Human Rights Watch Tuesday urged Pakistan’s government to undo the ‘unlawful acts’ of former president Pervez Musharraf and hold him accountable for his ‘crimes.’
   Former army general Musharraf resigned from office on Monday amid the threat of impeachment, ending almost nine years of his rule tainted with rights violations particularly attacks on judiciary and media.
   ‘Musharraf’s brazen disrespect for human rights and the rule of law for nearly a decade finally caught up with him,’ said Ali Dayan Hasan, senior South Asia researcher at the international rights group.
   ‘By undoing Musharraf’s unlawful acts and holding him to account for his crimes, the Pakistani government would advance human rights and national security in the country,’ he said.
   The rights group said it hoped that Musharraf’s exit from office will speed Pakistan’s transition to a society respecting human rights and the rule of law.
   It said that Pakistan’s democratic government now needed to assume full responsibility for rolling back measures Musharraf unlawfully imposed, such as changes to the constitution and the dismissal of senior judges last year.
   Musharraf imposed emergency rule in November 2007 to scuttle supreme court challenges to his candidature for a second presidential term, sacking and detaining chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and other senior judges.
   Meanwhile, Pakistani newspapers cheered the resignation of Pervez Musharraf as president and said on Tuesday that the coalition government now had no excuse not to tackle a deteriorating economy and militant violence, reports Reuters/Bdnews24.com.
   Musharraf quit on Monday to avoid impeachment charges, nearly nine years after the key US ally in its campaign against terrorism took power in a coup.
   Many Pakistanis celebrated the departure of the unpopular president, and financial markets rallied on an end to the political wrangling over his fate.
   Newspapers also welcomed an end to the confrontation between the president and the coalition government, led by the party of assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and said the government now had to turn to the country’s problems.
   ‘Determining what the priorities should be is not difficult: militancy, the economy and relations with India and Afghanistan need to be addressed urgently,’ the Dawn newspaper said.
   ‘Solutions, however, may prove more elusive ... But at the very least, the politicians must show the same purpose and focus in dealing with the problems that they have demonstrated in taking on the president,’ it said in an editorial.
   Dawn said the restoration of judges Musharraf purged last year and the election of a new president had to be addressed immediately.

Pervez Musharraf’s departure from the presidency is unlikely to have a significant impact on how Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are controlled.
   Experts say a 10-member committee, and not just the president, makes decisions on how to use them and only a complete meltdown in governance — still a distant prospect in Pakistan — could put the atomic bomb in the hands of extremists.
   ‘Pakistan’s nuclear assets are not one man’s property,’ said Maria Sultan, a defence analyst and director at the London-based South Asian Strategic Stability Institute.
   ‘Any (political) transition in Pakistan will have no effect on Pakistan’s nuclear assets because it has a very strong custodial control.’
   The committee, known as the National Command Authority, is served by a military-dominated organisation with thousands of security forces and intelligence agents whose personnel are closely screened. The nuclear facilities are tightly guarded.
   ‘The reality is that Pakistan’s government exists on different levels. One of the levels it exists and works at is in the control of its nuclear weapons,’ said Patrick Cronin, director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington.
   ‘Where it does not work is in providing effective services, jobs, education and health that people need.’ Although one of Asia’s poorer nations, Pakistan became the Islamic world’s first atomic power through a combination of guile, determination and illegal procurement of technology on the international black market. It tested the bomb in 1998, a year before Musharraf took power, in response to a similar test by its historic rival India.
   The prospect of a nuclear conflagration on the subcontinent has eased in recent years as Pakistan and India have talked peace.
   But political volatility in Pakistan, combined with the revelation in 2004 that its chief scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan had shared nuclear know-how and technology with Iran, North Korea and Libya, heightened concern over how safe the weapons and nuclear infrastructure were.

