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The Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, inched closer to a return to power on Thursday after one of four independent lawmakers holding the balance of power threw his support behind her Labor Party.
   Labor has promised to introduce a new tax on mining profits tax and a $38 billion telecoms project if it wins a second term after an indecisive August 21 election.
   Independent Andrew Wilkie’s decision to back Gillard means Labor can now claim 74 seats in the 150-member lower house of parliament, still two short of the number required to rule.
   The conservative opposition has 73 seats, but it could still win the race to form a government if the three remaining rural-based independents line up behind its leader, Tony Abbott. Their decision may not come until early next week.
   ‘I have judged that it is in fact (Labor) that best meets my criteria that the next government must be stable, must be competent and must be ethical,’ Wilkie told reporters at parliament in Canberra.
   ‘A future Gillard Labor government will have my vote on matters of supply. Furthermore I will not support any unwarranted no-confidence motion brought to bear against a future Gillard Labor government.’
   Wilkie had demanded gambling reforms in return for his support, to limit the amount people could lose on gaming machines. A crackdown on gambling would affect stocks like Tabcorp Holdings, Tatts, Crown and Aristocrat Leisure.
   ‘The prime minister has agreed that should she form the next government, the government will work to implement pre-commitment technologies on every poker machine in Australia by 2014,’ he said. ‘These are ways of individual gamblers being recognised by the machines and by the network of the machines, which is a very effective way ... to rein in problem gambling.’
   Labor’s proposed super tax on mining profits would hit miners Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.
   So far financial markets have not been ruffled by the political uncertainty. Investors are more focused on the risk that economic weakness in the United States and Japan could spill into Australia, undermining its relatively robust growth.
   Nevertheless, the Australian economy remains in rude health. Data released on Wednesday showed that the country’s gross domestic product rose by 3.3 per cent in the second quarter from the same period in 2009.

Relief efforts in flood-ravaged Pakistan are being stretched by the ‘unprecedented scale’ of the disaster, with the flow of international aid almost at a standstill, the UN said Thursday.
   A month of catastrophic flooding has now killed 1,760 people and affected more than 18 million, including eight million who are dependent on aid handouts to survive, it said.
   Although the initially slow pace of aid had improved since a visit by the secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, in mid-August, the UN said it has ‘almost stalled’ since the beginning of last week, rising from 274 million dollars to 291 million dollars — about two thirds of funding needs.
   ‘Given the number of those in need, this is a humanitarian operation of unprecedented scale,’ Manuel Bessler, head of the UN’s coordination agency OCHA said in a statement.
   ‘We need to reach at least eight million people, from the Karakoram Mountain Range in the north to the Arabian Sea in the south.’
   Thousands of people were trapped by floodwaters in towns in the southern province of Sindh, while others are complaining of going without food or water for days, some forced to live in the rubble of their ruined homes.
   The World Bank raised its emergency funding for Pakistan to one billion dollars amid dire warnings about the threat to the country’s food supplies.
   The floods have ruined 3.6 million hectares (8.9 million acres) of rich farmland and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said farmers urgently needed seeds to plant for next year’s crops.
   ‘Unless people get seeds over the next few weeks they will not be able to plant wheat for a year,’ Daniele Donati, director for FAO emergency operations in Asia, the Middle East and Europe, said on Wednesday.
   ‘Food aid alone will not be enough. If the next wheat crop is not salvaged, the food security of millions will be at risk,’ Donati warned.
   The World Food Programme has warned that Pakistan faces a triple threat to food supplies — with seeds, crops and incomes hit.
   In southern Pakistan, hundreds of hungry and desperate families from a relief camp in the city of Thatta blocked the highway to Karachi for three hours Wednesday, demanding the government provide more food and shelter.
   ‘No food or water has been provided to us for the past two days,’ Mohammad Qasim, a 60-year-old resident of the flooded town of Sujawal, said.
   The protest came as under-fire prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani warned the country faced inflation of up to 20 per cent and slower economic growth because of the floods, warning of job losses and social unrest.

