Malaysia’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was sworn in to parliament Thursday, only to stage a dramatic walkout hours later in a row over controversial DNA sampling legislation.
   Anwar won a seat in parliament by a landslide in a by-election this week in his home state of Penang, ending a long political exile after he was sacked as deputy premier in 1998 and jailed for sodomy and corruption.
   ‘I’m glad to be back after a decade,’ Anwar said, insisting he was on track to topple the government within weeks with the help of defecting lawmakers.
   The first order of business was a new bill which would force suspected criminals to give DNA samples — legislation Anwar says is targeted at him, as he refused to provide a sample after again being arrested on sodomy charges.
   He walked out with his 81 opposition lawmakers after the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition refused to establish a special committee to review the bill.
   ‘We have walked out because they have refused to respond. Many MPs requested a select committee to be formed but the minister (home minister Syed Hamid Albar) refused,’ Anwar told reporters.
   ‘There is no point staying and participating in the debate,’ he said.
   Syed Hamid condemned the actions of the three-party opposition alliance.
   ‘They walked out contrary to the rules because they don’t want to accept defeat. They know that they will be defeated,’ he told reporters.
   ‘They walked out because they don’t want it to appear like a failure for its leader who has said that he will be able to win over Barisan Nasional MPs.’
   Anwar arrived at parliament with his wife Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, who held his seat in northern Penang during his exile, and his daughter Nurul Izzah Anwar, who is also a parliamentarian.
   Dressed in a dark blue traditional Malay outfit and black ‘songkok’ hat, he was sworn in during a brief ceremony.
   Anwar attacked the prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who has faced persistent calls to quit since March elections in which the opposition gained unprecedented ground.
   ‘The prime minister has lost the mandate of the country and the nation,’ Anwar said, calling on Abdullah, his deputy Najib Razak and ‘all their cronies’ to be removed from power.
   Asked if he was on track to carry out his plan to seize power by securing the support of at least 30 government lawmakers by September 16, he said ‘Yes’.
   The March elections saw the opposition gain control of five states and a third of parliamentary seats, in the worst ever setback for the coalition which has ruled Malaysia for half a century.
   Anwar faces another daunting hurdle as he fights to clear his name of the new sodomy allegations levelled by a 23-year-old former aide, which he says have been concocted by the government to sideline him.
   His original sodomy conviction was overturned by the nation’s highest court in 2004, allowing him to go free after six years in jail.

Army troops helped evacuate more than 120,000 people from floods in Bihar, but more bad weather raised fears that rivers would to continue to overflow, officials said on Thursday.
   The flooding, which officials say are the worst in 50 years, was caused after the Kosi river broke a dam in Nepal where it originates, unleashing huge waves of water that smashed mud embankments downstream in Bihar.
   Many villagers offered prayers and slaughtered goats to appease the Kosi, known as Bihar’s ‘river of sorrow’ for its regular floods and ability to change course.
   ‘We are praying to the river goddess and offering her blood since only she can help us’, a village woman in the worst affected Supaul district told a local newspaper.
   At least two million people have been forced from their homes and a quarter of a million houses destroyed. So far 55 deaths have been officially reported in Bihar, but activists and local media put the toll many times higher.
   Stranded villagers complained of an unbearable stench from rotting carcasses and the United Nations warned of the spread of water-borne disease.
   TV stations showed swirling flood waters pouring into homes through windows, submerging hundreds of villages and roads and railway tracks. Telephone and power lines snapped.
   Torrential rains have killed more than 1,000 people in South Asia since the monsoon began in June, mainly in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where 725 people have lost their lives.
   Some experts blame the floods on heavier monsoon rains caused by global warming, while others say authorities have failed to take preventive measures and improve infrastructure.
   ‘The administration is misleading people about the casualty, I have myself seen some 40 dead bodies at a village in Araria district alone,’ flood expert Dinesh Kumar Mishra told The Times of India newspaper.
   The newspaper quoted a villager from a badly affected district as saying he had seen at least 250 bodies at one place.
   The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and Sonia Gandhi, head of the ruling Congress party, flew over devastated areas by helicopter on Thursday.
   State officials told Reuters more than 120,000 had been evacuated and kept in more than 100 temporary camps, but bad weather was hampering rescue and relief operations.
   ‘We have the army, disaster management teams, the police and other groups of rescuers making every effort to save the population,’ said RK Singh, a top disaster management official.
   Officials said floods had destroyed more than 227,000 homes and damaged about 100,000 hectares of vegetables, wheat and paddy crops.