Ten French NATO soldiers were killed in a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday, the deadliest incident for foreign troops in battle here since the US-led war was launched in 2001.
   The shock attack also left 21 French troops wounded, and prompted the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to announce he would immediately head to the country, where the monthly death toll for foreign forces has topped war-torn Iraq.
   News of the attack came as the resurgent Taliban attempted a mass suicide attack on a US military base, in a defiant reminder that tens of thousands of international troops have not been able to keep the Islamic militants at bay.
   ‘Yesterday 10 of our soldiers ... were killed in Afghanistan, 21 others were wounded during a joint reconnaissance mission with the Afghan national army,’ Sarkozy said in a statement issued in Paris.
   ‘In its struggle against terrorism, France has just been hit hard.’
   The ambush took place in the district of Sarobi, just 50 kilometres east of Kabul, the Afghan capital which has been increasingly targeted by the Taliban insurgency.
   Around 100 insurgents attacked a patrol containing French and Afghan troops, said NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, under which about 3,000 French soldiers serve.
   The fighting began Monday and lasted into Tuesday, it said in a statement.
   ‘The initial patrol was reinforced with quick reaction forces, close air support and mobile medical teams. During the engagement a large number of insurgents were killed,’ ISAF said.
   ‘There was fierce fighting throughout the night,’ said Afghan defence ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi, who said at least 13 Taliban fighters, including a Pakistani national, had been killed in the fighting.
   The extremist Taliban said it had attacked ISAF troops in Sarobi and blown up several vehicles. ‘We have inflicted heavy casualties,’ Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed said.

Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels Tuesday tacitly admitted that they were losing ground in the face of a major military offensive by warning that thousands of civilians in the north were at risk.
   In their first public acknowledgement that government forces were moving deeper into areas previously held by them, the Tigers said civilians have had to move several times because of the military onslaught.
   ‘Persistent shelling in this area, where two weeks ago a large number of internally displaced people sought refuge, forced them to (move) again further inside Kilinochchi,’ the Tigers said, referring to their political capital.
   ‘Such multiple displacements are also adding to the delays in providing adequate shelter,’ the Tigers said in a statement.
   The Sri Lankan government, which pulled out of a Norwegian-brokered ceasefire with the rebels in January, says its troops are advancing on several fronts in their bid to dismantle the Tamil Tigers’ northern mini-state.
   The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have been fighting for a separate ethnic state since 1972, accused the military of shelling civilian settlements.
   ‘Many of the internally displaced people, who are yet to receive temporary shelter and are thus still living under trees, are struggling to seek shelter from the rain,’ the LTTE said.
   More than 112,000 people have been displaced in the past two months by heavy fighting between the rebels and troops, aid agencies said last week.
   Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s defence ministry said 30 more rebels were killed in the latest clashes across the north on Monday.
   The military put their own casualties at seven injured.
   ‘Terrorists are now fleeing the areas in numbers following extensive military ground and air assaults,’ the ministry said.
   The figures raise to 5,964 the number of rebels the government claims it has killed since January.
   The ministry, which blocks media access to the front lines and rebel areas, has acknowledged losing 553 of its own soldiers in the same period.

Thailand’s Election Commission deferred a decision on Tuesday on whether to recommend that the ruling People Power Party be disbanded for electoral fraud, saying it needed to investigate further.
   ‘The commission will vote on the issue on September 2,’ EC secretary-general Suthipon Thaveechaiyagarn told reporters.
   Earlier, the Thai-language Matichon newspaper quoted an EC source as saying the five commissioners were split on the issue, suggesting their ruling would be delayed. Analysts say the Constitutional Court, which has the final say on the matter, is likely to endorse the EC’s findings, although it may take several months to implement any ruling.

