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US president Barack Obama on Thursday renewed pressure on Israel but rejected a timetable for his peace drive, noting domestic pressures heaped on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
   As Obama met Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas for the first time as president, he called for a halt to settlement building on the occupied West Bank, while his administration sparred with Israel over the sensitive issue.
   Obama vowed an ‘aggressive’ mediation effort, ahead of his visit to Saudi Arabia and Egypt next week, while Abbas pledged to live up to all previous peace agreements and warned ‘time is of the essence’ for a two-state solution.
   Abbas presented the US president with a document outlining ideas about how to take the peace process forward.
   ‘The document does not veer from the [US-backed] roadmap and the Arab peace initiative,’ Abbas told AFP. ‘It contains ideas to introduce implementation mechanisms for these two plans.’
   A top Abbas aide said Obama had promised to study the text.
   The US president recalled that last week he had been ‘very clear’ with Netanyahu about the need to ‘stop settlements.’
   Asked by a reporter if he would strong-arm Israel if it did not back down in its refusal to support a Palestinian state, he said, ‘I think it’s important not to assume the worst, but to assume the best.’
   Obama, who rejected an opportunity to set a date for the establishment of a ‘viable, potential’ Palestinian state, added, ‘I don’t want to put an artificial timetable.
   ‘I am confident that we can move this forward if all parties are ready to meet their obligations.’
   On Wednesday, secretary of state Hillary Clinton had significantly hardened the US position on settlements, prompting a blunt dismissal from Israel.
   But Obama appeared to give Netanyahu some leeway, noting the fierce pressures imposed on the Israeli leader by his hawkish right-wing coalition.
   ‘I think that we don’t have a moment to lose, but I also don’t make decisions based on just a conversation that we had last week.
   ‘Because obviously prime minister Netanyahu has to work through these issues in his own government, in his own coalition,’ said Obama.
   The US president also called on Abbas to offer security improvements to Israel and to quell anti-Israel incitement in Palestinian mosques and schools, and took note of challenges Abbas faces with the West Bank ruled by his Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip run by Hamas.

Thirty-one countries still hold stockpiles of cluster munitions despite signing a treaty to ban them, according to a report by anti-arms lobby groups published on Friday.
   Britain, Germany and the Netherlands hold the largest stocks, said the report by Human Rights Watch and Landmine Action.
   Britain has 38.7 million submunitions which are used in cluster bombs, Germany holds 33 million and the Netherlands has 26 million, the report said.
   The three count among 96 countries that have inked the Convention on Cluster Munitions since it opened for signing last December. Seven countries have since ratified the treaty, which needs 30 ratifications to come into force.
   But while the signatory states of the treaty have committed to destroying the stockpiles, other countries holding significant stockpiles have not, according to campaign groups.
   The biggest volume of 730 million submunitions is held by the United States, which has not joined the treaty and is therefore not obliged to eliminate its stock.
   ‘The US is out of step with most of its major military allies,’ said Steve Goose, arms division director at Human Rights Watch.
   ‘There should be a NATO-wide policy not to use cluster munitions in joint military operations. The United States should not put treaty signatories in a position where they have to fight alongside US forces that use cluster munitions.’
   According to the report, the total global stockpile of submunitions contained in the cluster bombs ‘likely number into the billions.’
   Cluster munitions spread bomblets over a wide area from a single shell or bomb. The bomblets often do not explode on impact, but can do so later at the slightest touch. Therefore, they are just as deadly after a conflict as during.
   Seventeen countries including the US, China and Russia are still producing cluster munitions this year even as lobby groups are pushing for them to ban these bombs, the campaign groups said.

