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Between 70 and 80 people were burned alive when a fuel tanker truck exploded in Nigeria, reportedly after a policeman fired a shot to keep passersby away from a road accident, newspapers said on Saturday.
   The truck hit a pothole and overturned on Friday on the road between Onitsha and Enugu in the south of the country, spilling its cargo of petrol, witnesses and police told the papers.
   Several witnesses said that the truck exploded when a policeman who wanted to distance inquisitive onlookers fired his gun in the air. One witness said that people had been trying to scoop up and recover the spilled petrol.
   At least five minibuses packed with up to 18 passengers each and two cars were incinerated by the fireball. A witness said that one of the minibuses was filled with schoolchildren, all of whom were burned alive.
   ‘Immediately the policeman shot into the air, the tanker burst into flames that engulfed other vehicles that were close by and also trapped some of the people that were gathered around the scene who were not fast enough to escape,’ a witness told The Nation newspaper.
   Anambra state road safety director Ben Ekenna admitted local roads were in a bad state and was quoted as saying that ‘if something isn’t done quickly, tragedies like this will happen again.’
   Accidents on Nigeria’s poorly maintained inter-city roads are common, with trucks habitually driving at breakneck speeds.
   Nigerian newspapers are daily filled with images of overturned trucks, flooded or collapsed roads and massive potholes.
   Almost everything in Nigeria, including the vast country’s petrol and oil demands, are transported by road because of a lack of rail infrastructure, increasing the possibility of accidents.
   Federal road safety body FRSC says that around 400 people are killed every month by road accidents in Nigeria.
   When he was elected in May 2007, president Umaru Yar’adua promised to improved road and rail transport in the country of 140 million people.
   Last June a road safety expert said Nigeria needs to treat the carnage on its roads as a national emergency.
   Apollos Jediel, a coordinator of the National Emergency Management Agency, said ‘we are daily being confronted by an epidemic that kills and maims on the scale of major infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.’

Poland’s president Lech Kaczynski signed the European Union’s reforming Lisbon Treaty in a ceremony Saturday, leaving his ultra-eurosceptic Czech counterpart Vaclav Klaus as the only holdout.
   ‘The fact that the Irish people changed their minds meant the revival of the treaty, and there are no longer any obstacles to its ratification,’ Kaczynski said before inking the text.
   ‘Today is a very important day in the history of Poland and the European Union,’ he added, as senior EU leaders looked on.
   Among them were European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, European Parliament speaker Jerzy Buzek, who is Polish, and the Swedish prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, whose country currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency.
   ‘President Kaczynski has set the seal on the very important chapter for Poland and for the European Union,’ Barroso said.
   The ceremony took a light-hearted turn when Kaczynski’s fountain pen appeared to run out as he began signing and the smiling president asked an aide for a replacement.
   The treaty aims to streamline the running of the EU, which has nearly doubled in size in the past five years as a swathe of ex-communist countries such as Poland have joined.

Denouncing public rapes of women in Guinea, the humanitarian agency CARE on Friday demanded immediate world action to end sexual violence against women, including the appointment of a top UN official to lead the fight.
   ‘What happened in Guinea is an outrage — and a stark reminder of a larger epidemic of violence against women and girls around the world,’ CARE chief executive Helene Gayle said in a statement.
   Women were brutally raped by soldiers during a crackdown on anti-government demonstrators which, according to the United Nations, left more than 150 people dead in the west African country late last month.
   ‘We must take action now to put an end to this abuse and humiliation,’ Gayle said.
   On September 30, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1888 that renewed a demand ‘for the complete cessation by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence with immediate effect’ and urged the UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, to appoint a special representative to spearhead the fight.
   In a letter sent to Ban Friday, Gayle urged immediate implementation of steps outlined in Resolution 1888.

