Pakistan’s new premier has vowed to tackle al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but the United States will remain nervous about the commitment of this frontline state in the ‘war on terror’, analysts say.
   With the power of stalwart US ally president Pervez Musharraf eroding fast, Washington sent two special envoys to Islamabad last week in a bid to woo the new prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, and his government.
   Gilani, who is from the party of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, set out his policies to parliament on Saturday and said that rising Islamic militancy was the biggest threat to the nuclear-armed nation.
   But his offers to negotiate with militants who renounce violence has caused jitters among US officials, who are already reeling from the loss of the ‘one-stop shop’ they had in the form of former dictator Musharraf.
   ‘The US nervousness will continue for some time till they recognise the political changes in Pakistan,’ political analyst Hasan Askari said.
   ‘The Americans will closely monitor what Pakistan is doing against terrorism – they have strong reservations about negotiation,’ said Askari, who is teaching at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.
   A key issue with the new Pakistani government will be its tolerance for unilateral US missile strikes on militant hideouts in its mountainous tribal badlands bordering Afghanistan.
   The Washington Post reported last week that the United States was escalating such strikes amid fears that Gilani’s administration will curtail such attacks.
   The strikes followed a ‘tacit understanding’ with Musharraf and army chief General Ashfaq Kayani that permits US strikes on foreign rebels in Pakistan, but not against Pakistani Taliban, the Post quoted officials as saying.
   A senior partner in the new coalition government, former premier Nawaz Sharif, warned the US envoys who came last week that it was unacceptable for Pakistan to become a ‘murder-house’ for the sake of US policies.
   ‘The US appears to be nervous on negotiations because it thinks they give unnecessary space to the extremists. Further, the US wanted greater freedom itself to undertake direct military action in the tribal areas,’ Askari said.
   ‘However the recent visit of the US diplomats to Pakistan has made it clear that the US will have to talk to the political forces and the parliament for policy on terrorism rather than rely on one person – Musharraf.’
   The deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, and the assistant secretary of state, Richard Boucher, spent four days in Pakistan last week.
   Political solutions to the violence are high on Gilani’s agenda, with his speech on Saturday promising a special package of reforms for the tribal areas as part of a broad-based strategy to fighting terrorism.
   ‘We are ready to talk to all those people who give up arms and are ready to embrace peace,’ Gilani said to loud support from MPs on Saturday. But officials from Bhutto’s party said newspaper editorials describing anger at the timing of the US visit in the week that Gilani was elected by parliament were ‘overcooked’.
   Political commentator and columnist Shafqat Mahmood said the aims of both US and Pakistani officials remained the same – to tackle extremism.

Thailand’s ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra returned home to Bangkok on Sunday after a brief jaunt to Europe ahead of his upcoming court hearing on fraud charges.
   He arrived from London at about 4:00pm (0900 GMT), and was greeted by his wife and three children as well as a handful of supporters who gave him red roses. Two cabinet ministers also met him.
   Thaksin, wearing a black suit and white shirt, chatted briefly with his supporters before leaving the airport.
   The entrepreneur-turned-prime minister flew to England earlier this month for a business trip connected to Manchester City football club, the premier league team he purchased after his ouster in a September 2006 coup.
   Thaksin first returned to Thailand on February 28, ending 17 months of self-imposed exile with a triumphant homecoming witnessed by thousands of cheering and tearful supporters.
   On Thursday, prosecutors at Thailand’s criminal court are set to decide whether to press charges against Thaksin over alleged securities fraud related to the 2003 filing of a property company.
   Thr former premier’s spokesman Phongthep Thepkanjana told reporters at the airport that Thaksin was returning for business reasons, not to attend the hearing.
   ‘There is a team of lawyers taking care of it,’ he said, adding that Thaksin planned to travel to his hometown of Chiang Mai on April 11 to celebrate the Thai new year.
   Thaksin has already pleaded not guilty in the Supreme Court on March 12 to separate charges alleging that he used his influence as prime minister to win a sweetheart property deal for his wife.
   The former first couple, who face up to 13 years in prison each over the graft charges, have been ordered to submit evidence in their defence by April 29, but no new hearing has been scheduled.

