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France and Brazil’s joint position for key climate talks next month is an attempt to force the United States and China to come to the table with serious greenhouse gas reduction targets, observers say.
   The presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva unveiled their common stance for the December 7-18 Copenhagen summit in a hastily arranged visit by Lula to Paris on Saturday.
   Both leaders said they would now try to rally other nations around their ‘ambitious’ position, which aims to reduce greenhouse gases globally by at least 50 per cent by 2050 from 1990 levels.
   Brazil said Friday it would offer a ‘voluntary’ emissions cut of 36 to 39 per cent at the United Nations-sponsored meeting, mainly by slowing Amazon deforestation, while Europe is pledging a 30 per cent cut.
   So far, though, the United States and China — the world’s two biggest polluters and contributors to climate change — have no firm commitments on cuts to bring to the table, troubling environmentalists and countries that have stumped up alike.
   ‘This puts the United States in a completely isolated situation,’ said Greenpeace Brazil executive director Marcelo Furtado.
   He said China would present its climate target next week, leaving the US president, Barack Obama, faced with ‘fulfilling his promises to fight climate change, or continuing the policies of his predecessor George W Bush.’
   While acknowledging that the France-Brazil tandem added significant pressure on Washington and Beijing, Furtado also described the relationship as a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ situation for the environment.
   ‘This is the same France that is promoting a nuclear programme in Brazil through the construction of Brazil’s first nuclear submarine, which is very negative. And this is a France that, with Lula, wants to take a leadership role in Copenhagen so that the summit is not a failure,’ he said.
   To add to the uncertainty, a Chinese foreign ministry official said Asia-Pacific leaders —Obama included — have dropped the 50 per cent target for reducing greenhouse gases by 2050 in a draft joint statement for a weekend summit underway in Singapore.
   Brazilian officials, too, are uneasy about what involvement the United States will bring to the Copenhagen meet, which is meant to draft a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol — the climate change-fighting treaty that the United States never ratified.
   Lula’s foreign affairs adviser, Marco Aurelio Garcia, was blunt in his assessment in comments just before the Brazilian president travelled to Paris.
   ‘We’re worried Copenhagen will be a fiasco,’ he said.
   ‘There are risks because the biggest country (the United States) won’t be arriving with an ambitious programme.’

President Barack Obama’s drive to remake US health care could face a critical test vote in the US Senate, where lawmakers await an influential report on the plan’s cost and overall impact.
   Obama’s Democratic allies hope to pass sweeping legislation to enact the president’s top domestic priority this year, but face intra-party feuds over the volatile issue of abortion and the government’s proper role.
   Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid hopes to set the stage to launch formal debate next week, after the non-partisan congressional budget office issues a report on the bill’s price tag.
   ‘The goal, still, is to at least start the debate before the Thanksgiving recess,’ which begins November 23, said Reid spokesman Jim Manley.
   Doing so would require a vote on whether to proceed to the health care debate, with support of 60 senators needed to ensure passage over any parliamentary delaying tactics from Republicans bitterly opposed to the plan.
   That could prove a risky test of support for the legislation: several swing-vote Democrats and one independent who often sides with them have signalled they may not support launching the debate at this point.
   The doubters chiefly object to the inclusion of a government-backed health insurance programme — popularly known as a ‘public option’— to compete with private insurers.
   And at least one Democratic senator, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, has said he will withhold his support unless the Senate bill tightens curbs on federal monies going to pay for health plans that cover abortion.

