Kabul, August 21
President Hamid Karzai's campaign and chief rival Abdullah Abdullah both said on Friday they had won Afghanistan's election, but Washington's chief envoy warned candidates not to declare victory prematurely.

Both camps said unofficial counts by campaign workers showed they had won enough votes to avoid a potentially destabilising second round of voting in October. Election officials said no confirmed results had been released.

"Initial results show that the President has got a majority," Karzai's campaign manager Deen Mohammad told Reuters. "We will not get to a second round." Abdullah, Karzai's former Foreign Minister, dismissed the Karzai camp's victory claim and said he was on track to win in the first round after Thursday's vote, which went ahead despite the sporadic Taliban violence. "I'm ahead. Initial results from the provinces show that I have more than 50 per cent of the vote," Abdullah told Reuters.

Official preliminary results are not due for two weeks, but counting began immediately after the polls closed on Thursday and is largely complete. Analysts have warned that uncertainty over the outcome or accusations of widespread fraud could lead to civil unrest.

US envoy Richard Holbrooke said he was certain the outcome of the vote would be disputed. "We always knew it would be a disputed election. I would not be surprised if you see candidates claiming victory and fraud in the next few days," Holbrooke said at a briefing in Kabul with election observers. Holbrooke said Washington had an "agnostic" position and did not support any early, unofficial victory declarations.

A US embassy spokeswoman said only the Independent Election Commission (IEC) was in a position to announce results and anything else was "just speculation". Polls conducted before the election showed Karzai in the lead but suggested he would not win more than 50 per cent of the vote needed to avoid a run-off.

Afghan and US officials have breathed a sigh of relief after the relatively peaceful election, which had been marked by a dramatic escalation in violence in the weeks leading up to the vote. Afghan and international forces suspended offensive operations on the voting day, but attacks continued nonetheless. — Reuters

A covert understanding involving political and military leadership and some of Pakistan's trusted foreign friends that led to former military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf's resignation a year ago has blocked all attempts to launch a treason trial against him, English daily The News has revealed.

The paper quoting "multiple sources" with direct knowledge of what happened in the corridors of power between August 11 and August 18 last year said that the deal that finally saw Musharraf’s departure was cobbled together by the top PPP leaders, including President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, US Ambassador to Pakistan Anne W Patterson, Britain’s special envoy to Pakistan Sir Mark Lyall Grant and an emissary of the King of Saudi Arabia.

“The bottom line of this deal was to grant Pervez Musharraf a graceful departure from the Presidency with guaranteed that there would be no impeachment or court proceedings against him in future,” The daily quoted an unnamed senior official as saying.

“There is no guarantee to what happens to Musharraf in distant future, but the deal promises no official disgrace for Musharraf under the present government,” the official said. Prime Minister Gilani’s statement in the National Assembly on Wednesday ruling out the trial as "undoable" and President Zardari’s advice to “friends” in an interview last week “to leave the politics of revenge” further testifies the sanctity of the arrangement reached in August last year. Notwithstanding the deal, senior PPP leaders seem convinced that Nawaz Sharif’s growing pressure on the government to file sedition charges against Musharraf was actually a political attempt from the PML-N to pitch the PPP government against the army. Zardari made it clear to Sharif in their meeting last month that his PPP had enough of confrontation with the army and had given enough of sacrifices. "This time please excuse us now, you go ahead and do the job,” the President reportedly told Sharif.

“This is a fantastic deal which none of the participants would own or confirm, yet there is nothing to suggest any violation of this unwritten agreement,” the official said. “It's more sacred than most written political agreements.”

Units from all three military services gave Musharraf a final salute before a warm send-off by three services chiefs that followed his historic resignation speech.

Stockholm, August 21
Indian sanitation expert Bindeshwar Pathak was awarded the 2009 Stockholm Water Prize, the most prestigious award for outstanding achievement in water-related activities on Thursday.

The founder of Sulabh Sanitation Movement in India, Pathak is known around the world for his wide-ranging work in the sanitation field. He has worked to improve public health, has advanced social progress, and has improved human rights in his home nation and other countries.

“Sanitation is humanity's and the world's most urgent and critical crisis of our times,” Pathak told IANS. He added: “However, it is not, yet, an unsolvable crisis and will require dedicated and selfless labour to achieve the goal.”

Pathak received the award, which has become akin to a Nobel Prize on environmental issues from HRH Prince Carl Philip of Sweden.

The Stockholm Water Prize, which was first presented in 1991, includes a $150,000 award and a crystal sculpture. It honours individuals, institutions or organisations whose work contributes broadly to the conservation and protection of water resources and improves the health of the planet's inhabitants and ecosystems.

“The correlation between sanitation and disease is dramatic and unmistakable,” said Anders Berntell, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).

Inadequate sanitation and its devastating effects on the world's poor comprise humanity's most urgent, yet solvable crisis, according to international leaders and experts convening at the 2009 World Water Week in Stockholm. — IANS

Unmindful and unaware of changes by the Australian immigration authorities to check “fraudulent use of education visa”, members of the Swinburne Punjabi Club, a vibrant group of international students, presented a programme of bhangra and Punjabi folk music here on Friday to “discredit” any impression of stress or tension among international students in general and Indian students in particular here.

“We are not aware of the changes the Australian authorities have made,” said Baljit Singh Sekhon, president of the club and an MIT student at Swinburne, one of five Australian universities blending professionalism with academics.

Twenty seven per cent of 6,000 international students of the university are Indians,” said regional team director of the Swinburne International, a wing that handles international students, Pankaj Arora. “I am not aware of the changes in the visa rules made yesterday, “ he said.

Immigration Minister Chris Evans announced yesterday that new visa rules would apply to international students from India, Mauritius, Nepal, Zimbabwe and a few other countries, where student applicants would henceforth be subject to stringent visa controls, as in some cases interviews would be made mandatory to access the suitability of the applicant.

Evans message was clear that only genuine students were welcome to Australia and others using education, as a tool to gain access to permanent residency in Australia may not find it any more easier. Those trying to mislead and conceal information at the time of application would face direct elimination at face-to-face interviews.

This would hit applicants from northern India, where ability to speak, write and listen to English to a desired level was a major problem. Some of the applicants had been managing IELTS certification by illicit means.

The new laws have evoked mixed response here. The present policy, many international students complain, needs a minimum of three to five years for a genuine student to get Permanent Residency (PR). There has been no job guarantee even after completing Masters from here. Jagrup Singh of Patiala said since he could not get a job in commercial cookery two years after completion of his course from a private college, where he paid a fee of $18,500, he took to taxi driving.