Russian strategic bomber TU-95 surrounded by MiG-29 flies over Monino airfield during an air show, Aug. 17.

CHEBARKUL, Russia, Aug. 18--President Vladimir Putin placed strategic bombers back on long-range patrol for the first time since the Soviet breakup, sending a tough message to the United States hours after a major Russian military exercise with China.
Putin reviewed the first Russian-Chinese joint exercise on Russian soil before announcing that 20 strategic bombers had been sent far over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans--showing off Moscow’s muscular new posture and its growing military ties with Beijing, AP said.
Putin said halting long-range bombers after the Soviet collapse had hurt Russia’s security because other nations--an oblique reference to the United States--had continued such missions.
“I have made a decision to resume regular flights of Russian strategic aviation,“ Putin said in nationally televised remarks. “We proceed from the assumption that our partners will view the resumption of flights of Russia’s strategic aviation with understanding.“
US-Russian relations have been strained over Washington’s criticism of Russia’s democracy record, Moscow’s objections to US missile defense plans and differences over crises such as the Iraq war. But the Bush administration downplayed the significance of the renewed patrols.
“We certainly are not in the kind of posture we were with what used to be the Soviet Union. It’s a different era,“ State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. “If Russia feels as though they want to take some of these old aircraft out of mothballs and get them flying again, that’s their decision.“
Soviet bombers routinely flew missions to areas where nuclear-tipped cruise missiles could be launched at the United States. They stopped in the post-Soviet economic meltdown. Booming oil prices have allowed Russia to sharply increase its military spending.
NATO jets were scrambled to escort the Russian aircraft over the oceans, he said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.
Eleven Russian military planes--including strategic bombers and fighter jets--carried out maneuvers west of NATO member Norway on Friday, a military official said.

CAIRO, Egypt,
Aug. 18--Police on Friday arrested 16 prominent Muslim Brotherhood leaders and businessmen for allegedly holding a secret meeting of the banned movement, a police official said.
The arrests occurred as police raided a house where the group was meeting, the police official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, AP said.
Essam el-Erian, a key Brotherhood leader was among the arrested, the official said, adding that the detained members’ activities at “reviving efforts“ of the outlawed group had led to the arrests. Authorities also confiscated Brotherhood material and publications, the official said.
The Brotherhood’s Web site identified the arrested as “top leaders of the group,“ and said they had gathered in the home of Nabeel Moqbil, a Brotherhood member and well-known businessman, in Giza, Cairo’s twin city.
El-Erian was released from prison in December after spending six months in jail as Brotherhood leader. He has been banned from going abroad and forced to report on his movements inside Egypt.
The Egyptian daily Al Gomhuria reported that el-Erian had intended to travel to Turkey.
The Brotherhood, which has been banned since 1954, is Egypt’s largest opposition group. Its lawmakers, who run as independents, currently hold 88 seats in the 454-member lower house of the parliament.
The Brotherhood claim that the number of their detained members is at 600, including key leaders.
Earlier this month, police arrested 40 university students and their professors at a beach resort on charges of belonging to the Brotherhood.

A firefighter walks through a destroyed street of Pisco, south of Lima, Aug. 17.

CHINCHA, Peru, Aug. 18--As thousands of terrified Peruvians ran from falling buildings during a deadly earthquake, nearly 700 inmates took advantage of a collapsed prison wall to run to freedom.
Wednesday’s 8.0-magnitude temblor that devastated Peru’s southern coast caused chaos inside the Tambo de Mora Prison on the outskirts of Chincha, just 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of the epicenter, police Lt. Jorge Soto said Friday.
Built on the sandy soil of Peru’s coastal desert, the lockup sank during the powerful quake and was severely damaged by a phenomenon called liquefaction, in which the prolonged shaking transforms loose, water-saturated sediments into a liquid slurry, reported AP.
“Tsunami, tsunami!“ the inmates shouted mistakenly as almost 2 feet of muddy water rushed into their cells, said Soto, who works at the prison. Ceiling lights came crashing down, prison doors swung open, and the wall surrounding the prison crumbled.
Soto said prison police desperately fired their weapons into the air to try to stop the inmates from escaping.
But then “people in nearby houses also started to come out and everyone got mixed up,“ he said. “That’s when we stopped shooting.“
When the shaking finally stopped after an agonizing two minutes, 90 percent of the prison was severely damaged and parts had collapsed, the National Penitentiary Institute said in a statement.
Twenty others were captured by authorities, and 607 were still missing Friday.
Journalists were not allowed inside the prison, but Soto said most of the cells were still flooded with muddy water.
In the town of Chincha the quake leveled scores of adobe homes and, according to some reports, killed as many as 170 people.