Thailand’s embattled prime minister vowed Thursday to end massive rallies against his rule without force — raising the spectre of a prolonged siege of Bangkok’s main government compound.
   More than 10,000 protesters barricaded themselves in at Government House for a third day and formed human shields to protect their leaders from arrest in an effort to cripple Samak Sundaravej’s administration and force him from office.
   Apparently undeterred by mounting legal pressures for them to get out, protest leaders said they would camp out until Sunday at least, and constructed barriers of tyres and barbed wire to keep police out.
   The prime minister, who has pledged to stay in power, said the police would not storm the compound but authorities would instead wait for the protesters to give themselves up in an effort to avoid bloodshed.
   ‘Foreign countries are monitoring and keeping a close watch and waiting for a showdown,’ Samak told reporters.
   ‘There will be no showdown.’
   He said the siege of his main headquarters would not be allowed to drag on forever, but threw the ball into the court of the protest leaders.
   ‘Whenever it ends, it ends — it’s up to them,’ he said. ‘I assign police to do this task without forcibly dispersing the rally.’
   Thai courts have ordered protesters to clear out of Government House immediately and issued arrest warrants for nine of the protest leaders, but the anti-Samak alliance remained defiant.
   Sondhi Limthongkul, a media mogul and key leader of the People’s Alliance for Democracy, told the cheering crowds they will ‘stay until Sunday’ at the earliest.
   The compound on Thursday began to take on signs of a permanent settlement, with people camping, setting up washing-lines to dry their clothes in the sun and refuelling at on-site food stands.
   Outside the frontier atmosphere at Government House, legal executors posted arrest warrants at the protest leaders’ homes while PAD lawyers took a petition to the Court of Appeals against the order demanding they leave the compound.
   Chamlong Srimuang, a 73-year-old retired general and protest leader, vowed not to budge.
   ‘We still maintain our goals. One: all parties have to commit that they will not amend the constitution at all. Two: the government has to quit,’ he said.
   The PAD — which despite its name is trying to bring down Samak’s elected government — began its campaign at the end of May, just over three months after the coalition government was formed.
   PAD leaders say Samak is a mere figurehead running the country on behalf of former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 coup, is barred from holding office and now lives in exile in Britain.

Japan said Thursday it planned to extend a controversial mission backing the US-led ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan, a day after Taliban extremists killed a Japanese aid worker in the war-torn country.
   The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, called Ito’s killing ‘a cowardly act by the enemies of the people of Afghanistan.’
   ‘Such attacks will not deter the process of international assistance to Afghanistan,’ he said.
   The Japanese foreign minister, Masahiko Komura, telephoned his counterpart, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, to thank Afghanistan for trying to free Ito.
   The slain worker’s group withdrew staff and charged that Japan’s rising military profile may have been to blame for the death of agricultural specialist Kazuya Ito, 31, whose bullet-riddled body was found on Wednesday.
   But the government said it would go ahead and submit legislation to keep ships in the Indian Ocean providing fuel to the US-led coalition.
   The mission is set to expire in January. The opposition briefly forced a halt to the mission last year, arguing that Japan, officially pacifist since Second World War, should not take part in ‘American wars.’
   ‘Right now each country is increasing its efforts to counter terrorism and bring domestic stability,’ chief government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura told a news conference.