A row over a botched condolence letter from Gordon Brown may have won him public sympathy, but the PM’s relations with the media are more fragile than ever, months before an election.
   After the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan accused Brown of making 25 spelling mistakes in his handwritten note to her, he faced a barrage of attacks, hostile even by the standards of the unforgiving British press.
   Some eventually turned to understanding — the prime minister is blind in one eye and has limited vision in the other, which affects his writing — but the row has underlined Brown’s chronic discomfort with the press.
   In the wake of the furore, Downing Street signalled a communications shake-up seen by some as an admission that things must improve before the general election, to be held by June.
   ‘His premiership has been disastrous. His reputation has crumbled,’ wrote Allan Massie in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph.
   ‘The hatred has shaded into contempt, and in recent months, the contempt into pity. Authority has fled him.
   ‘A poor communicator, maladroit in personal relations, (Brown is) waiting to be put out of his misery when he at last submits to an election.’
   Despite a predictable by-election victory in Glasgow Thursday, it has been another tough week for Brown, whose blunders have drawn highly personalised attacks as never before.
   Most damaging was his apparently misspelt condolence letter to Jacqui Janes, whose 20-year-old son Jamie died in Afghanistan. Brown writes personally to the families of all troops killed, in his thick, spidery scrawl.
   The letter was published by the Sun, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch.
   Previously a supporter of Labour, the Sun switched to the Conservatives in September to the fury of many in Labour.
   Its hard line on the story was echoed by several other papers. ‘Bloody shameful,’ was the Sun’s headline. ‘Only Gordon Brown could turn a tribute into a gross insult,’ added the Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn.
   The letter was particularly damaging because it exposed Brown to charges he does not care enough about the military, amid increasing questions over Britain’s role in the Afghanistan war.

Kosovo citizens went to the polls Sunday for the first time since the ethnic Albanian majority declared independence from Serbia last year and amid fears of a boycott by the Serb community.
   The polls are seen as a test of Kosovo’s readiness to organise democratic elections on its own.
   Since the end of 1998-1999 war, the territory had been run by a United Nations mission until it seceded from Serbia in February 2008 despite strong opposition by Belgrade.
   More then 1.5 million people are eligible to
   vote in the local election for mayors and local council members in 36 municipalities, including the
   capital Pristina.
   Polling stations opened at 7:00am (0600 GMT) and were due to close at 7:00pm. The first unofficial results are expected by midnight, and a runoff held on December 13 in municipalities where candidates fail to win more than 50 per cent in the first round.
   In his last address ahead the vote, president Fatmir Sejdiu on Friday called for a massive turnout, saying the elections were crucial.
   ‘This Sunday should prove to the world that Kosovo is a stable country that produces peace and stability in the region,’ he said.
   But a key issue at stake is how many local Serbs will boycott the vote as urged by authorities in Belgrade and the influential Serbian Orthodox Church.

Colombia captured four members of the Venezuelan National Guard on Colombian soil and said on Saturday it would send them home in a gesture aimed at lowering diplomatic tensions between the neighbouring countries.
   The Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, last week ordered his army to prepare for war, warning that a new US-Colombia military cooperation agreement could set the stage for an invasion of Venezuela. Bogota and Washington dismiss the claim, saying their pact is limited to fighting drug-runners and rebels in Colombia.
   ‘They should carry back the message that here there is brotherly affection for Venezuela and that affection is unbreakable,’ said the Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, referring to the Venezuelans captured on Friday.
   The four were stopped by the Colombian Navy while travelling by boat on a river in the border province of Vichada.
   The long-simmering spat between conservative Uribe and leftist Chavez has reduced bi-lateral trade, which amounted to more than $7 billion last year, and increased tension along a border already beset by the smuggling of drugs and other contraband. But analysts are not predicting war.
   The Colombian government issued a statement calling for the release of an officer of its DAS intelligence service being held in Venezuela. Chavez has also accused Colombia of spying.

The US space agency was readying the space shuttle Atlantis and its crew of seven astronauts for a Monday launch to deliver a stockpile of spare parts for the nearly completed International Space Station.
   Liftoff is set for 2:28pm (1928 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Centre near Florida’s Cape Canaveral, NASA said Saturday.
   ‘Atlantis is ready to go, in really great shape,’ said shuttle launch manager Mike Moses at a press conference broadcast on NASA television.

Hundreds of people turned out on Saturday in Venice for a symbolic funeral procession to highlight the Italian city’s dwindling population.
   A cortege of gondolas carrying empty coffins, decorated with wreaths, crossed the city to the sound of songs and poems in the Venetian dialect. The event’s organisers said they wanted to draw public attention to the problems experienced by the northeastern city, where the population recently fell below 60,000.

