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Thousands of men in turbans Wednesday marched for peace in Pakistan’s troubled Swat valley, led by the cleric who signed a deal to enforce Islamic law in a bid to quell a bloody insurgency.
   ‘I have come here to establish peace and I will not leave until this mission is achieved,’ the elderly Soofi Mohammad, leader of the Sharia movement, told the crowd in Mingora, the main town in the former holiday resort of Swat.
   The police and witnesses estimated that 15,000 people marched in the crowd, waving black and white flags as they paraded through town with the cleric, who advised them to recite only verses from the Qur’an.
   The male gathering, mostly Mohammad’s supporters, were mostly bearded and sporting black turbans. The elderly cleric walked behind several rows of followers marching hand-in-hand.
   Local residents lined the main roads, greeting Mohammad, who was jailed in Pakistan for six years after returning from Afghanistan where he led thousands of supporters to fight against US-led troops who toppled the Taliban in 2001.
   Wearing a black waistcoat and white shalwar kamiz, Mohammad sported a long white beard, walked slowly and avoided the gaze of television cameras.
   Amnesty International believes that over the past year, more than 1,200 people have been killed and 200,000-500,000 displaced from Swat as a result of fighting between hardliners trying to impose sharia and the government.
   Monday’s controversial deal between Mohammad and the Pakistani government to enforce sharia law has sparked concern from NATO and India and muted comment from Washington, which considers extremists in northwest Pakistan a direct threat.
   The cleric left Mingora later Wednesday for the nearby town of Matta, where he was hoping to meet firebrand Maulana Fazlullah and Taliban leaders in an effort to persuade them to disarm, his spokesman Amir Izzat said.
   No date for any meeting has been announced.
   Fazlullah, who is believed to live in mountains just outside Matta, has led a nearly two-year, terrifying campaign to enforce sharia in Swat while his father-in-law Mohammad was languishing in a Pakistani jail.
   
   Pakistan unrest displaces over 300,000
   More than 300,000 people in northwest Pakistan have been displaced over the last six months because of fighting between Taliban insurgents and government troops, officials said Wednesday.
   A total of 55,729 displaced families, or 337,772 individuals, have been registered by the authorities, Shaukat Tahir, a senior official from the national disaster management authority, told a news conference in Islamabad.
   Another official said the number displaced was for the time period since August.
   The Pakistani military has launched major operations in Bajaur, Swat and other areas in the country’s semi-autonomous tribal zones along the border with Afghanistan, where both al-Qaeda and Taliban are said to have bases.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, held talks Wednesday in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, on her first mission to start mending US ties with the Islamic world.
   She met the foreign minister, Hassan Wirajuda, and was due to meet leaders of the Jakarta-based Association of Southeast Asian Nations on the second leg of her four-nation trip through Asia, officials said.
   Wearing a red coat over a black blouse and trousers, Hillary touched down under heavy skies and was greeted by senior officials and a choir of students from US president Barack Obama’s old primary school in Jakarta.
   Obama, who spent part of his childhood here in the late 1960s, has promised to improve relations with the Islamic world after the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan under his predecessor George W Bush.

North Korea will face UN sanctions if it goes ahead with a long-range missile test that would be seen as a threat to the region, South Korea’s foreign minister said on Wednesday.
   ‘Whether the North launches a missile or a satellite, it is still a violation of a UN Security Council resolution,’ the foreign minister, Yu Myung-hwan, told a group of diplomats and journalists. ‘It will inevitably be followed by sanctions.’
   The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said in Tokyo on Tuesday such a launch would be ‘very unhelpful’ and Washington was watching the North’s moves very closely. The North appears to be readying a launch of the Taepodong-2, its longest-range missile, which experts said is designed to strike US territory but has never flown successfully.
   The North contends the rockets is the key to its peaceful space programme and said this week it had the right to launch it.
   In addition, South Korea’s Dong-a Ilbo newspaper, quoting a government source, on Wednesday said North Korea had been running a uranium enrichment plant near its main nuclear complex in Yongbyon, about 100 km north of the capital, Pyongyang, albeit on a small scale.
   South Korean officials declined to comment on the report. The possible existence of an uranium enrichment programme, which could offer an effective way of developing nuclear arms, has been a persistent sticking point in diplomacy.
   A US accusation that Pyongyang was clandestinely operating such a plan led to the breakdown of a 1994 disarmament deal and the start of new, six-way nuclear talks in 2003.

