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Abdullah Abdullah was poised Saturday to boycott Afghanistan’s run-off presidential election unless incumbent Hamid Karzai has a last minute change of heart and bows to a series of demands from his rival.
   Officials in Abdullah’s campaign team said the former foreign minister would announce he was pulling out of the November 7 contest on Sunday in the absence of any U-turn by Karzai on measures to combat fraud.
   ‘If by the end of today we do not receive a positive response to our conditions from the government, then Dr. Abdullah himself will announce his reaction to it tomorrow,’ Sayed Aqa Fazel Sancharaki, a spokesman for Abdullah’s campaign, said.
   Another senior campaign aide said if Abdullah’s conditions were not met, ‘we will not participate in an election which is not transparent and fraud-free.’
   Abdullah is due to make his announcement at an address in Kabul at 9:30am (0500 GMT) on Sunday, which the media have been invited to attend.
   Following widespread fraud in the August first round, Abdullah has demanded Karzai sack the head of the Independent Electoral Commission and suspend four ministers who campaigned for the incumbent.
   Asked what Abdullah’s stance would be if his conditions are not met, a lawmaker involved in his campaign said the candidate would not take part in the run-off.
   ‘If our conditions are not met and an election takes place on November 7, that will not be an election but a fraud trap and we will not go for a fraud trap, we will not participate,’ Ahmad Bezad said.
   Abdullah laid out his demands at a press conference on Monday but they received short shrift from both Karzai and Azizullah Ludin, the chairman of the IEC who was appointed by the president.
   The IEC said Wednesday that Ludin could only be dismissed by the supreme court, while Karzai says Abdullah has no right to interfere in ministerial positions.
   A source close to Karzai’s camp said there had been discussions between aides to the two men about Abdullah supporters being given a number of ministries in a national unity government after a run-off, but they had stalled.
   ‘There were talks on the possibility of power-sharing in some form. There were huge demands from Abdullah’s side for several ministries, eight ministerial positions, which were not accepted by Karzai,’ the source said, while not ruling out an 11th-hour breakthrough.
   Karzai’s share of the vote in the first round fell to 49.67 percent after a UN-backed watchdog deemed around a quarter of all votes cast to be fraudulent.
   Insistent that the fraud had been overstated, Karzai only agreed to a run-off under extensive diplomatic pressure from Washington, highlighted when he made the run-off announcement standing alongside top US senator John Kerry.

Full-page advertisements filled Indian newspapers on Saturday to mark the 25th anniversary of former prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
   ‘A grateful nation will never forget your sacrifice,’ declared an ad placed by the petroleum ministry, one of several government departments that funded notices honouring Gandhi, who was known as India’s ‘Iron Lady.’
   The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and Gandhi’s daughter-in-law Sonia, president of the ruling Congress party, were among those who paid tribute to the slain leader at various memorial sites around New Delhi.
   ‘People remember her indomitable courage, taking up the cause of the underprivileged... and in ensuring social justice and greater national integration,’ Congress party spokeswoman Jayanthi Natarajan told reporters.
   Newspapers ran retrospectives remembering Gandhi, India’s only female prime minister, on what the government has designated ‘Martyrdom Day.’

Typhoon Mirinae smashed through the Philippines overnight, killing at least one person and worsening floods in areas that were struggling to recover from recent deadly storms, officials said Saturday.
   One man was found dead and his one-year-old baby was missing after they were washed away while trying to cross an overflowing creek in a rural area on the outskirts of Manila, the nation’s capital, the military said.
   Another man was missing from a Manila slum district after his hut was washed away, said civil defence spokesman Ernesto Torres.
   The typhoon, which had maximum winds of 185 kilometres an hour, was the third major storm to hit the Philippines main island of Luzon in just five weeks, with the previous two claiming more than 1,100 lives.
   Tropical Storm Ketsana, which struck on September 26, caused massive flooding in Manila and outlying districts populated by more than a million people were expected to be remain flooded into the New Year even before Mirinae hit.
   In Laguna province to the south of Manila that was one of the worst affected by Ketsana, people were again forced onto their rooftops on Saturday to escape floodwaters. ‘We need help because the waters have risen. We need rubber boats and choppers,’ the mayor of Santa Cruz town, Ariel Magcalas, said in a radio interview.

Detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is aware of an upcoming visit by two American officials and supports the new US policy of engaging with Myanmar’s military rulers, her lawyer said Saturday.
   The assistant secretary of state, Kurt Campbell, and a deputy will be in Myanmar, also known as Burma, for a two-day visit beginning Tuesday and are scheduled to meet with the government and the opposition, including Suu Kyi.
   The trip is part of a new US policy that reverses the Bush administration’s shunning of Myanmar in favour of direct, high-level talks with a country that has been ruled by the military since 1962.
   Campbell will be continuing talks he began in September in New York with senior Myanmar officials, the first such high-level contact in nearly a decade.
   ‘We told Daw Aung San Suu Kyi about the visit of the US officials and she is aware of the visit,’ said Suu Kyi’s party spokesman and lawyer, Nyan Win, who met with her Thursday.

Europe’s leaders wanted to send a clear message to Asian giants from this week’s summit — one about coughing up their share in the fight against climate change.
   In the end, though, the need to cave in to last-minute Czech threats to get its flagship treaty for reform ratified and a typically European split over Tony Blair’s worth as its first president probably drowned it out.
   On climate, they agreed that developing nations will need 100 billion euros (150 billion dollars) annually by 2020 — hardly a new figure and one with lots of wriggle-room when it comes to who should pay which part.
   The signal more likely to be retained farther afield would be the European Union’s failure to nail down its own share amid sharp differences between its powerhouses France and Germany, and nine newer members led by Poland.
   ‘The EU now has a strong negotiating position’ to take to Copenhagen for international climate talks starting on December 7, said the Swedish prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, as a two-day summit ended on Friday.
   Calling for developed countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95 per cent by 2050, the European leaders nonetheless went into very little detail on how this could be done.
   ‘We can now look the rest of the world in the eyes and say we Europeans have done our job,’ said the head of the bloc’s executive branch, Jose Manuel Barroso.

The president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on Saturday it is still difficult for Iran to trust Western powers when it comes to negotiations, but he hopes the nuclear dialogue between the two will continue.
   His comments came as the White House warned that the US president, Barack Obama, will not wait for ever for Tehran’s response to a UN-drafted deal to supply Iran with nuclear fuel in exchange for its low-enriched uranium.
   Meanwhile an influential senior Iranian lawmaker said that he was against the UN-drafted deal, raising further possibility that Tehran could disagree to the proposed offer.
   Ahmadinejad also said Iran’s arch-foe Israel is unhappy with the ongoing talks with the world powers over the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme.
   Iran and six world powers are separately engaged in a dialogue over allaying Western concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme, which it suspects is aimed at making weapons — a charge strongly denied by Iran.
   ‘The best way for you is to respect the Iranian nation and cooperate honestly with this nation,’ the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying on Saturday at a function in northeastern Iran.
   He added Tehran will give a ‘constructive, generous and positive response’ if world powers extend an ‘honest hand’ towards it, but the Islamic republic will unleash its ‘revolutionary fury’ if that hand is of ‘hypocrisy.’

The World Health Organisa-tion has launched a programme to give H1N1 flu vaccines to nearly 100 developing countries, with the first ones receiving the shots soon, its vaccine expert said on Friday.
   Marie-Paule Kieny, head of vaccine research at the UN health body, said a group of 16 countries was being contacted and should shortly receive enough vaccines to inoculate up to 2 per cent of the population.
   The countries were recommended to vaccinate health care workers first, she told a news conference.
   Eventually the WHO would supply 95 developing countries with a view to immunising over 10 per cent of their population against pandemic H1N1, widely known as swine flu.
   WHO has received donations of 156 million doses of vaccine from four manufacturers or governments, and hoped to reach the 200 million dose level needed to help 95 countries, she said.

