Seoul, July 6
A defiant North Korea acknowledged for the first time today that it had launched several missiles, vowed to carry out more tests and threatened to use force if the international community tried to stop it.

Pyongyang’s statement came as the United States and Japan closed ranks in the face of a U.N. Security Council split over whether to impose sanctions on North Korea for the volley of missiles it fired off on Wednesday.

‘’The KPA will go on with missile launch exercises as part of its efforts to bolster deterrent for self-defence in the future, too,’’ North Korea’s official KCNA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry pokesman as saying.

‘’The DPRK will have no option but to take stronger physical actions of other forms, should any other country dare take issue with the exercises and put pressure upon it.’’

DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Officials say North Korea launched at least six missiles from its east coast early yesterday and as the international community fumed, it fired off a seventh some 12 hours later.

The missiles included a long-range Taepodong-2, which some experts had said could hit Alaska. U.S. officials said it flew for less than a minute and splashed into the sea west of Japan.

South Korea’s defence minister told a parliamentary committee that an analysis of equipment and personnel being moved in and out of a missile-launch site in North Korea suggested the possibility of additional launches, Yonhap reported.

South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo cited a government official as saying the North might be looking to launch three or four more intermediate-range missiles. And NBC News, citing unnamed U.S. officials, said preparations seemed to be under way for a second Taepodong test, but the weapon was not yet at the launch pad. — Reuters

London, July 6
In a sensational revelation, exiled former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday opened a hornet's nest by writing in his official biography that US President Bill Clinton told him that the then Pakistan army chief, Gen Pervez Musharraf, wanted to carry a nuclear attack on India.

Mr Nawaz Sharif claims that this happened during the post-Kargil war days and that he was not at all aware of his General's plan.

"During my post-Kargil misadventure meeting with President Clinton, I was told by the American leader that nuclear warheads had been shifted from one station to another during the Kargil war.

"I was taken aback by this revelation because I knew nothing about it. The American president further told me that the nuclear warheads have been moved so that these could be used against India", Sharif further adds.

Mr Sharif who has already said on records that he was oblivious of the Kargil episode and that Musharraf was the main architect behind it, further writes in his biography "Ghadaar Kaun? Nawaz Sharif Ki Kahani, Unki Zubani" ( Who is the traitor? Story of Nawaz Sharif in his own words): "I was asked by Clinton why I was unaware of these developments, despite being the elected Chief Executive and the Prime Minister of the country. It was a very irresponsible thing to do on General Musharraf's part".

Mr Sharif presently in London has been making amends with his former bete-noire, Benazir Bhutto and has already launched a united front against Musharraf. — ANI

Jerusalem, July 6
Israeli troops and tanks today re-occupied former Jewish settlements in Gaza to press for release of an abducted soldier and curb Palestinian rocket attacks, a move that could damage popular support for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plan to evacuate parts of the West Bank.

For the first time since evacuating them last year, troops took control of ruins of the former settlements of Nissanit, Dugit and Elei Sinai, after these areas were used by militants for launching rockets at Israel.

As the ground forces edged forward in the pre-dawn hours, artillery and Israel Air Force aircraft struck targets in the area, aiming at bases and groups of militants.

“Our presence there doesn’t mean that we intend to remain in the Gaza Strip. We simply want to prevent firing at our towns,” Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer told the Army Radio.

Defence spokesman Captain Jacob Dallal called the operation a “limited incursion to ensure the release of our abducted soldier and to stop the rocket fire into Israel”.

The Israeli security cabinet had yesterday authorised the army to advance into Gaza in response to the kidnapping of a 19-year-old soldier by Palestinian militants on June 25.

The troops also entered the Al-Atara neighbourhood close to Beit Lahiya, from where the rockets fired had hit southern Israeli city of Ashkelon.

During an overnight operation, the troops targeted a cell of militants in the northern Gaza Strip allegedly laying explosives, killing two of them. — PTI

Kufa (Iraq), July 6
A suicide car bomber blasted two coachloads of Iranian pilgrims outside a Shi’ite Muslim shrine in Iraq at dawn today, killing 10 persons and wounding 40, the police and hospital sources said.

The bomber drove his car between the two coaches as they arrived at the Maithem al-Tamar shrine in Kufa, a religious centre on the outskirts of the main Shi’ite holy city of Najaf, 160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad, the police said.

The burnt out wrecks of the vehicles lay in the street. Three women in distinctively Iranian dress lay dead.

The police said several Iraqi children, who make a living wheeling invalid pilgrims in carts at the shrine, were also caught in the blast. Many sleep there, waiting for business.

At Najaf’s Hakim hospital, doctor Alaa al-Tayar said he had seen 23 wounded and seven dead, while a second hospital in Najaf had two bodies and three wounded. A third hospital, in Kufa itself, had one dead and 14 wounded.

Shi’ite worshippers have been targeted in the past in apparently sectarian attacks by Sunni Arab insurgents and the US military warned only on Wednesday of a possible increase in car bomb attacks following the supposed succession of Abu Ayyub al-Masri as head of al Qaeda in Iraq. — Reuters 

London, July 6
Monkeys recognise each other by comparing faces to an average stored in their brains, not by memorising what every individual looks like, scientists have said.

And that probably goes for people, too, explaining how faces can be recognised in a fraction of a second, they said yesterday.

The scientists found in their study that a monkey’s brain did not keep track of different parts of a face, storing and then accessing the information to recognise others.

Instead it keeps a statistical average of the faces it has seen and uses it as a basis for comparison.

“When it sees a new face it compares it to this average and then it remarks upon the differences ... and that is how the face is seen,” said David Leopold, of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

“It elucidates how it is possible that you can so quickly and effortlessly, in just a few hundred milliseconds, recognise faces,” he added.

Leopold and his colleagues pinpointed the recognition system while studying neurons in an area of the brain called the inferotemporal cortex in two macaque monkeys which had been trained to recognise computer-generated human faces.

They monitored single neurons to understand how groups of the brain cells work together to recognise faces.

“What we found is that the neurons in this part of the monkey’s brain respond in a way that is extremely sensitive to the small differences in information between faces of different identities,” said Leopold, who reported the research in the science journal Nature.

The activity of the neurons was monitored as the monkeys were shown an average face of a person and as it was artificially morphed the full identity.

“The main finding was a striking tendency for neurons to show tuning that appeared centred about the average face,” Leopold said in the journal.

In psychological tests, humans identify faces in much the same way as monkeys so the researchers believe this aspect of the visual recognition system is similar in both species. — Reuters