World leaders urged stability and unity in Pakistan — regarded by the West as a key partner in fighting terrorism — as they reacted to news of Pervez Musharraf’s resignation as president.
   Britain said Musharraf’s announcement ended a ‘critical period’ in Pakistan’s history, and called for political leaders in Islamabad to unite to keep their nation on course with economic and security cooperation.
   Pakistan’s regional rival India declined to comment on Musharraf’s decision, with the foreign ministry in Delhi describing it as an ‘internal matter’ for its neighbour.
   Reaction from the United States — where morning had yet to break in Washington when Musharraf made his announcement on national television — was pending. Musharraf, the former army chief who seized power in a coup in 1999, announced Monday in a televised address that he would stand down in the face of looming impeachment charges.
   In Tokyo, the Japanese prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, said he expected no immediate change to the US-led ‘war on terror’ after Musharraf’s departure.
   ‘What kind of changes does this bring to the ‘war-on-terror’ and the Afghan situation? I don’t expect any significant change for now,’ Fukuda told reporters.
   Japan is a major donor to Pakistan, a front-line ally in the US-led military efforts in Afghanistan, despite concerns about Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal, public unrest and its democratic process.
   Afghanistan, whose president Hamid Karzai has had strained relations with Musharraf amid a surge in Islamic extremist violence, said it hoped the move would help strengthen the Pakistani government.
   ‘We hope that the resignation of president Musharraf... leads to a strengthening of the civilian government and democracy in Pakistan,’ foreign ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmad Baheen said.
   ‘Afghanistan is in favour of a democratic and stable Pakistan which is based on the rule of law.’
   Russia, another major player in Central Asian geopolitics, expressed hope that Musharraf’s departure would not cause instability in the country.
   ‘Russia hopes the departure of Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf will not have negative consequences for the internal political stability of this major Asian nation,’ its foreign ministry said in a statement.
   In Britain, from which Commonwealth member Pakistan declared independence in 1947, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, called for unity within the political leadership in Islamabad.
   He praised the ‘significant dividends’ of Musharraf’s time in office, including on the economic front, in fighting terrorism, tackling corruption and promoting dialogue with India.
   The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, said Musharraf’s departure was ‘essentially a matter of internal politics,’ while France — which holds the EU presidency — echoed Britain’s call for unity.
   ‘We would like the next president and the Pakistani government to work together in a constructive climate and with respect for the institutions to address the many challenges facing Pakistan,’ the French foreign ministry said.

Tens of thousands of Muslims took to the streets of Indian Kashmir’s main city Monday to demand that the United Nations recognise the Himalayan region’s right to self-determination.
   Security was tight as crowds marched towards a local UN office, in defiance of official warnings against holding the rally in revolt-hit Srinagar, which remained tense after deadly clashes last week.
   The UN office in Srinagar houses personnel who monitor ceasefire violations along the heavily militarised Line of Control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
   ‘I have never seen such a big rally in Srinagar,’ said Abdul Aziz, a 75-year-old shopkeeper who was taking part in the procession.
   ‘I couldn’t resist coming out to demand freedom from India,’ he said, as he marched towards the UN office carrying a placard reading ‘If freedom for Kosovo, why not for Kashmir?’
   The marchers chanted slogans including ‘We will give blood for Kashmir’s freedom.’
   Many also carried green or black flags — symbolising Islam and mourning.
   Kashmiri separatist leader Shabir Shah said the demonstrators delivered a plea for UN intervention in the wake of last week’s shootings of ‘peaceful protesters.’
   Another separatist urged the UN to ‘help us in achieving the right to self-determination.’
   There are decades-old UN Security Council resolutions calling for a referendum to allow the Kashmiri people to choose between India and Pakistan, but they have never been implemented.

Thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes in northern Sri Lanka, joining thousands of others displaced by a government push into Tamil rebel-held territory, the UN said Monday.
   The United Nation’s Inter-Agency Standing Committee said they expected more people to flee the ongoing fighting, with security forces attempting to take the Tamil Tigers’ political capital of Kilinochchi and key base of Mullaittivu. ‘The general security situation in Kilinochchi and Mullaittivu districts remains volatile with ongoing military operations and advancing of the army,’ the UN said.
   Aid agencies operating inside rebel-held areas of the island’s north reported that nearly 12,000 more people fled to government-controlled areas last week, in addition to the tens of thousands who have already fled.
   Last week, aid agencies said 112,000 people have been displaced in the past two months in the troubled areas and warned the figure could rise to 200,000 in the coming weeks. The island’s defence ministry meanwhile said 22 Tamil Tiger rebels and eight soldiers were killed in the latest fighting on Sunday across the Weli Oya, Vavuniya, Kilinochchi and Mullaittivu areas.
   This figures raise to 5,934 the number of rebels the government claims it has killed since January, when it pulled out of a Norwegian-brokered truce.
   The ministry has acknowledged the loss of 553 of its own soldiers in the same period.
   The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam did not comment on the claims, and reporters are barred from travelling to front line and rebel-held areas — making independent verification of the casualty claims almost impossible.

The son of slain former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto on Monday hailed the resignation of Pervez Musharraf, saying the next president would be from Benazir’s party.
   ‘After the martyrdom of my mother I said that democracy was the best revenge — and today it was proved true,’ said 19-year-old Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party.
   ‘Someone from the Pakistan People’s Party would be the next president of Pakistan but I don’t know who that would be,’ he told Pakistan’s GEO television at Karachi airport after flying in from Dubai. The student at Britain’s elite Oxford University was named as PPP chairman days after his mother was killed in a suicide bombing at an election rally on December 27. The party won the most seats in elections in February and now leads a coalition government that also includes the party of Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister ousted by Musharraf in 1999.

An Israeli ministerial commission on Monday approved the release next week of 200 Palestinian prisoners, including at least two implicated in deadly attacks in Israel three decades ago.
   ‘A ministerial commission which met on Monday approved the list of 200 Palestinian prisoners who are to be released as a goodwill gesture toward the Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas,’ prime minister Ehud Olmert’s spokesman Mark Regev said.
   The cabinet had voted on Sunday to release the prisoners in a move aimed at bolstering the slow-moving US-backed peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
   Israelis can appeal against the freeing of individual prisoners before the actual release takes place on August 25.
   The interior security minister, Avi Dichter, told public radio the criteria for establishing the list was ‘the same as in previous years except for two or three exceptional cases.’

Russia on Monday announced the start of a withdrawal from Georgia, but the president, Dmitry Medvedev, defiantly warned of ‘shattering’ blows against Russia’s enemies.
   Ten days after Russian forces poured into Georgia, the deputy head of Russia’s general staff, general Anatoly Nogovitsyn, said ‘the withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers has begun.’
   This was disputed by Georgian authorities who said swathes of their country remained occupied. ‘We see no signs of a pullout,’ the secretary of Georgia’s National Security Council, Alexander Lomaia, said.
   Lomaia said there were still ‘dozens’ of Russian checkpoints on the country’s main road
   and that troops remained
   in the northern town of Gori, near the conflict zone of South Ossetia.
   The interior ministry also claimed that 12 Russian armoured personnel carriers had probed deep into Georgian territory from the central city of Khashuri.
   Medvedev was unapologetic in the face of mounting
   Western criticism, vowing a ‘shattering’ blow against any foreign power that threatened Russian citizens.
   ‘If someone thinks they can kill our citizens, kill soldiers and officers fulfilling the role of peacekeepers, we will never allow this,’ Medvedev told a group of veterans in Kursk, Interfax news agency reported.
   An AFP correspondent with Russian troops in Gori saw no sign of a concerted withdrawal. Military traffic on the winding road over the Caucasus mountains to Russia moved in both directions.
   Georgia’s regional development minister, David Tkeshelashvili, told journalists in Gori that just 15,000 of the city’s 55,000 inhabitants had returned.
   Locals said they wanted the Russian troops to leave, although some were grateful to the Russians for ending looting and attacks on civilians that erupted following Russia’s rout of the Georgian army last week.
   The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe met in Vienna to decide whether to send more observers to Georgia.
   The OSCE agreed in principle last week to boost its
   monitoring contingent in Georgia from just a few to around 100 observers.
   The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who brokered the peace agreement, urged withdrawal ‘without delay’ in an article for French newspaper Le Figaro. ‘This point is not negotiable,’ he said.
   In another twist, US officials believe that Russia has deployed SS-21 tactical missile launchers in South Ossetia, within range of the Georgian capital, The New York Times reported.
   However, Nogovitsyn, the Russian deputy chief of staff, told journalists ‘there was no need’ for such a weapon in the area.

