Seven bombs kill 80 in Indian tourist city
AFP, Jaipur

Seven near-simultaneous bomb blasts tore through crowded markets in the Indian tourist city of Jaipur Tuesday, killing at least 80 people and wounding 200 in what police said was a terror attack.
"We have information that 80 people have died," Rajasthan state home minister Gulab Chand Kataria told reporters.
"One suspect was detained and is being investigated," he added in Jaipur, the state capital.
One of the explosions went off near a packed Hindu temple, leaving pools of blood outside in the street and cycles and rickshaws in a mangled heap, television pictures showed.
Among the 80 dead were a 10-year-old boy at the Hanuman (monkey god) temple, a bride in a bright red saree still wearing marriage bangles and a young man covered in blood who was left hanging over the twisted wreckage of a bicycle rickshaw, the Press Trust of India said.
Shopping bags, bloodied sandals and shoes were strewn around Johri bazaar, one of the hit markets, which security forces cleared quickly for fear of further blasts.
One live bomb was found attached to a bicycle at one of the explosion sites and was defused, police said.
Government officials usually blame Islamic militants based in Pakistan for such attacks, which have plagued India in recent years.
Junior home minister Shriprakash Jaiswal told reporters, "The people responsible for these attacks have foreign connections," but he refused to point a finger directly at traditional foe Pakistan.
Press Trust of India, which said 200 had been injured, quoted a statement from Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani saying his country, "condemns all acts of terrorism and reaffirms its firm commitment to fight this scourge together with the international community."
Police said seven blasts occurred within minutes of each other during the evening in crowded markets of old walled Jaipur, about 260 kilometres (160 miles) from New Delhi.
"It's a terror attack. There was no (intelligence) report of this," police director general A.S. Gill told reporters.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condemned the blasts and appealed for calm, while the United States immediately condemned the wave of bombings.
"We're still collecting some information about this. But given the facts that we know now, quite clearly these bombs were intended to claim innocent life and it's something that we very clearly condemn," US state department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Historic Jaipur, which has a population of more than two million, is one of India's top tourist resorts and a favourite attraction for foreigners.
Jaipur is popularly known as the 'pink city' because of the ochre-pink hue of its hill top forts, Hindu maharajah's palaces and crenellated city walls.
State borders were sealed and a high alert sounded in Rajasthan state and neighbouring areas, police said.
 

150 rebels killed in Afghan operation
AFP, Kandahar

International and Afghan troops forged ahead with an offensive against the Taliban near the Pakistan border on Tuesday, with a governor insisting 150 rebels had been killed in the past week.
US Marines and British troops under NATO command launched a significant new operation two weeks ago in Garmser district in southern Helmand province, a key battleground for a Taliban-led insurgency and an opium-producing centre.
Soldiers in a separate US-led coalition have also reported several engagements in the area in the past week. They said Tuesday they had killed a dozen rebels in Garmser on Monday.
The international forces helping Afghanistan fight an insurgency led by the Al-Qaeda-backed Taliban normally do not issue death tolls from their engagements, saying they want to avoid a "body count."
But Helmand governor Gulab Mangal told AFP on Tuesday that 150 Islamic rebels, most of whom he said were Al-Qaeda-linked Arab and Pakistani fighters, had been killed in military action in Garmser in the past week.
"In the past seven, eight days, we have killed about 150 insurgents, most of them foreign fighters," he said, citing "intelligence."
"We have intelligence reports that more than 500 enemy fighters, most of them foreign terrorists, are in the district," he said. "The operation will continue until the district is cleared of these destructive elements."
The Afghan army, operating with some of the international deployments, could not be reached for comment. NATO's International Security Assistance Force could not verify the numbers. "The Marines continue to gain ground down in Helmand," ISAF Major Martin O'Donnell told AFP, adding that he could not comment on death tolls.
The Marines said: "While we are continuing operations to clear the Taliban from the Garmser district, it is not ISAF nor US Military policy to comment on enemy casualties as we do not consider this a reliable measure of success."
Information is difficult to independently confirm in Garmser, a remote desert province where there are few roads and government authority is limited.
The military says Garmser is a rebel gateway into Afghanistan, bring fresh recruits and weapons from Pakistan where extremist rebels are said to have bases.