Nepal’s Supreme Court has ordered the government to ensure basic health care and education for virgin girls worshipped as ‘living goddesses’ in a centuries-old tradition in the Himalayan nation.
   A few children, some as young as three or four, in the Kathmandu valley are picked by Buddhist priests as kumaris, or ‘living goddesses’. They are then confined to temples until puberty, visited by thousands of devotees.
   Critics say the tradition violates the children’s rights and leaves them unprepared to face real life when they return to their families after reaching puberty.
   ‘A directive order has been issued to the government to provide basic human rights, including education and health (care) to the child,’ Supreme Court spokesman Hemanta Rawal said on Tuesday.
   ‘This means the child’s rights can’t be violated in the name of culture,’ he said. The ruling was made on Monday, he said.
   Nepal this year became a republic after lawmakers abolished the Himalayan nation’s centuries-old monarchy. Many cultural traditions are being changed or challenged as modernity gradually arrives in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Troops on Tuesday stepped up a manhunt for Muslim separatist rebels after a murderous rampage in the southern Philippines left 38 people dead and threw peace negotiations into chaos.
   Hundreds of Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels attacked towns in Lanao del Norte and Sarangani provinces Monday, looting businesses, burning houses and taking dozens of people hostage.
   The near-simultaneous raids began at dawn, triggering intense gun battles in the mostly Christian towns of Kolambugan and Kauswagan that raged until noon.
   Villagers were trickling back into their devastated communities Tuesday, only to find debris where their houses once stood.
   Some civilians were seen arming themselves with machetes and guns to fight off any future attacks, AFP reporters said.
   Five more bodies were retrieved from Kolambugan on Tuesday, said town mayor Beltran Lumaque, while two more were recovered from Kauswagan, the police said.

Georgia’s interior ministry on Tuesday dismissed a pullback of Russian military vehicles from the city of Gori as a ‘show’ and insisted no pullback was under way.
   ‘It is a show aimed at creating the illusion of a withdrawal,’ ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said.
   ‘No tank, no Russian soldier has left Georgia,’ he added.
   Journalists earlier saw a column of Russian armoured vehicles pull away from Gori, following orders to move to the rebel city of Tskhinvali and from there to the southern Russian city of Vladikavkaz.
   Both sides have accused the other of violating a peace plan brokered by France to end the conflict between Russia and its southern neighbour Georgia.
   Meanwhile, Russian and Georgian forces carried out their first prisoner exchange since the conflict began, in an apparent goodwill gesture despite ongoing tensions.
   Fifteen Georgian prisoners were exchanged for five Russians at the Igoeti checkpoint 30 kilometres from Tbilisi, the Georgian defence ministry said.
   A Russian helicopter bearing the Georgian detainees had early in the morning landed in a field beside the checkpoint. Russian soldiers then took the prisoners to the checkpoint, two of them wounded and on stretchers.
   The Russian prisoners had arrived in Georgian cars. Two of them were badly wounded and were laid out on stretchers before the exchange took place, AFP correspondents at the scene said.
   The prisoner swap was then carried out in the area between the Georgian and Russian controlled checkpoints, in coordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross.
   The Igoeti checkpoint has in recent days marked the current limit of Georgian control in the area, with one side blocked by Georgian police and the other controlled by a handful of Russian soldiers.
   Beyond the Igoeti checkpoint, Russia’s military presence was still evident, with several tanks and armoured vehicles stationed on the road to the city of Gori, 60 kilometres west of Tbilisi.
   Four ambulances were waiting on the Georgian side of the checkpoint to receive their prisoners after the exchange.

