The New Nation - Internet Edition

Pakistan cancels military leave as tension rises with India

AP, Islamabad

A senior military official says Pakistan has canceled leave for members of the armed forces because of tension with India following the deadly Mumbai attacks.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity Friday because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

India has said the gunmen who carried out last month's attacks were Pakistani and had connections to the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Pakistan has demanded India share evidence of its allegations.

Both countries have said they want to avoid conflict over the attacks, which killed more than 160 people. But India has not ruled out the use of force, and Pakistan has said it will respond to any attack and has placed its military on alert.

Meanwhile, Pakistan warned India on Thursday not to launch a strike against it and vowed to respond to any attack - a sign that the relationship between the two nuclear powers remains strained in the wake of the Mumbai attacks. Though the South Asian rivals have engaged in tit-for-tat accusations in recent weeks, both sides have repeatedly said they hope to avoid conflict. But India has not ruled out the use of force in response to the attacks, which it blames on a Pakistan-based militant group.

"We want peace, but should not be complacent about India," Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters in his hometown of Multan in central Pakistan. "We should hope for the best but prepare for the worst."

Pakistan and India have fought three wars since they were created in the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent at independence from Britain in 1947.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani echoed Qureshi's sentiments Thursday and urged the international community to pressure India to defuse the current tension.

He also repeated Pakistan's demand that India provide evidence to support its claim that the 10 gunmen who killed at least 164 people in Mumbai last month were Pakistani and had links to the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"Whenever we receive evidence, we will examine it and investigate it, and we will share it with our people," Gilani told reporters at the tomb of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in southern Pakistan, ahead of the first anniversary of her assassination on Dec. 27.

India has given Pakistan a letter from the lone surviving gunman involved in the attacks, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, reportedly saying he and the nine others were Pakistani. He also asked to meet with Pakistani envoys, but newspapers in Pakistan reported Thursday that the government has rejected the request because it has no record of Kasab as a Pakistani citizen.

"How can we give him consular access without having knowledge about his nationality?"

Dawn newspaper quoted the head of Pakistan's Interior Ministry, Rehman Malik, as saying.

India has said it has provided Pakistan with sufficient evidence and wants the government to crack down on Lashkar and other militants operating out of Pakistan.

Pakistan has arrested several senior members of the banned group and moved against a charity that India and others say is a front for Lashkar. But many in India are skeptical Pakistan will follow through on its crack down against Lashkar, which was created in the 1980s with the help of Pakistan's intelligence service.

Gilani said he understands Indian officials are under tremendous pressure to take action but sought to assure them that Pakistan was committed to cracking down on terrorists.

"We do not want our land to be used for terrorism," said Gilani.

At the same time, Qureshi said Pakistan's military is "alert and vigilant" in case it needs to respond to Indian action. Pakistani fighter aircraft have flown over several of the country's major cities in recent days, but Qureshi said the military has not mobilized its ground forces.

"India should refrain from any surgical strike," said Qureshi. "It should not commit this mistake, but if it does, Pakistan will be compelled to respond."

Also Thursday, police said they recovered 880 pounds (400 kilograms) of explosives and more than 500 detonators from a house in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

Police arrested 10 people inside the house during Wednesday's raid but were still looking for the owner of the explosives, said Asghar Raza Gardaizi, Islamabad's police chief.

Pakistani officials have expressed concern about the spread of violence in the country outside the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, where al-Qaida and Taliban militants have sought sanctuary.

Militants attacked the Marriott hotel in Islamabad in September with a truck bomb, killing more than 50 people.

Christmas Day fighting kills 40 in Sri Lanka

AFP, Colombo

Sri Lankan troops shot dead at least 40 Tamil Tiger rebels and beat back counter-attacks by the guerrillas on Christmas Day, the defence ministry said.

Clashes erupted Thursday along at least three fronts outside the town of Kilinochchi, the besieged political capital of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the ministry said.