A Malaysian opposition party on Sunday condemned the government for its refusal to free an ethnic Indian activist who was elected earlier this month as a state legislator while in detention.
   Lawyer M Manoharan, standing for the Democratic Action Party, soundly beat the incumbent in Selangor state while being held under the Internal Security Act, which allows for indefinite detention without trial.
   DAP leader Lim Kit Siang said Manoharan and four other ethnic Indian activists should be freed.
   ‘It shows that prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s administration has not really heard the voice of the people in the March 8 political tsunami to change towards a more democratic and accountable Malaysian society,’ he said.
   ‘The ISA detentions are used as political instruments to suppress dissent. It has no relationship whatsoever with national security.’
   The five activists – leaders of the rights group Hindraf – were detained last December for organising an unprecedented mass rally the month before, claiming discrimination against ethnic Indians.
   The Malaysian Indian Congress, part of the multi-ethnic ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, on Sunday made an about-face and said it would now ask Abdullah to free the activists.
   ‘I will raise it with the prime minister. If he wants to release all of them ... we have no objections. We also don’t want them to be kept inside for too long a period,’ MIC president S Samy Vellu told reporters.
   The MIC was punished by the minority Indian community in the March 8 polls for deriding last year’s protest by ethnic Indians, with a majority of its candidates losing.
   Syed Hamid Albar, the home minister responsible for internal security, on Friday rejected opposition calls for the activists’ release, citing security concerns.
   Abdullah has been battling for his political life since the election, which saw Barisan Nasional lose its two-thirds parliamentary majority for the first time since 1969.

A Indian government-run women’s rights body on Sunday accused the police in the resort state of Goa of trying to cover up evidence in the controversial killing last month of a British teenager.
   Local police initially said Scarlett Keeling, 15, had drowned after her body was found on a popular beach in Goa on February 18, but pressure from her mother and the media forced them to reopen the case.
   The police this month arrested a bartender for murder, and an alleged drug dealer for conspiracy to murder, alleging the two gave the girl a cocktail of illegal drugs, before one of them repeatedly raped her and left her for dead.
   ‘It is not an act of two persons. Four to five people are involved in the act,’ Nirmala Venkatesh, a member of the National Commission for Women, told a news conference in the local capital Panaji.
   ‘She was brutally raped and there is every possibility that her head was dipped in the water,’ she added, alleging that the police had destroyed evidence.
   ‘Police are trying to hide or close the case. We will never allow this to happen.’
   The police have said that an unconscious Keeling was dumped in shallow water, where she drowned, but a forensics report released a week ago suggested that she was forcibly drowned.
   Venkatesh said her report was based on interviews with the police, forensic experts and local residents, and that she would submit a final report after a full probe.
   Keeling’s mother Fiona MacKeown has accused the police of shielding top politicians and drug dealers during investigations into her daughter’s death.

North Korea threatened to suspend dialogue with the South over comments made by a South Korean military official and said it was ready to attack its wealthy neighbour, the North’s state media said at the weekend.
   Over the past several days, the North has lashed out at the new conservative government in Seoul and its ally the United States by test-firing missiles, expelling South Korean officials at a joint factory park in the North and threatening to slow down a nuclear disarmament deal.
   ‘The Korean People’s Army will counter any slightest move of the south side for ‘pre-emptive attack’ with more rapid and more powerful pre-emptive attack of its own mode,’ the North’s KCNA news agency quoted one of its military officials as saying.
   North Korea, one of the world’s most militarized states, has made similar statements for years threatening pre-emptive attacks, but those have almost always been in response to joint South Korean-US military drills.
   The new chairman of the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff last week said the South would hit North Korea’s nuclear weapon base to disable it if the North attacks but had no plans for a pre-emptive strike, according to the defence ministry.
   ‘If the south side does not retract the outbursts calling for ‘pre-emptive attack’ nor clarify its stand to apologise for them, the KPA will interpret this as the stand of the south side’s authorities to suspend all inter-Korean dialogues and contacts.’
   The South’s defence ministry said it would decide whether to respond in the next few days to a North Korean threat also made in the dispatch to cut back on inter-Korean military talks.
   The two Koreas stepped up bilateral contacts after the first summit of their leaders in 2000, which has led to a decrease in tensions on the heavily armed peninsula and the South helping to keep the decrepit economy of it pauper neighbor afloat with massive aid.