The death toll from suicide attacks that targeted a busy procession in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore rose to 31 on Thursday as six people succumbed to their injuries, officials said.
   Three suicide bombers targeted a Shia mourning procession made up of thousands of people on Wednesday at the moment of the breaking of the fast in the holy month of Ramadan, wounding hundreds.
   It was the first major attack in Pakistan since devastating floods engulfed a fifth of the volatile country over the past month in its worst disaster yet.
   ‘Thirty-one people have died and a total of 281 were injured,’ Fahim Jehanzeb, a spokesman for Lahore’s rescue agency said, adding that he feared more would die from their injuries.
   Sajjad Bhutta, a senior local administration official, confirmed the new death toll.
   Head of police investigations for Lahore, Zulfiqar Hamid, said that investigations were ongoing and no arrest had yet been made.
   Prayers were held for seven of the dead on Thursday, with police and paramilitary providing tight security, while local authorities announced a day of mourning with all public and private institutions closed.
   Later hundreds of Shia Muslims clad in black took to the streets to denounce the attack and said they would later hold a meeting to discuss a strategy in response.
   ‘We strongly condemn this incident. We will not tolerate such attack in future,’ a Shia leader, Hassan Zafar Naqvi, said.
   An AFP reporter said that all markets were closed and roads were quiet on Thursday, after the attacks provoked an outpouring of fury in the city a night earlier, with mourners trying to torch a nearby police station.
   The police fired tear gas to force back the surging crowd as furious mourners beat the bodies of the suicide bombers with sticks and shoes, while others beat their own heads and chests at the site of the attacks in frustration.
   The emotional crowd chanted slogans against the police and the provincial government over their failure to protect the Shia procession, an AFP correspondent on the scene said.
   Lahore, a city of eight million near Pakistan’s border with India, has been increasingly subject to Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked attacks in a nationwide bombing campaign that has killed more than 3,600 people in three years.
   The procession hit by the blasts was being held to mark the anniversary of the martyrdom of Hazarat Ali, who is revered by Shia Muslims and is the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad.
   Shiites account for around 20 per cent of Pakistan’s mostly Sunni Muslim population of 160 million.

The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, arrived in Kabul Thursday on a surprise visit following a trip to Iraq, where he attended ceremonies to mark the formal end of the American combat mission there.
   During his visit to America’s other war, Gates is expected to meet the president, Hamid Karzai, as well as the commander of international forces in Afghanistan, US General David Petraeus, and other officials, his staff said.
   Gates said Wednesday that America’s war in Iraq is over but that the outcome would remain ‘clouded’ by the reason it was waged in the first place.
   Asked by reporters at Camp Ramadi, an American base about 100 kilometres west of Baghdad, whether the United States was still at war in Iraq, Gates replied: ‘I’d say we’re not. Combat operations have ceased.
   ‘We are still going to work with Iraqis on counter-terrorism, we are still doing a lot of training and advising,’ said Gates, who had arrived early Wednesday on an unannounced visit to Iraq.
   ‘So I would say we’ve moved into the final phase of our engagement in Iraq,’ he said, after meeting US soldiers staying on to provide assistance to the Iraqi army.
   The president, Barack Obama, late Tuesday officially announced the end of the US combat mission in Iraq, where US forces are now down to around 49,700, for an advisory and training mission — with the last forces to leave in 2011.
   The end of US combat operations in Iraq has shifted attention to America’s war in Afghanistan, where troop deaths are at record highs and rampant corruption underscores the challenges facing the West.
   