It said snipers killed 28 rebels in two places while another 12 rebels were killed and 18 more wounded in the third clash. The military did not say if security forces suffered any casualties. "The LTTE terrorists have tried several times to recapture the lost areas," the ministry said, referring to running battles with the guerrillas along their Kilinochchi defences. There was no immediate comment from the Tigers.

The Tigers said Monday that they had killed more than 100 soldiers and had taken back territory lost to advancing government forces. Both sides are known to make exaggerated claims about casualties they have inflicted on each other, and independent verification is virtually impossible as journalists and aid workers are barred from the conflict area. In January the Sri Lankan government pulled out of a 2002 Norwegian-brokered truce with the rebels, who have been fighting since 1972 for a state for ethnic minority Tamils separate from the majority Sinhalese community.

Earlier, Sri Lanka's military beat back a Tamil Tiger counter-offensive in the island's north, killing at least 18 guerrillas, the defence ministry said on Thursday.

The rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) mounted the offensive outside their besieged political capital of Kilinochchi on Wednesday, the ministry said.

"Well prepared troops engaged the advancing terrorists with armour, tanks, artillery and infantry causing heavy damage," the ministry said in a statement.

It said 18 rebels were killed and another 34 wounded, but did not give details of casualties on the government side.

The pro-rebel Tamilnet.com website said there was heavy fighting in the area, but gave no further details.

Military officials said war planes also carried out bombing missions against Tiger defences of Kilinochchi on Christmas day Thursday, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.

The Tigers on Monday said that they killed more than 100 soldiers and had taken back territory lost to advancing government forces.

Both sides are known to make exaggerated claims about casualties they have inflicted on each other, and independent verification is virtually impossible as journalists and aid workers are barred from the conflict area.

In January the Sri Lankan government pulled out of a 2002 Norwegian-brokered truce with the rebels, who have been fighting since 1972 for a state for ethnic minority Tamils separate from the majority Sinhalese

US coalition kills 11 Taliban in operation

AP, Kabul

The U.S. coalition said Friday its forces killed 11 Taliban militants, including the leader of a bomb-making cell, during an operation in southern Afghanistan.

The raid in Kandahar province on Thursday targeted a bomb-maker responsible for roadside bomb attacks that killed NATO soldiers, the coalition said in a statement.

Militants barricaded themselves inside a home during the raid and opened fire on the coalition forces. After giving time to allow women and children to leave, the coalition forces fired on the militants with guns and grenades, it said.

One woman who remained in the building was wounded in the leg. She was evacuated to a coalition medical facility, it said.

Coalition forces found dozens of land mines, grenades, AK-47s and bomb-making materials in the home, the coalition said.

Overnight raids by elite Special Forces troops have been a sore point with some Afghans, including President Hamid Karzai. Often Afghan officials say innocent civilians were wounded or killed during the risky operations.

Karzai last week attended a memorial ceremony for three Afghans killed in an overnight raid in Khost province. Afghan officials said the three were innocent civilians; the U.S. coalition said they were militants or linked to the insurgency.

Man in Santa suit kills 8, self on Christmas Eve

AP, Covina

Stinging from an acrimonious divorce, a man plotting revenge against his ex-wife dressed up like Santa, went to his former in-laws' Christmas Eve party and slaughtered at least eight people before killing himself hours later.

Bruce Pardo's ex-wife and her parents were believed to be among the dead. Investigators planned to return to the scene Friday and sift through the ashes of the home, which Pardo set ablaze using a bizarre homemade device that sprayed flammable liquid.

Pardo, 45, had no criminal record and no history of violence, according to police, but he was angry following last week's settlement of his divorce after a marriage that lasted barely a year.

"It was not an amicable divorce," police Lt. Pat Buchanan said.

Pardo chose to exact his revenge at the annual Christmas party his former in-laws held at their two-story home on a cul-de-sac in a quiet Covina neighborhood 25 miles east of Los Angeles.