Despite his promises of change, US president Barack Obama has kept tradition by naming top donors to plum ambassador posts, drawing fire from career US diplomats and causing dismay among some US allies.
   Obama has been criticised for naming fund raisers with no diplomatic experience — and who together drummed up well over a million dollars for his record-shattering campaign — to be ambassadors to Britain, France and Japan.
   ‘It’s an 18th-century practice we are continuing which no other major democratic country does,’ said Ronald Neumann, a veteran ambassador and head of the American Academy of Diplomacy, a lobby of former senior diplomats.
   ‘It’s not “change you can believe in,” but it’s not terribly surprising,’ said Neumann, referring to Obama’s campaign slogan.
   Obama named Louis Susman, a former Citigroup banker in Chicago once dubbed the ‘vacuum cleaner’ for his prowess sucking up money, as ambassador to London.
   Obama also tapped two major California fund raisers — naming Charles Rivkin, the former producer of ‘The Muppets’ children show, to Paris and Silicon Valley lawyer John Roos to Tokyo.
   White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Thursday defended the picks, noting that Obama also appointed respected figures such as former congressman Timothy Roemer as ambassador to India.
   ‘It would be disingenuous for me to suggest that there are not going to be some excellent public servants ... who haven’t come through the ranks of civil service,’ Gibbs said.
   British newspapers described Obama’s appointment to London as ‘cronyism.’ Some dailies had speculated hopefully that the US president would pick one of his more glamorous friends — Oprah Winfrey.
   While US ambassador residences in London and Paris have long been retreats for presidents’ wealthy friends, Tokyo has been used to heavy hitters including former vice-president Walter Mondale, former Senate majority leaders Mike Mansfield and Howard Baker and ex-House speaker Tom Foley.
   Many Japanese are nervous that the United States will ignore its longstanding Asian ally as it builds ties with a rapidly growing China.
   While Tokyo publicly welcomed Roos’ appointment, one Japanese magazine worried that Obama was ‘Japan-passing’ — opposed to US ‘Japan-bashing’ during the 1980s trade wars.
   Tokyo-based analyst Robert Dujarric said Japanese worry that Roos is ‘lightweight’ compared with Obama’s pick for Beijing, Utah governor Jon Huntsman — a Mandarin speaker who some eye as a future president himself.

Nuclear powers broke more than decade of deadlock on Friday by agreeing to restart talks in the Conference on Disarmament, a UN spokeswoman and diplomats said.
   The 65 nations in the permanent disarmament negotiating forum, which includes all nuclear weapons states, ‘agreed on a work plan for 2009,’ United Nations spokeswoman Elena Ponomareva told journalists.
   It marked the first time since 1996 that member states had agreed on what they should negotiate, amid conflicting demands for full nuclear disarmament, a ban on the production of bomb-making material and the arms race in outer space.
   British disarmament ambassador John Duncan called the unanimous decision ‘a terrific result breaking 12 years worth of deadlock.’
   ‘As we’ve been saying we need to move from a decade of deadlock to a decade of decisions, and now we’re on the path to making those decisions,’ he added.
   Ponomareva said the conference would release a statement shortly.
   The breakthrough came after a growing number of countries in recent weeks signalled they were ready to support a compromise proposal drawn up by a group of non-nuclear states led by Algeria earlier this month, as well as the thaw in US-Russia relations.
   Even North Korea rallied around the decision, despite the sharp spike in tensions on the Korean peninsula since it tested a nuclear bomb on Monday as Pyongyang continued to defy international concern over its nuclear programme.
   ‘We were all concerned about the DPRK, how they would react,’ Duncan said.
   ‘The first reaction was a difficult one but they have come through and they support it today.’
   Following the nuclear test, the second since October 2006, North Korea reacted angrily when Seoul announced it had joined a US-led international initiative to halt the trade in weapons of mass destruction.

