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The US House of Representatives has approved the broadest US health care overhaul in a half-century, handing the president, Barack Obama, a major victory on his top domestic priority.
   Obama hailed the ‘historic vote’ and said he was sure of signing the ambitious overhaul in 2009.
   ‘Tonight, in an historic vote, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would finally make real the promise of quality, affordable health care for the American people,’ Obama said in a statement savouring the political triumph.
   ‘The United States Senate must follow suit and pass its version of the legislation. I am absolutely confident it will, and I look forward to signing comprehensive health insurance reform into law by the end of the year,’ he said.
   After hours of bitter debate and an appeal from Obama to ‘answer the call of history,’ lawmakers voted late Saturday 220-215 for a 10-year, trillion-dollar plan to extend health coverage to some 36 million Americans who lack it now. Facts: Health bill
   The chamber’s Democrats erupted in loud cheers and triumphant applause the moment the bill had the 218 votes needed for passage, about 11:07pm (0407 GMT), a happy din that grew deafening when a gavel made it official.
   The president had paid a rare visit to Congress to lobby for unity among his Democratic allies and reinforced it with a public speech, but 39 still joined 176 of the chamber’s Republicans in opposition to the proposal.
   One Republican broke ranks, nominally fulfilling, in the barest terms, Obama’s vow to secure bipartisan support.
   ‘This is our moment to deliver. I urge members of congress to rise to this moment, answer the call of history and vote yes for health insurance reform for America,’ Obama said in the White House’s rose garden hours before the vote.
   The fight to remake health care in the world’s richest country shifted to the US Senate, where its fate remained unclear amid a intra-party dispute among Democrats anchored on what role the US government should play.
   Democratic Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, struggling to pull together the 60 votes needed to ensure passage, has hinted that the chamber may not act until next year.
   That would put the issue front-and-centre in the 2010 mid-term elections, when one third of the Senate, the entire House of Representa-tives, and many US governorships are up for grabs.
   If, as expected, the two chambers pass rival versions of health care legislation, they will need to thrash out a compromise version and approve it in order to send it to Obama to sign into law.
   Final House passage came after a flurry of votes, including a 240-194 vote to sharply tighten restrictions on government monies paying for abortions, seen as critical to cementing support from a group of anti-abortion Democrats.

Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic won a small victory in a battle of wills with UN court judges when they adjourned his genocide trial to March next year, legal analysts said Sunday.
   While the judges opted to impose a lawyer on Karadzic, who has boycotted his trial since it started on October 26, they did not strip him of the right to conduct his own defence and effectively gave him more time to prepare — exactly what he was after.
   ‘This is an indirect way of giving Karadzic a bit more time to prepare his case,’ whi-le trying to minimise further interruptions, Willem van Genugten, international law professor at the Netherlands’ Tilburg University, said.
   The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on Thursday ordered the imposition of a defence lawyer on Karadzic and adjourned his genocide trial to March 1.
   Karadzic, 64, has refused to attend his trial since it opened in The Hague nearly two weeks ago, insisting on more time to prepare his defence, which he is conducting himself with the backing of about 20 legal advisers, many of them volunteers.
   He had asked the court in September for an extra 10 months to study 1.3 million pages of prosecution evidence and hundreds of witness statements.
   Karadzic stands charged with 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1992-95 Bosnian war in which some 100,000 people died and 2.2 million were forced to flee their homes.
   The judges warned that Karadzic would lose his right to self-representation should he continue his boycott when the trial resumes, in which case the court-assigned lawyer would take over.

The carnage at Fort Hood military base, where a Muslim army doctor is accused of killing 13 people in a shooting spree, was a ticking time-bomb that could explode again, observers said.
   ‘There’s a lot more of this out there, potentially. Anyone coming back from war with the PTSD could do the same thing,’ said Matthis Chiroux, a former US army sergeant who refused to go to Iraq.
   ‘We’re talking about nightmares yet unseen here.’
   Around 20 per cent of the more than 1.6 million US troops who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or the PTSD, and the US military has come under fire for failing to give soldiers and their families adequate treatment for the condition.
   Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, a psychiatrist and specialist in combat stress who was about to deploy to Afghanistan against his wishes, also wounded 30 people in Thursday’s rampage at the sprawling Fort Hood army base in Texas.
   The suspect himself was wounded when an officer shot him to halt his attack, and as he lay unconscious in a military hospital speculation swirled as to why Hasan had opened fire on his fellow soldiers.
   Others questioned why the military hadn’t noticed that the psychiatrist was himself in need of help.
   Hasan reportedly got a ‘poor’ rating while at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington, and Ann Wright, a retired US army colonel and former diplomat, said ‘one of his clients said he thought the psychiatrist was in as bad shape as he was.’
   Meanwhile, US investigators believe the army doctor accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at a Texas military base acted alone, but his motive for the massacre was unclear, officials said.
   The president, Barack Obama, will Tuesday attend a memorial service here to honour victims of the rampage at Fort Hood attributed to Muslim US army doctor Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who is also suspected of wounding 30 people.

