Butt, Amir, Asif dropped from Pakistan side

The three Pakistan cricketers at the centre of a betting scandal have been dropped from the squad for the remainder of the tour of England, team manager Yawar Saeed said Thursday.

The three, Mohammad Asif, Mohammad Amir and test captain Salman Butt, will be meeting Pakistan Cricket Board and government officials today. But while these players have been dropped from the side, Yawar Saeed has clarified that not all might be suspended.

“Great players come and go but cricket must move on. We have asked the board to provide alternate players,” Yawar said.

Pakistan would also seek replacements for the five one-day limited overs games againstEngland, Saeed added, denying the trio had been suspended.

“The T20 squad will remain what it is here this morning, ie 13 people,” Saeed said. “When we play the one-day internationals we will be asking for replacements to make the squad up to 16.

Saeed added he could not comment about the trio's state of mind, saying: “They are still here. I cannot answer anything on their behalf because investigations are being made by Scotland Yard and the ICC (International Cricket Council) and others.

“The game must go on, cricket will be played at its best.”

NASA drone to overfly hurricane threatening US

LOS ANGELES: A pilotless NASA aircraft is set to overfly Hurricane Earl on Thursday, in a scientific first to gather data about the potentially-deadly storm front bearing down on the US east coast.

After taking off from Edwards Air Force base in California, the converted Global Hawk drone plane will use a battery of instruments to study how hurricanes develop into awesome forces of nature.

“This is a real adventure for this airplane,” said Commander Phil Hall, who will remotely control the plane from the military base near Los Angeles on the US West Coast.

“Going over a hurricane, for any airplane, is a bit risky, and we are kind of breaking a new frontier with this flight,” he told AFP.

Thousands of people have evacuated North Carolina's barrier islands as Hurricane Earl threatened to pound large areas of the US East Coast with heavy winds and rough seas.

The strongest Atlantic storm of 2010 was on a path to lash the North Carolina coast and then move north, wreaking havoc on the end-of-summer US Labor Day holiday weekend that usually draws millions to the beaches.

The Global Hawk proved its mettle last week when it overflew Tropical Storm Frank off the coast of Mexico but Earl, with speeds of up to 140 miles (220 kilometers) per hour, is in a different league.

Originally built to take photos for military reconnaissance missions, the aircraft “is not designed for turbulence or for bad weather,” Hall said.

“We have to take a lot of extra steps to make sure we don't exceed the performances of the aircraft... But we have a very good vibration system. So if we get that kind of turbulence, we'll know right away.”

The plane may be fragile, but NASA is expecting a lot from it. The space agency's three aircraft are part of its Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) hurricane research mission.

The NASA mission aims to learn more about why and how storms gain or lose power, growing into mighty hurricanes or fizzling out to mere strong winds, over the course of sometimes only a few hours.

“Certainly there are many good tools already on other airplanes but this one allows us to develop satellite-like instruments,” said Gerry Heymsfield, a NASA research meteorologist.

“We are trying to understand what does lead to the intensification of the storms, because if we can understand some of these processes, we will be allowed to forecast better.” One key asset of the Global Hawk is that it can stay continuously aloft for 30 hours.

“We can take this airplane from here, in California, to the North Pole, and about 10 hours after, come back here in one flight,” said Hall.

“That's why this aircraft has capabilities that are so interesting to scientists.”In the near future, NASA hopes to move the planes' base to the East Coast closer to where many storms develop over the Atlantic to make even better use of its long flight time.

The GRIP program will notably give NASA a better understanding of how sand and dust from Africa's Sahara desert feed into storms.

“The general theory is that Saharan dust inhibits the formation of storms.

But it's not always the case,” said Heymsfield.

“The big picture is to help improve the forecast. So for the public, it allows us to increase safety and warnings,” added Hall. – AFP

Another 100 Indian fishermen released

KARACHI: Another batch of 100 Indian fishermen was released on Thursday by Malir jail authorities.

According to jail officials, the fishermen were released in the morning to facilitate their travel to Wagah border where they will be handed over to Indian officials.

The fishermen were arrested for violating Pakistani territorial waters.

The government has ordered the release of 442 Indian fishermen as a gesture of goodwill. First batch of 100 fishermen was released on August 30 from Malir jail.

The remaining fishermen will depart for India on September 4 and 6 respectively. — APP

China says reports of troops in Pakistan wrong

BEIJING: China on Thursday dismissed reports saying troops of the People's Liberation Army are in a disputed area of Pakistan.

The New York Times ran an opinion piece last week which said up to 11,000 soldiers of the People's Liberation Army were in Gilgit, a northwest area of disputed Kashmir.

''The story that China has deployed some military in the northern part of Pakistan is totally groundless and out of ulterior purposes,'' Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular briefing.

''Some people are making fabrications to destroy relations between China, Pakistan and India but their attempt will arrive nowhere,'' she said.

The piece by Selig Harrison, director of the Asia program at the US-based Center for International Policy, said China wants control of the region to get clear road and rail access to the Gulf through Pakistan. It said many of the soldiers are working on a railway link.

The article comes amid reports of military unease between China and India.

Earlier this week China said it had not received word from New Delhi that it had suspended military exchanges, despite Indian media reports that relations had been put on hold after Beijing refused to grant a visa to a top Indian army general from the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir.

An anonymous senior Indian official was quoted in the Hindu newspaper Saturday as saying that future military exchanges and a joint exercise between Indian and Chinese defense forces would remain suspended until China resolves the issue.

China's Ministry of National Defense said in a statement faxed to The Associated Press that it had not suspended the exchanges nor received word from India about any suspension.