The commander of a US army base in Kentucky has ordered a three-day suspension of regular duties to focus on a spike in suicides among his troops amid concern over a wider trend across the armed services.
   The ‘stand-down’ entered its third day on Friday at Fort Campbell, which is home to the famed 101st Airborne Division and has recorded the highest rate of suicide in the army, with at least 11 confirmed or suspected suicides.
   Brigadier General Stephen Townsend announced the stand-down to focus attention on the problem after two more soldiers took their lives last week.
   ‘It’s bad for soldiers, it’s bad for families, bad for your units, bad for this division and our army and our country and it’s got to stop now. Suicides on Fort Campbell have to stop now,’ he told troops.
   ‘Suicide is a permanent solution to what is only a temporary problem,’ Townsend said.
   ‘No matter how bad your problem seems today, trust me, it’s not the end of the world. It will be better tomorrow. Don’t take away your tomorrow.’
   The trauma of combat combined with the effect of repeated tours has led to a record rise in suicides across the armed services and particularly the US army — which has carried the heaviest burden in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   Last year 128 soldiers took their lives, up from 115 in 2007, as tours of duty since 2001 have come ever more frequently and last longer.
   With 64 confirmed or suspected suicides so far this year, the army looks likely to surpass last year’s record numbers.
   The 20.2 per 1,00,000 suicide rate among US soldiers is above the national record of 19.5 per 1,00,000 in 2005 in the US.
   Earlier this month a US soldier, Sergeant John Russell, allegedly sprayed his comrades with gunfire at a mental health clinic at a US base in Baghdad, and he has been charged with five counts of murder.
   The case has underlined concerns about the psychological well-being of those serving in the military.

Clashes between two major Arab nomadic tribes in Sudan’s South Kordofan region this past week have killed 244 people, including police officers, interior minister Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamad said on Thursday.
   ‘The toll of victims is 89 dead among the Misseriya, 80 among the Rizeqat and 75 in the central reserve [police],’ he told a cabinet meeting in Khartoum, the official Suna press agency reported.
   Those responsible will be brought to justice and the authorities will take steps to disarm civilians, he said.
   Members of the Misseriya and Rizeyqat tribes clashed last weekend near the village of Meiram, near the border between South Kordofan and Darfur, more than 800 kilometres southwest of the capital Khartoum.
   Sudanese police moved in on Tuesday to break up the fighting but were themselves attacked by 3,000 Arab horsemen from the Rizeyqat tribe.
   That attack led to the deaths of several police officers and civilians, said the minister.
   Sources among the two tribes told AFP that at least a hundred people had died in the fighting, while local newspapers reported more than 150 killed.
   The two tribes, who live on either side of the border dividing South Kordofan and Darfur, have clashed in the past over access to drinking water for their horses and their livestock.
   This week, the authorities called on both sides to pull back five kilometres to avoid fresh fighting.
   ‘The situation worries us a lot because the incidents took place in a sensitive sector,’ Kouider Zerrouk, spokesman of the United Nations Advance Mission in Sudan, told AFP.
   South Kordofan, which lies between Darfur and South Sudan, is one of the most unstable parts of the country.

Asia and the Middle East will boost defence spending in the next two decades amid growing regional tensions, a top Boeing executive said on Friday.
   ‘Those markets we think are going to expand, if I look at defence spending and where we see the growth coming over the next decade or two, it’s in Asia and it’s in the Middle East,’ said Jim Albaugh, president and chief executive of Boeing Integrated Defence Systems.
   ‘I think that a lot of countries... in the threatened environment that they live in, and with the economies that they now enjoy, are going to be doing more to protect their trade routes and their borders,’ Albaugh told reporters ahead of an annual Asia-Pacific security conference in Singapore.
   US aerospace giant Boeing manufactures commercial jetliners and military aircraft and its IDS unit provides services for large-scale systems that combine networks with air, land, sea and space-based platforms.
   Albaugh said Boeing sees opportunities in the two regions at a time of military spending cutbacks in the United States.
   ‘There’s an opportunity just as large worldwide as it is within the United States,’ Albaugh said, adding global defence spending already outstripped the US defence budget of $534 billion for 2010 fiscal.
   ‘We have anticipated a reduction in defence spending in the United States, and none of the announcements... were ones that surprised us,’ he said.
   He said Boeing was repositioning itself to look into new areas of defence, such as ‘special forces operations,’ that were of interest to the current US administration.