Somali pirates have demanded a $7 million (4.3 million pounds) ransom for a British couple captured on their yacht in the Indian Ocean, according to a phone call from a man purporting to be a member of the gang broadcast by the BBC on Friday.
   Gunmen kidnapped Paul and Rachel Chandler, both in their 50s, last Friday while they sailed in international waters north of the Seychelles and took them to the Somali coast.
   ‘We only need a little amount of $7 million,’ the BBC quoted the unnamed caller as saying. ‘If they do not harm us, we will not harm them.’
   Pirates have plagued busy shipping lanes off the coast of Somalia for several years. Foreign warships from 16 nations are patrolling the area to try and prevent hijacks, but the sea gangs are now hunting for ships far into the Indian Ocean.
   A foreign office spokesman in London said the British government was aware of the reported ransom demand but could not confirm its authenticity.
   In a tearful phone call to her brother Stephen Collett, Rachel Chandler said that they were coping with the pressure and their captors had given them food and water.

US spy agencies spent 49.8 billion dollars gathering intelligence in fiscal 2009, a two billion increase over last year, officials announced on Friday.
   National intelligence director Dennis Blair released the figure under a 2007 law that requires the secretive intelligence community to disclose the budget for the country’s 16 spy agencies.
   The budget covers funds for a vast staff of spies and analysts as well as elaborate surveillance technology, including operations by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
   But the office of the director national intelligence refused to offer a breakdown of the budget or provide any other details, saying it ‘could harm national security.’

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, told the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the Palestinians would not agree to re-launch peace talks with Israel without a complete freeze of Jewish settlements, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said on Saturday.
   Abbas rejected the request from Hillary because a deal reached between US Middle East envoy George Mitchell and Israel ‘does not include a complete freeze of settlement activities,’ Erakat said.

Former US president George W Bush stepped briefly back into the limelight on Saturday, using a conference speech in New Delhi to defend his record and to crack jokes about his retirement.
   Bush chose an annual gathering of business leaders in India, a country where his reputation rode high throughout his time in power, to make a rare public appearance nine months after leaving office.
   ‘I have a different life now,’ Bush, 63, said wryly. ‘I am an old, retired guy.’
   Reflecting on how his status had changed, he said he recently visited a hardware store in Texas that had offered him a job as a ‘greeter’ who stands outside to welcome customers.
   He said that inside the store a man came up to him and asked if anyone had ever told him that he looked just like George W Bush.

Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen, widely considered the father of the country’s nuclear missile and space programme, has died at the age of 98, state news agency Xinhua said on Saturday.
   Qian, who name is also spelled Tsien Hsue-shen, was born in eastern China but went to the United States in 1935 to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then the California Institute of Technology.
   He returned to China in 1955 after the Communist revolution, and joined the Party in 1958.
   Qian was put in charge of developing the country’s first missiles, and also oversaw the development of China’s first atom bomb, exploded in 1964.
   ‘His return brought China the hope of developing space science and its own missiles,’ state media said of him in a report last year.

A man who jumped into the Indian ocean to escape arrest drowned after being badly beaten by the Sri Lankan police in the water in front of a large crowd and television cameras, the police said Saturday.
   The 26-year-old motor mechanic was pursued by a policeman after he pelted stones at passing trains in the seafront Bambalapitiya area of Colombo on Thursday.
   ‘The victim had been beaten and prevented from reaching the shore, resulting in his drowning,’ the police spokesman Nimal Mediwaka said. ‘The constable has been arrested by the Crimes Division.’
   Television viewers watched with horror on Friday night footage of the man being chased by the policeman and another unidentified man who beat him with sticks until he collapsed in the water and drowned.
   The incident, which was watched from shore by a large crowd, had been captured on video by a private TV channel whose studios were nearby.
   The mechanic had been receiving treatment for a mental disorder, relatives said.