Lawyers at the trial of the Khmer Rouge’s chief torturer clashed Wednesday over the use of a film taken by Vietnamese troops showing the prison where he oversaw 15,000 deaths.
   The arguments came as the UN-backed Cambodian genocide tribunal wrapped up the opening session of the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, after just a day and a half. Full hearings are expected to start next month.
   Duch’s lawyers opposed a prosecution bid to show footage shot by Vietnamese troops showing conditions at the prison two days after they helped to topple the communist Khmer Rouge regime on January 7, 1979.
   ‘We the defence regard this video footage as having political motivation in nature to disguise the truth of the nature of the event,’ co-defence lawyer Kar Savuth said, adding that it was effectively a Vietnamese propaganda film.
   The seven-minute, black-and-white video shows scenes of horror inside the abandoned prison, which was a former high school, including several bloated corpses strapped to iron bedframes where they were apparently tortured.
   It also shows five children who survived the retreat of the Khmer Rouge from the jail by hiding in a pile of washing.
   Prosecutors said it was essential for the tribunal to see the film, partly because it confirmed that children were held at the notorious jail as well as men and women.
   ‘It is an absolute must for this trial chamber to have all available evidence,’ said co-prosecutor Robert Petit, adding that they wanted to call the Vietnamese cameraman and other witnesses related to the video.

A group of Indian tribals have married off a toddler to a female dog in eastern India in a bid to prevent his predicted death at the hands of a tiger, a report said Wednesday.
   The ceremony at a Hindu temple in Orissa state’s Jajpur district was conducted with all the rituals observed at traditional weddings, including a dowry for the bride — the village bitch.
   The dog sported two silver rings and a silver chain, the UNI news agency reported.
   Parents of the groom, one-and-a-half year old Sangula, were advised to arrange the marriage when they noticed a tooth growing from their infant son’s upper gum — considered a bad omen.
   Community elders believed the growth would lead to the boy being killed in a tiger attack — a fate preventable, according to tribal tradition, by marrying a dog.
   Sanrumula Munda, Sangula’s father, said the ceremony would not prevent him from marrying properly when he comes of age.
   Superstition is still a potent force in tribal and remote communities of India.

A bomb destroyed a local press club building Wednesday in a restive tribal area of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan, but caused no casualties, an official said.
   The two-storey building was reduced to rubble by the explosives, planted by unidentified people in Wana, the main town of South Waziristan tribal district, deputy administrator for the region Ghafoor Shah said.
   ‘Unidentified people planted a bomb at the press club which destroyed the building, but 13 security personnel deployed there remained unhurt,’ Shah said.

The support rate for Japan’s embattled prime minister Taro Aso has fallen to 13.4 per cent, down 4.7 points in 10 days, Kyodo news agency reported on Wednesday, a day after a furore over the finance minister’s resignation.
   Shoichi Nakagawa quit as finance minister on Tuesday after denying he was drunk at a weekend G7 news conference, sparking speculation over whether Aso will be forced to step down or call an early election that his party appears in danger of losing.
   In the telephone survey, conducted after Nakagawa’s resignation, 53.4 per cent said they would prefer a government led by the main opposition Democratic Party, while 28.1 per cent said they prefer one led by long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Kyodo reported.
   ‘The fall in the support rate is accelerating and the government seems to be in its last phase,’ Kyodo said in a comment on its poll. Its previous survey was on February 7 and 8.
   ‘It seems like Aso is no longer functioning as a prime minister,’ Democrats leader Ichiro Ozawa said on Wednesday.

Afghanistan is turning a new page in relations with the United States, an Afghan presidential spokesman said on Wednesday, as the US president, Barack Obama, ordered 17,000 more troops deployed to battle Taliban insurgents.
   Obama, in his first major military decision as commander-in-chief, said the troop increase was ‘necessary to stabilise a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan,’ but warned military means alone would not solve the problem.
   Obama spoke to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, overnight for the first time since he took office in Washington a month ago.
   Ties between Kabul and Washington have been strained since Obama’s inauguration, with the new administration questioning Karzai’s ability to govern effectively and the Afghan president hitting back at the killing of civilians by foreign troops.
   But after a telephone conversation overnight, Karzai’s spokesman said: ‘We have opened a new page.’
   ‘Obama spoke with the president about various issues including steps for improving security in the region, equipment and training of the national army, further strengthening of bilateral relations, and the increase of forces was also discussed,’ said presidential spokesman Humayun Hamidzada.
   The reinforcements will take US troop numbers to around 55,000, in addition to the 30,000 troops from 40 other mostly NATO countries already operating in Afghanistan.
   The United States will pressure its allies to also send more troops at a meeting of NATO defence ministers in Poland this week, but many European countries are wary of getting bogged down in Afghanistan and reluctant to let their troops engage in combat and take casualties due to domestic opposition to the war.
   But NATO diplomats say up to 10,000 more troops could be required, as many as 3,000 of them from Europe, as short-term reinforcements to guard elections on August 20, regarded as a key milestone that Afghanistan must pass if it is to attain peace.
   Some analysts however have questioned the wisdom of sending more troops, arguing that a larger foreign military presence runs the risk of being seen as an occupying force. Others say a bigger force is not necessary to achieve Washington’s primary objective in Afghanistan — preventing al-Qaeda using it as a base.