Pakistan facing crisis as Sharif’s party quits cabinet
AFP, Islamabad

Pakistan faced a new political crisis on Tuesday after former premier Nawaz Sharif pulled his party's ministers out of the country's six-week-old coalition government, officials said.
The nine ministers from Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) stepped down after the coalition failed to meet a Monday deadline on how and when to reinstate judges sacked by President Pervez Musharraf last year.
The eventual reinstatement of the judges is likely to cause a major headache for embattled former army chief Musharraf, a key US ally, who considers them hostile to his rule.
The ministers had submitted their resignations to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, PML-N spokesman Siddiqul Farooq said, insisting they would only return if the Pakistan People's Party took "concrete" steps to resolve the issue. "If the PPP takes concrete steps to restore the judiciary to the position of November 2 (before emergency rule), we will revert to our party's central working committee to seek advice given the changed circumstances," he told AFP.
"Our ministers may rejoin the cabinet if so advised." The move is likely to trigger political uncertainty, although Sharif insisted on Monday that his party would continue to support the government of Gilani, who had not yet accepted the resignations, according to state media.
The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) of slain former premier Benazir Bhutto, the senior partner in the coalition that swept into power following February general elections, said it hoped the PML-N ministers would soon return.
"Let's wait and try to resolve the matter," Gilani told the outgoing ministers, saying Pakistan was in the grip of a "serious crisis."
"We are determined to take the nation out of the crisis, with the cooperation of our allies," state media quoted him as saying, appealing to the judiciary to show "some flexibility" to stave off political upheaval.
Gilani also spoke to Sharif by telephone, who told him that the decision to pull his party from government was "painful," and that he would continue to cooperate with the government.
Musharraf, who came to power following a coup in 1999, deposed chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and dozens of other judges in November when it appeared they might overturn his re-election as president the month before. The judges were also to rule on a decree issued by Musharraf granting amnesty to political leaders charged with corruption. PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto's widower, himself is a beneficiary of the law.
Sharif and Zardari agreed in March to restore the judges, but differences quickly arose over how to put them back on the bench. A series of crunch talks between the two sides failed to resolve the stalemate.
"We have no differences with the PML-N over the restoration of the judiciary. The only point of disagreement is the method of restoration,"

UN warns of ‘second catastrophe’ in Myanmar
AFP, Yangon

The United Nations warned Tuesday that Myanmar faced a "second catastrophe" after its devastating cyclone, unless the junta immediately allows massive air and sea deliveries of aid.
But Myanmar's military rulers again rejected growing international pressure to open the door to a foreign-run relief effort, insisting against all the evidence that they could handle the emergency alone.
The United Nations aired its "increasing frustration" at not being able to bring more help to 1.5 million of the neediest survivors, and said the crisis in the country's remote, flooded south posed an "enormous logistic challenge."
It requires "at least an air or sea corridor to channel aid in large quantities as quickly as possible," said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman in Geneva for the UN's emergency relief arm. "We fear a second catastrophe." But the junta said Tuesday that the needs of the people after the storm, which has left around 62,000 dead or missing since ripping through the southern Irrawaddy delta on May 3, "have been fulfilled to an extent."
"The nation does not need skilled relief workers yet," Vice Admiral Soe Thein said in the New Light of Myanmar newspaper, a mouthpiece for the military, which has ruled the nation with an iron grip for nearly half a century.
Although aid flights are increasing, there are serious bottlenecks in getting supplies to the delta.
Many survivors said they had still not received help from the government 10 days after the disaster, and could not understand why their leaders have snubbed offers of help that have poured in from around the world.
Aid agencies warn that as every day passes without sufficient food, water and shelter, more are at risk of joining the staggering death toll, estimated by the UN at 100,000.
The World Health Organisation said it had dispatched supplies of body bags, as experts warned that corpses were going uncollected and that the putrefying remains pose a major health risk. Heavy rains overnight deepened the misery for many, seeping through the flimsy plastic sheeting of makeshift shelters of tens of thousands of people whose homes were sunk or blown away in the storm.
"These new rains are bringing us more misery," said Taye Win, a survivor sheltering at a monastery outside the country's main city Yangon.