"Christmases were that special time of the year, it meant so much to them," Rosa Ordaz, a family friend of the victims, told KCBS-TV.

In past years, a neighbor dressed as Santa Claus and entertained guests. But the neighbor had moved away and there was no Santa - until Pardo arrived around 11:30 p.m.

The massacre began when an 8-year-old girl answered Pardo's knock at the door. Pardo, carrying what appeared to be a large present, pulled out a handgun and shot her in the face, then began shooting indiscriminately as about 25 partygoers tried to flee, police said at a news conference.

A 16-year-old girl was shot in the back, and a 20-year-old woman broke her ankle when

Himalayan villagers on global warming frontline

AFP, Kyangjin Gompa

Standing in the Himalayan valley of Langtang, Rinjin Dorje Lama remembers where he used to play as a child in the 1960s.

"When I was a kid, it was a lot longer," said Lama, pointing at the Lirung glacier surrounded by snowy peaks on Nepal's northern border with Tibet.

"We used to play on the glacier, and it came right down to the monastery, but now it's about two kilometres (1.2 miles) further back." Temperatures in the Himalayas are rising by around 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.108 Fahrenheit) annually, according to a long-term study by the Nepalese department of hydrology.

The rate is far above the global average given last year by the UN's senior scientists, who said surface temperatures have risen by a total of 0.74 degrees C over the past 100 years.

"I don't really understand why the glacier has gone so far back, but I am told it's due to global warming," said Lama, whose weather-beaten face makes him look older than his 57 years.

Lama has witnessed other changes in the roadless valley, 60 kilometres (40 miles) northwest of Kathmandu, where sure-footed ponies remain the quickest form of transport.

"I feel that the sun is getting stronger, and in the past there used to be a lot more snow in winter. We used to get up to two metres in the winter, and it would stay for weeks. Last winter we only had two centimetres." On top of unpredictable weather, other dangers are increasing in Nepal's mountains because of climate change.

As the meltwater flows off the glacier, lakes begin to form and grow.

When the pressure becomes too great, the lake walls burst and release millions of cubic tonnes of water that can wash away people, villages and arable land. Researchers at the Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) have said five major glacial lake floods have hit Nepal since 1970, as well as at least two in Tibet and one in Bhutan.

Ang Tsering Sherpa, who grew up in Nepal's Everest region, has observed the growth of one glacial lake with growing concern.

"A small pond first appeared close to the Imja glacier in about 1962," said Sherpa, who owns a trekking and expedition company in Kathmandu.

Last year, a research team from Japan measured the Imja lake as being 1.7 kilometres long, 900 metres wide and 92 metres deep.

"If that lake bursts, it will be like a tsunami," said Sherpa, who estimates that the Imja glacier has been retreating at a rate of 60 metres per year.

"Imagine the damage that will be caused by a lake emptying within minutes into a well-inhabited valley. The loss of life will be huge."

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) calculates there are 2,000 glacial lakes forming in Nepal and around 20 are in danger of bursting.

Mountain dwellers are seeing at first hand the effects of global warming, but the changing climate will eventually have dire consequences for a much wider section of Asia's population.

Himalayan snow and ice is a massive freshwater reserve that feeds nine of Asia's major waterways, including the Indus, Ganges and Yellow rivers.

"In the long term, water scarcity will become a big problem," said Sandeep Chamling Rai, WWF climate change officer.

"There will eventually be a tipping point where the amount of water from the glaciers is hugely reduced, which will result in loss of water resources for people downstream who rely on these Himalayan-fed rivers."

The ICIMOD said in August that climate change posed a serious threat to essential water resources in the Himalayans, putting the livelihoods of 1.3 billion people at risk.

Studies say much of the blame is due to the "Asia brown cloud" spewed from tailpipes, factory chimneys and power plants-as well as forests and fields that are burned for agriculture, and wood and dung burned for fuel.

