File photo shows Japanese people scuffling with police during an anti-US demonstration outside US Embassy in Tokyo.

Thousands of Japanese rallied against the permanent basing of a nuclear-powered US warship near Tokyo, saying a recent on-board fire made it unsafe.
About 13,000 protesters gathered at a park near the port of Yokosuka, just south of the capital, where the USS George Washington aircraft carrier will be based, media reports and organizers said, according to “The Canadian Press“.
The George Washington -- relieving the soon-to-be decommissioned USS Kitty Hawk -- will be the first US navy nuclear-powered vessel to station permanently in Japan.
The ship’s arrival was originally set for August under a Japan-US security deal, but was delayed because of a fire aboard the vessel in May.

Concerns Escalate
The George Washington’s deployment had already triggered protests and the fire escalated concerns many Japanese have about nuclear power.
Some 250 residents have filed a lawsuit seeking to block the aircraft carrier from basing in Japan.
People in Japan, the only country to suffer from atomic bombings, tend to be sensitive about the military use of nuclear technology.
The US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 killed at least 200,000.
The US navy has said the George Washington’s fire, which left one sailor with minor burns and 23 others with heat stress, never threatened the safety of the ship’s nuclear reactor.
However, some of the protesters questioned the safety of the vessel Sunday.
“The US military has not fully disclosed the cause (of the fire),“ said Masahiko Goto, a lawyer representing local residents, Kyodo News agency reported.
“Japan should not allow a deployment when serious safety concerns remain,“ Goto said.
The Kitty Hawk, which was commissioned in 1961, has been home-ported in Japan since 1998 as the only forward-deployed carrier in the U.S. navy. It is the navy’s last conventionally powered aircraft carrier.

Fire Bomb at US Consulate
Meanwhile, an assailant threw a homemade firebomb into the US consulate compound on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, home to most of the American troops based in Japan, but nobody was injured in the attack, police said, AP reported.
The Molotov cocktail fell in the garden inside the compound and burned itself out, Okinawan police official Yasuhiko Yoshinaga said. He declined to give further details.
A local resident told police that a person driving a black motorbike fled the scene after the attack.
Okinawa, located 1,000 miles south of Tokyo, is home to more than half the 50,000 US troops based in Japan and is considered a linchpin in the American military posture in Asia.
There has long been anti-US military sentiment on the island, with Okinawans complaining of soldier-related crimes.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called on his Colombian counterpart Alvaro Uribe to restrain the neighboring country’s defense minister, two days after the two presidents met and agreed to improve diplomatic relations.
Chavez was responding to Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos’s comments on Monday that he hoped the Venezuelan leader would follow through with promises made during a meeting with Uribe on July 11, according to Bloomberg .
The Venezuelan president called Santos a ’warmonger’.
“Santos, who has said 100 times that Venezuela is Colombia’s enemy, wants to be president,’’ Chavez said in comments broadcast by state television.
“He’s a threat for us. I’m asking my friend President Uribe to put his defense minister in his place.’’
The South American leaders agreed to move past their differences at the meeting and increase cooperation in fighting drug trafficking along their shared border. A conflict between the two countries escalated earlier this year, with Chavez sending tanks and troops to the Colombian border and Uribe accusing the Venezuelan president of supporting Colombia’s biggest guerrilla group.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Monday he would seek wider European sanctions against President Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe at an EU ministers’ meeting next week.
“We are looking at a deeper hit on the financial sector and a wider travel ban,“ Miliband told reporters in Paris, according to AFP. He said the extension of European Union sanctions against Zimbabwe, which currently target 132 individuals, would be addressed at a meeting of European foreign ministers in Brussels on July 22 and 23.
Britain said last week it was considering seeking deeper EU sanctions after a bid to pass sanctions against Zimbabwe’s leadership was vetoed by Russia and China.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s office said Sunday that London would seek to add 36 individuals linked to Mugabe’s regime to the blacklist as well as two state-owned companies in Zimbabwe.
Miliband did not confirm the figure of 36, saying “there are lists circulating.“ e said he had discussed extending the sanctions with several EU foreign ministers on Sunday and that “there’s an understanding of the importance of this.“
“Europe has a united world view, we have a set of values that we stand up for. This is a opportunity for Europe to speak up, and I think it should take it,“ Miliband added.

China is breaking the United Nations arms embargo on Sudan, providing military equipment and training pilots to fly Chinese jets, the BBC said Sunday, citing an investigation by its journalists.
Citing two confidential sources, the broadcaster said China was training pilots to fly Chinese Fantan fighter jets, and that Sudan had imported several fighter trainers called K8s two years ago, AFP reported.
It obtained satellite photographs of the planes, reportedly believed to have been delivered to Sudan in 2003 -- the UN arms embargo was imposed in March 2005 -- at an airport in Nyala in south Darfur last month.
The BBC said it had established, without citing its sources, that the jets were flying out of Nyala on missions in February.
The broadcaster said that China had declined to comment on the report, which will be broadcast Monday evening.
A UN panel of experts had asked to examine the evidence compiled by the documentary team, the BBC added.
The investigators said they had also found one Dong Feng Chinese army lorry in the hands of a rebel group in Darfur.

A group of South Pacific foreign ministers will try this week to salvage a plan aimed at returning Fiji to democracy, amid signs the country’s military leader will break a promise to hold elections by next March.
Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, who is also the military chief, has warned in recent months he aims to root out corruption and reshape the South Pacific nation’s race-based political system before holding elections, which could delay the polls, according AP.
Bainimarama, who seized power in a December 2006 coup, briefly broke off contact last month with a group of South Pacific foreign ministers working to assist Fiji in meeting an earlier agreement to hold polls by March 2009.
Two days of talks by six foreign ministers in the 16-member Pacific Islands Forum begin in Fiji on Tuesday.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said Monday that democratic elections and social turnaround of Fiji.
Since the coup, and as a consequence it heightens the importance of the work we’re doing, Peters told New Zealand’s National Radio ahead of a two-day visit to Fiji.
The delegation, which also includes Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, is the most senior diplomatic mission to visit Fiji since Bainimarama’s coup.