Iraq’s main cities of Baghdad and Basra were locked down on Sunday amid a deadly standoff between security forces and Shia gunmen whose leader, cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is defying calls for fighters to lay down their arms.
   Pedestrians and vehicles stayed off the streets of the Iraqi capital for a third straight day of curfew, imposed amid intense firefights that have killed at least 90 people in the capital since Tuesday.
   The southern oil hub of Basra was relatively calm, residents said, adding however that two neighbourhoods had been bombed during night by US or British jets. The two militaries did not immediately confirm the assaults.
   US warplanes had carried out air strikes in the city on Friday and Saturday in which several people were killed, Iraqi and US officials said.
   An AFP photographer said a vehicle curfew was still in place in the southern port city of Basra but that some pedestrians had dashed out to do some emergency shopping, taking advantage of a relative lull in the fighting.
   More than 270 people have been killed since the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, on Tuesday ordered troops to launch an assault in Basra on Shia militiamen he has since described as ‘worse than al-Qaeda.’
   Fighting spread from Basra to other Shia cities, including Baghdad, where authorities Thursday night imposed a round-the-clock curfew.
   Iraqi and US-led forces are now engaged in the most intense standoff with Shiite gunmen since 2004, when Sadr’s feared Mahdi Army militia launched a rebellion against American troops in the central city of Najaf.
   Most of the fatalities have occurred in Baghdad, where 90 people have died, and in Basra, where the toll stands at around 50.
   In Baghdad, the fighting, which subsided on Sunday, has focused in the sprawling eastern slum area of Sadr City, a Mahdi Army bastion.
   The US military says troops are fighting ‘rogue’ elements of the militia but residents say the battle is a head-on clash with the Mahdi Army which has been observing a ceasefire ordered by Sadr in August last year.
   On Saturday, the cleric ordered his fighters to reject Maliki’s call three days earlier to lay down their arms.
   ‘Sadr has told us not to surrender our arms except to a state that can throw out the (US) occupation,’ Haider al-Jabari of the Sadr movement’s political bureau said in Najaf, home to the cleric’s main office.
   Maliki had given a 72-hour deadline to Shia fighters in Basra to disarm after launching an offensive against them last Tuesday.
   The deadline expired on Friday and Maliki then gave residents of Basra an April 8 deadline to surrender their heavy and medium weapons in return for money in a bid to cut the supply of arms to militants.
   A few hours after Sadr’s defiant stand, the premier vowed to press ahead with the assault against the gunmen, saying they were ‘worse than al-Qaeda.’
   ‘Our determination is strong. We will not leave Basra until security is restored, those who break the law are punished and those who draw their weapons in the face of the state are punished,’ he said in a statement.
   ‘Unfortunately we were talking about al-Qaeda but there are some among us who are worse than al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is killing innocents, al-Qaeda is destroying establishments and they (Shia gunmen) also,’ he said.

