WASHINGTON,
April 27--The Pentagon notified Congress on Tuesday of a proposed sale to Israel of 100 guided bunker-busting bombs, a move that analysts said could prompt concerns about a unilateral Israel strike against Iran, Reuters reported.
Israel has requested the sale of the Lockheed Martin Corp.
GBU-28s worth as much as $30 million, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency said in a notice required by law for government-to-government military sales.
The GBU-28 was developed for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground and would be used by the Israeli Air Force on their US-built F-15 aircraft, the agency said.
Israel--believed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear armed state--has denied speculation that it might make a military strike on Iran to prevent it from producing an atomic bomb.
In 1981 Israel sent jets to bomb an Iraqi reactor, driving Saddam Hussein’s quest for a bomb underground, and fueling speculation of a similar strike on Iran.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in a interview with CNN earlier this month, said his country was not planning any military attack on Iran.
Sharon, in a separate interview with Fox News, said: “Of course we take all precautions and all the steps to defend ourselves. But it’s not that Israel should give the answer to the international problem“ of Iran potentially developing a bomb.
In January, Vice President Dick Cheney warned Israel could in the future try to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The Defense Security Cooperation Agency said the sale of the GBU-28s would “not affect the basic military balance in the region.“
John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, said the proposed sale was clearly “a provocative step“ that would prompt concerns about a unilateral Israel strike, particularly in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.
“One could be suspicious that these bombs could be used for an Israeli attack on Iran,“ Isaacs said, noting that the bunker-busting bombs in question were nonnuclear, which limited their ability to dig far underground.

DUBAI, UAE, April 27--Al-Qaeda’s Saudi branch posted its Sawt Al-Jihad online magazine Wednesday after a hiatus of several months, dedicating it to clashes earlier this month between militants and security men in the kingdom, AFP reported.
The 29th edition of the magazine, which runs to more than 40 pages, includes an editorial by Saud Al-Otaibi, written before he was killed in the April 3-5 clashes and who is described by the authorities as Al-Qaeda’s chief in Saudi Arabia.
In the article, Otaibi denied Saudi authorities had “eliminated jihad (holy war)“ in the kingdom and urged “those who could not join the mujahedeen (warriors) in the Arabian peninsula“ to make their way “to Iraq or another front for jihad“.
They should “target Americans and kill the enemies of God among the crusaders and apostates in the peninsula of the Arabs or elsewhere“.
Fifteen suspected Al-Qaeda militants were killed in the three-day gunbattle with Saudi security forces in the Al-Qassim region, a haven for Islamist militants some 320 kilometers north of Riyadh.
The dead also included Abdel Karim Al-Mejati, the presumed Moroccan mastermind of the Madrid train bombings in March 2004.
The gunbattle was the bloodiest in a nearly two-year-old campaign by security forces against Islamist militants behind a spate of attacks in the oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdom.
The violence has claimed at least 221 lives, according to an official toll.

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan,
April 27--Protestors smashed through the door of Kyrgyzstan’s parliament on Wednesday amid continued unrest following president Askar Akayev’s ouster, an AFP reporter at the scene said.
Around 200 people rallied at the Central Asian country’s parliament, some of them scuffling with police. Around 100 more protested outside the national security service’s headquarters.
The protestors were mostly supporters of four candidates stripped by the supreme court of victory at parliamentary polls this spring that were widely considered to have been rigged and led to Akayev’s March 24 ouster.
“We want them to give Madiarov his mandate,“ protest leader Zynet Abdiyeva said, referring to Toktusun Madiarov, a candidate in the central Toktogul region.
“The parliament is prolonging this process so we want to force our way inside and ask the deputies why they are not solving this problem and what they are doing,“ Abdiyeva told AFP.
The protestors at the offices of the national security service were demanding freedom for two men arrested last week on suspicion of involvement in the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir and on suspicion of illegal weapons possession, protestors and officials said.
Observers say that this impoverished mountain republic remains somewhat unstable in the wake of the ouster of its first post-Soviet leader Akayev.
On Monday the supreme court’s longstanding chairman Kurmanbek Osmonov resigned due to the protests.
Amid heightened fears about security, police arrested four men carrying eight hand grenades with them in a taxi in the capital Bishkek on Tuesday night, an interior ministry spokesman told AFP.
Interim President Kurmanbek Bakiyev has promised free and fair presidential elections on July 10.