 Sri Lankan govt needs to act quickly to consolidate east
AFP, Colombo

The Sri Lankan government may be celebrating a key election victory in the ethnically-mixed east but it is still a long way from winning over the island's Tamil minority, analysts and observers say.
The polls on Saturday saw voters in the east give President Mahinda Rajapakse's ruling coalition control over a new provincial council designed to give more autonomy to the area and address the root cause of civil war.
To win the polls, the president allied himself with the Tamil People's Liberation Tigers (TMVP), a controversial grouping of defectors from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) -- the main rebel group.
Unlike the LTTE, which is fighting for a separate homeland, the TMVP says it trusts the government to devolve more power to Tamils, many of whom complain of discrimination by the island's majority Sinhalese community.
"The challenge now for the government is to show the Tamils that it is sincere with mass development," said Dharmalingam Sithadthan, who leads a Colombo-based Tamil party.
But he said the catch was that the TMVP remained very much a militia-albeit a pro-government one-and the government needed to accept that many Tamils in the east supported it out of fear.
"As long as they (TMVP) have the gun, Tamil people had no choice but to vote for the TMVP. Whoever had the weapons, won the elections," Sithadthan told AFP. "The LTTE created the fear psychosis. Now you have another group that has taken over and is doing the same thing."
Parts of the east were under LTTE control prior to a major government offensive last year.
Rajapakse formally revoked a moribund truce with the rebels in January, and government troops are currently pushing into the north, part of which is in rebel hands.
The president has hailed the provincial council election win as "a clear mandate for peace through the defeat of terrorism, the strengthening of democracy and the development of the country."
But others remain unconvinced. "The government is showing the win as show of faith from eastern Tamils to carry on with their military strategy," said political columnist Dilrukshi Handunetti.
"But they (voters) have endorsed the government's promises under the shadow of the gun. Its not a legitimate victory," she said of the polls, the first in the region in 20 years and touted as proof normality has returned to the once war-ravaged, tsunami-hit region. 

 Philippines urges removal from UN child soldiers list
AFP, Manila

The Philippines has urged its removal from the UN's list of countries with child soldiers, stressing that it condemns the practice by various rebel groups, the foreign department said Wednesday.
Hilario Davide, Manila's envoy to the UN, made the call during a meeting of the UN Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict in New York on May 8, it said.
Davide said the Philippines has put in place a "legal firewall for the protection of children" and advised the UN to focus on countries "facing worse circumstances" involving child soldiers.
"The Philippines condemns non-state actors in the country who recruit, abduct, and use children, yet deny their illegal and unjustifiable deeds," Davide said.
The Philippines was listed in 2005 through a Security Council resolution over reports that the communist New People's Army (NPA), the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Abu Sayyaf used children as combatants.
The communist rebels admitted using children in non-combat duties, although there have been cases of NPA child soldiers arrested by military intelligence. Children are also often seen in MILF training camps in the southern island of Mindanao.
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN's special representative for children in conflict, said the Philippines' listing was not meant to embarrass the country, but to acknowledge that the problem exists.
Coomaraswamy cited a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) study saying that the MILF adopts orphans to train as fighters, while the NPA is known to employ children as porters, cooks and couriers.
The 12,000-strong MILF has been waging a rebellion since 1978 for an independent Islamic state in Mindanao. Talks with the group were suspended last year. The NPA meanwhile has been waging a low-intensity Maoist insurgency since 1969.
 

 More than 250 dead in rebel attack on Khartoum
AFP, Khartoum

Almost 100 Sudanese soldiers were killed along with at least 91 Darfur rebels and 34 civilians in several days of fighting during an unprecedented assault on Khartoum, the army said on Tuesday.
An army spokesman giving official casualty figures for the first time said that the army had been battling the rebel force since Wednesday as it headed from the western region of Darfur to the capital in at least 150 vehicles.
The assault by the Justice and Equality Movement, the most powerful of the rebel groups in Darfur, saw the insurgents reach Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman on Saturday with the declared intent of toppling the regime.
"Ninety-seven Sudanese security forces were killed, including four officers, in Omdurman and other battles," the spokesman told reporters, asking not to be named.
He said that 91 rebels, which he referred to as "Chadian forces" following allegations of Ndjamena's involvement, were killed in Omdurman and "a lot more" in battles outside the city.
He said that 34 civilians were killed in the fighting in Omdurman, just across the Nile from the seat of power in Khartoum, including two Egyptians and two Senegalese. He could not say how many civilians were wounded.
The army captured 68 rebel vehicles and destroyed 75, he said, some of them outside the capital and Omdurman.
He said that two Sudanese soldiers were still missing. He said he had no figures on how many had been wounded.
Meanwhile, the UN Security Council on Tuesday condemned a deadly weekend rebel attack on Khartoum that killed more than 200 people and called on all sides to cease hostilities.
"The Security Council strongly condemns the attacks of 10 May perpetrated by the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) against the Sudanese Government in Omdurman, and urges all parties to cease violence immediately," said British ambassador John Sawers, whose country holds the rotating presidency this month.
The 15-member body also "urges restraint by all parties, and in particular, warns that no retaliatory action should be taken against civilian populations, or that has an impact on stability in the region," the council's declaration said.
Ninety-seven Sudanese soldiers were killed along with at least 91 Darfur rebels and 34 civilians in several days of fighting during an unprecedented assault on Khartoum, the army said on Tuesday.
The assault by the JEM, the most powerful of the rebel groups in Darfur, saw the insurgents reach Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman on Saturday with the declared intent of toppling the regime.
Khartoum has accused neighboring Chad of backing the rebels and severed ties after Saturday's attack. Chad had denied any implication and closed its porous border with Sudan on Monday.
Relations have been tense between the two countries since 2003 when war broke out in Darfur, sending hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees fleeing across the Chadian border.
 

