Near Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, September 29
The world's first female space tourist, Iranian-born Anousheh Ansari, returned to Earth today, bumping down in a Russian Soyuz capsule at dawn on the Kazakh steppe.

''They brought me home safe and sound,'' Ansari, looking tired but happy said as she sat in a special reclining chair next to the capsule in bright early morning sunshine.

''I had a great experience.'' A Russian space programme recovery team had surrounded the capsule, opened the hatch and extracted the cosmonauts from the Soyuz TMA-8 capsule, charred black from its fiery re-entry into the atmosphere.

Ansari, a 40-year-old US telecoms entrepreneur, left Iran in 1984 and who paid $ 20 million for the trip.

She came back with a Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and a US astronaut Jeff Williams and was greeted with red roses as well as a hug from her husband, Hamid.

''It was the ride of a lifetime,'' Williams, eating an apple, a symbol of Kazakhstan and a traditional treat for returning space crews, said as he adapted to gravity after his six months in space.

The craft slowed its descent with a large orange and white parachute and fired special gunpowder engines to cushion its landing on one side in a puff of dust and dirt in a field about 80 km (50 miles) north of the small town of Arkalyk.

Ansari waved and smiled broadly after being presented with the bunch of red roses with a pink ribbon by the recovery team.

Asked how she felt, she gave a thumbs up and said ''khorosho'' -- ''good'' in Russian.

There have been three other space tourists, each paying the Russian space programme about 20 million dollars for the trip.

Ansari blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 18 with a fresh US-Russian crew that relieved Vinogradov and Williams on the International Space Station.

''This 10 days has been magnificent for me,'' she said during a farewell ceremony aboard the station, about 3-1/2 hours before the landing at 0644 IST.

''I hope to be able to have this experience once again in the near future.''

Remaining on the space station are Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and US astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, who flew to the outpost with Ansari, and German astronaut Thomas Reiter.

Tyurin and Lopez-Alegria will be on the ISS for six months.

Reiter, who arrived on a US space shuttle in July, is set to return home in December. — Reuters

Moscow, September 29
The brutal killing of an Indian in a suspected racial attack has triggered angry protests by foreign students in the Russian city of St Petersburg, prompting its governor to personally monitor the probe into the murder.

Governor Valentina Matviyenko had a meeting with the city prosecutor probing the September 24 murder of Nitesh Kumar Singh, a final year student at the Mechnikov Medical Academy. He has decided to personally monitor the probe, according to state-run Rossia TV.

Singh, 27, was stabbed several times in the back by unidentified youth in a suspected hate crime near his hostel when he was returning after shopping on Sunday evening.

The killing has angered foreign student community in St Petersburg that has accused the authorities of failing to check racial attacks against Asians and Africans.

The angry students picketed the office of the rector of the academy and city prosecutor’s office.

Indian students in St. Petersburg also protested by stopping the car of Indian Consul General Jordana D. Pavel as she was leaving the academy after meeting the Indian students’ body. They complained that the Indian Consulate had turned a deaf ear to their complaints. — PTI

New York, September 29
Americans have a weakness for a compelling story, no matter where it comes from and who is telling it. For the past one week that story has been Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf’s.

Basking in all the attentions that he is getting in the mainstream American media coinciding with the release of his memoir “In the Line of Fire” by Simon & Schuster, Musharraf has been pushing all the right buttons.

Notwithstanding that the veracity of his claims about the Kargil conflict have been derided by his detractors in India, the Pakistani leader has even managed to get a substantial appearance on The Daily Show, America’s talked about nightly comedy show watched by a young demographic which shun real news shows.

Hosted by the Emmy winning comedian Jon Stewart the “fake news show” featured Musharraf on Tuesday night for nearly half of its 30 minute nightly segment. Obviously well-briefed about the irreverent nature of the show, Musharraf seemed to fit the format well.

Stewart, who is known to mercilessly skewer American politicians and other windbags, afforded Musharraf considerable levity. At one point he even asked him how he managed to stay so calm fighting terror while Americans were being so paranoid.

As part of Stewart’s “Seat of the Heat” segment toward the end of the show, where guests are asked one “tough” question half in jest and half in seriousness, Musharraf was asked who he thought would win if President George Bush and Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden were to contest election in Pakistan.

As questions go this was a pretty tricky one. Musharraf first smiled and then said “They will both lose miserably.” World leaders are not known to appear on Stewart’s show which America’s young turn to make sense of all the complexities of the world news. Although the show is entirely tongue-in-cheek, the host uses the format brilliantly to make significant points about many global issues, especially the Iraq war.

From his utterances on The Daily Show as well as elsewhere it is apparent that Musharraf joined the war on terror out of pragmatism rather than conviction.

It is possible that along the way in the past five years he has developed some conviction about his decision.

It is not hard to understand Musharraf’s initial reluctance, or predicament at the very least, considering the neighborhood he lives in and the kind of neighbors he chose to break bread with. Having presided over an apparatus that at the very least partially fathered the Taliban and hence by implication played a role in helping Osama bin Laden strike roots in Afghanistan, Musharraf ought to have been a deeply tormented soul in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Knowing what the CIA knew about the Pakistani intelligence’s barely concealed involvement with the Taliban and some of the most renegade Islamists in the region, it is conceivable that the Bush administration realized that the only way to break this union between the Pakistani military headed by Musharraf and the Taliban/Al Qaeda would be to issue an unambiguous threat.

It is in this backdrop that one has to read Musharraf’s assertion on ‘60 Minutes’ that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage threatened that the US would bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” unless it joined the war on terror. — IANS

Toronto, September 29
The Canadian Judicial Commission investigating into the 1985 bombing of an Air India Boeing-747 exploded off the Irish coast heard the testimony of English and Irish rescuers who first reached the scene.

Daniel Brown, a Scottish-born merchant seaman on the MV Laurentian Forest, a commercial vessel that was on the scene, submitted before Justice John Major Commission on Wednesday in Ottawa that he saw dismembered bodies covered with slick, oil and aviation fuel carried onto a lifeboat.

“Some were dismembered, one with torso split and intestines spilling out. Crew members were crying; some were physically ill,” Brown said.

He said he personally dragged six bodies aboard, including that of a long-haired Sikh whose face was riveted into his memory.

“His eyes were wide open; his mouth was wide open in a scream. .. He had a look of horror on his face.

At one point the lifeboat was nearly sucked beneath the screws of the Laurentian Forest in the rough seas,” Brown said.

“I had to lie on top of the bodies to keep my head under the gunwales,” Canadian Press reported quoting Brown.

Mark Stagg, the watch officer on the Laurentian Forest, told in a quavering voice of being handed a dead infant to place in a makeshift body bag.

“My faith in goodness, and God, and sense, and normality died then,” said Stagg. “Sitting here with all of you, I cannot begin to describe the utter wrongness of putting children into plastic bags,” he said. — PTI