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Opposition candidate Abdullah Abdullah on Sunday pulled out of Afghanistan’s run-off election, plunging the war-torn country into fresh political turmoil less than a week before the scheduled contest.
   Meanwhile, the Taliban threatened Sunday to carry out more attacks if Afghanistan goes ahead with a run-off presidential election.
   ‘We will not allow the second round to pass off peacefully,’ Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahmadi said by phone from an undisclosed location.
   ‘We will increase our attacks on the election process and we will ensure the election is a failure.’
   After the president, Hamid Karzai, snubbed a series of demands promoted as a bid to avoid a repeat of massive first-round fraud, Abdullah said he saw no point in standing in the second round, while stopping short of calling for a boycott.
   But Karzai’s camp insisted the contest should still go ahead, with analysts saying a one-horse race could still take place on November 7 even if turnout is likely to be well below the 38 per cent recorded last time.
   ‘The decision which I am going to announce was not an easy one. It was a decision that I have taken after wide-ranging consultations, with the people of Afghanistan, my supporters and influential leaders,’ Abdullah told supporters.
   ‘In protest against the misconduct of the government and the Independent Election Commission, I will not participate in the election,’ he added in an address in Kabul.
   During his lengthy speech, the former foreign minister launched a scathing attack on the ‘eight years of lost opportunities’ during Karzai’s rule, dimming prospects that the rivals could yet agree on a form of power-sharing.
   And in a later press conference, he denied he had cut any deals.
   ‘This is my decision. This decision has not been made in exchange for anything from anybody,’ he said.
   Following the widespread fraud in the first round on August 20, Abdullah demanded that Karzai sack the head of the IEC, Azizullah Ludin, and suspend four ministers who campaigned for the incumbent.
   Abdullah’s camp set a deadline of Saturday for Karzai to bow to his demands, saying he would not take part in a contest that will not be free and fair.
   But his demands received short shrift, with the IEC saying Ludin can only be dismissed by the supreme court while Karzai said Abdullah has no right to interfere in ministerial positions.
   Abdullah said he had no faith in the prospect of a free and fair election next Saturday while the head of the commission, who was appointed by Karzai, remained in place.
   ‘The election commission was not independent. If it was, the people would not face such a problem. It was their job to ensure a credible election and we saw what happened,’ he said.
   Abdullah urged supporters to refrain from protests which could enflame the situation and said it was up to them whether they choose to vote next Saturday.
   ‘I leave the choice to my followers and sympathisers,’ Abdullah said, when asked whether he was instructing his followers to refrain from voting.
   After the announcement, Karzai’s chief campaign spokesman said the run-off should still take place.
   ‘We believe that the election has to go on, the process must complete itself,’ Waheed Omar said.
   Kabul-based analyst Haroun Mir predicted the election would still take place in line with the constitution but said Karzai risked losing his legitimacy.

The Palestinians on Sunday said Israeli settlement construction was the ‘main obstacle’ to relaunching peace talks after the United States backed off from its demand for a complete freeze.
   ‘Israel should not be given any excuse to continue building settlements, and we consider all settlement activity to be illegal,’ Nabil Abu Rudeina, the spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, said.
   ‘This is the main obstacle in the way of peace. Israel must halt all
   settlement activity immediately without making excuses.’
   His comments came a day after the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, urged both sides to relaunch peace talks suspended at the turn of the year and said a complete settlement freeze should not be a precondition.
   She also praised the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for offering an ‘unprecedented’ restraint on settlement activity after the Obama administration had for months been calling for a complete halt to construction.
   In May, following Obama’s first meeting with Netanyahu, Hillary had said Obama ‘wants to see a stop to settlements. Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions.’
   Hillary’s visit to the region came after repeated rounds of shuttle diplomacy by US Middle East envoy George Mitchell in recent months yielded little progress in the US push to get Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.
   The presence of nearly a half million Israelis in dozens of settlements built across the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem is one of the thorniest issues at the core of the decades-old Middle East conflict.