Sudan has warned the United Nations of ‘serious consequences’ for its staff and facilities if the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant for the president, Omar Hassan al-Beshir, over Darfur, a UN envoy said on Monday.
   Addressing the UN Security Council, Ashraf Qazi, head of the UN mission charged with monitoring a 2005 peace accord between Sudan’s north and south, said the mission was preparing for any such actions.
   ‘The government has conveyed to me that the issuance of an arrest warrant against the president, Bashir, could have serious consequences for UN staff and infrastructure in Sudan,’ Qazi said, without specifying where the threat might come from.
   ‘We are taking all necessary precautionary measures including strengthening our cooperation with Sudanese security institutions,’ Qazi said.
   On July 14, ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo charged Beshir with masterminding a campaign of genocide in Darfur, western Sudan, and asked the court for the warrant. The Hague-based court has yet to issue a decision.
   Khartoum has acknowledged the distinction between the ICC and the mandate of the two peacekeeping missions in Sudan, Qazi said. However he noted the Beshir government had called the ICC prosecutor’s action a political and not a legal move.
   The missions in Sudan are UNMIS, a 10,000-strong UN force that aims to ensure the north and south comply with the 2005 peace deal that ended two decades of civil war, and UNAMID, a joint operation with the African Union in Darfur.
   International experts and UN officials estimate at least 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes in Darfur since mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in 2003 accusing the central government of neglect.
   While UNAMID is struggling to reach its planned level of 26,000 troops and police, UNMIS came under criticism after heavy fighting between Sudan’s army and southern Sudanese forces in the disputed oil-rich town of Abyei in May.
   US envoy to Sudan Richard Williamson has accused the force of hiding in barracks during the fighting instead of protecting Sudanese civilians. Qazi acknowledged mistakes but also defended the actions of UNMIS peacekeepers during the fighting, which resulted in an estimated 89 deaths, including 18 civilians.
   ‘The fact of the matter is that there was a breakdown of local command and control. Instructions of high officials were simply ignored by local commanders,’ Qazi reported, apparently referring to the Sudanese.
   He conceded that an internal UNMIS review had acknowledged failure to protect UN agency compounds in the town.

A key United Nations rights body voiced alarm on Monday at mounting racial violence in Russia and called on Moscow to take firm action against ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi groups and hate speech in the media.
   The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also urged the Russian government to hold an investigation into police repression of Georgians in Russia in 2006.
   The Committee said it was ‘gravely concerned about the alarming increase in the incidence and severity of racially motivated violence, especially by young people belonging to extremist groups.’
   The targets of violence and hate speech, it said, were Chechens and other people from the Caucasus, people from Central Asia, Roma, Meskhetian Turks, ethnic minorities of Jewish or Muslim faith and Africans.
   The Committee’s report followed a discussion its 18 expert members held with a Russian delegation — and with rights groups from the country — earlier this month as part of a review of UN states’ racism record.
   Russian human rights activists said during the hearings that police often stood by when skinhead and neo-Nazi groups staged demonstrations against Jews, ethnic minorities or foreigners.
   The Committee said a ‘thorough investigation’ was needed into events in 2006, which Tbilisi at the time said reflected official racism against Georgians, stoking tension between the two former Soviet states.
   According to reports cited by the Committee, Russian police rounded up hundreds of Georgians and ethnic Georgians with Russian citizenship, held them in packed jails and deported them to Georgia with little or no legal process.
   The review was held before this month’s conflict setting Russian and pro-Russian forces against Georgian troops in and around Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia.
   Roma also suffered from discrimination, the report said, asserting that courts around the country were ordering the destruction of well-established settlements while children attending school were put in special classes.
   It called on Russia to take action against police and other officials engaging in ‘racially selective arrests, searches or other unwarranted acts’ based on how people looked.

The US presidential election presents a sharp contrast between two types of patriotism: John McCain stands as a war hero. His rival Barack Obama calls Americans back to the can-do spirit of the nation’s founders.
   In November the candidates will find out which style appealed more to voters in this time of war and economic uncertainty.
   Democratic candidate Obama has made patriotism a core theme of his campaign, seeking to inspire voters to overcome divisions of race and party and using his own story as a child of a Kenyan father and Kansas mother as an example of opportunities available only in America.
   But on the campaign trail, audiences also applaud Republican McCain’s tales of his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam which embody qualities he seeks to project as a candidate.
   As a Navy pilot, McCain was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. He was stabbed, beaten, tortured and imprisoned for more than five years, including two years in solitary confinement.
   The appeal of that biography was apparent last Saturday in televised interviews with each candidate by a leading pastor, Rick Warren, at his megachurch in California. Asked to describe the hardest decision he had ever made, Obama talked about his decision to oppose the Iraq war.
   McCain recounted how he had decided to refuse early repatriation from a Hanoi prison even though he was injured, because he did not want to jump the line — a story that visibly resonated with the audience.
   Nothing in Obama’s life story can match those experiences and they reinforce McCain’s slogan of ‘Country First,’ said Richard Kohn, professor of history at the University of North Carolina.
   ‘For McCain, not only does it (patriotism) arise from his very being, his identity, but it plays a dual role of emphasising a national security part of the campaign and the contrast between him and Obama,’ he said.
   McCain retired from the Navy in 1981 and entered politics. He stresses his war years in questioning Obama’s foreign policy credentials and readiness to be commander-in-chief. For his part, Obama praises McCain’s patriotic service but has made unswerving opposition to the Iraq war a pillar of his campaign and vows to pull US combat troops out of Iraq.
   Obama grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, an island far from the US mainland. As a result, he could be vulnerable to the charge that his background and values are unfamiliar.