Honduras’ ousted president and de facto leader gave signs they would try again on Saturday to form a unity government to guide the country out of a four-month crisis after the process collapsed a day earlier.
   The president, Manuel Zelaya, a refugee in his own country in the Brazilian Embassy, early on Friday declared dead a pact to end the crisis, while de facto leader Roberto Micheletti said he would form a new government without Zelaya’s participation.
   The United States and the Organisation of American States on Friday pushed the two sides to try again, while Latin American presidents urged Zelaya’s re-instatement, which has been the sticking point of the accord.
   In the latest twist in the long saga, Micheletti’s government said it would suspend installing a new cabinet to give Zelaya the weekend to name members to it.
   On the other side, a negotiator for Zelaya said representatives from the two sides would meet on Saturday to continue the negotiating process.
   The poor Central American country, which exports bananas, coffee and clothes, holds presidential elections on November 29.
   But if Zelaya and Micheletti cannot resolve their standoff, a newly elected president might not be able to win back diplomatic recognition and vital financial aid that were cut off to punish the country over the coup.
   ‘We’ve possibly found a road. There’s a pre-agreement, but I don’t want to give more details,’ Jorge Reina, a negotiator for Zelaya, told a local radio station. ‘There’s a new path.’

The United States has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine.
   The journalist wrote that during meetings with current and former officials in Washington and Pakistan, he was told that the agreements would allow specially trained American units to provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis.
   At the same time, the Pakistani military would be given money to equip and train Pakistani soldiers and to improve their housing and facilities, the report says.
   The principal fear was that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead, Hersh notes.
   The Pakistani nuclear doctrine calls for the warheads and their triggers to be stored separately from each other, and from their delivery devices.
   The arrangement serves as a safeguard in case of a quickly escalating confrontation with India but also makes the weapons vulnerable during shipment and reassembly, the report points out.
   ‘We give comfort to each other, and the comfort level is good, because everybody respects everybody’s integrity,’ Hersh quoted the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, as telling him in an interview about the security relationship with Washington.
   ‘Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban,’ Zardari went on to say. ‘A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan. It’s a fear being spread by the few who seek to scare the many.’
   Meanwhile, former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf acknowledged that his government had given US State Department nonproliferation experts insight into the command and control of the Pakistani arsenal and its on-site safety and security procedures, the report said.

British politicians and military chiefs defended the war in Afghanistan on Sunday as Remembrance services for generations of war dead highlighted the cost of the increasingly unpopular conflict.
   A new poll found further erosion in public support for the war amid mounting troop deaths, confusion over the mission and a lack of faith in its success — sparking renewed efforts to explain why Britain must stay the course.
   ‘British public opinion has been dented by the level of losses that we have received, but we cannot run a campaign like this off the back of an opinion poll,’ the defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, told Sky News television.
   Queen Elizabeth II led the Remembrance Sunday commemorations, which mark the end of First World War on November 11, 1918, and all those killed in other conflicts, laying a wreath at the Cenotaph memorial in central London.
   The events, which included a minute’s silence in honour of the dead, took on added poignancy with the announcement of the 231st British fatality in Afghanistan since operations began in 2001.
   The foreign secretary, David Miliband, admitted that ‘the threat is hard to see and more complex to understand’ than in previous conflicts but insisted ‘this war is every bit a war of necessity’.
   Writing in the Daily Mail newspaper, he said pulling out before the Afghan government could provide security would give global terrorism ‘free rein’.
   Britain’s chief of defence staff, Air Chief Marshal Jock Stirrup, said he believed Afghan forces would not be able to take over until 2014, saying previous estimates by US and NATO commander Stanley McChrystal were optimistic.
   Earlier, Lieutenant General Jim Dutton, the most senior British commander in Afghanistan, suggested that it would take ‘three to four years’ to reach Britain’s stated goal of handing over the security lead to domestic forces.
   Both military chiefs acknowledged that to maintain public support they must better explain why Britain was fighting in Afghanistan.
   A new Comres poll for the BBC reveals that 40 per cent of the public think the war is ‘unwinnable’, up six points from July, and more than 40 per cent do not understand why Britain is there.
   
   17 rebels killed in Afghan battle: ministry
   Afghan troops and NATO war jets pounded insurgents during a ‘fierce battle’ in southern Afghanistan, killing 17 rebels, the defence ministry said Sunday.

