Beijing, August 4
The Chinese police said a grenade assault that killed 16 policemen in western Xinjiang region today was a ''suspected terrorist'' attack, four days ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games, state media reported.

The Xinhua news agency said two assailants drove a truck towards exercising border police officers in Kashgar. ''The two attackers got off the lorry after the vehicle hit a roadside pole,'' said the English-language report. ''They threw two grenades at the barracks, causing explosion. They also attacked the policemen with knives.

'' Sixteen policemen were killed, and 16 wounded. The police suspect it was a terrorist attack, said the report. Officials have said militants, seeking an independent East Turkestan homeland, are among the biggest threats to the establishment.

The police had got clues suggesting that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement planned terrorist attacks during August -8, just ahead of the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Xinhua reported.

Senior Colonel Tian Yixiang, China's military officer in charge of Olympics security, had said on Friday that the East Turkestan terrorist groups were the biggest threat to Games security.

Human rights critics and exiled uighurs have said Beijing has exaggerated the threat of violence in Xinjiang and stirred discontent by extending the Han Chinese presence there. — Reuters

Moscow, August 4
Russians on Monday mourned Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author and dissident whose criticismof the tyranny of Soviet rule made him one of the bravest figures of the 20th century.

Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel literature laureate, died of heart failure late on Sunday in his Moscow home. He was 89.

On Monday, a chorus of voices across the world expressed grief at the death of a man whose struggle exposed the horror of Josef Stalin’s camps and made him the conscience of Russia.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, described Solzhenitsyn as a “man of unique destiny whose name will remain in Russia’s history.”

“He was one of the first people who spoke up about the inhumanity of Stalin’s regime with a full voice, and about the people whose lived through this but were not broken,” Gorbachev, told Interfax news agency.

A funeral service will take place at the medieval Donskoi monastery in Moscow on Wednesday and Solzhenitsyn will be buried there later that day in accordance with his will, said a RussianOrthodox church spokesman.

President Dmitry Medvedev and top Russian officials as well as global leaders including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and US President George W. Bush sent their condolences.

Long banned from publication, Solzhenitsyn owed his initial fame to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who allowed the publication in 1962 of his “One Day in the Life of Ivan

Denisovich”, which described the horrifying routine of labour camp life.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 for his work, including “Gulag Archipelago”, a chronicle of his own and thousands of other prison camp experiences.

In his books, he shook consciences by unveiling the dark secrets of the Gulag, the network of prison camps where millions of Russians died during Stalin’s purges. Some read and distributed his books underground, fearing state persecution.

In 1974, he was stripped of his citizenship and put on a plane to West Germany for refusing to keep silent about his country’s past. He became an icon of resistance to the totalitarian system from his American home in Vermont.

In Troitse-Lykovo in the outskirts of Moscow where Solzhenitsyn spent his final years, passers-by paid tribute by tucking flowers into the blue-painted gate of his house.

Solzhenitsyn refused to return to Russia until after the Soviet Union collapsed, marking his comeback in a long train journey from Vladivostok on the Pacific coast to Moscow in 1994.

After his return, the post-Soviet leadership paid him great respect. But he became increasingly critical of the state of modern day Russia, denouncing corruption and Western influences in a society that had emerged from 80 years of Soviet rule.

He lived in seclusion outside Moscow, playing no discernible role in Russian political life and rarely appearing in public. TV channels and radio stations ran constant solemn reports on his life. — Reuters

Vancouver, August 4
The Indo-Canadian community has refused to accept an apology by Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the 1914 Komagata Maru ship incident in which hundreds of Indian passengers were not allowed to enter Canada.

The Komagata Maru was a Japanese ship hired by Malaysia-based wealthy Sikh Gurdit Singh to bring 376 Indians from Hong Kong to Canada in 1914 to challenge its racist laws.

The Indians were not allowed to disembark in Vancouver and forcibly sent back to India where many were shot on arrival in Calcutta, as it was then called.

Tendering the apology at the annual Mela Gadari Babian Da at Bear Creek Park in Surrey yesterday, Harper said Canada was sorry for the mistreatment of the passengers in 1914 and apologised for it. Since the government had promised to apologise in the nation's Parliament, mela organisers immediately rejected it.

"We wanted the House of Commons to apologise, not the PM. We reject this apology," shouted mela organiser Sahib Singh Thind, even as security personnel whisked the Prime Minister away.

