This TV grab image from a video obtained from the Democratic Voice of Burma 28 September shows Japanese video journalist Kenji Nagai lying dead on the street after being shot by Myanmar troops in Yangon's city center.

YANGON, Myanmar, Sept. 29--Security forces on Saturday charged a crowd of about 100 protesters in the center of Myanmar’s main city Yangon, beating many of them and arresting about five, witnesses said.
According to AFP, the group had gathered on the Pansoedan bridge in downtown Yangon, and as soon as they started to clap their hands, the squad of about 50 security forces swooped and began attacking them, they said.
“They beat people so badly. I wonder how these people can bear it. I saw the security forces arrest about five people on the streets,“ said one Yangon resident who witnessed the scene.
Those who were not detained managed to disperse, the witnesses said.
The small protest was the first to be held in Yangon on Saturday, as an overwhelming security operation successfully choked off daily rallies that attracted 10,000 on Friday and tens of thousands earlier in the week.
“Security members are outnumbering protesters in downtown.
The protesters dare not to come to downtown as they would certainly be badly beaten and arrested,“ another witness at the scene said.
At least 13 people were killed when troops opened fire and launched baton charges Wednesday and Thursday, but the United States and Britain, as well as Burmese opposition groups, have raised fears the death toll could be far higher.
The regime deployed large numbers of soldiers near the Sule Pagoda downtown on Saturday, where up to 100,000 protesters led by Buddhist monks took to the streets earlier in the week, the witnesses told AFP.
The two Yangon-based army divisions which have spearheaded the crackdown have now been joined by 66 Division from Pago, which lies northeast of the city.
As well as the tight security and vicious beatings that have deterred protesters, buses and taxis had abandoned the streets, making it difficult for people to travel to the city centre.
Eyewitness accounts have also related how ordinary people caught up in the onslaught of the military crackdown had been bashed, kicked and shot at with rubber bullets.

Viktor Yanukovich

KIEV, Ukraine, Sept. 29--Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, in a last election campaign push, urged voters on Friday to shun advocates of the “Orange Revolution“ that swept his rival to victory, accusing them of quarrelling over the spoils of power.
Yanukovich, who has rebounded from defeat in 2004, was addressing his second rally of the day as campaigning closed for Sunday’s parliamentary poll, aimed at ending months of turmoil pitting him against pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko, reported Reuters.
“Orange“ supporters, newly united in their resolve to win a majority, form a government and force out Yanukovich, also staged last-ditch rallies in the capital.
Addressing thousands in Independence Square, the focal point of the 2004 “orange“ protests, Yanukovich hammered home his Regions Party’s slogan of stability and said his rivals were intent on selling off the country’s wealth for their own benefit.
“Instead of creating new jobs, they provoke artificial crises, sell strategic companies to foreigners, steal and sell off Ukrainian land and beggar their own citizens,“ he said.
“We do our best to keep plants, factories, mines and farms working. They are already carving up their booty and quarrelling over jobs.“
Sunday’s early election is certain to produce a close finish and spawn long, difficult negotiations to form a stable majority in the 450-seat assembly able to form a government.
Any notion of orientation to the West or Russia, critical in the 2004 campaign, has been replaced by calls to improve the lot of Ukrainians earning a monthly average of $260.
Yushchenko on Thursday embraced the heroine of the Orange Revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, sacked as prime minister of his first government, making it plain she could once again become premier if voters return an “orange“ majority on Sunday.

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 29--Rwanda joined other countries Friday in appealing for a global moratorium on executions, stressing that if it could abolish the death penalty while perpetrators of the 1994 genocide still await sentencing, no country should use it.
Diplomats and human right organizations met at the United Nations to push for a global moratorium on executions with the goal of ending the death penalty altogether.
Rwandan Minister for Cooperation Rosemary Museminali said that her country, which outlawed the death penalty earlier this year, should serve as a model for others, AP said.
She said that even though genocide perpetrators are still around, “we still feel it is our moral obligation to preserve the right of life.“
Rwanda got rid of capital punishment in part to encourage European and other countries to extradite suspects in the genocide to Rwanda.
About 500,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, were massacred in 100 days of frenzied killing led by radical Hutus. The killing ended when Tutsi-led rebels under current President Paul Kagame defeated the Hutu extremists in July 1994.
The meeting was co-hosted by the Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema, whose country began a diplomatic push to gain international support for a moratorium following the Dec. 30 execution in Iraq of Saddam Hussein.
The moratorium was the focus of Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s speech to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday.
The death penalty is no longer carried out in 130 countries, including the 27-nation European Union, which has fought for global abolition. The US and China, which both have the death penalty, oppose the moratorium. So does the conservative government of EU member Poland, even though the country has no capital punishment.
D’Alema said the group was realistic about the strength of the opposition, which is why they are pushing for a moratorium before complete abolition.