Democrat Barack Obama was to campaign in New Mexico Monday to court the Hispanic vote amid swirling rumours about his possible choices of running mates.
   New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who has also been touted as a possible Democratic vice-presidential pick, said he was glad the Democratic Party was leaving past rivalries behind.
   ‘The point is the party is united. We’re coming together,’ Richardson told CNN’s Late Edition Sunday.
   He added that the Obama was ‘doing everything’ possible to bring all supporters of his former rival, New York senator Hillary Clinton, into the fold.
   The bitter 18-month presidential campaign has cost about one billion dollars, while promising history.
   Now, a frenetic two-and-a-half month sprint for the finish looms, with the ultimate prize still within reach for both campaigns, and with both camps still to announce whose name will be emblazoned on the ticket with them.
   ‘We are now entering one of the most intense political periods that we have ever seen,’ said McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis.
   ‘We are jamming in a lot of major events, the selection of each candidate’s vice president, their national conventions, the debates and election day all in an almost 10-week period.’ Obama is throwing himself back into the crossfire after a week-long vacation in his native Hawaii.
   He and McCain met on Saturday for the first time during this campaign at a mega-church forum in Lake Forest, California, to talk about religion, which plays an increasingly prominent role in US politics.
   They briefly greeted each other on stage but spoke separately, disagreed over abortion and spoke of their own moral failings, as each candidate seeks to woo faith-based groups — comprised mostly of right-of-centre voters.
   Obama expressed his support for legal abortions, but called for efforts to limit unwanted pregnancies, while McCain said human rights begin ‘from the moment of conception,’ vowing to be a ‘pro-life president.’
   Asked to reflect on their shortcomings, Obama said he had been guilty of ‘fundamental selfishness’ at times, mentioning dabbling in drugs as a youth.
   ‘I had a difficult youth,’ Obama said. ‘There were times when I experimented with drugs.’ McCain cited his unsuccessful first marriage.
   ‘My greatest moral failing, and I have been a very imperfect person, is the failure of my first marriage,’ McCain said.
   Neither of the candidates gave an indication about their potential running mates but one potential pick for McCain, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, ruled himself out of the race on Sunday.
   Asked by NBC if he would like to be the Republican’s running mate, the 37-year-old Jindal said: ‘No. I’ve got the job I want.’
   And possible Obama pick, Virginia governor Tim Kaine, said he didn’t think it was likely, while Indiana senator Evan Bayh, a strong Clinton supporter, who is seen as having appeal among white conservative Democrats, coyly told CBS there was nothing to report yet.