Thind said: "The government has betrayed us, as only yesterday it had promised us that the PM will announce a date here for the apology in Parliament later.

“Today, they have treated us like they did the Komagata passengers in 1914.

It was the same racist conservative government then as now. Racism is alive in Canada."

He said the Indo-Canadian community would chalk out its plan to fight for an apology in Parliament.

However, Jason Kenney, secretary for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, ruled this out, saying: "The apology has been given and it won't be repeated."

An indignant Indo-Canadian MLA Jagrup Brar, who was instrumental in getting the provincial British Columbia Assembly to apologise for the Komagata Maru just last month, asked: "If our Provincial Assembly can apologise, why can't the nation's Parliament?

"It was the House of Commons which had passed a unanimous resolution proposing an apology. The apology should have been entered into the House records. I wonder who is advising this PM."

But Deepak Obhrai, Canadian parliamentary secretary (minister of state) for foreign affairs, justified the apology, saying: "It does not matter where the apology is tendered. Some people are bound to make noises. The government has acknowledged that Indo-Canadians were discriminated against in the past." — IANS

Kathmandu, August 4
Indigenous ethnic organisations in Nepal today revived the anti-Hindi protest triggered by Vice-President Parmananda Jha taking oath of office in Hindi on July 23.Normal life was disrupted across 22 districts in the Terai plains bordering India.

Normal life across 22 districts in the southern Terai region was affected following a general strike call by the Tharuhat Struggle Committee, an association of the Tharu community, in protest against the newly elected Vice-President’s decision to take the oath of office in Hindi.

The Tharuhat Struggle Committee affiliated eight other organisations also expressed solidarity with the one-day strike. The protesters claimed that Jha had “disrespected” the interim constitution by taking the oath in a foreign language.

Protesters blocked traffic and held demonstrations disrupting normal life across the Terai districts, including Morang, Sunsari, Siraha, Dang, Rupandehi and Rautahat, the Kantipur online said today.

Jha is a member of the ethnic Mahadhesi community that dominates the southern plains bordering India, and for whom Hindi is the most common language.

Nepal’s Supreme Court had issued notice to the Vice-President and the Prime Minister’s office on a petition filed by Nepali lawyer Bal Krishna Neupane demanding the oath be invalidated. — PTI

Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani has said that tensions between Pakistan and its two neighbours India and Afghanistan have been diffused during his bilateral meetings with leaders of both countries in Colombo on the sidelines of the SAARC summit.

Gilani, who returned from Colombo today morning, also told mediapersons at Islamabad airport that he was optimistic about the outcome of the Tuesday’s crucial meeting planned between PPP co-chairman Asif Zardari and PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif.

“I am confident that the coalition will stay,” he remarked.

Gilani said the 15th SAARC summit in Colombo had helped reduce tensions with India and Afghanistan that had cropped up in the wake of bombing in Kabul outside the Indian embassy. He met Indian premier Manmohan Singh and Afghan President Hamid Karzai during the summit.

“These meetings were useful in dispelling the misgivings both leaders had been expressing recently after the Kabul bombing,” he said.

BRIEFLY

UN envoy meets monks
YANGON: The UN’s new human rights envoy for Myanmar met senior Buddhist monks on Monday, as his first visit to the military-ruled nation got under way, a senior official said. United Nations special rapporteur Tomas Ojea Quintana, met the monks as well as other religious leaders in Yangon, a Myanmar official told on condition of anonymity. — AFP

5 die in plane crash
CANADA: Five persons were killed in a plane crash on northern Vancouver island, however, two survivors were rescued. The plane belonged to Pacific Coastal Airlines and was on a 30-minute flight between Port Hardy and Chamiss Bay. — AP

Flash flood kills 15
PESHAWAR: Up to 15 persons were killed when heavy rains triggered a flash flood in northwest Pakistan on Monday, with hundreds more forced to abandon their homes, officials said. A small riverbed flooded by torrential rains overnight swept away several villages and killed livestock in the Khyber tribal region and on the outskirts of Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province. — Reuters

Man beheads girlfriend
ATHENS: A 31-year-old man killed his girlfriend on the Greek island of Santorini, beheaded her, then fled in a patrol car, a local official said. During the chase, the suspect was shot five times by the police and ran over two women doctors, riding a motorcycle, before he was caught, the official said. — AP