Kuwait’s prime minister on Friday announced a new 16-member cabinet with no changes to key posts in the cabinet which resigned in March after a dispute with the former parliament.
   The emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, approved the line-up presented by prime minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammad al-Ahmad al-Sabah, state television said.
   Besides the prime minister, the new cabinet includes five members of the Al-Sabah ruling family, one more than the previous cabinet. They continue to hold the key posts of defence, interior, foreign affairs, oil and information.
   The cabinet also saw the return of former energy minister Sheikh Ahmad Fahad al-Sabah, who was appointed as deputy premier for economic affairs and minister for housing and development.
   Oil minister Sheikh Ahmad Abdullah al-Sabah kept his post in the oil-rich emirate and was given the information portfolio in addition.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the justice department will play a larger role in anti-terrorist operations as part of a shift away from a reliance on the Central Intelligence Agency and the military, the Los Angeles Times reported on Thursday.
   The plan to expand the role of the law enforcement agencies has been dubbed the ‘global justice initiative,’ the newspaper said, citing unidentified officials.
   Under it, the FBI would be used to conduct interrogations and gather evidence in terrorism cases.
   ‘Regardless of where any bad guy is caught, we want the bureau to be in position to put charges on them,’ an official was quoted as saying.
   The bigger FBI role was ‘part of a US policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions,’ the report said.

North Korea fired another short-range missile on Friday and threatened fresh steps to defend itself if world powers impose sanctions for its nuclear test, as tensions persisted on the Korean peninsula.
   With US and South Korean troops on high alert at the border, Chinese fishing boats were reported to be leaving the area in the Yellow Sea that was the scene of deadly naval clashes in 1999 and 2002 between the two Koreas.
   The communist North, which has warned it could launch an attack on the South, vowed to respond to any fresh sanctions imposed by the United Nations.
   ‘If the UN Security Council provokes us, our additional self-defence measures will be inevitable,’ the North’s foreign ministry said in a statement carried by official media.
   ‘The world will soon witness how our army and people stand up against oppression and despotism by the UNSC and uphold their dignity and independence.’
   Tensions have been running high since Kim Jong-Il’s regime tested a nuclear bomb on Monday for the second time and renounced the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953.
   The council has been discussing a response to the North’s latest nuclear test, expected to be a resolution condemning the move. But it was not yet clear if that would include new sanctions.
   ‘This is quite a complicated discussion,’ Britain’s UN ambassador John Sawers said after the latest round of talks on Thursday. ‘We need some time.’
   South Korea and the United States put their troops on the Korean peninsula on higher alert on Thursday, and Seoul’s defence ministry said forces were keeping a close watch on the land and sea border with the North.
   North Korea test-fired another missile off its east coast Friday, the sixth this week, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.
   There was no immediate confirmation but the agency’s reports of five launches earlier this week were later confirmed by Pyongyang.
   US defence secretary Robert Gates, en route to a regional security meeting in Singapore, accused the North of ‘very provocative, aggressive’ actions.
   But Gates said he was unaware of any unusual troop movements in the North, which has around 1.1 million soldiers, compared with 6,80,000 South Korean and 28,500 US troops south of the border.
   ‘I don’t think there is a need for us to reinforce our military presence in the South. Should the North Koreans do something extremely provocative militarily, then we have the forces to deal with it,’ he said.
   The North may take further steps following its latest verbal statement, which aims to send a ‘strong warning’ to the Security Council, said Professor Yang Moo-Jin at Seoul’s University of North Korean Studies.
   ‘The North may put its military on a war footing, test-fire a long-range missile and restart the plutonium reprocessing facilities at Yongbyon,’ he told AFP.
   The North could also stage a third nuclear test but this would come much later than the other steps, Yang said.
   In a possible sign of trouble ahead, Chinese fishing boats were leaving the tense border area in the Yellow Sea, with the number of vessels more than halving on Thursday, South Korea’s defence ministry said.
   ‘As this could be a signal foreboding a possible provocation by the North, we are watching the situation closely,’ ministry spokesman Won Tae-Jae said. Despite the stand-off, hundreds of South Korean workers travelled to the North on Friday to work at a joint industrial complex, and commercial ships from the North were sailing south of the border, Yonhap news agency reported.