Indian troops have shot dead three Muslim militants in Kashmir and freed seven hostages they seized after going on a killing spree, the army said Thursday.
   Two militants were shot on Wednesday evening during a fierce gun battle, but three male hostages were killed by their captors.
   ‘The operation is over. We killed third militant early Thursday,’ Indian army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel SD Goswami said from the stand-off on the outskirts of Hindu-dominated Jammu city.
   The army had earlier said only women and children were taken hostage.
   On Wednesday, the police said the militants opened fire on an army post killing one officer and wounding two other soldiers.
   The soldiers retaliated but the militants escaped in a taxi rickshaw and later killed its driver and two other civilians.
   They then barricaded themselves in a house and took 10 people hostage, the police said.
   Goswami said a total of 10 people were killed — three militants, six civilians and an army officer.
   ‘The dead militants are believed to be Pakistani nationals and most probably members of Lashkar-e-Toiba,’ he said, referring to a hardline Islamic group.

At least 37 Tamil Tiger rebels and five government soldiers were killed in an upsurge of fighting in Sri Lanka’s embattled north, the defence ministry said Thursday.
   Troops advancing deeper into territory held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam killed the 37 rebels and wounded another 18 in clashes on Wednesday, the ministry said in a statement.
   It said five soldiers were killed and another 33 wounded.
   The latest fighting raised the number of rebels killed by troops since January to 6,167, according to defence ministry figures. The government says 581 of its troops have died over the same period.
   Casualty figures from the two sides cannot be verified as the military blocks media access to the front lines and rebel-controlled areas.
   Tens of thousands of people have died since the LTTE launched a separatist campaign in 1972 to carve out a homeland for minority Tamils in the majority Sinhalese island’s north and east.

Pro-Palestinian activists who sailed to the Gaza Strip in symbolic defiance of an Israeli blockade were to return to Cyprus on Thursday with a few residents of the besieged territory on board.
   ‘We will leave today with several humanitarian cases,’ said Huwaida Arraf, one of the organisers of the ‘Free Gaza’ protest.
   She said at least seven Palestinians, including students who couldn’t get Israeli exit visas to study abroad, would join the activists on the two wooden fishing boats for the 370-kilometre voyage.
   Organisers awaited an all-clear from authorities in Cyprus who were sent the list of Palestinian passengers.
   The activists said they did not expect the Israeli navy to interdicts them at sea since the vessels will not be entering Israeli territorial waters.
   But there was media speculation that the authorities might stop them to check the Palestinian passengers’ identities.
   ‘Why is it that the only people in the Mediterranean without access to their own waters are the Palestinians?’ asked Vaggelis Pissias, one of the organisers.

Long-term daily use of incense, an important feature of Asian religious practices, increases the risk of some cancers, an international study has found.
   The research found that people who burned incense at home daily for more than 40 years had a risk of getting a certain type of cancer more than 70 per cent higher than people who did not.
   ‘This is chronic, long-term exposure,’ Koh Woon-Puay, a co-author of the study, said in an interview late Wednesday.
   ‘We’re not saying, therefore, that people must stop burning it. Try to reduce exposure to it.’
   The study involved about 61,000 middle-aged and elderly ethnic Chinese people in Singapore who were cancer-free between 1993 and 1998. Researchers looked at how frequently they used incense at home and tracked them until the end of 2005 to see whether they developed cancer.
   Singapore is a majority ethnic Chinese city-state where most people live in apartments. Incense burning is practised by followers of Taoism or ancestor worship.
   The research found the incense smoke was associated with only one type of cancer, upper airway cancer, which includes cancer of the tongue, oral cavity and sinuses.