The US president, Barack Obama, used a landmark encounter with the prime minister of military-run Myanmar on Sunday to demand freedom for detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.
   ‘I reaffirmed the policy that I put forward yesterday in Tokyo with regard to Burma,’ Obama told reporters, using the former name of the country that has kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for most of the past two decades.
   White House spokesman Ben Rhodes said the president reiterated a speech he made in Japan on Saturday when he urged Myanmar’s ruling generals to release the opposition leader and all other political prisoners.
   ‘So privately he said the exact same thing that he said publicly in enumerating the steps that the government of Burma must take: freeing all political prisoners, freeing Aung San Suu Kyi, ending the violence against minority groups, and moving into a dialogue with democratic movements there.’
   Obama made the call to the Myanmar prime minister, Thein Sein as he sat down with friends and foes alike at the first summit between a US president and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
   Officials at the meeting said Thein Sein did not react to the unprecedented face-to-face demand over Myanmar’s most famous citizen, but thanked Washington for its new policy of engagement with the military regime.
   Before opening the talks in a hotel ballroom, Obama and all 10 ASEAN leaders stood in a line on a stage, crossing their arms to shake hands with the leader on either side.
   Thein Sein sat nearly opposite the president as the leaders assembled at a round table, reporters saw before they were ushered out.
   The meeting on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific forum was aimed at injecting some much-needed warmth into US relations with a region that has felt neglected, with Washington consumed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   The prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, of Singapore applauded the United States for moving past the Myanmar issue, which has hamstrung relations between Washington and the Southeast Asian region for many years.
   ‘That... the US president considers it worthwhile to have a summit meeting with all 10 ASEAN members notwithstanding difficulties which they have, particularly with Myanmar, I think that’s very significant,’ he said.
   For Obama, it was an opportunity to enlist the support of Myanmar’s neighbours in his new strategy of engagement to push for democracy and the release of Suu Kyi and other political prisoners.
   In his speech in Tokyo, the US leader offered Myanmar’s generals the prospect of a better relationship if they agreed to reform, but said sanctions would remain until they took concrete steps.
   ‘That is how a government in Burma will be able to respond to the needs of its people,’ he said on the first leg of his debut tour of Asia.
   ‘That is the path that will bring Burma true security and prosperity.’
   In a joint statement released after the talks, the US and ASEAN leaders did not mention Suu Kyi but warned the junta that elections planned for next year must be ‘free, fair, inclusive and transparent’ to be credible.
   Myanmar’s critics have demanded that Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, be allowed to participate in the elections. It won 1990 elections in a landslide but was never allowed to rule.
   Obama is keen to review the relationship with fast-developing Southeast Asia as China exerts a growing presence in its backyard.
   First signs of a change came earlier this year, when the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, signed a landmark friendship pact with ASEAN in a move seen as a sign of the US desire to counter Beijing’s influence.
   ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Pakistani villagers repelled an attack on an anti-Taliban mayor near Peshawar Sunday, the police said, as the death toll from the latest suicide bombing to strike the under-siege city rose to 15.
   The northwest capital on the fringes of a lawless tribal belt has been hit by four suicide bombings in a week, as Pakistani troops press on with a major offensive against Taliban fighters in their nearby mountain strongholds.
   In Saturday’s attack in Peshawar, a man detonated a cache of explosives as the police tried to stop and search his car at a checkpoint.
   ‘Four critically injured people including a child succumbed to their injuries in hospitals overnight,’ taking the death toll to 15, Peshawar district administration chief Sahibzada Anis said.
   Violence continued to plague the area Sunday, when about 50 militants with the banned Lashkar-e-Islam group set upon the home of Fahimuddin, a local mayor who had raised a militia to fight the Taliban.
   Fahimuddin said that some of his would-be assassins were disguised in the all-encompassing burqa garments worn by conservative women in Pakistan, and approached his home in Bazid Khel village on Peshawar’s outskirts.
   ‘There were around 50 attackers, three of them wearing burqas managed to reach near my house. My men stopped them and asked for identification but they started firing after flinging off the burqas,’ said Fahimuddin, who goes by one name only.
   ‘It is 100 per cent sure that these people came to kill me. They left behind grenades and Kalashnikovs,’ he said.
   Karim Khan, a senior police official in Peshawar, confirmed the attack, and said three militants were killed in the ensuing clash. The rest fled the scene.
   ‘The village militia repulsed the attack before the police reached the spot. The dead bodies of the three militants will soon be shifted to police headquarters,’ said Khan.
   Lashkar-e-Islam (Army of Islam), which has loose ties to the feared Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan movement, enforces prayers five times a day and punishes people accused of prostitution, gambling and other vices.
   The TTP claimed responsibility for Saturday’s suicide car bombing and a brazen attack on the Peshawar headquarters of the nation’s top intelligence agency, the ISI, on Friday that killed 17 people.
   The militia has vowed further attacks to avenge the assault on its South Waziristan stronghold, where 30,000 troops backed by fighter jets and helicopter gunships have been battling since mid-October to crush the Islamist threat.
   The police spokesman Fazal Hayat said the authorities were filing a case against Lashkar-e-Islam head Mangal Bagh, blaming him for Saturday’s attack.