Zimbabwe’s opposition said on Sunday it had won the most crucial election since independence but president Robert Mugabe’s government warned its opponents that premature victory claims would amount to an attempted coup.
   Tendai Biti, secretary general of the main MDC opposition party, told diplomats and observers overnight that early results posted at polling stations showed the MDC was victorious. ‘We have won this election, we have won this election,’ he said.
   Officials said they would begin announcing results of the presidential, parliamentary and local polls on Sunday. Voting ended at 7:00pm (1700 GMT) on Saturday.
   Zimbabwe’s security forces, which have thrown their backing firmly behind Mugabe, said before the election they would not allow a victory declaration before counting was complete.
   ‘It is called a coup d’etat and we all know how coups are handled,’ government spokesman George Charamba told the state-owned Sunday Mail.
   Residents in the eastern opposition stronghold of Manicaland said riot police stopped a victory demonstration by about 200 MDC supporters. There was no violence, they said.
   Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, faced his most formidable challenge in the election against MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and ruling ZANU-PF party defector Simba Makoni campaigning on the collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy.
   Although the odds seem stacked against Mugabe, 84, analysts believe he will be declared the winner, and the opposition accused him of widespread vote-rigging.
   African observers say they detected fraud in Saturday’s ballot. Mugabe, who accuses the West of sabotaging Zimbabwe’s economy, expressed confidence on Saturday he would be returned to office. ‘We will succeed. We will conquer,’ he said. He rejected vote-rigging allegations.
   Once-prosperous Zimbabwe is suffering from the world’s highest inflation rate of more than 100,000 per cent, chronic shortages of food and fuel, and an HIV/AIDS epidemic that has contributed to a steep decline in life expectancy.
   Biti said the MDC’s election agents had reported that early results showed Tsvangirai was projected to win 66 per cent of the vote in the capital Harare, an opposition stronghold.

Syria promised Arab leaders at an annual summit on Saturday to cooperate in ending a political crisis in Lebanon, and regional power Saudi Arabia said it saw Damascus as part of the solution.
   The conciliatory language on Lebanon offered some relief from the tensions that have built up during preparations for the two-day meeting, which Lebanon and key pro-US Arab leaders are skipping in protest against Syria’s Lebanon policy.
   The Beirut government is boycotting the summit while Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have sent low-level delegations.
   Eleven heads of state from the Arab League’s 22 members were present at the opening, less than normal for an Arab summit, reflecting suspicions that through its local allies Syria has obstructed the election of a new Lebanese president.
   The conflict over Lebanon is part of the wider struggle for regional influence between the United States and Syria’s ally Iran.
   Assad dismissed accusations that his country was behind the deadlock in Lebanon, which has not had a president since November because the government and the Syrian-backed opposition cannot agree on the composition of a new cabinet.
   ‘We in Syria are fully prepared to cooperate with Arab or non-Arab efforts ... on condition that they are based on Lebanese national consensus, the basis for stability in Lebanon,’ Assad said in his opening speech as summit host.
   He rejected criticism of Syria’s conduct, saying: ‘On the contrary, the pressures which have been put on Syria for more than a year, and increasingly for the last several months, have been to have Syria intervene in Lebanese internal affairs.’ The Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moualem, said Assad’s speech was aimed at showing Syria’s willingness to work towards ending the Lebanese crisis.
   ‘The president in his speech extended his hand to those Arabs and non-Arabs who want to contribute to a solution to the Lebanese crisis based on Lebanese consensus,’ he told reporters.
   At a news conference in Riyadh, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, denied that Arab countries were trying to isolate Syria over the Lebanese crisis.
   ‘On the contrary, Syria is one of the important countries in the region and, naturally, Arab countries are keen to have Syria as part of common Arab action,’ he said.
   ‘The problem is that what was decided unanimously in the Arab League, including by Syria, is not being carried out.’
   The heads of delegations at the summit discussed inter-Arab relations at a closed session. Delegates said the discussions were calm, but there were no breakthroughs.
   They expected Arab League chief Amr Moussa to work in the coming weeks to bridge differences.
   ‘There was no tension, no confrontations, discussions proceeded fine,’ one delegate said. ‘It was clear that the hosts don’t want any confrontation, any major divisive discussions at the summit.’ Arab foreign ministers in January approved an outline of a deal for Lebanon, including the election of army chief Michel Suleiman as the new president, a choice approved by both sides.

