the transitional government of national unity ... should be led by the incumbent president.’
   Twenty-five days have now passed since the country held joint parliamentary and presidential elections, and the outcome of both ballots still remains up in the air.
   While the election commission has given no word on the outcome of the presidential poll, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change had initially wrested control of the 210-seat parliament from ZANU-PF.
   But even that result could now be reversed as the commission recounts votes in 23 constituencies, all but two of which were initially said to have returned an MDC candidate to parliament. In the first constituency to complete its recount, Goromonzi West, ZANU-PF was confirmed the winner and only needs to reverse the result in seven of the other seats under the microscope in order to regain control of parliament.
   The opposition has denounced the recount process as a ploy by Mugabe to steal back control of parliament and says the delay to the result of the presidential election is also intended to buy a defeated regime more time.
   MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who has already declared himself the outright winner over 84-year-old Mugabe, was in Mozambique on Wednesday as part of his ongoing quest to build up diplomatic pressure on his longstanding rival to stand down.
   He held meetings in the morning with former president Joaquim Chissano and was due to meet in the afternoon with the president, Armando Guebuza.
   Tsvangirai has also floated the idea of a national unity government but with himself, rather than Mugabe, at its helm.
   The MDC leader has accused Mugabe of human rights abuses and of having led the one-time regional model to economic rack and ruin.
   At independence from Britain in 1980, when Mugabe began his marathon 28 years in power, the country was the bread basket of the region.
   Now however it has the world’s highest rate of inflation – officially put at 165,000 per cent but believed to be several times higher – and an unemployment rate of more than 80 per cent.
   Mugabe’s regime blames the country’s woes on a package of sanctions, including a ban on weapons sales, imposed by the United States and European Union since the president’s disputed re-election in 2002.
   After the collapse of relations with the West, Mugabe has been looking to forge ties with Asian countries such as China from whom he has ordered a massive shipment of weaponry.
   However China appears to be getting cold feet over the consignment which has been shunned by ports in countries neighbouring landlocked Zimbabwe and indicated on Tuesday that the ship could abandon its mission.
   The United States has asked Beijing to turn the vessel back to China and has also asked Angola and Zimbabwe’s other neighbours, including South Africa, Mozambique and Namibia, not to allow the ship to dock.
   The State Department’s top Africa hand, the assistant secretary of state, Jendayi Frazer, was due to arrive in South Africa Wednesday to discuss the turmoil in Zimbabwe on the first leg of a trip which will also take her to Zambia and Angola.

After murder rates hit a 40-year low last year, Chicago is again in the grip of a wave of violence that has left dozens dead and forced parents to keep their children home from school for fear of stray bullets.
   A weekend spree of violence that ended on Monday saw seven people killed in 36 separate shootings in just the latest bloodshed to draw calls for better gun control from city officials and community leaders.
   And with more people out on the streets as warmer weather returns, the police are worried the violence will only get worse.
   Twenty-four of the city’s public school children have been slain since the academic year began in August; 21 of them were killed by shootings.
   While just one was killed on school grounds – an 18-year-old boy shot to death in a parking lot on a Saturday afternoon – the violence in surrounding neighbourhoods has created a climate of fear in the classrooms.
   Parents and the police are escorting students in high-risk housing projects to and from school in a program dubbed Operation Safe Passage, which began last month after gang violence escalated.
   The city has tightened its curfew for teens and is even planning to deploy SWAT teams to help boost regular patrols.
   Religious leaders have thrown open the doors of their churches and officials have expanded after-school programmes to give children a safe place to play.
   Community leaders and frightened students have held rallies and vigils.
   And yet the shootings have continued. ‘We need to stop the killing right now,’ said Reverend Walter Turner whose niece was shot on her way home from church just a few weeks ago.
   Much of the violence has been limited to low-income and predominantly black and Hispanic neighbourhoods on the city’s south and west side and can be traced to gangs.
   But the Chicago Sun Times said it is time for the city’s wealthier residents to stop ignoring the violence just because they don’t hear the gunfire.
   Borrowing the idea of a Colombian newspaper protesting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia rebel movement, the paper reversed the type on its front page Tuesday and ran a photo of the backs of a group of white people waiting to cross the street.
   ‘We are trying to say to our fellow Chicagoans, in the most attention-grabbing manner we can, that turning our back on the violence killing our young people will not make it disappear,’ the paper wrote in an editorial.
   ‘Winter is over. The spring kill is here, and summer is coming. Still more blood will stain our sidewalks and streets, our porches and playgrounds.’
   The violence among teens comes after a steady decline in overall murder rates in Chicago and across the nation.
   The number of homicides in Chicago fell to 443 last year, the lowest number in more than 40 years and nearly half the 761 recorded in 1997, according to the Chicago police statistics.
   Eighty-seven people were killed in the first three months of this year, down from 88 a year earlier.
   But even though the numbers may be down historically, they are still far too high, said Chicago Public Schools chief Arne Duncan.
   ‘Way too many children are living in fear and saying ‘if I grow up’ instead of ‘when I grow up,’ he said.
    ‘I got a letter from a second grader who said her goal in life is to be able to walk to the corner store safely.’

A top UN official said Tuesday as many as 300,000 people may have died in the Darfur conflict, amid warnings a joint UN-African Union peace force might not be fully operational before 2009.
   UN humanitarian chief John Holmes told the Security Council that it was likely the death toll from five years of war, famine and disease in Darfur had risen in the past couple of years.
   ‘A study in 2006 suggested that 200,000 had lost their lives from the combined effects of the conflict,’ he said.
   ‘That figure must be much higher now, perhaps half as much again,’ he added, but he conceded this was just an ‘extrapolation.’
   Adding to the grim picture, the head of the joint UN and African Union mission, Rodolphe Adada, said the troop component of the UNAMID mission was unlikely to be completely up and running until next year. The force ‘is at less than 40 per cent of its mandated level of 19,555 and it is very unlikely to achieve full-operating capability before 2009,’ he told the 15-member Security Council. ‘We are going to try to speed up the deployment,’ he later told reporters. ‘Maybe we’ll have 80 per cent of the force at the end of the year.’
   Adada, a former Congolese foreign minister, also told the council that UNAMID still lacked 24 critical attack and transport helicopters as well as key military engineers and logistical support.
   And he again appealed to the council ‘to redouble its efforts’ to help UNAMID overcome its current logistical and political obstacles.

Unable to pull off an upset in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary, Barack Obama swiftly moved on Tuesday night to Indiana, anticipating that his long, tense battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton for their party’s nomination would persist for at least another two weeks, reports USA TODAY.
   Obama was in midflight when the Associated Press declared Hillary the winner. He was on his way Philadelphia to a rally that opened with Indi -ana’s working-class hero, rocker John Mellencamp, singing his hit Small Town.
   ‘This is your chance to say, ‘Not this year.’ This is your chance to say, ‘Not this time.’ We have a choice in this election,’ he said as more than 7,000 people in a stadium roared.
   Indiana and North Carolina, the next states in the primary lineup, vote May 6.
   Obama, who has a large lead in North Carolina polls, plans to be back in Indiana Wedn-esday and Friday, with a day at home in Chicago on Thursday.