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US drone kills 21 in missile attack in Pak
Zardari moves into presidency
Sharif again declines offer to join coalition
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Australia not to sell uranium to India
till it signs NPT
The spy ‘who plotted to kill notorious Nazi’
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US drone kills 21 in missile attack in Pak Islamabad, September 8 Security officials were quoted by Dawn News channel late tonight as saying that Al-Qaida leaders Hamza Arabi, Qasim Hamza and Musa Arabi were among those killed in the attack on the seminary in Tanda Darpakhel, 2 km from Miranshah, the headquarters of North Waziristan. Women and children were also among the dead. Twenty others were injured in the missile strike. The drone operated by the US-led forces in Afghanistan fired six to seven guided missiles. Four missiles hit a madrassa run by senior Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani while three hit nearby houses. State-run APP news agency quoted official sources and residents as saying that three women seminary students and three labourers were among the dead. It was not immediately known if Haqqani was present in the area at the time of the strike. Haqqani, a close aide of Taliban supreme commander Mullah Omar, has not been seen since the fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul in 2001. ARY News channel reported that Naseeruddin Haqqani, the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, had said his father and brother Sirajuddin were “alive and well” in Afghanistan. Taliban fighters surrounded the area around the madrassa and did not allow people to approach the site.
— PTI
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Zardari moves into presidency
President-elect Asif Zardari today shifted amid religious rites to the “Aiwan-e-Sadr” (presidency) from his current temporary residence in a section of the Prime Minister House, where he had recently moved for security considerations. Zardari, who will be formally sworn in tomorrow, was accompanied by both daughters Bakhtawar and Assefa. A beaming Zardari embraced both daughters as he entered the portal of the imposing presidential building. Son Bilawal Zardari Bhutto is reaching here later tonight to be in time to attend the oath-taking ceremony. It was a meteoric transformation in the life of a much-maligned person, whose two decades of not too flattering political career owed all to his marriage to charismatic Benazir Bhutto in 1987. Till his accidental ascent to unprecedented national prominence after the assassination of Bhutto in December last year, Zardari spent 11 years in jail and two in exile on corruption charges. Attendants held the Holy Koran over Zardari’s head as mark of God’s blessing. Earlier he touched two black goats, which were sacrificed in keeping with the superstition that this wards off bad omen. The family will live in luxurious residential quarters of the presidency, where household goods were moved earlier. Zardari will begin attending his office in the main building from tomorrow after taking oath. Zardari will be the fourth President after Ghulam Ishaq Khan (1988-93), Farooq Leghari (1993-97) and Rafiq Tarar (1997-2001) to live in the “Aiwan-e-Sadr”. All three civilian predecessors of Zardari had to quit unceremoniously before completing five-year term. Ghulam Ishaq Khan was forced to resign along with the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1993 when army chief Kakar mediated to end their escalating fierce feud. Farooq Leghari had to quit amid raging controversy between Nawaz Sharif and then Chief Justice Sajjad Shah. Tarar was removed by Gen Musharraf in June 2001 after he declined to voluntarily step down to let Musharraf represent Pakistan as President at his planned summit meeting with Indian premier Atal Behari Vajpaee in Agra. The fate of the three civilian presidents to reside in the presidency gave currency to the superstition that the building is jinxed.
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Sharif again declines offer to join coalition
PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif on Monday again declined an offer to rejoin the ruling coalition when he called on Asif Zardari at the Prime Minister House to personally felicitate him on his election as president of Pakistan. Sharif was accompanied by top leaders of his party while Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and several senior cabinet ministers and PPP leaders were present at the meeting. He regretted his inability to attend Zardari's inauguration on Tuesday because of his plans to visit his ailing wife in London. Sharif will be away in the UK for nearly a week. Zardari renewed his invitation to Sharif to return to the coalition, saying the country needed a government of national consensus to overcome huge problems it was facing as the legacy of eight years of rule by military dictator. Sharif politely declined the offer while appreciating his gesture. The PML-N pulled out of the coalition on August 25, a week after the resignation of General Musharraf when Asif Zardari reneged on written agreement to restore deposed judges. He assured Zardari that the PML-N would play a positive and constructive role in the opposition and remain focused on consolidating the present democratic dispensation, PML-N Ahsan Iqbal told reporters after the meeting. "It was primarily a courtesy call to felicitate Zardari on his election as president," Iqbal said, adding that there was no occasion for substantive political discussion. To another question, Iqbal said the PML-N expected the PPP to respect the mandate received by it in Punjab just as it had recognised the PPP mandate in the Centre. PML-N leadership has accused Punjab governor Salman Taseer and PM's adviser Manzoor Wattoo of trying to destabilise the Punjab government.
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Australia not to sell uranium to India
till it signs NPT
Melbourne, September 8 “However, Labour is committed to supplying uranium to only those countries party to the NPT. Australia will ,therefore, not be supplying uranium to India while it is not a member of the NPT,” Australian trade minister Simon Crean was quoted as saying in The Australian newspaper report today. The Labour Party welcomed the decision by the NSG as strengthening the global security of nuclear facilities, Crean added. However, the federal Opposition claims the Labour's policy was hypocritical and said the foreign minister should use his next visit to India to announce a new uranium policy. “Foreign minister Stephen Smith should use next week's visit to India to announce a new uranium export policy for New Delhi,” Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Andrew Robb said yesterday. While critics of the Vienna announcement said the decision would undermine the non-proliferation efforts, Robb said Canberra needed to support India in efforts to produce greenhouse gas-free electricity. “One of the first foreign policy acts of the Rudd government was to renege on a decision by the Howard government to help India supply greenhouse gas-free electricity to its growing population by providing uranium under an agreement being negotiated between the US and India,” Robb said. —
PTI
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The spy ‘who plotted to kill notorious Nazi’
London, September 8 A new book on the Danish-born spy, whose exploits made him a legend in espionage circles, has revealed how Sneum laid in ambush in German-occupied Copenhagen only armed with a bow and arrows to kill Heinrich Himmler, the then Head of the SS. He planned to strike from a penthouse that belonged to a Danish film starlet he had seduced. Sneum chose a longbow because he did not want the sound of a bullet to be traced back to her flat, according to the book. The untold story of Sneum's career has been published in ‘The Hornet's Sting’ penned by Mark Ryan,who interviewed the spy at length before his death last year,aged 89.— PTI
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Japan backed N-deal due to “international consensus” Vietnam discovers mass grave of Communist soldiers
Police suggests indicting Israeli premier 
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