Russia on Thursday tested an inter-continental missile, reports said, heightening tensions with the west as France said the European Union could slap sanctions on Moscow over the Georgia conflict.
   Russia also sought international support for its stance at a summit with China and central Asian nations.
   The missile test in northern Russia came barely a week after the United States completed an accord with Poland on basing an anti-missile shield in central Europe and as Russia accuses NATO of building up its navy vessels in the Black Sea.
   A spokesman for Russia’s strategic nuclear forces said the test was successful, Russian news agencies reported. The announcement came as Russia complained about the number of NATO ships in the Black Sea and said it was taking ‘measures of precaution’.
   NATO said there were five warships taking part in exercises in the Black Sea that were organised before Russia’s military offensive in Georgia on August 8 to rebuff a Georgian attempt to retake breakaway South Ossetia.
   The standoff with the West deepened with president Dmitry Medvedev’s announcement that Russia recognised South Ossetia and another rebel region, Abkhazia, as independent states.
   ‘There is no NATO naval build up in the Black Sea as Russian authorities are claiming in the media,’ alliance spokeswoman Carmen Romero said.
   In a statement, NATO said: ‘This deployment is routine in nature and has been planned for over a year. Notification of the requirement to transit the Turkish Straits was given in June well before the current Georgia crisis and is completely unrelated.’
   US warships have taken relief supplies to Georgia outside of the NATO exercises and other western nations are believed to have vessels in the Black Sea. Russia has moved some of its own naval forces to the Abkhaz port of Sukhumi.
   EU states are considering imposing sanctions on Russia at an emergency summit on the Georgian crisis on Monday, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said.
   ‘Sanctions are being considered, and many other means,’ said Kouchner, whose country holds the European Union presidency.
   ‘We are trying to draw up a strong text showing our desire not to accept’ the situation in Georgia, he told reporters, while refusing to disclose what kind of sanctions were under consideration.
   The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, shrugged off the threat, saying it was made ‘just because they’re upset that the ‘little pet’ of certain western capitals didn’t fulfil their expectations.’
   Lavrov suggested the French foreign minister had a ‘sick imagination’ after Kouchner argued that Moscow could have designs on Ukraine, Crimea and Moldova.
   Russia claimed it had secured support from China and four other nations at a summit in Dushanbe, the Tajikistan capital.
   The statement released by the six nations at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit voiced support for Russia’s ‘active role’ in ‘assisting in peace and cooperation in the region’ but also called for dialogue and respect for ‘territorial integrity’.
   ‘The SCO member states express their deep concern over the recent tensions surrounding the South Ossetia question and call for the sides to peacefully resolve existing problems through dialogue,’ said the statement signed by Medvedev, the China president, Hu Jintao, and the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, issued a scathing attack on NATO Thursday, saying the western alliance was failing to bring security to Afghanistan and fanning tension with its expansion drive.
   ‘The presence of NATO forces in Afghanistan has not only not helped ensure security but has led to the deaths of innocent people on a regular basis,’ he said, speaking alongside his Russian and Chinese counterparts, Dmitry Medvedev and Hu Jintao.Ahmadinejad referred to a ‘horrific attack’ Friday in Afghanistan’s western province of Herat in which US-led airstrikes killed 90 civilians, including 60 children,
   according to a UN human rights team.
   He also made an apparent jab at NATO expansion plans in the former Soviet Union, which have been blamed for raising tensions between Russia and its ex-Soviet neighbours including pro-western Georgia.
   ‘Some western powers, by encouraging certain political forces and countries and calling on them to join military agreements, are harming integration in the region and are creating tension in relations between neighbouring countries,’ the Iranian leader said.
   ‘This is how they pave the way for political and military influence... and unfortunately their unilateral actions are continuing,’ he added. Ahmadinejad made the remarks at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a regional grouping consisting of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
   Iran and Afghanistan have observer status in SCO, which was founded in 2001 as a counterweight to NATO in the strategic Central Asian region.
   The summit in the Tajik capital Dushanbe has been overshadowed by Russia’s armed conflict with Georgia, which has provoked a standoff between Moscow and the west that is stoking fears of a new Cold War.