Thousands of demonstrators from Thailand’s royalist ‘Yellow Shirt’ movement protested in Bangkok Sunday against a visit to Cambodia by their arch-foe, fugitive former premier Thaksin Shinawatra.
   The group said it had called the rally to express outrage at the neighbouring country’s appointment of Thaksin as an economic adviser and Phnom Penh’s refusal to extradite him during his four-day trip there this week.
   The yellow-clad People’s Alliance for Democracy led mass protests against Thaksin before he was toppled in a 2006 coup, and blockaded Bangkok’s airports in late 2008 to force Thaksin’s allies out of government.
   The police estimated that around 4,000 people had gathered by the official start of Sunday’s rally at 4:00pm (0900 GMT) at a parade ground in downtown Bangkok, but said that more were expected to arrive later.
   ‘Our duty is to protect and preserve the country’s honour and dignity and the monarchy. Cambodia violated the extradition treaty and allowed a convicted person to be its adviser,’ senior PAD leader Somsak Kosaisuk said.
   ‘This action harms our country’s prestige. We will denounce both convicted Thaksin and the Cambodian prime minister, Hun Sen, at the protest,’ Somsak said.
   Thaksin left Cambodia on Saturday for Dubai, where he has spent most of the time since fleeing Thailand in August 2008 to avoid a two-year jail term for corruption. Thailand has also frozen 2.2 billion dollars of his assets.
   The nationalist PAD said it was also gathering to express outrage at comments that billionaire Thaksin made in a newspaper interview in which he called for reform of institutions around Thailand’s revered monarchy.
   The issue is sensitive because 81-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej — a major force for stability in the politically divided nation — has been in hospital for the past two months.
   Deputy national police spokesman Piya Utayo said around 1,500 police officers were deployed for the rally.
   Thaksin’s visit to Cambodia sparked a diplomatic crisis between Bangkok and Phnom Penh, with relations already tense after a series of deadly clashes in the past year over a disputed temple on their border.

The leaders of the world’s wealthiest nations will be conspicuous by their absence as more than 60 heads of state and government gather in Rome this week for a UN summit on the plight of the planet’s billion hungry.
   The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is the only leader from the Group of Eight industrialised countries expected to attend the ‘Hunger Summit’ from Monday through Wednesday.
   Pope Benedict XVI will be among the inaugural speakers at meeting at the Rome headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
   Also expected at the summit are the Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Moamer Gaddafi of Libya, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
   The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, arrived Saturday with an entourage of some 60 people. His human rights record has seen him barred from travelling to the European Union, except for international gatherings, since 2002.
   Humanitarian groups warned last week that the summit could be a ‘waste of time,’ calling for the commitment of new resources to fight hunger.
   ‘It’s a tragedy that the world leaders are not going to attend the summit,’ said Daniel Berman of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres — MSF).
   A draft declaration already circulating ahead of the meeting is ‘just a rehash of old platitudes,’ said Francisco Sarmento, ActionAid’s food rights coordinator.
   ‘Rich countries are failing to show enough interest and urgency,’ said Oxfam spokesman Frederic Mousseau.
   ‘At the G8 in Italy this summer they pledged 20 billion dollars (13.5 billion euros) for agriculture over three years, so they believe they have done enough. They haven’t — and the 20 billion dollars is a mirage,’ he said.
   Even the Italian Catholic Church warned of a possible ‘flop’ unless the produces concrete commitments.
   The Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire lamented that the draft final declaration makes no mention of the 44 billion dollars per year that FAO chief Jacques Diouf is seeking for agriculture in poor countries.