The party of Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi expressed ‘grave concern’ on Friday for her health while she is in prison facing charges that carry a jail term of up to five years.
   ‘It is learnt that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has not been able to sleep well at night because she gets cramps in her legs day after day,’ the National League for Democracy said.
   Nyan Win, one of Suu Kyi’s lawyers, said the court decided to delay final arguments in the case until June 5. The final hearing was to be held on Monday.
   ‘They did not give us a reason,’ he told Reuters.
   The 63-year-old Suu Kyi was moved from her home to a guest house in Yangon’s notorious Insein Central Prison on May 14 to face charges of violating her house arrest. Only days earlier, she had been treated for low blood pressure and dehydration.
   The NLD said she ‘is in desperate need of proper medical treatment and we are very much concerned about her health.’
   Suu Kyi has spent more that 13 of the past 19 years in some form of detention, and activists fear for her health if she is convicted, as is widely expected.
   She faces a three to five year prison term if found guilty of breaking the terms of her house arrest by allowing an American intruder to stay for two days after he swam to her home on May 4.
   The case has been condemned by the West as a ‘show trial’ to keep Suu Kyi detained during the regime’s promised elections next year, dismissed by critics as a ploy to entrench nearly a half century of military rule.
   Myanmar’s Southeast Asian neighbours have warned the trial threatened the military government’s ‘honour and credibility,’ but rejected calls for tough action against the ruling generals.
   The American intruder, John Yettaw, has told the court that God sent him to warn Suu Kyi that she was going to be assassinated by ‘terrorists.’
   Suu Kyi has denied any prior knowledge of his plans and blamed the incident on a security breach, for which no officials have been punished.
   Suu Kyi is accused of breaking the terms of her house arrest under a draconian state security law. Her lawyers argue she was charged under a section of the law that is no longer valid because it is based on the 1974 constitution abolished years ago.
   Suu Kyi’s two female housemates and Yettaw are charged under the same security law. The American is also accused of immigration violations and breaking a municipal law that bans swimming in Inya Lake where Suu Kyi’s home is located.

Sri Lanka faced fresh allegations on Friday that its army had killed huge numbers of civilians during its offensive against the Tamil Tigers, as well as complaints it was continuing to block aid workers.
   Britain’s Times newspaper said its investigation into the blistering war on the separatist rebels pointed to more than 20,000 Tamil civilian deaths, most of them killed by army shelling in the final weeks of the conflict.
   Citing aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony, the paper said the final stages of the conflict saw 1,000 civilians killed each day up to May 19, when the corpse of rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was shown on television and the war declared won.
   The Sri Lankan government angrily dismissed the report.
   ‘These figures are way out... What we think is that these images are also fake. We totally deny the allegation that 20,000 people were killed,’ defence ministry spokesman Lakshman Hulugalle said.
   The Sri Lankan army has denied it used heavy weapons and has blamed any civilian deaths on the Tigers, who have been widely condemned for holding people as human shields.
   The United Nations has made confidential estimates of about 7,000 civilian deaths up to the end of April, but French newspaper Le Monde cited UN sources as saying the full figures were not made public to avoid a diplomatic storm.
   The UN humanitarian coordination office [OCHA] responded by saying civilian deaths were ‘unacceptably high,’ but denied a cover-up.
   ‘The UN has publicly and repeatedly said the number of people killed in recent months has been unacceptably high and it has shared its estimates with the government as well as others concerned,’ OCHA spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told AFP in Geneva.
   ‘The point is the UN has not been shy about the scale of human suffering and civilian casualties. It has been ringing the alarm bells for a long time.’
   A week before the last Tiger territory was overrun, the International Committee of the Red Cross had also described an ‘unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe.’
   The UN meanwhile complained that Sri Lanka’s government was still refusing to provide aid workers with full access to hundreds of thousands of displaced Tamil civilians despite an appeal by the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.
   Ban, who visited the island last weekend, had sought complete freedom for international aid agencies to help civilians uprooted from their homes by the offensive against the now defeated Tamil Tigers.
   ‘We still don’t have access beyond the north of Omanthai [in the island’s north],’ UN resident coordinator Neil Bhune told reporters in Colombo.