Back in the Langtang Valley, where around 700 people and 4,000 yaks live, Lama can only watch as the ice and snow retreat from around his home.

"I am very worried, but what can we do. We are not contributing to global warming but we feel its effects. I am scared there will be no snow and ice in these mountains within the next 15 years."

20 killed in fresh Iraq violence

AFP, Ramadi , Iraq

Al-Qaeda militants launched a pre-dawn breakout from a police station in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, triggering a shootout that left 13 people dead.

"During an exchange of fire between prisoners trying to escape and police officers in the station, six policemen and seven prisoners were killed," provincial police chief Tareq al-Dulaimi said.

Three prisoners managed to flee but one was re-arrested, Dulaimi said, adding that another four policemen were wounded in the shootout that occurred at 2 am (2300 GMT Thursday) at Forsan police station in the centre of Ramadi. Ramadi police have imposed a curfew in the city following the incident, an interior ministry source said, adding that three fugitive Al-Qaeda militants were "emirs" or local chiefs.

The ministry source said that a prisoner wanting to go to the toilet was escorted from his cell by a policeman at 2 am, kicking off what appeared to be a well-planned operation.

"The policeman was overpowered by the inmate who seized his weapon and shot him," the source said.

"He then opened up the other cells and and he and his fellow prisoners grabbed weapons from the police station's armoury, opening fire on the policemen." The predominantly Sunni Arab city of Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, was a key Al-Qaeda stronghold in the aftermath of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime by US-led forces in 2003.

But since 2006 local Sunni tribes there have sided with the US military to fight the jihadists. Daily violence has dropped dramatically in Anbar province as Al-Qaeda fighters have been pushed out of the region.

Earlier report adds : A car bomb near a popular restaurant in north-western Baghdad killed four people and wounded 25, police said.

A few hours later, a suicide car bomber targeting a US military patrol killed three people and wounded 14 in Muqdadiya, 80 kilometres north-east of Baghdad, police said. The US military said it was checking if there were any US casualities.

The explosion near the restaurant in the Shiite Baghdad district of Shula occurred while policemen and labourers were eating breakfast. Casualties included police officiers and civilians, police said.

The Shiite-led Iraqi government declared Thursday, Christmas Day, a national holiday to show what it said was its solidarity with minority non-Muslim religious groups in Iraq.

Violence has dropped sharply in Iraq, where the US-led invasion in 2003 unleashed years of sectarian and insurgent attacks. However, car bombs, suicide bombings and assassinations are still routine.

A week ago, twin bomb blasts killed 18 people and wounded 53 in central Baghdad.

65 children sickened by carbon monoxide in China

AP, Beijing

Sixty-five elementary school students in northern China were poisoned by carbon monoxide after smoke from a dormitory boiler seeped into their rooms, state media reported Thursday.

Nineteen were still being treated in hospitals in Inner Mongolia, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Meng Lei, a regional health official, told Xinhua they weren't in serious condition.

Calls to provincial and city authorities, including the health and education departments, were not answered Thursday.

The students at Niuchang Primary School in Hohhot, the regional capital, reported feeling dizzy after waking up on Wednesday, Xinhua said.

The poisoning was caused by smoke that leaked from a boiler in the students' dormitory, Xinhua said.

Earlier this month, 11 girls died from carbon monoxide poisoning in their dorm room in central Shaanxi province after blankets fell onto a charcoal heater they were using to keep warm.

Carbon monoxide detectors are not required in schools in China, though the Education Ministry last year suggested that schools that use coal heating should install them.

Carbon monoxide is an odorless, colorless gas. Moderate exposure can cause headaches, dizziness, nausea and mental confusion. Prolonged exposure can lead to death.

Bomb kills two girls in Pakistan

AFP, Quetta

Two Pakistani girls were killed Friday when a bomb exploded in their home in a remote village in restive southwestern Baluchistan province, police said.

