Algiers, December 11
67 people were killed when two car bombs exploded in upscale districts of Algiers today, a health ministry source said, in the bloodiest attack since an undeclared civil war in the 1990s.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but commentators said it appeared the work of Al-Qaida’s north Africa wing, which claimed a similar bombing in downtown Algiers in April and other blasts east of the capital over the summer that have worried foreign investors in the OPEC member state.

The White House, concerned by Islamist militancy in north Africa, described the attackers as “enemies of humanity”.

A UN spokesman said one employee of the UN refugee agency was killed and another was missing. One of today’s blasts struck near the Constitutional Court building in Ben Aknoun district and the other close to the UN offices and a police station in Hydra, both areas where several Western companies have their offices, a source said.

Interior minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni said a suicide attacker appeared to have detonated the Hydra bomb. In Ben Aknoun people ran through the streets crying in panic and the wail of police sirens filled the air.

A body lay on the road covered with a white blanket, two buses were burning, debris from damaged cars was strewn across pavements while police struggled to hold back onlookers.

Kuala Lumpur, December 11
The police today arrested P. Uthayakumar, legal adviser of the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) and the man behind a rally of Indian immigrants on November 25. He could be charged with sedition, attracting stringent punishment.

The arrest, part of the drive against opposition leaders and rights activists, came hours after Malaysia’s police chief, Inspector-General Musa Hassan, said their investigations would be sufficient for court action against Hindraf leaders.

The group has courted controversy and strong government response since the rally that was declared illegal and forcibly dispersed by the police using water cannons.

Hassan’s statement came even as the high court here set aside a lower court’s earlier decision to discharge three Hindraf leaders charged with sedition.

“We will not go soft on parties who want to threaten the nation’s peace and stability,” he was quoted as saying by The Star newspaper today. He added that the police would take more drastic measures.

The use of the stringent Internal Security Act, however, would be “as the last resort”, he said in Johor Baru, the province adjoining Singapore.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has directed Hassan to probe Hindraf’s terror links, particularly with Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Hassan’s statement did not indicate whether the evidence pertained to Hindraf being ‘extremist’ or actually having terror links, a line that the Malaysian authorities have so far drawn, analysts said.

Hindraf has denied any links with the LTTE or any terror group, saying it was an alibi by the government to invoke draconian laws and mislead public opinion. — IANS

Chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party Benazir Bhutto, who flew here from Dubai on way to Mardan for an election meeting, has welcomed PML-N’s decision to take part in the elections and urged all opposition parties to coordinate their post-election strategy if these are rigged.

“I hope Nawaz Sharif’s decision would add to the pressure to make it difficult for Pervez Musharraf to manipulate the poll,” she told reporters during a brief chat at the airport.

Bhutto said a boycott would have harmed the struggle for the restoration of democracy in the country. She said her party fully recognised the contribution made by deposed chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and his colleagues to protect independence of the judiciary. But, she believed that their reinstatement should be left to new parliament.

She said the boycott call by her party leader and president of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan was his personal initiative that was at odds with decision of the PPP.

Bhutto regretted that the All-Parties Democratic Movement had split on the boycott issue and invited Sharif to return to the fold of the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD).

Her party was willing to make “seat adjustments” with Sharif as well as with other parties, including Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam.

Asked about the reinstatement of deposed judges after the elections, she avoided an answer, merely saying that she would work for a system where such things could not happen.

She defended her decision not to boycott the elections as that would have made it unnecessary for the government to rig the elections and give a walkover to the ruling group.

Sharif, who was interviewed live from Lahore on the same programme, said the rejection of his and Shahbaz Sharif’s nomination papers was a major step towards election rigging. He described the rejection of his papers as “unthinkable” since his credentials had been found in order in 2002.

Nusa Dua, December 11
UN climate chief Yvo de Boer called on finance ministers meeting here today to provide the monetary muscle to tackle Earth’s global-warming crisis. Finance ministers or their representatives were holding the first-of-a-kind talks on climate change in parallel to a worldwide gathering that aims to deepen action against the peril from greenhouse gases.

“Designing a long-term solution to climate change is mainly a challenge of intelligent financial engineering,” said Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is organising the December 3-14 talks in Bali, Indonesia.

“It is the environment ministers who set the goals in this process, but it’s the finance and economics ministers who have to get us to those goals,” he told AFP before addressing the finance chiefs.

“I think that there’s an opportunity here for finance ministers, by coming to grips with this issue, to turn it into an opportunity for clean economic growth rather than a threat,” he said.

The two-day talks among financial representatives from about 37 countries began yesterday, preceded by a weekend meeting of trade ministers.

It is the first time that ministers from the trade and finance arenas have attended the annual UNFCCC meeting, a development that reflects how climate change has amplified from being a purely environmental issue.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told the finance delegates today that climate change was a costly challenge to global development, and urged all countries and sectors to work together to meet it.

“Because of (climate change), some say $200 billion more in investment will be needed each year,” he said.

“If a key challenge is financing, then we need to have finance ministers at the table discussing the options.”

“We also need ways and means to bring new technologies and capacities to the developing world,” he added.

How to muster funds to help poor countries cope with climate change and transfer clean technology to them so that they avoid following rich economies down the path of carbon pollution was a key issue at the finance talks.

Caroline Tupoulahi Fusimalohi, advisor to Tonga’s minister of finance, said her island nation -one of the countries that is most at threat from rising seas -had been encouraged by a willingness shown by richer countries yesterday to help them cope with the problem.

“It’s encouraging and optimistic that climate change is being identified as one of the priorities for small island states such as Tonga,” she said. — AFP