Scientists and officials from across the world meet in Thailand this week for the first formal talks in the long process of drawing up a replacement for the Kyoto climate change pact by the end of 2009.
   Around 190 nations agreed in Bali last year to start the two-year negotiations to replace Kyoto, which only binds 37 rich nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by an average of five per cent from 1990 levels by 2012. UN climate experts want the new pact to impose curbs on all countries, although there is wide disagreement about how to share out the burden between rich nations led by the United States and developing countries such as China and India.
   No major decisions are likely from the Bangkok talks, which are intended mainly to establish a timetable for more rounds of negotiations culminating in a United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen at the end of next year.
   ‘The challenge is to design a future agreement that will significantly step up action on adaptation, successfully halt the increase in global emissions within the next 10-15 years and dramatically cut back emissions by 2050,’ said Yvo de Boer, head of the UN’s Climate Change Secretariat.
   Although the negotiations are likely to be tough and tortuous, a series of UN climate change reports last year highlighted the need to curb emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that are driving global warming. One report in particular said it was more than 90 per cent certain that human actions – mainly burning fossil fuels – were to blame for changes to the weather system that will bring more heatwaves, droughts, storms and rising seas.
   One major issue to be tackled is the reluctance of big developing nations such as India and China to agree to any measures that might curb their rapid industrialisation.
   Negotiators will also have to work out how to deal with the United States – the only rich nation not to have signed up to Kyoto – given that the president, George W Bush, will be leaving the White House after November’s election.
   Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto in 2001, saying the pact would hurt the US economy and was unfair since it excluded big developing nations from committing to emissions cuts.

After almost six months and more than 250 witnesses, the judge presiding over the inquest into Princess Diana’s death wraps up the case on Monday with his summary to the jury.
   Few areas of the private life of the ‘People’s Princess’ were spared before Lord Justice Scott Baker and a string of sensational allegations were explored in court.
   Did security services kill Diana on the orders of Britain’s Royal Family? Was she pregnant? Did the 36-year-old plan to get engaged? Was her phone bugged?
   To some the inquest was an unnecessary 10 million-pound soap opera. To others it was a chance to bring closure in a tragedy of lives unfulfilled.
   Friends, family, faith healers, spies, bodyguards, police chiefs and butlers – everyone had an opinion on Diana.
   The jury was flown to Paris to see the crash scene in a road tunnel and the hospital where she died in August 1997.
   Mohamed al-Fayed, whose son Dodi died alongside Diana in a high-speed car crash after a brief summer romance, pointed the finger of blame at the royals.

Barack Obama refused Saturday to go along with other Democrats who are calling for Hillary Rodham Clinton to step away from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
   ‘My attitude is senator Hillary can run as long as she wants,’ Obama said.
   Obama told reporters he did not agree with one of his supporters, Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, when he said earlier this week that Hillary cannot win the nomination and should therefore drop out. ‘I hadn’t talked to Pat about it,’ Obama said.
   At stops throughout the day, Hillary raised the question of whether she should leave the race – eliciting loud jeers from supporters.
   ‘There are some people who say we should just stop these elections. ‘Enough people have already voted, what’s a few million more?’ Hillary said in Louisville, Ky. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m glad Kentucky is going to be voting and you’ll be choosing because it’s such an important election.’ The state holds its primary May 20.
   Campaigning in Pennsylvania, her husband, Bill Clinton, said party insiders looking to resolve the contest should step back and allow the process to move forward.

An influenza pandemic can be avoided if proper disease surveillance and control measures are carried out promptly and thoroughly, leading bird flu expert and microbiologist Yi Guan said.
   Guan, who studied the H5N1 bird flu virus after it showed up in people in Hong Kong in 1997 and has tracked its footprints all over the world ever since, is convinced that the world can stop the bug in its tracks if it has enough resolve.
   ‘If proper surveillance is in place for animals and humans, yes, we can stop pandemic influenza forever. Not just for H5N1, it may also work for other subtypes of viruses,’ he said in an interview over the weekend.
   ‘We have the ability to remove pandemics if we have a long-term strategy.’
   Guan, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, knows just how backbreaking and mundane surveillance work can be.
   He and his researchers have tested more than 200,000 stool samples of chickens, aquatic and wild birds collected from various parts of China since 2000, screening them for the H5N1 virus which experts say could cause the next flu pandemic, killing millions of people.
   The university laboratory where Guan works is a World Health Organisation reference facility that also helps to analyze H5N1 samples from other parts of the world, particularly Asia.