PRISTINA, Serbia,
Aug. 18--NATO will not allow Serbia to send troops back to its breakaway Kosovo province, an official said Saturday.
“Serbian forces will not be authorized to return,“ Germany’s Colonel Michael Knop, spokesman of NATO-led peacekeeping forces in Kosovo (KFOR), told AFP.
“KFOR is responsible for security in Kosovo and there is no intention to authorize such a decision,“ Knop added.
Serbia said Friday it wanted to send soldiers and policemen back to Kosovo in accordance with the UN Security Council resolution 1244.
Resolution 1244 ended the Kosovo conflict between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanian separatists. It included an option that up to 1,000 Serbian policemen and soldiers could be sent back to the province to guard cultural and religious sites.
The option has never been taken up amid fears that it would exacerbate tensions.
Kosovo is still technically a Serbian province. But it has been a UN protectorate since a NATO air campaign in June 1999 ended a Serbian armed forces’ crackdown against the independence-minded ethnic Albanian majority and drove them out of the province.
Some 16,000 NATO-led peacekeepers are currently deployed throughout the province.
Ethnic Albanian officials in Kosovo also rejected the idea of Serbian forces’ return.
“It’s an absurdity,“ Kosovo government spokeswoman Ulpiana Lama told AFP.
The international troika of the United States, the European Union and Russia has launched a new round of negotiations on Kosovo.
This follows Belgrade and Moscow’s rejection of the UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari’s plan to grant Kosovo supervised independence.
The talks are expected to resume on August 30 in Vienna.
Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, who make up 90 percent of the 1.8 million population, want nothing short of independence, while Belgrade only wants to concede at most a high degree of autonomy.

SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Aug. 18--A US hacker’s homemade program to pinpoint origins of Wikipedia edits indicates that alterations to the popular online encyclopedia have come from the CIA and the Vatican.
Virgil Griffith’s “Wikiscanner“ points to Central Intelligence Agency computers as the sources of nearly 300 edits to subjects including Iran’s president, the Argentine navy, and China’s nuclear arsenal, AFP said.
A CIA computer was the source of a whiny “Wahhhhh“ inserted in a paragraph about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s plans for the office.
“While I cannot confirm whether any changes were made from CIA computers, the agency always expects its computer systems to be used responsibly,“ CIA spokesman George Little said in response to an AFP inquiry.
Wikipedia is a communally refined Internet encyclopedia that taps into the “wisdom of the masses“ by letting anyone make changes.
Its founders believe people who know better will quickly correct inaccurate or misleading information.
Griffith, a university graduate student and self-described hacker, says his software matches unique “IP“ addresses of computers with Wikipedia records regarding which machines are used to make online edits. “I came up with the idea when I heard about Congressmen getting caught for whitewashing their Wikipedia pages,“ Griffith explains on his website.
Most edits listed at Wikiscanner involve minor changes such as spelling. Some alterations involve removing unflattering information, adding facts or inserting insults.
Wikiscanner’s roster indicates a Vatican computer was used to remove references to evidence linking Ireland’s Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to a decades-old double murder.

GHAZNI, Afghanistan, Aug. 18--Taliban militants on Saturday were deciding the fate of 19 South Korean hostages in Afghanistan after talks for their release failed, a spokesman for the militia told AFP.
“The negotiations have failed. The Taliban leading council is making its decision now on the fate of the hostages,“ said the spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi.
Face-to-face talks between Taliban negotiators and a South Korean delegation in Ghazni, the capital of Ghazni province where the 23 Christian aid workers were abducted nearly a month ago, ended Thursday with no result, he said.
Ahmadi said more talks did not seem “probable“ as Taliban demands for the release of some of their men from prisoner in exchange for the hostages’ liberty had not been met by the Afghan government.
“Further talks will not achieve anything, the Koreans told us that the Americans and the Afghan government are not ready to release our prisoners,“ he said.
The Taliban freed two women hostages on Monday in what they said was a “gesture of good will“. The two were the first to be released since the South Koreans were seized on July 19 on the main highway south of the capital Kabul.
Two of the men in the group have been murdered, and the Taliban have threatened to shoot more if their demands are not met.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Aug. 18--A suicide car bomber attacked a US convoy in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing 15 people, including 11 civilians, and wounding 26 others, police said.
Police said the attack took place in a crowded area west of the city of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban movement that is now waging an increasingly bloody insurgency against Afghan officials and foreign troops.
“Fifteen people, four Afghan security guards and 11 civilians were killed and another 26 including 19 civilians and seven guards were wounded in the suicide blast today,“ police chief Sayed Aqa Saqib told AFP.
The logistics convoy, which was guarded by a US private security firm, was heading to troubled Zehri district in Helmand province when the attack took place.
The blast destroyed two vehicles belonging to the guards and a civilian minibus, police said at the scene.
“The bomb was so strong that it ripped through the civilian minibus and several other vehicles,“ police officer Jan Mohammad said.