Tens of thousands of Okinawan residents rallied Sunday against a US military base on the island, raising the heat in a simmering row days before the US president, Barack Obama, is due in Japan.
   Opposition has often flared on the island against the presence of the large US military base, strategically located within easy reach of China, Taiwan and North Korea and dubbed the United States’ ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’.
   But the election of a new centre-left government in Tokyo in September, ending decades of conservative rule, has brought the issue to the centre of national politics and strained Japan’s most important security alliance.
   ‘I urge the prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, to tell president Obama that Okinawa needs no more US bases,’ said Ginowan mayor Yoichi Iha at the rally.
   ‘I urge prime minister Hatoyama to make a brave decision and put an end to Okinawa’s burden and ordeal.’
   Protesters, from elderly people wearing straw hats to young families carrying babies, applauded the mayor’s speech in a park near the controversial US Marine Corps Futenma Air Base in Ginowan city.
   Organisers said some 21,000 people had gathered for the event, which comes ahead of Obama’s visit to Tokyo on Friday and Saturday.
   The Futenma base, located in a densely populated urban area, has emerged as a flashpoint for local opponents who have been angered by aircraft noise, pollution, the risk of accidents and crimes committed by US service personnel.
   Okinawans reacted with fury to the 1995 rape of a schoolgirl by three US servicemen. Demands to close the base on safety grounds grew when a US helicopter crashed in the grounds of a local university in 2004.
   Hatoyama’s government, which swept to power in a landslide and has vowed a less subservient relationship with Washington, has said it may want the base moved off the island or even out of the country.
   The United States has demanded Japan honour a 2006 agreement under which the Futenma base would be closed but its air operations moved to an alternative site to be built on Okinawa by 2014 in the coastal Camp Schwab area.
   But many Okinawans and activists also oppose the planned new base, which would be built on reclaimed land and would include two runways protesters say are likely to affect a marine habitat that is home to corals and an endangered sea mammal, the dugong.
   On a visit to Japan last month, the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, bluntly urged Tokyo to ‘move on’ and resolve the issue before Obama’s arrival, stressing that Washington does not want to renegotiate an agreed pact.

Proposals from world powers to supply nuclear fuel for a research reactor in Iran are still on the table, a leading MP said on Sunday a day after suggesting that Tehran could reject the deal.
   ‘Our first option is to buy fuel of 20 per cent (enrichment),’ ISNA and Mehr news agencies quoted Alaeddin Borujerdi, the head of parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, as saying.
    ‘But if we cannot buy it we could make a limited exchange on condition that first we get fuel of 20 per cent,’ he added.
   On Saturday Borujerdi said that Iran has decided to reject proposals from major powers for the supply of nuclear fuel, in a serious setback for UN-brokered efforts to allay Western con-cerns about its atomic ambitions.
   Under the plan thrashed out in talks with France, Russia and the United States, Iran was to have shipped out most of its own stocks of low-enriched uranium in return for fuel to power a research reactor in Tehran.
   The proposals were designed to assuage fears that Iran could otherwise divert some of its LEU and further enrich it to the much higher levels of purity required to make an atomic bomb.
   ‘We do not want to give part of our 1,200 kilos of enriched uranium in order to receive fuel of 20 percent enrichment,’ Borujerdi told ISNA on Saturday.
   ‘This option of giving our enriched uranium gradually or in one go is over now,’ he said.

The Muslim world is watching how the United States will act on the stalled process for Palestinian-Israeli peace and wondering how one of the main sticking points, Israeli settlements, will be resolved, the world’s top diplomat for Islam said on Saturday.
   Arab discontent over statements from Washington seen as favouring Israel culminated this week when the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said he did not want to run in an upcoming poll, citing disappointment with the US president, Barack Obama.
   Abbas’ frustration with Obama centred on the US administration backing away from support for demands for a ‘freeze’ on Israel settlement building in the occupied West Bank and an endorsement of Israel’s view that settlement expansion should not be a bar to resuming peace talks.
   ‘We would like to keep our hopes that president Obama’s commitments and good intentions will translate to reality, but of course we’ve found that the whole negotiation comes back to square one,’ said Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.
   ‘The sine qua non for any negotiation is the stopping of the settlements ... We are still hopeful despite the fact that there are more reasons not to be hopeful,’ he said.
   The 57-nation OIC, based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was set up in the early 1970s when Islamic nations were divided along Cold War lines. While the body has no direct political power it represents more than one billion Muslims.
   The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has refused to halt construction in the settlements, many of which the Jewish state plans to annex under any eventual peace accord.
   Palestinian elections are scheduled for January 24, though few are anxious to take on Abbas’ role, throwing into doubt the reconciliation of fighting Palestinian factions as well as the peace process with Israel.