Unknown attackers, apparently targeting the girls' male relatives, planted the bomb in the mud-brick home in the village of Teenda in Naseerabad district, local police official Muhammad Ali Khoso told AFP.

"Two girls, aged six and eight years, were killed in the bomb blast," Khoso said, adding that one wall of the house was destroyed. The apparent targets of the attacks escaped injury as they had already left for work on nearby farms, he said.

"The incident is being investigated, but the attacks appear to be linked to the ongoing unrest," the official said.

Hundreds of people have died in violence in gas-rich Baluchistan since an insurgency flared in late 2004, with rebels demanding political autonomy and a greater share of profits from the region's vast natural resources.

Baluchistan, which borders both Afghanistan and Iran, has also been hit by attacks blamed on Taliban militants and sectarian extremists.

Nobel laureate Harold Pinter dies at 78

AP, London

British Nobel laureate Harold Pinter - who produced some of his generation's most influential dramas and later became a staunch critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq - has died, his widow said Thursday. He was 78.

Pinter died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer, according to his second wife Antonia Fraser.

In recent years he had seized the platform offered by his 2005 Nobel Literature prize to denounce President George W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the war in Iraq.

But he was best known for exposing the complexities of the emotional battlefield.

His writing featured cool, menacing pauses in dialogue that reflected his characters' deep emotional struggles and spawned a new adjective found in several dictionaries: "Pinter-esque."

"Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the Nobel Academy said. "With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution."

His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives were set against the neat lives they constructed in order to try to survive. Usually enclosed in one room, the acts usually illustrated the characters' lives as a sort of grim game with actions that often contradicted words. Gradually, the layers were peeled back.

"How can you write a happy play?" he once said. "Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life."

Pinter wrote 32 plays; one novel, "The Dwarfs," in 1990; and put his hand to 22 screenplays.

The working-class milieu of his first dramas reflected his early life as the son of a Jewish tailor from London's East End.

Born Oct. 30, 1930, in the London neighborhood of Hackney, he was forced along with other children during World War II to evacuate to rural Cornwall in 1939. He was 14 before he returned. By then, he was entranced with Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway.

By 1950, Pinter had begun to publish poetry and appeared on stage as an actor. Pinter began to write for the stage, and published "The Room" in 1957.

A year later, his first major play, "The Birthday Party" was produced in the West End.

In it, intruders enter the retreat of Stanley, a young man who is hiding from childhood guilt. He becomes violent, telling them, "You stink of sin, you contaminate womankind."

The play closed after just one week to disastrous reviews, but Pinter continued to write and was most prolific between 1957 and 1965.

"With his earliest work, he stood alone in British theater up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers, too," British playwright Tom Stoppard said when the Nobel Prize was announced.

"I find critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch of people," Pinter once said.

In "The Caretaker," (1959) a manipulative old man threatens the relationship of two brothers, while "The Homecoming" (1964) explores the hidden rage and confused sexuality of an all-male household by inserting a woman.

In "Silence" and "Landscape," (1967 and 1968) Pinter moved from exploring the underbelly of human life to showing the simultaneous levels of fantasy and reality that occupy the individual.

"The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear," Pinter once said. "It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness."

"Betrayal" (1978) was reportedly based on the disintegration of his marriage to actress Vivien Merchant, who appeared in many of his first plays.

Their marriage ended in 1980 after Pinter's long affair with BBC presenter Joan Bakewell. He then married Fraser. Merchant died shortly afterward of alcoholism-related disease.

During the late 1980s, his work became more overtly political; he said he had a responsibility to pursue his role as "a citizen of the world in which I live, (and) insist upon taking responsibility."

In the 1980s, Pinter's only stage plays were one-acts: "A Kind of Alaska" (1982), "One for the Road" (1984) and the 20-minute "Mountain Language" (1988).