International scientists said they had found the first evidence of resistance to the world’s most effective drug for treating malaria, reported the BBC on Friday.
   They said the trend in western Cambodia had to be urgently contained because full-blown resistance would be a global health catastrophe.
   Drugs are taking longer to clear blood of malaria parasites than before.
   This is an early warning sign of emerging resistance to a disease which kills a million people every year, said the report.
   Until now the most effective drug cleared all malaria parasites from the blood within two or three days but in recent trials this took up to four or five days.
   A BBC correspondent from Cambodia said it was unclear why the region had become a nursery for the resistance — but the local public health system was weak, and the use of anti-malaria drugs was not properly controlled.
   The artemesinin family of drugs is the world’s front-line defence against the most prevalent and deadly form of malaria.
   Two teams of scientists, working on separate clinical trials, have reported seeing the disturbing evidence that the drugs are becoming much less effective.
   There is particular concern because previous generations of malaria drugs have been undermined by resistance which started in this way, in this part of the world, the correspondent reported.
   The World Health Organisation warned in 2006 there was a possibility the malaria parasite could develop a resistance to artemesinin drugs, and that there was particular concern about a decreased sensitivity to the drug being seen in South East Asia.
   It urged drug firms to stop selling artemesinin on its own in order to prevent resistance building up.
   Early results from two studies by US and UK teams have both revealed the early stages of resistance.
   Between a third and a half of patients in the US study saw delayed clearance of the malaria parasite.
   In the UK study, patients in the Cambodia arm of the trial took almost twice as long to clear the parasite as a comparison group in Thailand.
   ‘Twice in the past, South East Asia has made a gift, unwittingly, of drug resistant parasites to the rest of the world, in particular to Africa,’ the report quoted Professor Nick Day, director of the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit which is carrying out the UK study, as saying.
   ‘That’s the problem. We’ve had chloroquine and SP [sulfadoxine pyrimethamine] resistance, both of which have caused major loss of life in Africa,’ he added in reference to earlier generation anti-malarial drugs.
   ‘If the same thing happens again, the spread of a resistant parasite from Asia to Africa, that will have devastating consequences for malaria control,’ he said.
   Cambodia has long been a laboratory for malaria investigators and a nursery of anti-malaria drug resistance.
   Alongside a weak public health system and poorly-controlled drug use, there are many fake drugs, produced by international criminals.
   These fakes often contain a small amount of the real drug to fool tests, which can also help to fuel resistance.
   Those working to control malaria are calling for urgent action to contain this emerging resistance.
   If it strengthens and spreads, they warn, many millions of lives will be at risk. About half the world’s population faces exposure to the disease.

India’s army chief said on Friday arch-rival Pakistan’s apparent expansion of its nuclear programme was a ‘matter of concern’ for the entire world that only global pressure could halt.
   General Deepak Kapoor was speaking after satellite photos released on Tuesday showed Pakistan had expanded two sites crucial to its nuclear programme, according to a US arms control institute.
   The Institute for Science and International Security said the enlargement was part of an effort to bolster the destructive power of Pakistan’s atomic arsenal.
   ‘Even if Pakistan is looking at deterrence, they require a minimum amount. But when you keep increasing it, it is a matter of concern,’ Kapoor told reporters in New Delhi.
   ‘I think the world community should put the kind of pressure which is required for Pakistan to cap their nuclear weapons,’ he said.
   Pakistan stopped short Thursday of denying reports it had expanded its nuclear programme, accusing India of disturbing the regional balance and compelling Islamabad to take remedial steps.
   A peace process between the two neighbours has been on hold since deadly militant attacks in Mumbai last November, which killed 166 people.
   Also on Friday India’s newly appointed external affairs minister, SM Krishna, renewed calls for Pakistan to stop militant activities directed at India from Pakistani soil.

