Pakistani security policy set to follow Musharraf

This hand out picture released by the Pakistan People's Party shows Pakistani leaders of the ruling coalition attending a meeting in Islamabad on Tuesday. Leaders of Pakistan's ruling coalition were to meet later to discuss a replacement for President Pervez Musharraf and the fate of dozens of deposed judges, a party spokesman said. The meeting comes a day after key US ally Musharraf resigned in the face of impeachment charges, nine years after he seized power of the nuclear-armed nation in a military coup. l AFP Photo

Russia warns of Georgia withdrawal delays

Russia's army remained entrenched in Georgia Tuesday and a top official warned that withdrawal could be delayed, as the main Western military alliance met in crisis session to discuss the conflict.In a rare gesture of goodwill prisoners were exchanged at a checkpoint 30 kilometres (19 miles) from the Georgian capital Tbilisi.An AFP reporter saw 13 Georgians exchanged for five Russians. The Georgians, two of them wounded, had earlier emerged from Russian helicopters that landed near the site.Despite Moscow's assurances of having started a pullout Monday, there was no sign on the ground of major troop movements out of the ex-Soviet republic, which shares the Caucasus mountains border with Russia.NATO foreign ministers met in Brussels to discuss ways to pressure Russia to stick to the French-brokered peace plan which demands both sides retreat from the battle zone of South Ossetia.But Russia, which sent in a huge force on August 8 to drive off a Georgian assault on Moscow-backed separatists in South Ossetia, indicated there would be delays.

US shrugs off NKorea criticism over nuclear issue

The United States on Monday shrugged off criticism from North Korea and maintained that it should adopt measures to verify its nuclear program before being delisted from Washington's terrorism blacklist."What we require right now is that verification package from North Korea before we can go forward with the delisting," State Department spokesman Robert Wood said. He was reacting to criticism from North Korea Monday that Washington was not honoring a six-nation denuclearization deal.

US election contrasts two types of patriotism

The US presidential election presents a sharp contrast between two types of patriotism: John McCain stands as a war hero. His rival Barack Obama calls Americans back to the can-do spirit of the nation's founders. In November the candidates will find out which style appealed more to voters in this time of war and economic uncertainty. Democratic candidate Obama has made patriotism a core theme of his campaign, seeking to inspire voters to overcome divisions of race and party and using his own story as a child of a Kenyan father and Kansas mother as an example of opportunities available only in America. But on the campaign trail, audiences also applaud Republican McCain's tales of his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam which embody qualities he seeks to project as a candidate. As a Navy pilot, McCain was shot down over Hanoi in 1967. He was stabbed, beaten, tortured and imprisoned for more than five years, including two years in solitary confinement.

43 dead in three days as Mexico violence escalates

At least 43 people died in violent attacks in the last three days in the northern Mexico state of Chihuahua, the scene of ongoing drug gang turf wars, police said Monday.Thirteen males, aged between 18 and 41, died in separate attacks on Monday, mostly in the flashpoint city of Ciudad Juarez on the US border, local police said. Assassins killed nine people overnight Sunday in the city, following the slaying of 21 people the previous night, including 14 in a massacre at a family gathering in the western Chihuahua town of Creel.

43 killed in Algerian police school suicide attack

A suicide attack Tuesday on a police school killed 43 people and wounded 38, authorities said as Algeria reeled from its worst militant assault this year.An Al-Qaeda group has claimed previous suicide attacks in Algeria but officials gave no indication who was behind the attack on candidates waiting to take an examination at Issers, 60 kilometres (40 miles) east of Algiers.The Interior Ministry stressed that the casualty toll was still provisional.But it is already the deadliest attack this year in Algeria and worse than the December 2007 attacks in Algiers against government and United Nations buildings, which killed 41 people and injured many others.Witnesses told AFP the attacker drove a car packed with explosives at the main entrance to the school as university graduates waited outside to start an entry exam in the hope of joining the paramilitary gendarmerie.

Iran picks firms to hunt for nuclear plant sites

Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation signed deals on Tuesday with six local companies tasking them to hunt for potential sites for new nuclear power plants, the official news agency IRNA reported."These six domestic companies have been given 13 months to find appropriate locations to build new atomic power plants," the director of nuclear energy production, Ahmad Fayaz Bakhsh, was quoted as saying."After finalising the locations, construction of the power plants can begin," he said, without mentioning how many would be built.The announcement came with Iran under intense international pressure over its refusal to freeze uranium enrichment, a process used to manufacture nuclear fuel but which can also be diverted to make the core of an atomic bomb.Iran, OPEC's number two oil exporter, has vehemently denied Western allegations it is seeking to to build nuclear weapons and insists it only wants to produce energy for its growing population.A Russian contractor is currently building Iran's first nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr, but completion has been repeatedly delayed.Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, the head of Iran's atomic agency, was quoted as saying on August 8 that Bushehr was expected to start up by the end of the year.Among the six chosen to hunt for sites is Khatam-ol-Anbia, the vast business arm of Iran's ideological Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps which is under US and EU sanctions for links with nuclear proliferation activities.Fayaz Bakhsh said that four foreign companies-two Russian, one from Canada and a Swiss firm-had joined 58 domestic bidders for the contract. In May 2007, Iran said it had started building a 360-megawatt nuclear power plant, also in the south of the country, using indigenous technology.