A new drug sharply improves the survival rate of patients with a bone-marrow disorder that often develops into acute myeloid leukaemia, according to a study released Wednesday.
   Up until now, there has been no known treatment for the disorder — called myelodysplastic syndrome — besides bone-marrow transplant, which is suitable for only a small percentage of patients.
   MDS is condition in which immature blood cells in the bone marrow known as blasts fail to develop properly into adult blood cells. This leads to a lack of while blood cells to fight infection, red blood cells to carry oxygen, and platelets to stop bleeding.
   In clinical trials led by Pierre Fenaux at the Universite Paris 13 north of Paris, 358 patients with high-risk MDS were divided into two groups.
   One received azacitidine injections seven days each month for six months. The other 179 patients were randomly given one of several conventional treatments, including so called ‘best supportive’ or palliative care, and intensive chemotherapy.
   Follow-up continued for an average of just over 21 months.
   Overall, patients who took azacitidine survived more than nine months longer than those who received conventional care.
   The benefits of the new drug became apparent after only three months, and researchers estimated that after two years of treatment, the survival rate with the new drug would be doubled.

Israel’s pointman in talks with Egypt on a Gaza truce has lashed out at the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, for linking the issue to the release of captive Israeli soldier, a report said on Wednesday.
   Amos Gilad, the senior defence ministry official who has been shuttling between Israel and Egypt for weeks, said requiring the freeing of Gilad Shalit for a Gaza ceasefire at the last moment risked alienating key ally Cairo.
   ‘I don’t understand what it is that they’re trying to do,’ the Maariv daily quoted Gilad as telling a close associate. ‘To insult the Egyptians? We’ve already insulted them. It’s madness. It’s simply madness. Egypt has remained almost our last ally here.’
   The quotes were published on the day that Israel’s powerful security cabinet met to decide whether to back Olmert’s position, first stated at the weekend, that without the freeing of the soldier seized by Gaza militants in June 2006 Israel would not agree to a lasting ceasefire with the enclave’s Hamas rulers.
   ‘Until now the prime minister hasn’t involved himself at all. Suddenly, the order of things has been changed. Suddenly, first we have to get Gilad.
   I don’t understand that. Where does that lead, to insult the Egyptians? To make them want to drop the whole thing? What do we stand to gain from that?’
   Gilad warned that the changed Israeli position risked alienating the Egyptians, whom he hailed for their efforts during the weeks-long negotiations.
   ‘The Egyptians have shown extraordinary courage.

Iran’s hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday said Washington’s relations with Tehran and the region can change if there is an effective policy shift by the United States.
   In an interview with state-run television, Ahmadinejad once again called upon Washington’s new administration of president Barack Obama to implement changes that could make a ‘real’ difference in the region.
   ‘If they accept the rights of the Palestinians, the Afghans... if there is a real change, relations can change,’ Ahmadinejad said.
   ‘We are waiting to see the change. A lot of people are awaiting the change and if they (the United States) do change the relationship will change itself.’
   However, Ahmadinejad also said his country’s controversial nuclear programme which the West suspects is aimed at making atomic weapons is a ‘closed’ chapter.
   ‘If anybody wants to talk of the nuclear issue, they would be hurting themselves,’ he said in the television interview.
   The Iranian president said on February 10 that Tehran is prepared to talk with Washington on the basis of mutual respect and equality.
   Formal ties between the two countries have been severed for 30 years and the rift has been further aggravated since Tehran controversially revived its nuclear programme.

Prominent Italian gynaecologist Severino Antinori will artificially inseminate a woman with the sperm of her comatose husband, in a first in Italy that has drawn Vatican criticism, press reports said Wednesday.
   ‘I decided to act because ... there’s a woman who wants to become a mother to overcome the immense sadness’ brought about by the brain cancer that put her husband in a coma, Antinori told the leading Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
   Antinori is well known in Italy for controversially helping post-menopausal women to bear children, earning himself the nickname of ‘the grandmother’s obstetrician.’
   The in vitro fertilisation of the woman will be the first in Italy using the sperm of a man in a coma, Corriere said.

A union activist was killed overnight in Guadeloupe as the month-long strike on the French Caribbean island escalated into riots and shootings, local authorities said Wednesday.
   Jacques Bino, aged in his 50s, was shot dead while driving his car near a roadblock manned by armed youths who opened fire at the police with buckshot in the capital Pointe-a-Pitre, an official from the local administration said.
   He was the first victim of the escalating violence on the island crippled since January 20 by a general strike over the high cost of living.
   The government in Paris appealed for calm and the interior minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, called crisis talks on the deteriorating security situation.