 Hillary wins West Virginia, vows not to quit
AFP, Charleston

Hillary Clinton scored a crushing win over Barack Obama in West Virginia's primary Tuesday and vowed to fight on, despite doing little to loosen his stranglehold on the Democratic White House race.
Clinton piled up a two-to-one winning ratio over Obama as votes were counted, in a contest which highlighted African-American Obama's struggle to win white, working class voters who will play a key role in November's general election.
"You will never quit, and I won't either," Clinton told cheering supporters at her victory rally here.
"There are some who have wanted to cut this race short," Senator Clinton said.
"I am more determined than ever to carry on with this campaign until everyone has had their chance to make their voices heard," she said, in a apparent hint she will carry on through the five remaining nominating contests.
With 56 percent of the votes in, Clinton led Senator Obama by 65 percent to 28 percent in the poor, mountainous state.
But with only 28 of the 2,025 pledged delegates needed for the nomination, the West Virginia contest was not sufficient to upset the mathematical equation in the race, which Obama leads by every metric-pledged delegates, party insiders or superdelegates, the popular vote and nominating contests won.
Clinton was conciliatory towards her rival, saying "I deeply admire Senator Obama," adding that she would support the nominee of her party in November.
But she also bluntly stated her belief that she was the best candidate to lead the Democrats against Republican John McCain in the November presidential election.
"I am in this race because I believe I am the strongest candidate to lead our party in November of 2008, and the strongest president to lead our nation starting in January of 2009."
Obama had already conceded the primary and was in the general-election battleground of Missouri as results came in, as he geared up for a contest with McCain.
Clinton meanwhile fired off a fundraising appeal within an hour of polls closing, underscoring her desperate need for cash to carry on.
Exit polls cited by MSNBC showed that Clinton won white voters by 68 percent to 28 for Obama, and won 72 percent of those earning less than 50,000 dollars, compared to her foe's 24 percent.

 China quake toll soars as full horror begins to emerge
AFP, Dujiangyan

The full horror of the devastating China earthquake began to emerge Wednesday as rescuers discovered whole towns all but wiped off the map, pushing the death toll well above 20,000.
Military and police teams punched into the heart of the disaster zone, with 100 troops parachuting into a county that was previously cut off while planes and helicopters air-dropped emergency supplies.
But the message that came back from this mountainous corner of southwestern Sichuan province was that town after town was flattened by the 7.9-magnitude quake that struck two days ago. The death toll has soared well above 20,000, but that toll is rising by the hour as more information comes in from stricken communities.
"The losses have been severe," Wang Yi, who heads an armed police unit sent into the epicentre zone, was quoted as saying by Sichuan Online news site.
"Some towns basically have no houses left. They have all been razed to the ground."
At least 7,700 people died in the small town of Yingxiu alone, state media cited a local government official as saying, with only 2,300 surviving.
Across Sichuan, countless thousands more people are missing or buried under the rubble of shattered homes, schools and factories.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said 100,000 military personnel and police had been mobilised, indicating the epic scale of the country's worst earthquake in a generation.
The air drop started with planes and helicopters flying dozens of sorties, dropping tonnes of food and relief aid into the worst-hit zone, most of it cut off from the outside world by landslides and road closures.
The destruction around the epicentre in remote Wenchuan county is massive, with whole mountainsides sheared off, highways ripped apart and building after building levelled.
Rescue teams have been seen pulling bodies and badly injured survivors out of the ruins.
As well as Yingxiu, CCTV television said air drops were also made in nearby Mianyang-where the death toll jumped to nearly 5,500 -- as well as Mianzhu and Pengzhou.
Helicopters also flew to Wenchuan with food, drinks, tents, communications equipment and other supplies.
The rescue effort has been badly disrupted since Monday by heavy rain, and the Meteorological Authority forecasting more later in the week, raising the risk of fresh landslides.