Iraq’s human rights ministry says it wants to put on trial torturers who benefit from full immunity despite what it says are dozens of proven cases of abuse in the country’s prisons.
   ‘We call on the government and judicial authorities to ensure the protection of prisoners, to punish torturers and not to include them on amnesty lists,’ said Saad Sultan, head of the ministry’s prisons supervision service.
   Iraq, which on Sunday announced it has ratified the UN convention against torture, has no law against the practice.
   ‘It’s true that there is no specific law but they (torturers) could be charged for voluntary blows and injuries,’ the senior official said late Monday.
   He said 121 ‘proven cases’ of detainees — including three women — being tortured had been unearthed in 2007. Two-thirds of them were in interior ministry facilities and the rest in centres run by the defence ministry.

Controversial British reality television personality Jade Goody has pulled out of the ‘Bigg Boss’ show in India after being diagnosed with cancer, report said Tuesday.
   Indian news channels said Goody had told contestants on the show — the Indian version of ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ — that she has been diagnosed with cervical cancer.
   NDTV said Goody, 27, abruptly flew out of India to return home for treatment, just days after arriving in the country’s entertainment capital Mumbai.
   The media reports said she spoke to her doctor in Britain, then ran out in tears and announced to her housemates on the Indian show, ‘I have cancer.’
   Goody’s appearance on the show came 18 months after she was accused of racism on British TV’s ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ due to her taunting of Bollywood actress and fellow contestant Shilpa Shetty.

FBI officials defended on Monday the scientific evidence linking a US Army scientist who committed suicide to the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, but acknowledged missteps occurred early in its investigation.
   The FBI marched out a panel of outside scientific experts in an effort to end lingering doubts on whether doctor Bruce Ivins was solely responsible for the attacks that killed five people and shook a nation already reeling from the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
   In briefings first for scientific journals and then for the news media, the FBI laid out what one official described as a ‘body of powerful evidence’ after nearly seven years of investigation on the origin of the anthrax sent through the US mail system and on the alleged perpetrator.

Speculation about Barack Obama’s vice presidential nominee hit new heights as a report said he could reveal his choice for a number two as early as Wednesday.
   The New York Times reported the presumptive Democratic nominee had not yet notified his prospective running mate, but was focusing mainly on Virginia governor Tim Kaine, Indiana senator Evan Bayh and foreign policy expert senator Joseph Biden.
   Fresh buzz about Obama’s intentions came as the Democratic White House hopeful prepared to court veterans Tuesday at an annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Orlando, and exactly a week before the Democratic nominating convention opens in Denver, Colorado.
   Running mate anticipation was also building on the Republican side, as the Politico web site and Fox News said the party’s presumptive nominee John McCain would name his running mate on August 29, the day after Obama’s acceptance speech before 70,000 people in Denver.
   The date, if confirmed, would allow McCain to limit Obama’s post convention news coverage, mark his own 72nd birthday, and build up some steam ahead of the Republican convention, in St Paul, Minnesota beginning on September 1.
   The Times, in a report on its web site, cited unnamed Obama advisers as saying he reached his decision last week while on vacation on Hawaii, and the campaign was readying an elaborate rollout for his selection.