Off-stage he was also highly political: Pinter turned down former Prime Minister John Major's offer of a knighthood and strongly attacked Blair when NATO bombed Serbia. He later referred to Blair a "deluded idiot" for supporting Bush's war in Iraq.

He said he deeply regretted having voting for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Tony Blair in 1997.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Pinter a "great playwright and lucid, agitated and uncompromising humanist."

He called the Nobel "a belated consecration of his immense work, but also an homage to a man's courage and commitment against all forms of barbarism."

The prize gave Pinter a global platform, from which he frequently and bitterly decried the Iraq war.

"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law," Pinter said in his Nobel lecture, which he recorded rather than traveling to the Swedish capital of Stockholm.

"How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?" he asked, in a hoarse voice.

Though he had been looking forward to giving the Nobel lecture - calling it "the longest speech I will ever have made" - he canceled his attendance at the award ceremony, and then announced he would skip the lecture as well on his doctor's advice.

In March 2005, Pinter announced his retirement as a playwright to concentrate on politics. But he created a radio play, "Voices," that was broadcast on BBC radio to mark his 75th birthday.

"I have written 29 plays, and I think that's really enough," Pinter said. "I think the world has had enough of my plays."

Pinter's influence was felt in the United States in the plays of Sam Shepard and David Mamet.

Friend and biographer Michael Billington said Pinter "was a political figure, a polemicist and carried on fierce battles against American foreign policy and often British foreign policy, but in private he was the most incredibly loyal of friends and generous of human beings."

"He was a great man as well actually as a great playwright," Billington said.

Pinter is survived by his son, Daniel, from his marriage to Merchant.

Abbas urges Hamas to resume reconciliation talks

AFP, Hebron

President Mahmud Abbas on Thursday called on Hamas to resume reconciliation talks with his secular Fatah party which broke down in November.

"We want them to return to reason," Abbas said while on a visit to the southern West Bank city of Hebron.

"We do not want to get rid of them, they are a part of the Palestinian people, whatever their ideas and vision may be, and however they may differ from ours."

"But we want them to find the right way, we will not accept for this nation to remain torn apart. We call and continue to call for national dialogue." "It is true that they refused dialogue without reason, but we tell themt 'come so that we can reach an agreement with you'." He also rejected any clashes with the Islamist group, saying that "democracy" must be the sole resolution of internal Palestinian discord.

"We do not wish for clashes, a civil war is a destructive war, it does not bring any result," he said. "We refuse to resort to arms."

Abbas recently said that if Hamas did not return to reconciliation talks by the end of the year, he would call snap parliamentary and presidential elections.

Hamas has warned that it would no longer recognise Abbas if he remained in power after his term expired on January 8 and would not allow the holding of new parliamentary polls before they are due in January 2010.

Hamas boycotted reconciliation talks that were due to take place in Cairo in November to protest the "political detentions" of its members by pro-Abbas forces in the West Bank.

Simmering tensions between Western-shunned, Islamist Hamas and Western-backed secular Fatah burst into all-out street warfare in June 2007, when the Islamists forced pro-Abbas forces out of the Gaza Strip.

Nepal declares power 'crisis’

AFP, Kathmandu

Nepal's Maoist-run government has declared a "national power crisis" and warned that blackouts in the impoverished country will increase to at least 16 hours per day, officials said Friday.

Nepal is struggling to recover from a civil war waged by the Maoists who now govern the country after winning elections earlier this year, and the Himalayan country can currently meet only around 50 per cent of its electricity needs. "We had no other alternatives than to declare national power crisis because there is a severe shortage of electricity," Bishnu Poudel, minister for water resources said Thursday evening.

The government will import more electricity from neighbouring India as well as set up diesel-powered generators and attempt to attract more investment in hydro electricity projects, the minister said.

"It will still take at least five years to free the country from power shortages if everything works out as planned," said Poudel.

An official from the Nepal Electricity Authority said electricity demand had been outstripping supply for years in the mountainous country dotted with Himalayan rivers, which has massive untapped potential for hydro power.