Voter registration for Sudan’s first presidential and legislative elections in nearly a quarter of a century, due to be held in April, kicked off on Sunday.
   ‘Voter registration has started across Sudan,’ the head of the elections commission, Al-Hadi Mohammed Ahmed, said.
   An AFP correspondent said a trickle of would-be voters were seen registering in the capital Khartoum on Sunday morning.
   Sudan, Africa’s largest nation, is due to hold its first general elections in 24 years in April 2010.
   Some 19 to 20 million eligible voters will be able to cast their ballots for a new president, for parliament as well as for local officials across the nation, the authorities said.
   The general elections will be the first in Sudan — home to 39 million inhabitants — since 1986, three years before the president, Omar al-Beshir, toppled a democratically elected government in a bloodless military coup.
   Beshir has since March faced an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in the war-torn western Darfur region.
   Sudanese voters have a month to register for the polls and in order to reach all potential voters, the authorities have set up both fixed and mobile registration centres across Africa’s largest country.

A spate of bombings across Iraq, including two suicide attacks and a bicycle bomb, killed eight people and wounded more than 50 others on Sunday, the police said.
   In the deadliest attack, five people were killed and 37 wounded when a bomb hidden in a cooler on the back of a bicycle ripped through a market in the Shiite city of Mussayib in Babil province at around 9:30am (0630 GMT).
   The two-wheeler had been parked at the market in Mussayib, 60 kilometres south of Baghdad, the police said.
   The western Iraqi city of Ramadi, capital of the predominantly Sunni province of Al-Anbar, a former rebel stronghold, was hit by two suicide bombings, the police said.
   One of the attackers detonated a car bomb at the city’s western entrance, killing two people and wounding four others, according to police Colonel Jabbar Ajaj.
   Ajaj added that another suicide attacker blew himself up near a police station outside Ramadi, 100 kilometres from Baghdad, but killed only himself. No one was wounded.
   In the Shia holy city of Karbala, 110 kilometres south of the capital, a magnetic bomb affixed to a bus detonated as the vehicle was approaching a security checkpoint, killing a woman.
   The ‘sticky bomb’ attack also wounded 12 people, including five women, medical and security officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
   The attacks come a week after twin suicide bombings in central Baghdad killed 153 people and wounded 500, the deadliest day of violence in Iraq in more than two years.

George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl paid their respects to the ordinary people who were behind the peaceful revolution of 1989 that brought down the Berlin Wall at an emotional ceremony in Berlin on Saturday.
   The three statesmen from the United States, Soviet Union and West Germany — whose steady-handed leadership paved the way for the Wall’s opening on November 9, 1989 — recalled the heady events that led to the end of the Cold War at a ceremony attended by 1,800 people.
   ‘We Germans don’t have very much in our history to be proud of,’ said Kohl, 79, who was chancellor of West Germany and then united Germany from 1982-98. ‘But we’ve got every reason to be proud about German reunification.’
   The reunion in Berlin of the three leaders at the centre of the whirlwind of events kicked off a week of celebrations in the German capital marking the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9.
   Bush, US president from 1989-93, paid tribute in his speech to the countless thousands of courageous East Germans who risked persecution by attending mass protests to demand reform in the months leading up to the Wall’s peaceful collapse.
   ‘It’s a joy to be here with my former colleagues,’ said Bush, who repeatedly put his arm around both Gorbachev and Kohl during the two-hour long ceremony in a theatre on Friedrichstrasse just east of where the Berlin Wall stood until 1989.
   ‘The point needs to be made that the historic events we are gathered to celebrate were set in motion not in Bonn, or Moscow or Washington but rather in the hearts and minds of the people who had too long been deprived of their God-given rights.
   ‘The Wall could never erase your dream, our dream of one Germany, a free Germany, a proud Germany,’ said Bush, 85.
   The three former leaders clearly enjoyed each other’s company at their first reunion in many years — even though Kohl was in a wheelchair and had difficulty speaking while Bush relied on the help of a cane to move about.
   The Berlin Wall, a symbol of the Cold War that split the city and Germany, opened in November 1989 and the two Germanys reunited 11 months later. Researchers said at least 136 people were killed trying to cross to the West.
   Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union at the time who was later awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, said the opening of the Wall and end of the Cold War was the culmination of a long process of post-World War Two rapprochement.
   ‘The people were the heroes,’ said Gorbachev, 78, who remains hugely popular in Germany for his pivotal role in the autumn of 1989. ‘The three of us don’t want to take credit for the accomplishments of the previous generations.’
   Gorbachev, who went out of his way to say he thought ‘it’s a good thing he (Barack Obama) won the Nobel Peace Prize’ this year despite misgivings in the United States, also offered his unsolicited thoughts on Bush’s predecessor, Ronald Reagan.
   Bush had initially been criticised in some US circles in 1989 for not rushing to Berlin to celebrate the opening of the Wall.