The new leaders of South Africa’s ruling ANC are scrambling to fix the party’s image ahead of elections next year, but a clash of views shows it faces a battle to speak with one voice, analysts said.
   A flurry of activity recently has seen African National Congress heavyweights hold frank meetings about its policies with minority groups and businessmen, with a rare acknowledgment of shortcomings in the party.
   However the personality of the former liberation movement appears to have split as it sends out conflicting statements, analysts said.
   ‘The problem is they are speaking in so many different voices, all the various components are expressing their own views and these are contradictory. It’s really more a confusion than any kind of strategy,’ said Robert Schrire, head of the political science department at the University of Cape Town.
   In recent weeks some leaders have defended the independence of the judiciary, while others attacked it in defence of their graft-accused party chief Jacob Zuma, who faces a trial next year as the country heads to the polls.
   There has been scant condemnation from party leaders on fiery statements from staunch Zuma backers declaring they would ‘kill’ for him and that nothing will stand in the way of their man becoming the country’s next president.
   ‘While you have these positive messages you also have the negative messages coming from leaders who feel the party, their leader — Jacob Zuma — is under siege.’
   The new leadership of the ANC was elected at a conference last December where the populist Zuma toppled the current head of state, Thabo Mbeki, in an acrimonious battle.

The Arctic ice cap keeps melting under the effects of global warming and in August saw its second largest summer shrinkage since satellite observations began 30 years ago, US scientists said Wednesday.
   Measurements on August 26 showed an ice cap of 5.26 million square kilometres, just below the 5.32 million square kilometres observed on 21 September 2005, making it the second biggest summer Arctic ice-cap melt in history, said the National Snow and Ice Data Centre.
   Since the start of August, the Boulder, Colorado-based centre said, the Arctic polar cap shrank by 2.06 million square kilometres.
   The melting is so fast and extensive it could shrink the ice cap to below the 4.25 million square kilometres reached in the summer of 2007, the smallest it has ever been observed by satellites, the centre said.
   Since the end of the Arctic summer and the start of the freezing autumn is several weeks away, it said, the ice cap could dwindle even more than it did in 2007.
   At the end of northern hemisphere summer 2007, the Arctic ice cap was 40 per cent smaller than the average 7.23 million square kilometres observed in 1979-2000, the NSIDC said.
   The North Pole melting season begins in mid-June. The ice cap shrinks to its smallest area by mid-September and grows the most in winter by mid-March.
   ‘The bottom line, however, is that the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent characterising the past decade continues,’ the Centre said in a report.
   The North Pole itself could even become free of ice by September for the first time in modern history, setting a new milestone in the effects of global warming on the Arctic ice shelf, NSIDC glaciologist Mark Serreze said in late June.
   ‘We could have no ice at the North Pole at the end of this summer. And the reason is that the North Pole area right now is covered with very thin ice, and this ice we call ‘first-year ice,’ the ice that tends to melt out in the summer,’ he explained.
   Serrreze said the possibility the ice cap could vanish stood at 50 per cent.
   If it does happen in September, he added, ‘it’s possible that ships could sail from Alaska right to the North Pole’.

Tropical Storm Gustav rumbled Thursday toward Jamaica and Cuba and threatened to take hurricane force winds to Louisiana after leaving 22 people dead in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
   The eye of the storm was expected to pass ‘very close’ to Jamaica later Thursday, the US National Hurricane Centre said, while 50,000 people were evacuated from zones at risk in eastern Cuba. Gustav, which struck Haiti as a Category One hurricane on Tuesday, could regain hurricane strength by Friday, the hurricane centre warned.
   The storm pushed oil prices higher on fears that the storm could strike rigs when it moves to the Gulf of Mexico.
   Blowing winds of 75 kilometres per hour, Gustav was located about 130 kilometres northeast of Kingston and 165 kilometres southwest of Guantanamo, Cuba, the centre said in its latest advisory.