Iran will enrich uranium to the 20 per cent purity required for its research reactor in Tehran if third-party deals fail, the spokesman of the atomic body said on Saturday.
   ‘We will write a letter and announce to the (International Atomic Energy Agency) agency that Iran will act directly to supply the fuel for the Tehran reactor,’ ISNA news agency quoted Ali Shirzadian as saying when asked what would happen if proposed third-party deals fail.
   Officials from Iran, the United States, Russia, France and the IAEA are to meet in Vienna on October 19 to work out the modalities for deals under which Tehran has said it is ready to buy 20 percent pure uranium from abroad.

Eleven UN peacekeepers died on Friday when their surveillance plane crashed into a mountainside in Haiti during a routine patrol, UN officials said.
   A UN rescue team confirmed there were no survivors among the 11 crew and military personnel on the plane, a Casa-212, when it went down near the town of Fonds-Verrettes, near the border with the Dominican Republic.
   The dead were Uruguayans and Jordanians, UN spokeswoman Vannina Maestracci said. The cause of the crash was unknown.
   ‘The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti announces with sadness that a MINUSTAH plane, carrying 11 passengers, including the crew, crashed southeast of the commune of Ganthier,’ the United Nations said in a statement.

Yemen security forces said they have killed 100 rebels and injured a further 280 in the country’s northern Saada province, where the authorities are battling a renewed Shia revolt.
   The conflict has intensified since the army began ‘Operation Scorched Earth’ on August 11, and aid agencies are warning of a humanitarian crisis in the north, where up to 150,000 people have fled their homes since Shia tribesmen launched an insurgency in 2004.
   ‘Terrorist and destructive elements yesterday evening infiltrated (areas) between military barracks and security posts in Saada province,’ the military said in a statement issued late on Friday.
   ‘Our armed and security forces put a stop to them and inflicted painful and heavy blows on them during which the terrorist ‘Houthi’ elements lost more than 100 people and more than 280 were injured,’ the statement said, referring to rebels led by Abdul-Malik al-Houthi.
   Washington and Riyadh fear that fighting in northern Yemen, and frequent street clashes with separatists in the south, may create instability that al-Qaeda could exploit to carry out attacks in Saudi Arabia. It has already staged a comeback in Yemen in the past two years, with attacks on government and foreign targets.
   The northern Zaydi rebels say they suffer religious discrimination by Sunni fundamentalists who have gained in strength because of president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s close ties to Saudi Arabia, which adheres to a puritanical form of Sunni Islam.
   Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, is also facing a growing al-Qaeda militancy.

Hours after being named a Nobel peace laureate, the president, Barack Obama, shouldered his duties as commander in chief of the US armed forces and convened his war council for crucial talks on Afghan strategy.
   Obama gathered his top political, military, and security aides in the secure Situation Room of the White House for the fourth in a series of in-depth consultations on rescuing the US mission in the unpopular eight-year war.
   ‘The president had a robust conversation about the security and political challenges in Afghanistan and the options for building a strategic approach going forward,’ an administration official said. Obama ‘looks forward to continued discussion on Wednesday,’ the official said.
   Obama was scheduled to be briefed by Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal on his report warning that the US counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan could fail within a year without more troops.
   The meeting came amid more suggestions of tension between the White House and top military brass on the best way forward.
   On Thursday, the White House made a clear distinction between al-Qaeda and the lesser threat they say is posed to US security by the Taliban, fuelling suspicion that Obama was leaning away from sending tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan to escalate the counter-insurgency.
   Hours later, in a leak to the Wall Street Journal, it emerged that McChrystal had offered the president several alternative options, including a maximum injection of 60,000 extra troops.
   That figure is more than the previously reported 40,000-strong deployment that McChrystal apparently prefers.
   White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that Friday’s meeting could be followed by more than one meeting before the president makes a decision on strategy, still several weeks away.
   The Taliban scoffed at Obama’s shock Nobel prize award on Friday, suggesting his policy towards Afghanistan barely differed from that of ex-president George W Bush.Related article: Obama urged to spur peace
   ‘We have seen no change in his strategy for peace,’ said Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Islamic fundamentalist militants.
   ‘He has done nothing for peace in Afghanistan,’ Mujahid said. ‘He has not taken a single step for peace in Afghanistan or to make this country stable.’
   The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has seen his stock diminish in the United States amid election fraud allegations, immediately congratulated Obama on Friday, saying he was the ‘appropriate’ person to win the peace prize.