Indian media reports said the suspension was New Delhi's response to Beijing denying a visa for Indian army Lt. Gen. B.S. Jaswal, who was scheduled to join a military delegation to China.

Jaswal was denied a visa because he is responsible for army operations in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, the reports said.

Jiang said such reports were untrue and that Beijing had no intention to interfere in the Kashmir dispute. ''As a neighbor and friend of both countries, China believes that the issue should be left to the two countries so that it can be properly handled through dialogue and consultation.''

India and Pakistan, an ally of China, both control part of the Himalayan region while claiming all of it. China also claims part of northeastern Kashmir that it says is part of Tibet.

While relations between China and India have improved in recent years, they are still testy over territorial claims dating back to a brief border war in 1962.

In recent years, India and China have held more than a dozen rounds of talks on settling the border dispute but have made little progress.

Beijing is also highly critical of India's support for the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 and set up a government-in-exile in the northern Indian hill town of Dharmsala. – AP

Iran hardliners attack opposition leader’s home

TEHRAN: Hardline “thugs” surrounded the home of opposition Iranian leader Mehdi Karroubi, pelting the building with rocks to prevent the cleric from attending a rally on Friday, his website said.

In the latest such incident, members of the Islamist Basij militia “violently attacked” the building where the opposition cleric lives, the sahamnews.org website said.

The militia, “in a coordinated and pre-planned action, gathered in front of the building which houses Mehdi Karroubi,” the website said.

“The Basij thugs... with the support of police... disrupted public order and peace. They threw stones, sprayed the building with paint and stole security cameras of the building” in northern Tehran, the report said.

It said the Basij had been gathering outside the building every night since Sunday, and that the harassment was meant to prevent the opposition leader from attending annual nationwide rallies marking Quds Day, or Jerusalem Day.

They were “intimidating and terrorising public opinion, especially to prevent Karroubi from participating in the Quds Day rally,” Sahamnews said.

Every year Iran organises pro-Palestinian marches across the country on the last Friday of Ramadan, an event started by revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a protest against arch-foe Israel.

At a similar rally last year supporters of Karroubi and fellow opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi staged demonstrations against the hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his government.

Karroubi, along with Mousavi, have remained steadfast in rejecting the re-election of Ahmadinejad last year. They continue to claim that his victory was the result of massive vote rigging.

Their opposition to Ahmadinejad has deeply divided Iran's ruling clergy, in turn threatening the very pillars of the Islamic republic.

The Sahamnews report said Karroubi's wife Fatemeh has already written a letter to Iran's hardline supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, complaining about the siege of their home.

“What have differences between my husband and your highness on issues which we all know about got to do with the right of my family to live?,” Fatemeh Karroubi wrote in the letter, according to the website.

Opposition websites claim that the two opposition leaders have been previously attacked by hardliners during public rallies, and that Karroubi has been surrounded and harassed by supporters of Iran's hardline faction on other occasions. – AFP

Wealthy landowners accused of diverting floods to villages

ISLAMABAD: Wealthy landowners in Pakistan have allegedly diverted waters from the country's devastating floods away from their own properties and into villages, the country's UN ambassador said Thursday.

Abdullah Hussain Haroon called for an inquiry into claims that embankments had been allowed to burst to protect commercial crops.

“Over the years, one has seen with the lack of floods, those areas normally set aside for floods have come under irrigation of the powerful and rich,” Haroon told the BBC's HardTalk programme.

“It is suggested in some areas, those to be protected were allowed, had allowed, levies to be burst on opposite sides to take the water away. If that is happening the government should be enquiring.”

A month of catastrophic flooding has killed 1,760 people and affected more than 18 million, according to the UN, and large areas of Pakistan, especially in the Sindh province, remain under water.

More than 3.6 million hectares of productive farmland have been destroyed by the floods.

Lahore mourns triple bombing as death toll rises

LAHORE: The death toll from suicide attacks that targeted a busy procession in Pakistan's eastern city of Lahore rose to 31 on Thursday as six people succumbed to their injuries, officials said.

Three suicide bombers targeted a Shia mourning procession made up of thousands of people on Wednesday at the moment of the breaking of the fast in the holy month of Ramazan, wounding hundreds.

It was the first major attack in Pakistan since devastating floods engulfed a fifth of the volatile country over the past month in its worst disaster yet.

“Thirty-one people have died and a total of 281 were injured,” Fahim Jehanzeb, a spokesman for Lahore's rescue agency told AFP, adding that he feared more would die from their injuries.

Sajjad Bhutta, a senior local administration official, also confirmed the new death toll.

A mass funeral was hastily arranged for later in the day with police and paramilitary providing tight security, while local authorities announced a day of mourning with all public and private institutions closed.

An AFP reporter said that all markets were closed and the roads were quiet on Thursday, after the attacks provoked an outpouring of fury in the city a night earlier, with mourners trying to torch a nearby police station.

Police fired tear gas to force back the surging crowd as furious mourners beat the bodies of the suicide bombers with sticks and shoes, while others beat their own heads and chests at the site of the attacks in frustration.

The emotional crowd chanted slogans against the police and the provincial government over their failure to protect the Shia procession, an AFP correspondent on the scene said.

Lahore, a city of eight million, has been increasingly subject to Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked attacks in a nationwide bombing campaign that has killed more than 3,600 people in three years.

The procession hit by the blasts was being held to mark the anniversary of the martyrdom of Hazarat Ali, who is revered by Shia Muslims and is the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed.

Shias account for around 20 per cent of Pakistan's mostly Sunni Muslim population of 160 million.

Religious violence in Pakistan, mostly between Sunni and Shiite groups, has killed more than 4,000 people in the past decade, and it is not the first time Lahore has seen bombers target religious gatherings. – AFP