Victims and activists on Friday marked the third anniversary of the eruption of a deadly mud volcano in Indonesia with calls for justice and full compensation.
   There was no comment, however, from the government of president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is comfortably ahead of his rivals in the lead-up to elections in July.
   The mud has not stopped devouring land and homes in Sidoarjo district, East Java, since it began spewing from a gas drilling well on May 29, 2006.
   It has buried 12 villages, killed 13 people, displaced more than 42,000 people and wiped out 800 hectares of densely populated farming and industrial land.
   ‘I’m extremely upset and disappointed with the government, which doesn’t seem to care about our suffering,’ mud victim Sunarto, 48, said.
   ‘We’ve waited too long for our money. The government should quickly settle this problem.’
   Finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati visited the disaster site and said the government had set aside only 1.1 trillion rupiah [$110 million] this year for rebuilding and mud-containment efforts in the area.
   ‘If there is an urgent need to change the budget... that will require the agreement of parliament,’ she was quoted as saying by the state-run Antara news agency.
   Independent foreign experts have concluded that gas exploration company Lapindo was almost certainly to blame for the disaster but no one has been prosecuted.
   Lapindo, which is connected to powerful welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie, says the eruption was triggered by a distant earthquake.
   It has nevertheless agreed to pay 3.8 trillion rupiah for compensation to over 10,000 families.

Iran’s leading moderate candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi said on Friday he is prepared to hold talks with the international P5-plus-1 group over Iran’s nuclear drive if he wins next month’s presidential election.
   ‘I agree to talks with 5-plus-1,’ Mousavi told journalists from international news networks.
   But Mousavi said Tehran would continue its nuclear programme.
   ‘We will not give [up] anything for having the technology. What will be negotiated is finding ways [to guarantee] that our nuclear programme will not deviate towards a weapons plan,’ the moderate candidate said.
   Mousavi’s stand is the opposite to incumbent conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is seeking a second term in office in the June 12 polls.
   On Monday, Ahmadinejad rejected talks with the 5-plus-1 group over Tehran’s nuclear issue.

India summoned Australia’s top envoy on Friday to express its concerns about a wave of attacks on Indian students in Melbourne that has raised diplomatic tensions between the two countries.
   Overseas Indian affairs minister Vayalar Ravi had ‘conveyed Indian concerns very clearly’ over the attacks during a meeting in New Delhi, Australia’s high commissioner John McCarthy told reporters.
   ‘We totally share the perspective of the government of India on the abhorrence of these sorts of attacks and we condemn them,’ McCarthy said.
   Ravi had urged Australia to ensure there was no recurrence of such events, he said.
   The attacks on students from the subcontinent have been occurring for more than a year.
   But they came into sharp focus last weekend when student Sravan Kumar Theerthala was left in a coma and fighting for his life after being stabbed with a screwdriver by gatecrashers at a party.
   A 17-year-old boy has been charged with attempted murder.
   The attacks have prompted Australian authorities to set up a helpline to allow victims to report any incidents to Hindi- and English-speaking operators.
   Indians form the second-largest group of overseas students in Australia.
   McCarthy said although it was ‘not clear they were racist attacks,’ he ‘would not discount’ the possibility.
   Indian minister Ravi told CNN-IBN television network that New Delhi would do ‘everything possible to protect’ the safety of Indian students in Australia.
   ‘This [attack] is not the first incident,’ he said.
   The attacks have caused outrage in India, with the media dubbing Australia a ‘racist’ country and newly appointed external affairs minister SM Krishna saying he was ‘appalled’ by the violence.