Japan urged Myanmar on Saturday to release detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi before next year’s election, adding it was ready to provide more aid if democratisation in the country advanced.
   The comments came a few days after a US delegation made a landmark visit to Myanmar as part of a new policy of engagement by the Obama administration.
   ‘It is extremely important that Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners are all released before the general election to be held in 2010,’ the Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, told Myanmar’s visiting prime minister, according to a Japanese foreign ministry spokesman.
   Hatoyama also urged General Thein Sein to ensure all stakeholders could take part in the election.

Worried over the rise in terror incidents in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, on Friday asked the global community to extend sustained cooperation for dealing with the menace for ensuring stability in the region.
   ‘We are very worried about the rise of terrorism in our neighborhood, particularly what is going on in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. We have a vital stake in peace, progress and stability of these countries and other countries of South Asia,’ Manmohan said while inaugurating the India Economic Summit here.
   He said India has been a victim of terrorism, ‘unfortunately coming from across our border for the last 25 years’ but the world discovered it as a global problem only after 9/11 (attack on the US).
   ‘I sincerely hope that among the processes, which require sustained international cooperation, dealing with terrorism figures very high on the priorities of all civilised countries of the world,’ he said.
   India is concerned over a sharp rise in deadly terrorist attacks in various parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan in recent past.

Four Saudi soldiers are missing after clashes on the southeastern border with Yemen-based Shiite rebels, deputy defence minister, Prince Khaled bin Sultan, said in remarks published on Sunday.
   He rejected rebel claims to have captured several soldiers after seven Saudis and an unknown number of Yemenis were killed in five days of fighting in the rugged terrain.
   Speaking to troops near the front in Jizan province late on Saturday, Prince Khaled also said Saudi forces had recaptured all territory seized by the rebels earlier in the week.
   ‘There were five missing and one came back. They are missing and not prisoners’ of the rebels, he was reported by the official SPA news agency as saying.

France is staging a big celebration for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to make amends for not fully sharing the euphoria of the event in 1989, the minister for Europe said Sunday.
   A dazzling light-and-sound show will take place on the Place de la Concorde in central Paris, inspired by the impromptu concert given by Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich at Checkpoint Charlie two days after the Wall fell.
   The festivities will underscore that France shares the joy of Germany’s reunification even though at the time president Francois Mitterrand was worried about the potential threat coming from a resurgent Germany in Europe.
   ‘I wanted to organise a celebration in Paris to chase away, once and for all, the fears that surrounded this period,’ the minister for European affairs Pierre Lellouche told Le Parisien newspaper.

Sri Lanka’s sidelined military chief, General Sarath Fonseka, will stand against president Mahinda Rajapakse in elections to held before April, a press report said Sunday.
   The Sunday Times newspaper here said Fonseka, who is credited with crushing Tamil Tiger separatists earlier this year, had been chosen by a consortium of opposition parties to be their presidential nominee.
   Fonseka has been at loggerheads with the government in recent months after he was removed as army chief and made chief of defence staff, a more ceremonial post with no command responsibilities.
   ‘Constituent parties of the newly formed (opposition) United National Front reached consensus this week that General Sarath Fonseka should be their common candidate,’ the Sunday Times said.
   There was no immediate comment from Fonseka, who returned to the island last week after a controversial visit to the United States where the department of homeland security wanted to question him about alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka.

Ousted Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra will visit Cambodia this week in his new role as the government’s economics adviser, the Cambodian prime minister told reporters Sunday.
   ‘Thaksin will be at the ministry of economy and finance on November 12, to do a briefing with more than 300 Cambodian economics experts,’ Hun Sen told a news conference at Phnom Penh International Airport.
   The visit is likely to increase tensions between Cambodia and Thailand, which have escalated since Wednesday when Cambodia announced the appointment of Thaksin, who was ousted as Thai prime minister in a 2006 coup.

Tropical storm Ida churning in the western Caribbean strengthened late Saturday and gained hurricane status, US government forecasters announced.
   At about 0430 GMT, Ida packed maximum sustained winds of about 75 miles (120 kilometers) an hour and north northwest at about 12 miles (19 kilometres) an hour, the Miami-based National Hurricane Centre said.
   The eye of the Category 1 hurricane was located about 120 miles (195 kilometres) southeast of Cozumel, Mexico, according to the centre.
   The storm is expected to dump up to 13 centimetres (five inches) of rain over parts of the Yucatan peninsula and Cuba, with possible isolated maximum amounts of 25 centimetres (10 inches).