   10 civilians killed in NATO airstrike in Afghanistan
   An Afghan official said Thursday that 10 election campaigners had been killed in an airstrike by international forces in the relatively peaceful north of the country.
   Two other people, including a candidate in the September 18 parliamentary elections, were injured in the alleged air raid in Rustaq district, in Takhar province, provincial government spokesman Faiz Mohammad Tawhedi said.
   The men were travelling in a ‘caravan’ of vehicles when raided by ‘aircraft and helicopter gunships,’ he said.
   The election campaigners were working for parliamentary candidate Abdul Wahed Khurasani, who had survived the bombing with injuries, he said.
   NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, the international counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan, said it was ‘aware of the allegations’.
   ‘We’re investigating to find out if it’s true or not,’ an ISAF spokesman said.
   NATO has around 150,000 troops in Afghanistan to fight a Taliban-led insurgency.

Sonia Gandhi was Thursday set for a record fourth term as Congress president with at least 55 sets of nomination papers filed in her favour by her party’s office-bearers. It will make her the longest serving party president in the 125-year history of the Congress, reports Indo Asian News Service.
   Gandhi, 63, assumed office as party president in 1998.
   Over 55 sets of nomination papers had been filed till Thursday afternoon, chairperson of the party’s Central Election Authority Oscar Fernandes told IANS.
   The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, the chief ministers of Congress-ruled states and several union ministers were among those who visited Gandhi’s 10 Janpath residence to get her assent on the nomination papers.
   The others included the finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, the rural development minister, CP Joshi, the health minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, the power minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, ministers of state for telecommunications Sachin Pilot and minister of state for external affairs Preneet Kaur.
   Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi broke off his three-day trip in his constituency Amethi to take part in the process of filing nomination papers for his mother.
   Congress leaders said each state wanted to file at least one set of nominations for Gandhi.
   The chief ministers of Delhi, Haryana, Maharashtra, Manipur and Rajasthan came along with leaders of their state to support her candidature. Former union minister Arjun Singh and former Kerala chief minister K Karunakaran also put in their signatures to forms submitted for Gandhi’s re-election at the party headquarters here.
   The formal declaration of Gandhi’s re-election is expected to be made Friday. Thursday was the last date for filing nominations.

The Thai king on Thursday formally appointed a tough new military chief, thought to have been active in quashing recent anti-government protests as the premier urged army accountability.
   King Bhumibol Adulyadej officially endorsed the appointment of General Prayut Chan-O-Cha as the powerful commander-in-chief, part of his approval of the annual military reshuffle list involving 550 positions.
   The prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, said he expects the reorganised army to work effectively at flash points on Thailand’s borders, as well as under emergency laws.
   Bangkok and six other provinces remain under emergency rules implemented in early April as a response to the ‘Red Shirt’ demonstrations.
   ‘The public expectation is very high, so the military must increase its capacity but it must also be accountable,’ he said, adding that the military was expected to act in line with government policy.
   The shadow of the military constantly looms over the Thai political scene, with 18 actual or attempted coups since 1932.
   Prayut, 56, who will be promoted from second in command of Thailand’s powerful army when the reshuffle comes into effect on October 1, has long been seen as the top contender to replace retiring boss General Anupong Paojinda.
   Local media have portrayed his rise as a reward for his tough stance during the mass rally by the red-shirted movement in April and May, although the Thai government has denied a link.

China on Thursday urged its fellow parties to six-nation North Korean nuclear talks to ‘meet halfway’ as Beijing continues to try to drum up support for a resumption of the stalled negotiations.
   The talks — which are hosted by Beijing — had previously secured North Korean pledges to give up its nuclear programmes, only to see Pyongyang reverse course and storm out of the discussions last year.
   ‘The current situation on the Korean peninsula is complicated and sensitive,’ foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters.
   ‘We hope that relevant parties can remain calm, exercise restraint, meet each other halfway and do more to alleviate tensions.’
   China’s top North Korean nuclear envoy Wu Dawei has recently visited the two Koreas, Japan and the United States in an effort to restart the negotiations.