Regional leaders’ failure to resolve Zimbabwe’s crisis has raised questions over whether the president, Robert Mugabe, is prepared to cede enough power to make a deal possible, analysts said Monday.
   A summit of southern African leaders with Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in attendance ended on Sunday with no final deal between the two rivals despite a push from heads of state to bring them to an agreement.
   Divisions remained over how power would be shared between the two men in a national unity government, including what authority they would have as president and prime minister.
   ‘He is definitely choosing for the hardline and he has always done that, and I think it is particularly unlikely for him to concede powers over the security establishment,’ said Olmo Von Meijenfeldt, an analyst with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. Zimbabwe’s military and security chiefs are strong backers of Mugabe, who was a hero of the country’s liberation struggle against white minority rule.
   Some analysts argue the powerful Joint Operations Command of security chiefs call the shots to a large degree in Zimbabwe, and Mugabe’s position at the negotiating table depends heavily on them.
   ‘I think the question to ask from where I’m sitting is whether it is Mugabe’s decision,’ said Aubrey Matshiqi of the Centre for Political Studies in South Africa.
   An obstacle to a settlement to end the crisis that intensified after Mugabe’s widely condemned re-election in June may be the Joint Operations Command, he said.
   ‘It would be very difficult for the JOC for instance to give up ministerial posts if this includes giving up the security portfolios.’
   Tsvangirai in June claimed that Zimbabwe was being run by a ‘military junta’, and he boycotted the June run-off vote, citing rising violence against his supporters that had left dozens dead and thousands injured.
   The opposition leader has held out so far against accepting a deal that he sees as not granting him real power.
   ‘It’s better not to have a deal than to have a bad deal,’ Tsvangirai told The New York Times in an interview published Sunday.

Tropical Storm Fay, which killed at least 57 people in other Caribbean countries over the weekend, slammed into Cuba’s south-western coast on Monday on a path expected to take it to Florida as a likely hurricane.
   The storm hit Cuba with 50 mile per hour winds and could drop as much as eight inches of rain as it crosses the island on a northward path, forecasters said.
   The Miami-based National Hurricane Centre said that as of 5:00am EDT, the centre of the storm was located inland over central Cuba.
   It was moving to the north-northwest at nearly 12 miles per hour and was expected to emerge into the Florida Straits later on Monday and reach the Florida Keys some time during the night. By that time, it would be approaching hurricane strength, meaning minimum winds of 74 miles per hour.
   Cuban officials ordered evacuations of low-lying parts of Havana, fearing that heavy rains and a storm surge from the Florida Straits could flood the Cuban capital and cause dilapidated buildings to collapse.
   In the Florida Keys, tourists fleeing Fay, the sixth storm of the Atlantic cyclone season, created bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway out of the islands at the state’s tip.
   Cuba had earlier evacuated people along its southern coast as Fay slid along, brushing the area with the winds and rain it now carries inland.
   In Haiti, officials said about 50 people died when a bus tried to cross a river swollen by rain from Fay. Five others were known dead in Haiti and the Dominican Republic from flood-related accidents.

The mayor of an Australian outback mining town has come under fire for urging unattractive women to move in, assuring them they will find a man because there is a shortage of women.
   John Moloney, mayor of Mount Isa in north-western Queensland, told a newspaper his town was a place for ‘ugly ducklings to flourish into beautiful swans’ and called on the ‘beauty-disadvantaged’ to flock there.
   In the face of outrage over his remarks, Moloney stood by his comments, saying he did not mean to cause offence but wanted to highlight the gender imbalance in the remote town of some 25,000 people.
   ‘Well I said beauty disadvantaged,’ he told national radio. ‘Now beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty can be a good set of teeth, beauty is nice wavy hair. Beauty can be blue eyes or green eyes.
   ‘There is such a thing as disposition, temperament, manners, general attractiveness, attitude and demeanour, all those things tend to make a person attractive.’
   Mount Isa city councillor Gary Asmus said that while there was a shortage of women, Moloney’s comments were an insult to the town’s menfolk.
   The mayor was ‘returning us to the Dark Ages and making the guys that live in this town seem like sex-hungry starved men that will pounce upon the first girl that they see walking down the street,’ he said.
   Anne Morris, who has lived in Mount Isa for 50 years, told the radio she had not come across anyone who she would call ugly.
   ‘The people that are coming into town now are coming here to work and find a house and live and bring up their families, but with these sort of comments ... I’d say ‘humph, fancy going up to that place’, she said.
   The operations manager of the city’s popular Irish club, Bernard Gillick, said he sees the gender imbalance daily but suggests the mayor’s solution might not be the right one.
   ‘Anyone who moves to Mount Isa, beautiful or not so beautiful, they have a great chance to make a great life here. It is a fantastic town.’ he said.