The world’s media were divided Saturday after the shock award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the president, Barack Obama, with some calling it a victory for ideals and others condemning it as deeply politicised.
   The prize-giving committee in Oslo named Obama the winner of the prestigious prize on Friday, hailing his ‘extraordinary’ efforts in international diplomacy and hastening nuclear disarmament.
   But the announcement proved as controversial as it was surprising.
   The Washington Post’s Dan Balz said there was amazement all around that the award had gone to ‘a president still in his first year in office with no major accomplishments internationally’.
   ‘The breadth of reaction, from exuberant gratification in some quarters to scorn and dismissal in others, underscored the political divisions over the direction of Obama’s policies and the sharply polarised impressions of his leadership,’ wrote Balz.
   The New York Times called it a ‘mixed blessing’ for Obama that highlighted ‘the gap between the ambitious promise of his words and his accomplishments’.
   It said the award further demonstrated that Obama was still celebrated as the ‘anti-Bush’ while in fact he had not shifted as much as he once implied he would from the previous administration’s national security policies.
   London’s Daily Telegraph said it was ‘one of the biggest shocks Nobel judges have ever sprung’ and would also be seen as one of the most political, with nominations closing just 12 days after Obama took office.
   France’s Liberation wrote that the prize was deserved ‘because he’s Obama, with his life symbolically on three continents (and) because his success has become synonymous with dignity and hope.’
   In China the unofficial Beijing News called it ‘an award of encouragement’.
   Japanese media said the award would increase global expectations of the Obama administration, with the mass-circulation Yomiuri Shimbun saying it was ‘an important task for him to achieve fruitful results from now on’.

Afghanistan’s Taliban mocked the award of a Nobel Peace Prize to the US president, Barack Obama, on Friday, saying he should get a Nobel prize for violence instead.
   Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said it was absurd to give a peace award to a man who had sent 21,000 extra troops to Afghanistan to escalate a war.
   ‘The Nobel prize for peace? Obama should have won the ‘Nobel Prize for escalating violence and killing civilians,’ he told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location.
   ‘When Obama replaced president Bush, the Afghan people thought that he would not follow in Bush’s footsteps. Unfortunately, Obama actually even went one step further.’
   In awarding the Nobel Prize to Obama, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said he had ‘created a new climate in international politics’ and praised his promotion of multi-lateral diplomacy and advocacy for arms control.
   ‘For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman,’ it said.
   Obama ordered 21,000 extra troops to Afghanistan this year, continuing a strategy of dramatically ramping up forces that began in the final months of the presidency of his predecessor George W Bush.
   There are now more than 100,000 Western troops in Afghanistan, two thirds of them American. In July, thousands of newly arrived US Marines launched the biggest offencive of the eight-year-old war.
   The United Nations says 1,500 civilians have died so far this year, with insurgents killing three times as many as Western and government forces.
   The new commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has asked for 40,000 more troops to implement an overhauled counter-insurgency strategy.