Three coffins with the bodies of Hong Kong tourists killed in a Philippine hostage crisis last week were mis-labelled, a government spokesman said Thursday.
   One victim’s family went to a Hong Kong morgue to identify their dead relative only to find that the body inside the coffin was a different victim of the tourist bus hijacking that left eight Hong Kong citizens dead.
   ‘Three of the coffins were wrongly labelled,’ a government spokesman said.
   ‘When the bodies were at the mortuary in Hong Kong, the error was discovered.’
   The mis-labelling happened at a Manila funeral home before the bodies were flown back to the southern Chinese city, the spokesman said, adding that the error likely occurred when they were transferred from plain coffins to more elaborate caskets.
   The hostage ordeal on August 23 began when sacked policeman Rolando Mendoza hijacked a bus with 22 Hong Kong tourists and three Filipinos on board in the heart of Manila.
   The day-long drama was played out on television screens around the world and ended with a hail of gunfire in a botched rescue attempt riddled with police errors.

A two-year-old Indone-sian boy who smoked about 40 cigarettes a day has kicked the habit after receiving intensive specialist care, a child welfare official said Thursday.
   Ardi Rizal shocked the world when a video of him drawing heavily on cigarettes appeared on the Internet in May and drew attention to Indonesia’s failure to regulate the tobacco industry.
   ‘He has quit smoking and the most important thing is he doesn’t ask for cigarettes anymore,’ national commission for child protection secretary-general Arist Merdeka Sirait said.
   Six months after his father gave him his first cigarette, the overweight boy was smoking two packs a day and threw violent tantrums if his addiction was not satisfied.

A Malaysian woman on Thursday won a damages payout after suing her surgeon for taking photographs of her backside during haemorrhoid surgery, her lawyer said.
   Freelance writer Lee Ewe Poh, 50, was awarded 35,000 ringgit (11,000 dollars) in damages for invasion of privacy.
   Lee’s counsel Simon Murali said the court also ruled that surgeons must obtain their female patients’ consent before taking photos of their private parts.
   ‘The judge said the doctor has a duty towards his patient and it is crucial that he must respect the modesty and dignity of his patients instead of violating it,’ he said.
   Murali said Lee underwent a surgery at a private hospital in the northern state of Penang in 2006.
   She later discovered that her surgeon had photographed her while she was unconscious and without her consent.

The number of reported victims of a recent mass rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo has grown by nearly a hundred over the last week, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
   UN spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters in New York that the world body’s MONUSCO peacekeeping force in Congo has received further reports of rapes committed over the course of several days in a town in the eastern part of the country, bringing the number well above the 154 reported last week.
   ‘They (MONUSCO) have received by now reports of more than 240 victims of rape in the eastern Congo,’ Haq said.
   MONUSCO has said it was only informed of the incident more than a week after it happened, even though they had a base just 20 miles from the scene in the country’s violent east.
   That led UN Security Council members to suggest, at an unscheduled meeting called last week by the United States and France, that the 20,000-strong MONUSCO force needed at least to improve its communications with the local population.
   One senior Western diplomat said on condition of anonymity that there was a ‘robust discussion’ underway at the United Nations about why it took MONUSCO so long to learn about the rapes, and for the Security Council to be informed.
   Rebels from the Mai Mai militia and Rwandan Hutu FDLR occupied the town of Luvungi in North Kivu provin-ce from July 30 to August 3.
   UN officials have said that they first learned of the rapes on August 12. But a report from the UN humanitarian agency OCHA dated August 10 — two days earlier — refers to the reported rapes of at least 25 people. One aid group has said many women were gang-raped by between two and six armed men.
   The attack has stung the United Nations, whose peacekeeping force in Congo is its largest anywhere. The secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, has made protecting civilians and combating sexual violence central themes of his stewardship of the world body.