Australian soldiers at Banda Aceh airport carry an injured Acehnese, January 4. (Reuters File Photo)

JAKARTA, Indonesia, April 27--Foreign peacekeepers won’t be part of any international monitoring of Indonesia’s tsunami-devastated Aceh province after a possible peace deal between the government and rebels, Reuters quoted Jakarta as saying on Wednesday.
The European Union said on Tuesday the mediator for ongoing peace talks, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, had raised the possibility of deploying peacekeeping troops in Aceh to manage any deal to end three decades of fighting.
After three rounds of talks in Finland that began in January following the devastation of the Asian tsunami, Indonesia and the separatist Free Aceh Movement said in a statement earlier this month they would welcome involvement from regional organizations such as the European Union (EU) in monitoring a peace agreement.
However, Indonesian Information Minister Sofyan Djalil, a key member of Indonesia’s negotiating team, said on Wednesday a foreign peacekeeping troop deployment in Aceh was not an option.
“The general understanding is that if a peace deal is reached, an external monitoring team will become possible but not a foreign peacekeeping force,“ he told Reuters.
“If there is a deal, it needs to be monitored. The monitors can be civilians or from the military. But remember, the deal has not been reached yet,“ said Djalil, who is Acehnese.
Any proposal for foreign peacekeepers would be a hard sell to Indonesia’s military and some nationalist politicians after such a deployment ended in independence for East Timor in 1999.
Foreign soldiers, including from EU member nations, played a key role in emergency relief in Aceh after the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami, which killed nearly 130,000 Indonesians, but their presence also raised nationalist hackles.
Most foreign troops have now left Aceh, but some, including American and Australian forces, returned to Nias island after a March 28 quake that devastated islands off the Sumatra coast.
A Jakarta military general stressed on Wednesday the military would only tolerate foreign troops in Aceh for humanitarian aid.

Chinese demonstrators march in streets during an anti-Japanese rally in Shanghai, April 16. (AFP Photo)

TOKYO, April 27--Japan is becoming increasingly unpopular with its closest Asian neighbors, according to a poll carried out before a series of anti-Japan demonstrations in China earlier this month, a Japanese daily said on Wednesday.
In a survey commissioned by the liberal Asahi Shimbun in March, 63 percent of respondents in South Korea and 64 percent in China said they disliked Japan, Reuters reported.
The figures were up from 34 percent of Chinese who said they disliked Japan in a 1997 poll and 57 percent of respondents who expressed dislike in a South Korean poll in 2001, the paper said.
Earlier this month, anti-Japanese demonstrations in China turned violent as feelings erupted over a range of issues, many related to a view in China that Japan has tried to whitewash its history of aggression in Asia before and during World War Two.
South Koreans were also angered by Japanese claims to a group of tiny islets between the two countries, known as Takeshima in Japan and Tokto in South Korea. They are currently held by Seoul.
More than 80 percent of respondents in each country opposed Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, the paper said, while two thirds of Chinese said they were unaware of Japan’s record of providing official development assistance (ODA) to China.
Feelings were more muted in Japan, where 22 percent of respondents said they disliked South Korea and 28 percent said they disliked China, the Asahi said.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, April 27--Taliban fighters ambushed a police chief’s convoy in southern Afghanistan, killing four policeman, in the latest incident in a wave of rebel violence, Reuters quoted police as saying on Wednesday.
The police chief of Deshu district in Helmand province, Shadi Khan, survived Tuesday’s attack near the Pakistan border but four of his men were killed. Two Taliban fighters were also killed in the clash, the police chief said.
“I lost four of my bodyguards and two others went missing. We killed two Taliban,“ Khan said.
A Taliban spokesman, Abdul Latif Hakimi, confirmed the ambush but said no Taliban were killed. The two policemen captured in the fighting were executed, he said. Taliban attacks have picked up in recent weeks, especially in the south and east of the country, after a winter lull.
Rebels raided a district headquarters in neighboring Kandahar province at the weekend, killing two policemen. Four guerrillas were killed.
A Romanian member of a US-led international force hunting militants was killed in a weekend blast in another part of Kandahar and two US soldiers and two government men were wounded in a weekend attack in Uruzgan province.
US-led forces toppled the Taliban government in late 2001 after it refused to hand over al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks on US cities.

An elderly Ukrainian woman places a portrait of her relative, who perished after battling the aftermath at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, at a memorial to the victims in Kiev, April 26. (Reuters Photo)

KIEV, Ukraine,
April 27--Hundreds of people took part in religious services in Ukraine early Tuesday to commemorate the victims of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which spread radioactive contamination across a swathe of Europe and led to the premature death of tens of thousands of people, AFP reported.
An overnight service was held in the village of Slavutich near the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine, which closed in December 2000 but still poses a threat due to the 200 tones of radioactive magma buried under the fractured cover of its number four reactor.
In Kiev hundreds of people--former Chernobyl employees, people sent in to “clean up“ after the disaster, widows and mothers who had lost sons--placed flowers on the memorials to the dead.
The disaster occurred on April 26, 1986, at 01:23 am, when the core of Chernobyl’s number four reactor exploded, spewing out radioactive elements into the atmosphere, equivalent to 200 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. The radioactive cloud spread across Ukraine, Belarus, Scandinavia and western Europe.
Officially 31 people died in the accident, shortly after the explosion. However, since 1986, more than 25,000 civilian and military personnel from Russia and Belarus, who fought the radioactive blaze and built a concrete cover for the damaged reactor, have died.
Some 600,000 of these so-called “liquidators“ worked on the disaster site between 1986 and 1990, in addition to the 130,000 people who were evacuated from the contaminated zone in the days which followed the accident.