Fuad Siniora

BEIRUT, Lebanon, July 20--Lebanon’s new Prime Minister Fuad Siniora unveiled his cabinet on Tuesday which includes for the first time a member of the Shi’ite Muslim militant group Hezbollah, regarded as terrorist by Washington, AFP reported.
Siniora’s cabinet, which was approved by President Emile Lahoud after three previous draft line-ups had been rejected, is the first elected government since Syria ended its three-decade military presence in April.
“It is a coherent team...chosen to overcome the challenges confronting Lebanon,“ Siniora told reporters, saying he was proud to have Hezbollah in his cabinet.
“It is excellent that Hezbollah is in the government...It has a strong popular base and must be represented.“
Siniora, a 62-year-old former finance minister who was a close ally of slain ex-premier Rafiq Hariri, also pledged that his new government would do everything it could to improve relations with neighboring Syria.
Ties with Damascus have taken a turn for the worse since Syria’s troop pullout and the May-June elections, which gave anti-Syrian groups a majority in parliament for the first time since the 1975-1990 civil war.
Siniora said that after his cabinet receives a vote of confidence from parliament he will travel to Syria “smooth over differences“ with Damascus.
He also called on the Arab League to aid in that, particularly in helping to break the bottleneck in cross-border traffic since the Syrian withdrawal, created by more stringent Syrian checks at the frontier, which has been causing economic hardship in Lebanon.
Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa called Sunday for “political entente“ between Damascus and Beirut.
The prime minister-designate has pledged to try to rebuild national unity shaken by the February assassination of Hariri, and to embark on sweeping reforms to revive the debt-laden economy.
Since his nomination at the end of June, Siniora had been scrambling to form a government in the face of the mounting political and economic tensions with Damascus, which has dominated Lebanon since the end of the civil war.
Hezbollah representative Mohammed Fneish becomes energy minister in the new government while Shi’ite independent Fawzi Salukh becomes
foreign minister.
Two of the new ministers, however, are technocrats, and occupy key posts.

UNITED NATIONS, July 20--The UN Security Council ordered governments on Tuesday to freeze the assets of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a London-based Saudi opposition group accused of ties to Al-Qaeda, Reuters reported.
Britain, backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia, proposed adding the group’s name to the council’s list of organizations linked to the Taliban, Osama bin Laden or his Al-Qaeda network.
A council committee approved the proposal days after Washington added the group to its own compilation of such organizations. London ordered a freeze on any assets the group may have in Britain last December.
The organization is run by Saad Al-Fagih, an exiled Saudi dissident who was put on the UN list in December.
Fagih uses the group to provide Al- Qaeda with recruits and public relations help, said Stuart Levey, the US Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.
The group’s Web site contained messages from bin Laden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al- Qaeda’s Iraq wing, Levey told reporters last week in Washington.
Fagih told Reuters in London last week that he and his group aimed to topple the Saudi monarchy by peaceful means and accused Washington of targeting them because of the threat they posed to the Saudi government, a close US ally.
“Those justifications are rubbish. I am telling the American government to prove that our Web site is being used by Al-Qaeda or that I am their spokesman,“ he said. “I am surprised that what is supposed to be a respectable superpower speaks at the same level as a tyrannical government in the Middle East.“
The UN committee provided no explanation for its action.
But the goal of its listing mechanism is to deprive suspected terrorists of the money and other resources they need to carry out attacks.

MOSCOW, July 20--Authors of a scandal-stirring public letter attacking Russian Jews announced late Tuesday they had gathered 15,000 signatures to press charges against the Russian publisher of a 16th century Jewish religious code, which they accuse of being anti-Russian.
“We lodged a demand late Monday with Moscow’s Basmanny Court to force the Prosecutor’s office to open an inquiry against the Russian publishers of the Shulhan Arukh,“ one of the petition’s authors, publisher Viktor Nazarov, told AFP.
The petition accuses the Shulhan Arukh of spreading racial hatred. Under Russian law, only the prosecutor’s office can press charges on such grounds.
Last January, 500 people, including 20 lawmakers, signed an anti-Semitic public letter called “Jewish happiness, Russian tears“.
It attacked the Shulhan Arukh’s Russian translators, demanded the banning of all Jewish organizations, which it accused of “extremism,“ and denounced “a hidden genocide against the Russian nation and Russian culture.“
Signatories of the letter included former world chess champion Boris Spassky and mathematician Igor Shafarevich, and dozens of Russian Orthodox priests and editors of nationalist newspapers.
Russian prosecutors last month declined to bring charges against either the Shulhan Arukh’s translators or the authors of the letter.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 20--Pakistan has detained more than 100 suspected Islamic militants in a crackdown launched in the wake of London bombings police sources said Wednesday.
“We have rounded up over 100 suspected militants in raids on seminaries, offices of religious groups and houses throughout the country,“ a senior security official monitoring the crackdown told AFP.
He said President Pervez Musharraf had given “clear orders“ to stamp out militancy and demanded a “zero tolerance“ attitude against those spreading violence and hatred.
Pakistan has been under pressure to act since it emerged that three suicide bombers involved in the July 7 London attacks were Britons of Pakistani origin who had recently visited the country.