Hurricane Earl quickly closed in on a large part of the US east coast on Thursday, as tens of thousands of people fled North Carolina’s barrier islands to avoid dangerous winds and surf.
   The strongest Atlantic storm of 2010 was on course to lash the coast of North Carolina and then move north, wreaking havoc on the end-of-summer Labor Day holiday weekend that usually draws millions to the beaches.
   At 5:00am (0900 GMT), Earl’s top winds had increased to their highest level yet — 145 miles — as the powerful category four storm sped toward the eastern seaboard, the National Hurricane Centre said.
   The eye of the storm was 410 miles south of Cape Hatteras in the Outer Banks — a narrow band of North Carolina barrier islands.
   Hurricane force winds were expected to reach the state’s coast later by late Thursday and a ‘dangerous’ storm surge was due to raise water levels by up to three to five feet above ground level in the hurricane warning area, the NHC said.
   ‘The surge will be accompanied by large and destructive waves,’ it warned, noting that large swells associated with the storm ‘will likely cause dangerous surf conditions and rip currents’ through the weekend.
   In a sign the hurricane season was heating up, the fourth storm in the past 11 days, Tropical Storm Gaston, formed in the Atlantic.
   Gaston had winds of 40 miles per hour and was cantered 965 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands.
   But forecasters warned the storm’s track could well put it in the path of Haiti, a worst-case scenario now threatening to become reality for a nation still struggling to recover from a January earthquake.
   Thousands of quake survivors remain in flimsy, makeshift, open air camps in and around the capital Port-au-Prince, and observers warn of a further humanitarian catastrophe if the area is hit by a major storm.
   US officials meanwhile ordered a mandatory evacuation for 30,000 residents and visitors of North Carolina’s Hatteras Island. Thousands more were told to leave the state’s Ocracoke Island, where ferry service is the only transport link with the mainland.
   The president, Barack Obama, signed a disaster declaration for North Carolina, ordering federal assistance to support response efforts.
   ‘The timing is not good for folks trying to enjoy the last good summer weekend, but safety and protection of personal property comes first,’ said Cyndy Holda, public affairs officer at Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

Iraq cannot yet sustain its army despite having managed to quell a violent insurgency, US and local commanders said, raising the prospect that American troops will stay on beyond 2011.
   US military advisers described myriad inefficiencies and problems, from hospitals that lacked medics and dentists to byzantine processes that must be followed to request spare vehicle parts and other vital equipment.
   ‘Tactically, they do well, but ... warfare is about logistics,’ said Colonel Steven Apland, who heads a Stability Transition Team that advises the Iraqi Army’s 3rd Division at Al-Kissik Base, west of the northern city of Mosul.
   ‘Their logistics systems are just, at this point, way below what their tactical competence requires,’ he said, as US forces ramped up an ‘advise and assist’ mission in Iraq, following the formal end of combat operations on Tuesday.
   To illustrate his point, Apland held up his pen, and related the complicated process that Iraqi soldiers — there are now more than 300,000 — must follow to request a new box of such pens.
   ‘I have to fill out this document in triplicate, quadruplicate, and then I have to hand it to some major, and he has to drive down to Baghdad to get it stamped ... and provide a document for you to come back up here, two blocks away, to actually release it (the supplies) to you,’ he said.
   One of Apland’s deputies, Lieutenant Colonel Craig Benson, later walked through a medical centre on the base and pointed out how well-supplied it was.
   But the centre’s lights were mostly off, because of a power cut on a base that has a generator farm that Benson says can provide sufficient capacity to power the base twice over.
   ‘They have the equipment, they need the staff, and they need their logistics systems,’ he said.
   ‘(Iraqi) combat lifesavers that we try and train to deal with a little bit of trauma on the battlefield have combat lifesaver kits that have expired stuff,’ Benson added.
   Lieutenant Colonel Salah al-Din, the head of one of the base’s workshops, said many Iraqi units did not properly maintain their vehicles, eventually leading to engine and transmissions failures.
   ‘We tell them — before you go on a mission, check the vehicle, and after you come back from a mission, check the vehicle. If there is a small problem, you can fix it. The big problems, they start from the small problems,’ he said.