China accused rich countries of undermining key elements of an international climate change agreement that nations hope to agree by the end of 2009, adding to a chorus of discord over the negotiations.
   Su Wei, who led Beijing’s delegation to climate treaty talks in Bangkok that ended on Friday, said splits over the framework for a new pact to fight global warming remained ‘quite large,’ just two months before negotiations culminate in Copenhagen.
   China, as both the world’s biggest developing country and world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases from human activity, is at the heart of those disagreements.
   Su told China’s official Xinhua news agency that rich countries were seeking to abandon key principles of the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty that governs nations’ efforts to address climate change up to the end of 2012.
   Negotiators have been wrestling with whether to extend Kyoto into a second commitment period from 2013, amend the pact or create a new one, a step many developing nations resist.
   Kyoto obliges rich countries to make quantified commitments to cut emissions of greenhouse gases that are stoking global warming, while developing countries do not have to assume quantified emissions targets.
   Su said any attempt to abandon the Kyoto Protocol ‘gravely violated the fundamental basis of the international climate negotiations,’ Xinhua reported on Saturday.

Out with the red wine and foie gras: half the French cabinet are fighting the fat to please their clean-living boss president Nicolas Sarkozy and his supermodel wife, a top nutritionist has said.
   Sarkozy is said to have lost seven kilos in the two years since taking office, and the mix of a punishing diet, gruelling work-outs and a high pressure job was blamed for causing him to collapse while jogging this summer.
   Coached by the sylph-like first lady Carla Bruni, the slimline president appears to have kicked off a health craze in the cabinet, where before-and-after shots show several ministers to have melted.
   Most spectacular is the transformation of Brice Hortefeux, the interior minister and lifelong Sarkozy friend, who was reported this week to be on a draconian diet of soup, low-fat yoghurt and red berries.
   But he is not alone in watching his waistline, according to Jean-Michel Cohen, a star nutritionist who says he counts several ministers and a host of other politicians among VIP clients at his diet clinic in the Paris suburbs.
   ‘It’s a well known syndrome. People copy their boss and in this case the boss has lost weight, he is watching his image,’ Cohen said.
   ‘Half a dozen ministers are on a diet. It’s all done very discreetly.
   ‘Our clients used to be 25- to 50-year-old women. Then there was the wave of artists and TV journalists,’ he said. ‘Now it’s politicians both men and women, who are even sending their children.’
   Other weight-watchers include Eric Besson at immigration, Rama Yade the sports minister, the head of Sarkozy’s ruling party Xavier Bertrand and senior UMP lawmaker Roger Karoutchi, Cohen said.
   Ministers’ tables have shifted into health-conscious gear too.
   ‘Back in the old days, it was all roast lamb and beans, tarte tatin and half a bottle of wine. That’s all over: now it’s lobster terrine with a crayfish side salad and mineral water,’ said Cohen.
   Sarkozy has long worked to project a fighting-fit image — jogging up the steps of the Elysee Palace the day he took office — but his health binge began in earnest after his divorce from his second wife Cecilia.
   ‘He’s just your average Joe, he gets dumped and needs to make himself feel attractive again. But he took the slimming to a new level after he married a beauty queen — a real professional when it comes to nutrition,’ Cohen said.
   While US politicians from John F Kennedy to Barack Obama have long kept their waistlines in check, it is a small revolution in food-loving France where a generous physique — in men at least — was long seen as ‘reassuring’.
   ‘Of course a guy who knocks back half a bottle of red at lunch won’t be as effective as one who is working on an empty stomach,’ Cohen said.
   ‘But now our whole moral view is about dominating the body and staying slim. Fat is seen as immoral.’
   The president reportedly told one would-be minister to get a haircut and shed a few kilos ahead of a reshuffle in June — when the last remaining rotund member of the government, Andre Santini, was sacked.

Floodwaters from tropical storm Parma receded in much of the northern Philippines on Saturday but the toll from heavy rain rose further as more bodies were recovered, officials said.
   A total of 265 people were confirmed dead in landslides and flooding caused by Parma in the past two days, civil defence and local officials said.
   This brings the death toll from two weeks of killer storms to at least 602 with about 301,000 still crammed into makeshift evacuation centres since tropical storm Ketsana struck two weeks ago, the civil defence office said.
   Civil defence spokesman Ernesto Torres said that among the latest fatalities were three firemen who were carrying out rescue operations at the landslide site.
   In the northern Mountain Province, governor Maximo Dalog made an appeal for medicine, food and sniffing dogs, ‘so we can find the bodies.’

