Dhaka, November 23
The Bangladesh's caretaker government today appointed former judge and Election Commissioner Mahfuzur Rahman as acting poll chief to replace M.A. Aziz who went on a three-month leave following intense street protests by the Opposition alliance.

The 14-party Opposition alliance, led by Sheikh Hasina's Awami League, went into a huddle this morning to discuss the development and work out a strategy, officials said here.

Chief of the interim government and President Iajuddin Ahmed last night declared that Aziz had agreed to take three months leave responding to his government's request to end the current political standoff.

He appointed Justice Rahman, one of the deputies of Aziz, as the acting election chief this morning.

Rahman said he hoped all quarters would help him hold free and fair elections, which was his greatest challenge.

However, the media here did not give the acting election chief a clean go-ahead when he was appointed the Election Commissioner.

Ahmed, in his televised speech, said Justice Aziz would stay inside the country during the leave and the "state will provide his overall security and other facilities". He also decided to appoint two new Commissioners in the Election Commission with an objective of reconstituting the body.

However, the Opposition, which has decided to mark today as the day of "victory" following Aziz's decision to temporarily move out of office, said the President's speech was "sketchy" and smacked of toeing former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's "blue-print" for the elections.

Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party, however, welcomed the move. Elections have to be held by January 25, 2007, and its schedule is expected to be announced this month. — PTI

Islamabad, November 23
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said he wanted “substantive talks” with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh but “that is only possible when there is a solution to the Siachen and the Sir Creek issues and headway in the Kashmir dispute”.

“We want good relations with India, but the existing conflicts are a barrier and it is not possible (to have good relations with India) without a resolution of the disputes,” he told reporters at the International Defence Exhibition and Seminar (IDEAS)-2006 at the Expo Centre in Karachi.

He expected some headway towards conflict resolution during his meeting with Dr Manmohan Singh, who General Musharraf said, would soon visit Pakistan.

The News quoted him as saying: “Pakistan and India will have to move forward jointly for close cooperation, confidence-building and dispute resolution.”

Daily Times said Dr Manmohan Singh had accepted an invitation by General Musharraf to visit Pakistan. — IANS

Kandhar, November 23
Forced to wear yellow patches in the days of the Taliban, the homesick Sikhs of Afghanistan still hide in back alleys and yearn for India.

In the Taliban's birthplace, Kandahar, their children cannot go to school and locals stone or spit on men in the streets, who mostly try to hide in the narrow alleys of the mud-brick older quarter of the city.

''We don't want to stay in Afghanistan,'' says 40-year-old Balwant Singh. ''The locals tell us 'you are not from Afghanistan, go back to India'. Sometimes, they throw stones at us, the children. We feel we have to hide.

''I am even afraid to go to parts of the city.''

Their gurdwara in Kandahar is a simple traditional yellow pole capped by the orange Nishan Sahib.

It sits outside a stark prayer room in an obscure courtyard reachable only after knocking on two sets of unmarked heavy timber doors down a cramped mud-brick tunnel-way.

The pole does not rise above roof level, unlike the splendid gurdwaras across India where they tower above the temples and the countryside, visible for kilometres.

There are about 10 Sikh families in Kandahar -- fewer than 50 persons. Another 22 lonely men, all their families back in India, live as traders in the neighbouring province of Uruzgan, another Taliban stronghold.

Similar numbers are scattered across Afghanistan, a strictly Islamic nation where most people do not recognise Sikhism's close links with Islam. In the late 1980s, there were about 500,000 Sikhs scattered across Afghanistan, many here for generations. The country's Islam was moderate, based on the Sunni Hanafi sect. — Reuters

BRIEFLY

11 skinheads arrested
MOSCOW: The Russian police has detained 11 teenagers for beating an immigrant from former Soviet Kyrgyzstan with metal chains, a spokeswoman for the Moscow prosecutor said. The group attacked 23-year-old Chingiz Kailypov, now in a coma, on a suburban Moscow commuter train on Sunday. The police is treating the attack as a racially motivated crime rather than hooliganism as previous race attacks have been termed in Russia. In the wagon of an electrical train a group of skinheads, wearing short black jackets and long boots and shouting nationalistic slogans, attacked Kailypov with their arms, legs and metal chains. — Reuters

Web porn king gets life term
BEIJING: A Chinese court has sentenced the founder of the country's largest pornography Web site to life imprisonment and jailed another eight of the site's organisers, state media reported. The Taiyuan Intermediate People's Court on Wednesday handed down the sentence to Chen Hui, 28, and ordered the confiscation of 100,000 yuan ($12,500), Xinhua news agency said. — Reuters