The foreign minister, Katsuya Okada, pushed Sunday for a speedy Japanese review of a US base realignment plan, showing widening differences with the prime minister, who wishes to spend more time on the issue.
   ‘We must reach a decision as the cabinet’ of the prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, Okada said during a visit to southern Okinawa island, which reluctantly hosts more than half of the 47,000 US troops in Japan.
   ‘We cannot put it off that long,’ said Okada, who is under strong pressure from Washington and many Japanese experts to implement the existing plan.
   Hatoyama, who came to power in September, has rattled Washington by saying he is reviewing the 2006 agreement to close one base on Okinawa and build a replacement facility in a less populated area of the island.

Iran will soon be able to produce an advanced missile defence system itself if Russia does not deliver it to the Islamic Republic, a senior lawmaker said in comments published on Sunday.
   The warning by Alaeddin Boroujerdi, who heads parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, was the latest sign of growing irritation in Tehran over what it sees as Moscow’s failure so far to fulfil a missile sales agreement.
   Moscow, which is under Western pressure to distance itself from Iran over its disputed nuclear ambitions, has not followed through on proposals to supply high-grade S-300 air defence missiles to the Islamic state.
   ‘Iran is not a country to come to a halt in the face of non-cooperation of other countries,’ Boroujerdi said, according to Aftab-e Yazd newspaper.

Indian troops Saturday shot dead five suspected Islamic militants as they tried to enter Indian Kashmir from the Pakistani side of the disputed state, the army said.
   ‘Indian troops have foiled a major attempt by militants to infiltrate into (Indian) Kashmir from across the Line of Control,’ said army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel JS Brar.
   The heavily-militarised line divides Kashmir between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan who both claim the whole territory and have fought two wars over it.
   ‘So far five militants have been killed in (northern) Baramulla district during an operation that started Saturday evening,’ he said, adding that the operation was still continuing.

Watchtowers and close-circuit televisions will help secure the Taj Mahal, one of the world’s most visited monuments, as the busy tourist season begins in India, a senior police officer said.
   Based on input from intelligence agencies, security at the Taj Mahal, a stunning 17th century marble mausoleum, has been beefed up, said Brijbhooshan Singh, a deputy inspector general of police in Agra, about 200 km from New Delhi.
   The paramilitary Central Industrial Security Force is responsible for protecting the monument, which draws hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. Now its officers, and the police, will also man eight watchtowers that ring the monument.
   ‘The security personnel at the tower would be able to keep a tight vigilance,’ Singh said, adding they had also installed barricades and CCTVs at the showpiece monument built by Mughal ruler Shah Jahan after the death of his favourite wife Mumtaz.
   ‘We plan to come up with more things in the future. We are still working on them,’ Singh said.
   Security at public places in India has been stepped up following last November’s attacks in Mumbai by militants, whose targets included a busy train station and two luxury hotels.

The Palestinians intend to ask the UN Security Council to recognise their independence, a senior official said on Sunday amid mounting frustration with the stalled peace process.
   ‘We have reached a decision... to go to the UN Security Council to ask for recognition of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and with June 1967 borders,’ chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said.
   ‘We’re going to seek support from EU countries and Russia and other countries’ for the measure, he said.
   Erakat’s comments came amid growing frustration among the Palestinians with so-far ineffective US efforts to relaunch peace negotiations with Israel that were suspended during the Gaza Strip war at the turn of the year.
   They mark the latest in a series of options that the Palestinians have warned they could take if the Middle East peace process remained stalled.
   Others include unilaterally declaring independence, asking the UN to determine final borders of their promised state, dissolving the Palestinian Authority and seeking equal rights within Israel.

South Korea went on alert briefly Sunday after a North Korean coastal battery unit turned its radar on for firing amid tensions after a recent naval clash, a report said.
   YTN television, quoting unnamed military sources, said the North’s short activation of the radar sent the South rushing to relocate its 1,500-tonne destroyer out of range in the Yellow Sea.
   The radar at a battery in Ongjin on the North’s southwest coast was powered on for an hour until 2:00pm (0500 GMT), YTN said, adding South Korea’s naval patrol boats were on stand by for emergencies.
   Seoul’s defence ministry refused to confirm the YTN report in detail, but admitted having responded to unspecified movements by the North.
   ‘There were some North Korean movements, and we took necessary steps. Everything has returned to normal now,’ a ministry spokesman said without elaborating.
   South Korea’s military is already on high alert as the North threatened to take ‘merciless’ action following a naval clash on November 10.