Britain is building a training camp for Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps to help in the fight against the Taliban in the lawless border area with southern Afghanistan, a report said Friday.
   The Times said Britain also planned to base 24 army trainers at the camp in the southwestern province of Baluchistan for a three-year stint from August next year, when construction is due to finish.
   The British personnel would work alongside six US trainers at the camp, which is designed to house 550 people, the newspaper reported, quoting a senior official at the British High Commission in Islamabad.
   The camp will train 360 Frontier Corps soldiers at a time, on 12-week courses, the official said.
   The report said the plan was politically sensitive because the British and US trainers will be the first foreign forces formally stationed in Baluchistan since Pakistan’s independence in 1947, although US special forces operated there during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The United States on Friday called on the Sri Lankan government to allow Tamil refugees displaced by recent fighting to move freely around the country.
   The assistant US secretary of state, Robert Blake, who is focussed on US relations with central and southern Asia, ‘emphasised the importance of the government allowing freedom of movement for internally displaced people, read a State Department statement.
   While the Sri Lankan government ‘has made some progress easing camp congestion, registering IDPs, and expanding access by humanitarian organisations, much remains to be done,’ Blake said.
   Blake also ‘underscored the importance of political reconciliation’ in Sri Lanka, where some 250,000 people who were displaced by fighting between troops and Tamil Tiger separatists have remained in the state-run camps since the rebels were defeated in May.
   In order to reach a lasting peace, the Sri Lankan government must ‘promote justice and political reconciliation for all parties and dialogue with all parties, including Tamils inside and outside Sri Lanka, on new mechanisms for devolving power.’Sri Lanka ‘must also seek to improve human rights and accountability,’ he said.

Amid Maoists’ agitation aimed at dislodging him from power, the prime minister, Madhav Kumar Nepal, has challenged them to form government by proving majority in parliament instead of pursuing politics of deceit and rejected their charge that his administration was a ‘puppet’ installed with ‘foreign’ support.
   Those ‘who can show a majority in (601-member) parliament will form the government as per the rule,’ Nepal said, addressing a meeting of his CPN-UML party’s cadres in Pokhara, a famous tourist spot of western Nepal.
   The prime minister called on the opposition Maoists to come up in a legitimate way and not in a dishonest manner to dislodge the government.
   His remarks came amid Maoists’ obstruction of the Parliamentary proceedings and street agitation in order to form a national government led by them.

US lawmakers urged authorities in India’s eastern state of Orissa to prosecute perpetrators of violence against Christians, saying the nation’s reputation for tolerance was at stake.
   In a letter to the state’s chief minister Navin Patnaik released Friday, the lawmakers voiced concern that many perpetrators of last year’s violence were still at large and intimidating their victims.
   More than 100 Christian were killed and thousands more left homeless between August and October 2008 following the murder of a revered Hindu holy man, which was blamed on Christians. While praising recent statements by India’s central government, the lawmakers said that local authorities have sometimes turned away victims seeking redress.
   ‘Such attacks on the fundamental freedom of religion threaten not only India’s reputation for religious diversity, but also the very stability of India’s secular democracy,’ the 21 lawmakers, led by Republican Trent Franks, wrote in the letter sent late last month.

The leaders of China, Japan and South Korea on Saturday called for the quick resumption of talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear drive, with Beijing saying the door was open to make real progress.
   The leaders, who pledged to deepen regional cooperation, said they would work together to ensure the success of global climate talks in Copenhagen later this year and promote the development of clean energy technologies.
   The summit between the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, new Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, and the South Korean president, Lee Myung-Bak, was only the second to bring the regional leaders together, after one in Japan last year.
   ‘We will remain committed to dialogue and consultation and continue to work through peaceful means to pursue the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula,’ the leaders said in a joint statement after the morning meeting.