Either the US envoy has been misquoted or her statement was aimed at appeasing India, Pakistan’s Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmad said.

Denying any infiltration of militants from Pakistan into J and K, he said the USA should impress on India to begin talks with Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir issue.

“The world community, particularly the USA should exert pressure on India to sit on the negotiations table with Pakistan for the resolution of the outstanding issues, including the core issue of Kashmir,” he said.

Ms Powell told a meeting of the American Business Council in Karachi yesterday that “Pakistan must ensure that its pledges are implemented to prevent infiltration across the Line of Control and end the use of Pakistan as a platform for terrorism”.

The Pakistani Information Minister claimed that his country was “top supporter of anti-terrorism” operation and “expects from the USA that it should use its influence and pressurise India to start a dialogue with Pakistan to ensure peace in the region.”

“We neither are infiltrating nor patronising it. The Kashmir struggle is purely indigenous and they (Kashmiris) have been rendering sacrifices for their fundamental right,” he claimed, according to the official APP news agency.

The minister said during the past 11 days India test-fired three missiles and expelled four Pakistani diplomats, while claiming that Pakistan’s High Commission in New Delhi lodged protests time and again for a month with India drawing its attention towards “harassment” of its officials.

Islamabad, he claimed, had expelled only those officials of the Indian High Commission who were not following the diplomatic norms.

Hard-line Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami also reacted sharply to Ms Powell’s comments, saying the US Ambassador had repeated exactly what the Indian government had been saying.

The Jamaat, a component of the six-party alliance Muttahida Majlis-e Amal (MMA), also criticised the Information Minister for issuing a very “muted” reaction to her remarks.

“The US envoy should realise that enough is enough and Pakistan is not a colony of the USA,” senior Jamaat leader Khurshid Ahmad told the local media here.

“Pakistan is a sovereign country with 140 million Muslims and no individual has the right to compromise their freedom.”

He alleged that America itself was the “biggest terrorist” and involved in “cross-border terrorism” against various countries like Libya, Kenya, Sudan and Afghanistan.

The documents accessed by the opposition group Iraqi National Coalition consisting of former military officials now living in exile, showed the potential use of chemical weapons, the BBC reported today. The group claimed it had received the information from serving members of Baghdad’s military.

The hand-written notes in Arabic said the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s elite military units, had been issued with the drug atropine, which protects against the nerve gases sarin and VX.

It also contained details for attacking ships in the Gulf. The documents were brought out of Iraq in December last and had been verified by three different experts, the BBC said.

The papers suggest that the chemical suits and anti-nerve gas drugs have been smuggled into Iraq from neighbouring countries, the BBC said, adding that the notes included details of testing of unmanned submarines designed to attack ships in the Gulf, information on fibre-optic radar systems, and plans of the layout of Saddam’s presidential palaces.

The Secretary-General of the opposition group, Mr Tawfik al-Yassiri, a former Brigadier-General in the Iraqi army told the BBC radio: “We received the documents from inside Iraq, passed by people who left Iraq.”

Moscow will not support the US proposal to raise the issue of North Korean nuclear crisis at the Security Council, as it was ‘premature’, said Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov, who had held long parleys in Pyongyang with the North Korean leader Kim Jong IL.

According to him, the attempts to raise this issue at the UN Security Council will be regarded in Pyongyang as additional attempts to bring pressure on the DPRK, RIA Novosti reported.

“The adoption of any economic sanctions may be regarded by the North Korean leadership as the declaration of war,” Mr Losyukov was quoted as saying by the agency.

According to him, the same position is shared by Beijing. Mr Losyukov also said that his contacts with the North Korean leadership made it clear that North Korea was ready to start negotiations with the USA without any preliminarily conditions.

In his phone conversation yesterday, President Vladimir Putin has briefed US President George W Bush on the outcome of Russia’s Pyongyang mission.

Mr Losyukov said during his meeting with the visiting US Deputy State Secretary Richard Armitage yesterday, North Korea was also discussed in detail.

The South Korean delegates to the cabinet-level talks said they had “strongly demanded” that their counterparts declare that North Korea would quickly abandon its nuclear weapons programme.

A spokesman for the South side, Rhee Bong-Jo, said the North Koreans were also urged to announce Pyongyang would reverse its recent withdrawal from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

However, Rhee said the five North Korean delegates were adamant they were not prepared to give any concessions unless Pyongyang could discuss the matter directly with Washington.

“North Korea kept contending that this nuclear issue should be resolved through a dialogue with the USA,” Rhee said.

“North Korea has a different view towards the nuclear issue from ours.

“Of course we have failed to narrow the differences but the agreement to peacefully resolve the issue has significance... and we conveyed enough of what we wanted to say and what we had to say to the North side during the talks.”

Marcos Parra’s car was hit by a drunken driver and his head was almost completely severed from his body, with only his spinal cord keeping it connected.

Parra was rushed from the scene to the emergency room at St Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, ABC News said.

Doctors had never seen such injuries. It almost didn’t matter that he had a broken clavicle, pelvis, tailbone and ribs. They were stunned to learn of the injury to his neck that technically severed his head, it added.

His skull was ripped from the cervical spine, detaching Parra’s head from the neck.

At that point, it seemed only a miracle could save Parra. But that is essentially what he got in the form of Dr Curtis Dickman of the Barrow Neurologic Institute at St Joseph’s. What happened in that Phoenix hospital seemed like something straight out of Hollywood.

No one can say if it was luck or destiny, but it so happens that Dr Dickman had been perfecting a technique to treat an injury as rare as Parra’s. The surgeon had been testing the method on human cadavers.

The soldiers were ambushed last night at the Kvasim junction near the Jewish settlement of Beit Haggai. Two radical Palestinian groups — the military wing of the Hamas, Iz-a Din al-Kassam, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction — claimed responsibility for the attack.

The military wing of the Hamas, in a leaflet, said the attack was a response to the Israeli army operations against Palestinian civilians and the actions of Jewish settlers against the local Arab population.

The former Superman, who arrived here earlier this week as the guest of the New South Wales state government, spoke to journalists ahead of a special two-day conference on spinal cord injury which begins on Monday.

He said he was grateful the Australian government had allowed the use of surplus IVF embryonic stem cells for research but that this was only half the solution.

“The other piece of the puzzle is nuclear transfer,” Reeve said.

Nuclear transfer is also known as therapeutic cloning, a term Reeve said he was reluctant to use because people often confused it with reproductive cloning.

The US authorities want to collect all information about “every Tom, Dick and Harry” who is supposed to be able to pose threat to US interests, local daily Dawn quoted officials of the Pakistani Interior Ministry as saying.

In view of the possibility of a popular backlash, the FBI will use domestic investigation agencies to collect the data, the daily said.

For the purpose, the US bureau is currently conducting a week-long course in Islamabad to train local officials.

At least 15 inspectors were selected from each of the four provinces for the training course to be started from this month.

COMEDIAN DISARMS GANGSTERS
TIRANA: A famous Albanian comedian averted a highway robbery by making the bandits laugh, an Albanian newspaper reported. The gangsters who aimed Kalashnikov rifles at Sejfulla Myftari’s car recognised his shaved head and bulging eyes when he stepped out of it, the Shekulli daily said on Thursday. “Oh thanks, I haven’t seen a Kalash (Kalashnikov) in ages — will you let me hold it please,” Myftari said, reaching to pat one of the guns as if it were a much-missed toy. The bandits laughed and told Myftari and his friends to leave quickly so that they could hold up another car instead. Reuters