SYDNEY, Australia, July 20--Islamists who preach violence should be deported to rid Australia of the “disease“ of extremism, AFP quoted Australia’s top Muslim cleric as saying in remarks published Wednesday.
Sheikh Taj Aldin Al Hilali told The Australian newspaper in an interview that radical clerics were “a disease like AIDS and you can’t cure them with Panadol“.
“Any clerics who preach violence or hatred against Australian society should be deported, 100 percent,“ he told the newspaper’s reporter, stressing that he did not believe this was happening at present.
The mufti, commenting on a controversy over extremist literature discovered at Sydney bookstores this week, also said the sale of Islamic books preaching hatred or violence should be banned.
Police are investigating the bookstores and Attorney General Philip Ruddock said Australia may tighten its anti-terror laws to prevent the sale of radical Islamic books which incite attacks.
Another senior Muslim cleric, Sheik Mohammed Omran, rejected both suggestions by the mufti.
“We do not have clerics who incite hatred here so there is no point raising the issue of deporting clerics who incite hatred,“ he told the newspaper.
“Australia is a free country and should allow all books to be sold here.“
Hilali said, however, that some young Muslims were drawn to extremist teachings by a few local and visiting clerics who had little religious education themselves.
“A small number of Muslims do have a disease of the mind,“ he said.
The row over the books and extremist teachings follows the terror attacks in London and the discovery that the bombers were British, sparking fears acknowledged by Prime Minister John Howard that a similar attack could take place in Australia.
Hilali said that though he believed this was unlikely, he was concerned that the minds of some young Australian Muslims were being manipulated.

South Korea's chief delegate Moon Sung-Muk (2l) shakes hands with his North Korean counterpart Ryu Yong-Chul (2r) before Inter-Korean working-level military talks at the truce village of Panmunjom July 20. (Reuters Photo)

SEOUL, South Korea, July 20--Senior military officers from South and North Korea began rare talks on Wednesday aimed at building trust between two armies that have faced off for decades along the one of the world’s most fortified borders, Reuters reported.
The meeting of colonels at the Panmunjum truce village inside the Demilitarized Zone sets the stage for a meeting of military generals, which is likely to be held next month in North Korea, South Korean officials have said.
The talks reopen a channel of dialogue between two militaries that are technically still at war and come days before six-party talks in Beijing on ending North Korea’s nuclear arms program. The 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, not a full peace treaty.
Two rounds of talks by military generals last year resulted in an agreement, not yet fully implemented, to cease propaganda broadcasts along the Cold War’s last frontier and establish radio hotlines between the two Koreas’ navies.
“This is about reducing tension on the Korean peninsula,“ said South Korea’s top delegate to the talks, Army Colonel Moon Sung-muk.
Moon said the two sides will also discuss ways to better improve communication between the two Koreas’ navies operating in disputed waters off the peninsula.
Naval clashes in rich fishing grounds of the Yellow Sea in past years left scores of sailors on both sides dead or wounded. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun has said the potential for such clashes remains the biggest threat to stability on the Korean peninsula.
Despite stepped-up bilateral ties in recent weeks and an unprecedented-- and unrepeated--meeting of the two Koreas’ leaders in June 2000, military tensions have remained high.
The majority of the North’s 1.2 million soldiers are deployed near the border against the South’s 690,000 troops.

LIMA, Peru, July 20--Thousands of Peruvians, many wearing white clothes and gloves to signify their hands are clean, marched on Tuesday to call for an end to public graft in one of the biggest protests of President Alejandro Toledo’s unpopular rule, Reuters reported.
“We must combat this virus that grows in people’s hearts and fills their pockets. It’s every Peruvian’s obligation,“ protest organizer Luis Bambaren, a retired bishop, told a crowd at Peru’s main court, which critics call the “Palace of Injustice“.
Toledo, who has a year to go in office, has been beset by scandals during his four years in power and is accused of faking signatures to register his party for the 2000 elections.
There were no official estimates on the size of the protest, but reporters at the scene said about 4,000 people participated in the event, which was peaceful.
Dozens of people wore huge masks of Toledo and ex-President Alberto Fujimori, whom the government has been unable to extradite since he fled to Japan at the height of a corruption scandal in 2000.
Fujimori, who makes regular radio broadcasts from Tokyo, denies any wrongdoing and says he plans to run for president in April’s elections.
A new Apoyo poll showed that 56 percent of Lima residents see corruption as the most serious problem in Peruvian politics and say they are tired of the impunity in which politicians operate.
One protester dressed as a clown said: “The justice system clowns around and laughs at Peruvians in their faces.“
Nineteen of Toledo’s relatives are being investigated for corruption, while a former aide is in prison accused of bribing judges. Seven of Toledo’s ministers have quit over influence-peddling scandals.
Despite Toledo’s pledge to “go to war“ on corruption, several of those accused of Fujimori-era graft have been freed for a lack of evidence or because the courts never agreed on a sentence. Last week, a court lifted the house arrest of Telemundo TV presenter Laura Bozzo--accused of receiving $3 million from Fujimori’s jailed spy chief, Vladimiro MontesinosÑbecause judges kept her under arrest for three years without handing down a sentence.
Of the 73 people on trial for corruption in Peru, 50 are under house arrest and Peruvians fear they too will be freed.