Barack Obama Wednesday offered unstinting praise of the Clintons and vowed to ‘take America back’ after making history as the first black presidential nominee of a major party.
   In a surprise appearance at the Democratic convention, Obama took to the stage with his running mate Joseph Biden after the veteran Delaware senator gave an impassioned acceptance address to run as his vice presidential pick.
   Bringing the house down as thousands of delegates leapt to their feet, Obama declared his pride in having the whole Biden family ‘with me on this journey to take America back.’
   Reviewing the convention so far ahead of his own acceptance address Thursday, Obama said his wife Michelle ‘kicked it off pretty well, don’t you think?’
   ‘And just in case you were wondering, I think president Bill Clinton reminded us of what it’s like when you’ve got a president who actually puts people first,’ he said, pointing to the smiling former first couple.
   Obama explained that his decision to deliver his acceptance speech in front of more than 70,000 supporters at a Denver sports stadium, rather than in the convention hall, was designed to bring as many people in as possible.
   ‘At the start of this campaign, we had a very simple idea, which is change in America doesn’t start from the top down, it starts from the bottom up,’ he declared.
   ‘That change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.

The AIDS virus spreads in New York City three times faster than in the rest of the United States, the city’s health department said Wednesday in a report on the deadly disease.
   Some 4,800 New Yorkers became HIV infected in 2006, said what is considered the first report to distinguish between people actually infected that year with the AIDS virus and those infected in previous years.
   For the same reason, however, the report said it was impossible to determine if there was an increase in HIV infection, but suggested that in New York the infection rate was three times higher than the national average.
   With its estimated 100,000 HIV-positive individuals, New York City is considered the
   US epicentre of the AIDS epidemic.

Some 70 African migrants are feared missing in the central Mediterranean after a large rubber dinghy taking them to Europe capsized, the Malta representative of the UN refugee agency said on Wednesday.
   A Maltese fishing boat rescued eight migrants some 55 miles south of Malta on Wednesday, and the crew were told the group had originally numbered 78, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees representative Neil Falzon said.
   Falzon said the survivors, whom he interviewed at a detention centre, said they had set sail from Libya on Thursday last week but their dinghy had started taking in water, and capsized on Monday. A Maltese fishing boat found the eight survivors on the half submerged dinghy early on Wednesday.
   Falzon said the survivors came from Togo and Ghana, but the missing migrants also included people from Somalia and Ethiopia. A Maltese military plane searched for the missing migrants for most of Wednesday but found no trace of them.

President Robert Mugabe’s regime insisted Thursday it will form a new government alone as an outraged opposition planned to petition mediator Thabo Mbeki to save Zimbabwe’s power-sharing talks from an ‘act of insanity’.
   ‘Nothing is going to stop us from forming a new government. We need to move forward, we need to make sure that Zimbabwe regains its status, we need to work on the economy. People are suffering,’ Mugabe’s junior information minister Bright Matonga told South Africa’s state broadcaster SABC.
   Matonga was responding to opposition claims that Mugabe would be violating a recent agreement between his ruling ZANU-PF party and the Movement for Democratic Change, as well as jeopardising the delicately-poised power-sharing talks if he unilaterally formed a government.
   ‘That is the mandate that he (Mugabe) was given by the SADC (Southern African Development Community regional bloc) and he is not going to stop forming that new cabinet. The MDC are not serious at all,’ said Matonga.
   Speaking earlier, MDC deputy leader Tendai Biti warned Mugabe’s move would scupper the talks.
   ‘You will be killing the talks. Once you form a government, forget about talks. It is a disaster and an act of insanity to think that Mugabe can go it alone,’ Biti said.
   ‘Once he does that (forms a new government), then he has put a final nail on this dialogue...So what in fact you are doing is you are making people suffer, and therefore declaring a war on the people,’ he said.