The police shot and killed a man who took three people hostage, waving a gun and apparently fitted out with explosives, in the headquarters of the Discovery Channel near Washington Wednesday.
   Officers who had been watching the hostage drama on a building security camera crept in while police negotiated with the emotional gunman and shot him when he pointed his pistol at one of the three men he held hostage.
   ‘A hostage moved, he pulled his gun, and a shot was taken,’ Montgomery County police chief Tom Manger told reporters. He said the suspect was killed and the hostages were safe.
   The man, named by a US law enforcement official as James Lee, had been arrested before for protesting against Discovery Channel over environmental issues. ‘He had a history ... of conflict with Discovery,’ Manger said.
   The incident caused chaos in Silver Spring, Maryland, a shopping and office district and commuter hub on the edge of the US capital.
   Police sealed off the area around the building and SWAT teams deployed shortly after the suspect entered the building carrying a handgun at about 1 p.m. Manger said county and state police, FBI and Homeland Security agents joined the operation.
   The building, where nearly 1,900 employees work, was evacuated and children were rushed from a day-care centre.
   The police said they were still trying to determine whether two boxes and two backpacks that the hostage-taker had were explosive devices. Bomb-sniffing dogs checked the area before workers were allowed to leave neighbouring buildings.

Ex-premier Tony Blair’s memoirs are a good read but they risk re-opening old wounds in his Labour party just as it struggles to fight back from electoral defeat, British newspapers said Thursday.
   The personal details and indiscreet remarks contained in ‘A Journey’ — including Blair’s admission that he used alcohol as a ‘prop’ and details of his sex life — raised eyebrows among commentators after its publication Wednesday.
   The Guardian newspaper was not alone in calling the book ‘extraordinary’, and publishers have predicted that it will be a sell-out.
   But observers warned that in laying bare the enmity between Blair and his long-serving finance minister, one-time friend and successor Gordon Brown, the former prime minister did his party a disservice.
   The Times said the book sets a major challenge for those currently vying to succeed Brown as the new leader of the Labour party, which was ousted in May elections after 13 years in power.
   ‘The philosophical difference that emerged between Blair and Brown — essentially a dispute about the size and role of the state — traces the lineaments of the battle between Old and New Labour that brought both of them to public attention,’ the centre-right newspaper said in an editorial.
   ‘This is a question
   that the Labour Party has
   yet to settle.’
   The Labour-supporting Daily Mirror paper also accused Blair of ‘reopening old wounds’, saying: ‘Tony Blair gave the Labour party many things to be greateful for — but his memoirs aren’t one of them.’
   The main contenders for the Labour leadership swiftly distanced themselves from the former prime minister, insisting he no longer dictated their future.
   A chief criticism in the newspapers Thursday was that while Blair attacked Brown throughout the book, he never really explained why he allowed his chancellor of the exchequer to stay in his job.
   The Conservative-supporting Daily Telegraph said the book represents ‘Mr. Blair’s belated revenge for the manner in which his chancellor thwarted much that he would like to have achieved, before destroying his residual legacy’.
   Blair was Labour prime minister from 1997 to 2007, and was replaced by Brown, who lost power in May’s election.

Bahrain should investigate allegations of torture made by four Shia activists who were detained by security forces in mid-August, Human Rights Watch has said in a statement.
   ‘Bahraini authorities should immediately investigate... allegations of torture and guarantee the physical and psychological well-being of the four men,’ Joe Stork, the deputy Middle East director at HRW, said in the late-Wednesday statement.
   Abduljalil al-Singace, a leading figure in the mainly-Shia opposition association Haq, told Bahrain’s attorney general in late August that he had been tortured by security forces while in detention over the previous 15 days, HRW said.
   ‘The next day, three other detainees arrested shortly after al-Singace complained of similar mistreatment at the hands of their captors during their Public Prosecution Office proceedings,’ it said.
   Bahraini security forces arrested Singace on August 13, and the three other activists — Sheikh Mohammed al-Moqdad, Sheikh Saeed al-Nuri and Abdulghani Ali Issa Khanjar — on August 15, the rights group said.
   HRW cited an unnamed lawyer as saying that ‘at least 160’ additional arrests have been made subsequently. One, HRW said, was Singace’s sister.
   Bahrain is ruled by a Sunni dynasty but has a Shiite majority population.
   Haq, or the Movement of Liberties and Democracy, is a splinter group of the main Shiite formation, the Islamic National Accord Association. It insisted on boycotting elections in 2006 while INAA scooped 17 of 40 parliament seats.
   Bahrain experienced a wave of Shia-led unrest in the 1990s, which abated after authorities began steps to finally convert the Gulf emirate into a constitutional monarchy in 2002.

