Cape Canaveral, September 21
The US space shuttle Atlantis returned safely to its Florida home port today, capping a successful mission to resume international space station construction after the 2003 Columbia accident.

After 12 days in space, including six at the half-built $100 billion outpost, the shuttle dropped from its orbital perch into earth’s atmosphere, shedding speed as it soared through predawn skies over the Pacific Ocean, Yucatan Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico before reaching Florida’s west coast.

Gliding across the state, commander Brent Jett circled Atlantis high over the Kennedy Space Center, lining up his ship to touch down on a 4.8-km-long, canal-lined runway at 6.21 am.

Double sonic booms rang out as the shuttle slipped below the speed of sound for the first time since it blasted off on September 9 after two weeks of delay.

“Welcome back,” said astronaut Tony Antonelli from the Mission Control in Houston. “Glad to be back,” Jett replied.

The mission marked NASA’s official entry back into the space-station construction business, a task put on a four-year hiatus due to upgrades and test flights made after the Columbia accident.

Jett and five other crew members installed a $372 million solar power system during a complex series of robotic manoeuvers and three spacewalks.

NASA needs to fly at least 14 more station assembly missions to finish the outpost before the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010.

NASA had planned to bring Atlantis home on Wednesday, but managers wanted the crew to make additional inspections of the ship’s heat shield after unidentified objects were found flying near the spaceship. The objects stoked concerns that the shuttle had been hit by something and possibly damaged.

The inspection found nothing and NASA managers cleared Atlantis for the return home. — Reuters

President George W. Bush said on Wednesday that he would order US troops into Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden if he had actionable intelligence that the Al-Qaida leader was hiding there.

Reacting to Mr Bush’s comments, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf told reporters at the United Nations in New York that he would oppose any US action on Pakistani territory. “We wouldn’t like to allow that at all. We will do it ourselves,” he said.

General Musharraf will meet Mr Bush at the White House on Friday and the issue of a resurgent Taliban and a recent peace deal Islamabad struck with tribal leaders along the Afghan border are likely to dominate the meeting.

In an interview to the CNN, Mr Bush was asked whether he would order American troops to kill or capture Bin Laden or other terrorist leaders if good intelligence indicated that they were in Pakistan. “Absolutely,” Mr Bush replied. “We would take the action necessary to bring them to justice.”

The assertion is a departure from the American President’s position reiterated at a White House press conference just last week.

Mr Bush had told a group of journalists that he thought the idea of sending US special forces into Pakistan to hunt Bin Laden was not a viable strategy. Later, at the White House, he explained he could not send troops into Pakistan because it was “a sovereign nation”.

“In order for us to send thousands of troops into a sovereign nation, we’ve got to be invited by the government of Pakistan,” he said at that time.

A January 13 US air strike on suspected Al-Qaida figures in a village in northwestern Pakistan killed 18 persons and sparked protests against the USA across the country.

Talking to the CNN, he hinted that Bin Laden could be hiding in Pakistan. “There’s no question there is a kind of a hostile territory in the remote regions of Pakistan that makes it easier for somebody to hide,” he said. “But we’re on the hunt. We’ll get him.”

Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai insisted that terrorism did not emanate from within his country. In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, he said, “Military action in Afghanistan alone, therefore, will not deliver our shared goal of eliminating terrorism.”

“We must look beyond Afghanistan to the sources of terrorism. We must destroy terrorist sanctuaries beyond Afghanistan, dismantle the elaborate networks in the region that recruit, indoctrinate, train, finance, arm and deploy terrorists,” he said. Though he did not name Pakistan, his implications were clear.

Mr Bush said he viewed General Musharraf “as somebody who would like to bring Al-Qaida to justice”. Mr Bush will hold a joint meeting with General Musharraf and Mr Karzai next week.

Meanwhile, the Human Rights Watch urged Mr Bush to press General Musharraf to restore civilian rule in Pakistan and hold free and fair elections, and end legal discrimination against women.

The New York-based group asked Mr Bush to stop turning a blind eye to General Musharraf’s use of torture and “disappearances” in the fight against terrorism and in Pakistan’s political conflicts.

“If Bush is serious about fostering democracy in the Muslim world, how can he support Musharraf’s refusal to end military rule in Pakistan?” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

General Musharraf had made it clear that he wanted to stay on as the army chief and president beyond the date set for elections in 2007, the group said.

“The counter terrorism partnership between the USA and Pakistan should start to follow the rule of law rather than the law of the jungle,” said Mr Adams.

New York, September 21
The Taliban is again active in Afghanistan due to the presence of allied forces and its leader Mullah Omar is leading the Islamic militia from Kandahar, according to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.

The Afghan people have never accepted foreign invasion and that is why they have united against the allied forces, Musharraf told a gathering here on Wednesday.

But he hastened to add that all Pakhtoons were not with Taliban, which was ousted from power following the US invasion in 2001 and which is now very active in southern Afghanistan.

"Taliban leader Mullah Omar is not in Pakistan, rather he is leading Taliban while sitting in Kandahar in Afghanistan," Musharraf said at a function organised by the Clinton Global Initiative, Online news agency reported.

Musharraf said though his country was the West's biggest ally in the war against terror, still there was a lot of misunderstanding regarding Pakistan.

Pakistan had not reached any accord with Taliban, he said, adding that a peace pact his government had singed was with the people of North Waziristan province according to which they would not allow any kind of movement of Taliban forces in their region.

"After Al Qaida, our focus is on the Taliban as it is a bigger danger than Al Qaida as it has roots among the masses," he said. — IANS

Amman (Jordan), September 21
Seven persons were sentenced to death today for triple hotel bombings that killed 60 persons in Jordan's capital last November.

The only one in custody was a 35-year-old Iraqi woman, Sajida Al-Rishawi, who confessed on Jordanian television shortly after the blasts that she intended to carry out a suicide attack on one of the Western hotels.

Six others, including another Iraqi woman, were sentenced in abstentia, and remain at large.

The late Al-Qaida leader in Iraq, Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was also tried as a fugitive, but the Jordanian military court dismissed his case after his death in a US airstrike north of Baghdad in June.

The guilty verdicts can be appealed.

The court said al-Rishawi and the other six were found guilty “beyond doubt” in Jordan's deadliest terror attack in recent history. Nearly 60 civilians and three Iraq suicide bombers died in the coordinated blasts.

In a televised confession after her arrest, Al-Rishawi said her explosives belt failed to detonate. She later retracted those statements, saying through her lawyer that she had no intention of killing herself and insisted that she did not even try to explode her belt. — AP