"In the last eight or nine years the demand for electricity has been increasing by around 10 percent per year, but we have not been able to bring in new hydropower projects," said Sher Singh Bhat, spokesman for the state-run Nepal Electricity Authority told AFP on Friday.

Nepal relies on hydro power for most of its electricity and as the dry season approaches in early 2009, power cuts will increase, said Bhat.

"From next week, the power cuts will be increased to 12 hours per day and by mid-February it will be a minimum of 16 hours per day," said Bhat.

Around 40 per cent of Nepal's 28 million people have access to electricity.

Russia launches three new navigation satellites

AFP, Moscow

A Russian Proton-M rocket was launched into space Thursday with three new satellites for Moscow's GLONASS navigation system, aimed at competing with US and European systems, a report said.

The satellites were placed into orbit after the rocket blasted off from Russia's Baikonur launch pad in Kazakhstan at 1043 GMT, a Russian space agency spokesman said, according to Interfax news agency.

The 1.4-tonne satellites join 17 others that are part of the GLONASS system, which Russia aims to finish next year. When completed, it will have a total of 24 satellites. GLONASS was developed by the Russian military in the 1980s to compete with the US Global Positioning System (GPS) and Europe's Galileo.

Chinese navy off on historic anti-piracy mission

AFP, Beijing

An anti-piracy task force of the Chinese navy has set sail for Africa, state media said, in the nation's first potential combat mission beyond its territorial waters in centuries.

The three vessels, decorated with coloured ribbons and flowers, weighed anchor at the Yalong Bay naval base on south China's tropical Hainan island at 1:50 pm (0550 GMT), heading for Somalia, the Xinhua news agency reported. "It's the first time we go abroad to protect our strategic interests armed with military force," said Wu Shengli, commander of the Chinese Navy, in a ceremony to see off the approximately 1,000 sailors, according to Xinhua. "It's the first time for us to organise a naval force on an international humanitarian mission, and the first time for our navy to protect important shipping lanes far from our shores."

Dressed in white naval uniforms, the crew of the two destroyers and one supply ship saluted crowds on land as they left for a mission expected to last at least three months.

It marks a new chapter for the modern Chinese navy, which has focused on the defence of coastal waters, combined with the occasional friendly port call. Only in 2002 did it circumnavigate the globe for the first time.

Indeed, a Chinese fleet has not fired a shot in anger near Africa since the 15th century, when a Ming Dynasty armada sailed to the continent and back.

The navy has been drawn back to Africa by an escalation of pirate attacks on merchant ships, including Chinese vessels, plying the crucial shipping route linking Asia and Europe.

The three vessels on the mission-the missile-armed destroyers DDG-171 Haikou and DDG-169 Wuhan and the Weishanhu supply ship-are among China's most sophisticated and have all entered service this decade, Xinhua said.

They will operate alongside other international warships patrolling the area near the Gulf of Aden, part of the Suez Canal route.

"Since this is the navy's first overseas mission, we could encounter unforeseen situations. But we are prepared for them," the commander of the force, Rear Admiral Du Jingcheng, told the China Daily earlier.

State press suggested morale was high among the crew members, drawn from the all-volunteer navy.

"Our pride is too strong," said 21-year-old Ding He, a sailor on board the Wuhan. "It washes away the pain and rigours of training."

The mission also includes a special forces detail that has spent the past days in intensive training in maritime tactics and diving, said one of their commanders, Lieutenant Commander Xie Zengling.

"If the pirates make direct threats to the warships or the vessels we escort, the fleet will take counter-measures," he told Xinhua, bragging that one member of his unit "could handle several enemies with his bare hands".

Xinhua said the navy was prepared for the boredom of life at sea, equipping the ships with libraries, computer rooms and gyms.

China has said its warships will investigate any suspected pirate vessels, and approach them and demand that they show their relevant documents and certificates.