 Lebanon army ready to use force to halt fighting
AFP, Beirut

A precarious calm returned to Lebanon on Tuesday after the army warned it was ready to use force to restore order after six days of sectarian bloodshed that have shaken the nation.
US President George W. Bush, on the eve of a trip to the Middle East, warned Iran and Syria that the international community would not allow Lebanon to fall under foreign domination again and vowed to shore up the Lebanese military.
The fighting, which has left at least 62 people dead and close to 200 wounded, is the worst sectarian unrest since the 1975-1990 civil war and has stoked fears the country was headed for another all-out conflict.
After being ordered not to intervene to protect its neutrality in deeply divided Lebanon, the army said it was prepared to resort to force to disarm gunmen and bring an end to the violence between supporters of the Western-backed government and Hezbollah-led opposition fighters. No major incidents were reported on Tuesday although fierce battles had erupted briefly overnight in northern port city of Tripoli.
In Beirut, the situation was calm, schools reopened and traffic was slowly returning to normal although some stores remained shut.
Several highways were still blocked by Hezbollah-led Shiite protests including the one to Lebanon's only international airport which remained closed to normal flights, forcing most of those wishing to leave to do so by road to Syria or by boat to Cyprus.
"The civil disobedience campaign will only end when Prime Minister Fuad Siniora officially rescinds his decisions and when his camp returns to the negotiating table," an official with Hezbollah ally Amal told AFP.
That brought a sharp response from the leader of the pro-government bloc in parliament, Saad Hariri, who vowed not to negotiate "with a pistol aimed at our heads. This will not happen even if they fire at us," he insisted.
The latest unrest, which dramatically raised the stakes in an 18-month standoff between the majority and the opposition, erupted after a government crackdown against Hezbollah which the powerful militant group said amounted to a declaration of war.

 Zimbabwe violence could reach crisis levels: UN
AFP, Harare

The UN warned on Tuesday that post-election violence in Zimbabwe was rising to near crisis levels ahead of a planned presidential run-off, with opposition supporters bearing the brunt of attacks.
As opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai prepared to return home to contest the election against President Robert Mugabe, his hopes the ballot would be held later this month in a peaceful atmosphere appeared to be wishful thinking.
With Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change claiming 32 of its supporters have been killed since voting on March 29, the United Nations resident representative in Zimbabwe said most of the violence was directed against followers of the opposition, although the MDC was not blameless.
"There is an emerging pattern of political violence inflicted mainly but not exclusively on rural supporters of the MDC," Agustino Zacarias told reporters, adding that there were "indications that the level of violence is escalating ... and could reach crisis levels."
Announcing plans to return home this week, Tsvangirai said at a news conference on Saturday that he would only participate in the run-off if there was a complete end to unrest. He also called for a revamp of the electoral commission and the deployment of international peacekeepers and foreign observers, but these demands have been brushed aside by the government.
"The United Nations country team urges all political leaders across the political divide to unequivocally renounce politically-motivated violence," added Zacarias, a Mozambican diplomat.
Keen to see evidence of the attacks on opposition supporters with their own eyes, a group of Western ambassadors visited a number of hospitals on Tuesday where they chatted with victims.
"I think it is absolutely urgent that the entire world knows what's happening in Zimbabwe," US Ambassador James McGee told an AFP correspondent accompanying the diplomats.
On a visit to one of the hospitals, McGee became embroiled in a stand-off with four armed police who tried to prevent him from leaving the grounds before relenting.
"If on two occasions, you are questioned for nearly two hours by security officials, yes, it is harassment," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters in Washington, adding the incident was "indicative of the kind of atmosphere in Zimbabwe right now."
The post-election tension has been mounting by the day, with an opposition lawmaker and the country's two most senior trade unionists among those who are currently in custody.

 Iran rules out talks on nuclear ‘rights’
AFP, Tehran

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday Iran is ready to talk to world powers over global problems but ruled out negotiations over Tehran's nuclear "rights".
"We are ready for talks to resolve world problems and alleviate concerns," Ahmadinejad said in response to a question about a new proposal that world powers are to put forward to resolve the long-running nuclear standoff.
"We are ready to examine with a positive view others' propositions, wherever they come from, and give our opinion," he said.
But asked if Iran would suspend sensitive uranium enrichment work during talks with the world powers, Ahmadinejad said it would refuse to "discuss its rights" in the nuclear programme.
"All we want is our rights and nothing more."
Iran insists it has the right to enrich uranium to make nuclear fuel and has so far defied UN Security Council resolutions which demand a halt to the work.
Highly enriched uranium can also make the fissile core of an atom bomb but Iran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful and has vehemently denied allegation of seeking to make atomic weapons.
Permanent Security Council members Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States plus Germany have agreed on a "reviewed and updated" offer initially made to Iran in 2006, including economic, security and technological rewards.
No details of the new offer have yet been made public, although Russia has said it asks Iran to suspend uranium enrichment during talks on the proposal.