TBILISI, Georgia,
Sept. 29--President Mikhail Saakashvili returned to Georgia on Saturday, an administration official said, interrupting a trip abroad amid tension over the arrest of a former ally who accused him of a murder plot.
Saakashvili returned overnight, deputy administration chief Eka Dzhodzhua said. He had been in New York attending a session of the UN General Assembly, AP reported.
Dzhodzhua declined to comment on the reason for Saakashvili’s return, which came hours after thousands of opposition supporters rallied in the capital, calling for his resignation in one of the most vocal challenges since the 2003 Rose Revolution street protests that propelled him to power.
The small, US-allied ex-Soviet republic was thrown into turmoil after Irakli Okruashvili, a longtime Saakashvili ally who served as his defense minister until late last year, charged Tuesday that Saakashvili was corrupt and had encouraged him to kill a prominent businessman.
Saakashvili has not commented on the allegations.
They came amid increasing tension between the Georgian government and the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia spiked further. Heavy gunfire between separatist and Georgian forces erupted Thursday night in South Ossetia’s main city and Abkhazian officials ordered heavy weaponry and extra troops deployed along the internal border separating Abkhazia and Georgia.
Security agents and police officials detained Okruashvili on Thursday at the offices of the new political party he announced earlier this week.
On Friday, prosecutors charged him with extortion, money laundering and abuse of power, and a court early Saturday ordered him held in jail for two months during further investigation.
The ruling came after midnight, delayed by a dispute between Okruashvili’s lawyer Eka Beselia and court security guards. Beselia said she was not allowed in, calling it pressure on the defense; a court official said she had left after refusing to produce an item that set off a metal detector.

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 29--Serbia and Kosovo’s Albanian leaders failed to narrow their differences in crunch talks here on the breakaway Serbian province’s future status but agreed to meet again in Brussels next month.
“We will have our next meeting with both parties in Brussels on October 14,“ said German mediator Wolfgang Ischinger, a member of the troika composed of the European Union, Russia and the United States mediating the talks, reported AFP.
The troika has until December 10 to complete their last-ditch effort to find a compromise acceptable to both sides, with the separatist Kosovo leaders threatening to declare independence unilaterally.
Serbs and ethnic Albanian separatist leaders stuck to their respective positions in Friday’s direct talks at the EU liaison office here, but agreed on the way forward in a document entitled “the New York declaration.“
After the meeting, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica expressed disappointment.
“I must say that I am a bit disappointed because this is the second round of talks that has happened in two years,“ he told a press conference.
“I’m afraid the other (side) is encouraged by some countries, mostly the United States, not to negotiate, feeling quite secure because it can be granted its independence.“
Kostunica blamed the United States for the stalemate, accusing Washington of pushing for months for Kosovo independence, even if it means recognizing a unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo’s majority Albanians, who comprise 90 percent of the territory’s population.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 29--Pakistan’s election commission on Saturday approved President Pervez Musharraf’s nomination to run in October 6 presidential elections despite objections from his opponents, officials said.
The commission cleared Musharraf and two rivals, plus covering candidates for all three, after scrutinizing their nomination papers, while rejecting 37 other applicants, AFP quoted commission secretary Kanwar Dilshad as saying.
Police used teargas and batons to break up a protest by hundreds of lawyers outside the building as Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and other officials attended the scrutiny of the papers.
“Musharraf’s nomination papers have been accepted. The other candidates raised objections. The others have also been accepted along with covering candidates,“ Dilshad told AFP.
His rivals are Wajihuddin Ahmad, a retired judge who refused to swear allegiance to Musharraf after the 1999 coup in which he seized power, and the vice chairman of Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, Makhdoom Amin Fahim.
Musharraf is almost certain to win the election because the ballot is by an electoral college of the national and provincial parliaments, in which his allies have a majority.
“We raised legal and constitutional objections to his candidacy but it is sad that our objections were ignored,“ said justice Tariq Mehmood, who represented Ahmad.
“We will take the legal course now.“ All the candidates filed their papers on Thursday.
Military ruler Musharraf won a Supreme Court battle on Friday to quash opposition legal challenges against his eligibility for election while he remains chief of the army.

Mahmoud Abbas

UNITED NATIONS,
Sept. 29--Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Friday that his government was completely committed to a US-proposed Mideast peace conference and vowed that the “olive branch of peace“ would not fall from his hands.
His impassioned speech to the UN General Assembly recalled the famous address to the same forum in 1974 by his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, who appeared wearing a holster and carrying a sprig, AP said.
Arafat told the assembled leaders that he carried both the olive branch and “the freedom fighter’s gun,“ and implored the world not to let that branch fall.
Abbas pledged that the “olive branch of peace that never withers or dies, will not fall from my hands.“
“Today, there is not the slightest obstacle to promoting the holding of (the upcoming) peace meeting, in particular because our brother Arab countries have demonstrated through the Arab Peace Initiative their true readiness to bring about a just, lasting and comprehensive peace,“ Abbas said, referring to the Arab proposal that offers peace in exchange for land.
“This is why we are very committed to the substance of that meeting as proposed... We would hope all parties would sit down to negotiation.“
He reiterated his government’s position that the key to solving the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinians lay in directly addressing the divisive “final status“ issues including Palestinian statehood, the status of Beit-ul-Moqaddas and right of return for refugees.
The November meeting proposed by the Bush administration is aimed at bringing together all parties involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, including key regional players like Syria and Saudi Arabia, as well as Jordan and Egypt which have already signed peace agreements with Israel.
But the Arab nations have so far been reluctant to commit, fearing that a failure to address the final status issues will result in a gathering high on show, but low on substance. An agenda has yet to be set and the invitations have not been sent.