Paramilitaries shot dead seven separatist guerrillas in a gunbattle in Manipur on Sunday, the police said.
   The Assam Rifles, one of the country’s oldest anti-insurgency paramilitary forces, raided a rebel hideout in the mountainous state which borders Myanmar.
   They seized automatic weapons, ammunition and explosives from the hideout, 30 km southeast of state capital Imphal.
   ‘Troops came under fire when they approached the hideout, and in retaliatory fire which lasted for an hour seven militants were killed,’ a police spokesman who did not want to be identified told Reuters by phone from Imphal.
   The police did not say which group the rebels belonged to. More than 20 militant groups operate in the state of just over two million, some demanding independence or greater autonomy.

Cuba’s former leader, Fidel Castro, has blamed the growth in swine flu on an increase in US visitors to the island.
   The US president, Barack Obama, recently lifted restrictions on Cuban-Americans visiting relatives on the island.
   This is the first time any Cuban official has found cause to complain about the US president’s policy of relaxing travel restrictions.
   But, in an editorial published by Castro in all state media, he suggests more US visitors mean more swine flu.
   The 83-year-old former president said that the H1N1 virus had spread to all the island’s provinces, especially those with a large number of relatives living in the US.
   At the same time, Fidel Castro noted, the US trade embargo prevents Cuba from obtaining equipment and medicines needed to combat the virus.
   But he stopped short of calling it a conspiracy. ‘I don’t think, of course, that it was the intention of the United States government,’ Fidel Castro wrote.

The United States and its ally South Korea have drawn up a contingency plan to cope with emergencies in North Korea, including a possible regime change there, a report said Sunday.
   ‘Operational Plan (OPLAN) 5029’ was completed by Seoul and Washington recently, Yonhap news agency said.
   It dictates how to respond case-by-case to such emergencies in North Korea as a civil war, an outflow of weapons of mass destruction, a mass influx of refugees or a natural disaster, Yonhap said.
   Under the plan, the United States assumes the role of eliminating North Korea’s WMDs, including its nuclear weapons, while South Korean troops play a leading role in most other parts, it said.
   Officials at Seoul’s defence ministry were not immediately available for comment on the report.
   North Korea has strongly protested at US-South Korean discussions of contingency plans which it denounces as preparations to invade the communist state.
   Such discussions had been suspended under the previous liberal Seoul government which feared such a plan could infringe on its own sovereignty.

Sri Lanka’s top military commander, General Sarath Fonseka, is to be questioned by US authorities over allegations of war crimes during the island’s fight against Tamil Tiger rebels, a report said Sunday.
   The privately-run Sunday Times newspaper said Fonseka, who is visiting his daughters in Oklahoma, had been asked to present himself for an interview with the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday.
   The move ‘prompted fears in Colombo that Washington is asserting its legal authority over the ‘war crimes’ report’ released last month, the paper said referring to a State Department dossier on alleged war crimes.
   The report outlined excesses by security forces and Tamil Tiger rebels during the final stages of fighting earlier this year. The report, submitted to the US Congress, refers to Fonseka having overstepped his brief.

Six Chinese Muslim Uighurs held at Guantanamo Bay arrived in the Pacific island nation of Palau on Sunday, the latest step in US president Barack Obama’s struggle to close the controversial prison.
   The men, held at the US naval base in Cuba for more than seven years despite being cleared of all charges, arrived here ‘to begin rebuilding their lives in freedom,’ New York-based lawyers for three of the former prisoners said.
   They had been cleared by the previous George W Bush administration after it decided to no longer treat them as ‘enemy combatants,’ the justice department said.
   It identified the men as Ahmad Tourson, Abdul Ghappar Abdul Rahman, Edham Mamet, Anwar Hassan, Dawut Abdurehim and Adel Noori.