Dutch authorities have found two babies’ bodies in the garden of a women arrested last week for killing another child, the prosecution service said on Thursday.
   The corpses of the newborns were found in Geleen, a village about 200 km southeast of Amsterdam.
   The police arrested the 41-year-old woman on August 27 following the discovery of the first corpse, the prosecutors said in a statement. Two other bodies were found in the garden later.
   Forensics investigators are probing whether the three babies are related as well as how and when they died. It is the second case in less than a month of a Dutch mother being suspected of killing multiple babies.

Jordanian and US archaeologists have discovered what they say is a 3,000-year-old Iron Age temple dating from the country’s biblical Moabite kingdom, the antiquities department said on Thursday.
   A joint team from the department and La Sierra University in the United States uncovered the temple, which dates back to between 1200 BC and 539 BC, in Khirbat ‘Ataruz, near the town of Mabada southwest of Amman, a statement said.
   The three-storey temple, which has a multi-chambered sanctuary and open courtyard, ‘is the largest and most complete in the region,’ the statement said.
   It added that the dig also unearthed more than 300 Moabite artefacts, including a figurine of four-legged animal god Hadad.

Britain’s foreign secretary William Hague said on Thursday he had gone public to deny rumours he was gay and in a relationship with an aide because he and his wife were fed up of the allegations.
   Suggestions about Hague’s sexuality surfaced in recent days after newspapers published pictures of the foreign secretary with his aide Christopher Myers and reported the men had shared a hotel room during campaigning for May’s election.
   Myers quit on Wednesday and Hague later issued a highly personal statement denying they had been involved in an improper relationship.
   ‘My wife and I really felt we’d had enough of the circulation of untrue allegations, particularly on the internet, and at some point you have to speak out about that and put the record straight,’ he told a joint news conference with Germany’s foreign minister in London.
   In his statement, Hague rejected accusations that Myers, 25, had not been qualified to hold the post of special adviser.
   ‘Any suggestion that his appointment was due to an improper relationship between us is utterly false, as is any suggestion that I have ever been involved in a relationship with any man,’ said Hague, 49.
   ‘This speculation seems to stem from the fact that whilst campaigning before the election we occasionally shared twin hotel rooms.

The chief of the UNAIDS agency said Thursday that global contributions to fighting the disease are dropping off for the first time in 15 years amid tough economic times.
   ‘The world economic recession is pushing countries... to enforce austerity,’ UNAIDS chief Michel Sidibe said in Tokyo,
   calling on Japan to keep
   up its financial support to the public-private Global Fund.
   The head of the United Nations agency has in recent days stressed the need for the international community to mobilise 10 billion dollars for universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support.
   ‘Governments and donors are second-guessing in terms of their budget and priorities,’ he told a Tokyo press conference. ‘For the first time in 15 years, we are seeing the global commitment beginning to falter.’
   Many patients, particularly in Africa, still struggle to receive expensive care that often requires skills of highly trained professionals, Sidibe said.
   The creation of cheaper drugs and simpler treatment methods should save millions of people from dying of AIDS and HIV-related complications, the Mali official added.
   Sidibe also called on the city of Tokyo, which saw 370 new infections last year, to aim to prevent all new infections in five years.