US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday urged China to use all its influence with North Korea to ensure the reclusive Stalinist state moved ahead quickly with nuclear disarmament;-With the clock running down on the Bush administration, Rice used her meetings with the Chinese leadership to call for a renewed push to end a two-month impasse with North Korea over its denuclearisation.

“I’m expecting from China what I’m expecting from others – that we will use all influence possible with the North Koreans to convince them that it’s time to move forward,” Rice said after meeting Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi.

“We are at the cusp of something very special here. Now is the time to move on, time to continue the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, which is in everyone’s interest.”

China chairs the six-country talks that are aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear programmes. The other members of the forum are the United States, the two Koreas, Japan and Russia.

China is regarded as having the most influence with the leadership in Pyongyang because it is the North’s closest political ally and one of its most important trading partners.

A landmark six-nation deal reached in February last year offered the North a million tonnes of fuel oil, normalised ties with the United States and Japan and a formal peace treaty, if it scrapped all nuclear programmes and material. In the current phase, the North agreed to disable its atomic plants and fully declare all nuclear programmes by the end of last year. But it missed the deadline amid a dispute with the United States over the declaration.

The United States believes the North has still not given a full account of its nuclear activities, with particular concern over a suspected highly enriched uranium project.

Washington also has suspicions North Korea has transferred nuclear technology to Syria and other countries.

The North, meanwhile, has accused the United States of bad faith in the disarmament process. It has received only part of the one million tonnes of fuel oil or equivalent energy aid and complains Washington is dragging its feet on a pledge to start the process to remove it from a list of state sponsors of terrorism;-Rice insisted the United States would keep its commitments made in the six-party process, as long as North Korea did. Yang sought to highlight “important progress” that had already been made in the six-party process, despite the current delays, while saying that China was in close talks with the North Korean government.

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French fossil hunters have pinned down the age of Toumai, which they contend is the remains of the earliest human ever found, at between 6.8 and 7.2 million years old.

The fossil was discovered in the Chadian desert in 2001 and an intense debate ensued over whether the nearly complete cranium, pieces of jawbone and teeth belonged to one of our earliest ancestors.

Critics said that Toumai’s cranium was too squashed to be that of a hominid – it did not have the brain capacity that gives humans primacy – and its small size indicated a creature of no more than 120 centimetres four feet in height, about the size of a walking chimp.

In short, they said, Toumai had no right to be baptised with French researcher Michel Brunet’s hominid honorific of Sahelanthropus tchadensis – he was simply a vulgar ape. Toumai’s supporters used 3D computer reconstructions to show that the structure of the cranium had clear differences from those of gorillas and chimps and indicates that Toumai was able to walk upright on two feet, something our primate cousins cannot do with ease;-If Toumai is truly an early human, that means that the evolutionary split between apes and humans occurred far earlier than previously thought.

And pinning down his age is key to redrawing the evolutionary map;-”The radiochronological data concerning Sahelanthropus tchadensis  is an important cornerstone both for establishing the earliest stages of hominid evolution and for new calibrations of the molecular clock,” Brunet wrote in a study which will appear in the March 4 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Thus, Sahelanthropus tchadensis testifies that the last divergence between chimps and humans is certainly not much more recent than 8 Ma million years ago.”

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 Four Colombian former lawmakers freed Wednesday by FARC guerrillas spoke in Caracas of their years-long ordeal and of other captives left behind in the jungles of Colombia.

“It’s the greatest feeling: to be born again. You can’t imagine the horrors of living seven years in the subhuman conditions we were kept,” Luis Eladio Perez told reporters after being picked up by Red Cross officials flown in on Venezuelan aircraft.

He explained he had survived a heart-attack, three diabetic comas and a kidney malfunction because of tropical diseases.

He also said he feared for the most high-profile prisoner still held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia FARC, Ingrid Betancourt, and vowed to do all to have her freed as well.

Betancourt, a 46-year-old French-Colombian who was seized in 2002 as she campaigned for the Colombian presidency, was “very, very sick, physically and morally spent,” he said, adding that he last saw her on February 4. Perez said three Americans captured in 2003 by the rebels were also faring badly, adding that they would likely remain in captivity unless a FARC leader who was jailed for 60 years in January gets his sentence reduced by US courts.

Perez and the three other freed hostages Gloria Polanco, Orlando Beltran and Jorge Gechem – were recovered Wednesday by Red Cross and Venezuelan officials.

They were flown out of the southern Colombian jungle in two Venezuelan helicopters bearing the Red Cross symbol and later flown by plane to Caracas. The four had spent more than six years in the hands of the Marxist FARC, who constantly moved them around in tropical woodland to prevent their rescue by the Colombian military.

It was the second such joint Red Cross-Venezuelan mission in as many months;-In both cases, the FARC said it would only hand the hostages over to services commanded by leftwing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has rocky relations with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

After the latest hostage release, the FARC called for the Colombian government to make concessions on one of the rebels’ principal demands: that a temporary demilitarized zone be created around two rural munipalities. It wants the zone to be used for negotiations in which more hostages will be released in return for the freeing of 500 rebels in Colombian prisons.

“Now the army must leave the towns of Pradera and Florida for 45 days, with guerrillas and an international community presence as guarantors, so negotiations can take place in this area for the liberation of the guerrillas and the prisoners of war held by the FARC,” it said in a statement delivered to the Caracol radio station.

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 A suspected US missile strike destroyed an al-Qaeda and Taleban hideout in a Pakistani tribal area Thursday, killing 13 alleged militants including several Arabs, security officials said.

Residents of Azam Warsak village in South Waziristan , that a house was blown up by a missile fired from a pilotless drone and the loud blast was heard miles kilometres away in the rugged valley.

US drones have launched several strikes on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border targeting members of Osama bin Laden’s network, although Islamabad never confirms such attacks due to issues of national sovereignty.

The attack comes a month after Bin Laden’s operational number three, Abu Laith al-Libi, was killed in a missile strike on January 29 in the neighbouring Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan.

“A house used as a den by al-Qaeda and Afghan Taleban militants was hit by a missile. Thirteen people were killed and around 10 were wounded,” a senior Pakistani security official told AFP. “There was no immediate information about the presence of any high-value target,” the official said;-A security source based in the northwestern city of Peshawar, which adjoins the lawless tribal belt, said the missile was fired by a US drone at about 2am Thursday (2100 GMT Wednesday).

Another security official said most of the dead were Arabs.

Armed militants cordoned off the site after the missile strike, residents said. They said four unidentified “guests” had arrived late Wednesday at the destroyed house, although their identities were not known;-South Waziristan is also the base of Baitullah Mehsud, an al-Qaeda-linked warlord accused by Pakistan of masterminding the slaying of former premier Benazir Bhutto, but officials said the strike was not in the area he commands.

A spokesman for the US-led coalition force based in Afghanistan said it had “no reports” that either it or the separate NATO-headed force were involved in the strike. Pakistani forces were not immediately available to comment on the incident.

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Students of the state-run Polytechnic University of the Philippines in Manila shout slogans after forcing their way inside the campus on Feb 28 after security personnel closed the school’s gates upon receiving reports of a bomb threat coinciding with the arrival of former government employee and corruption probe key witness Rodolfo Lozada..

MANILA —-

 The Philippine military warned Thursday that a planned massive anti-government protest calling for the resignation of scandal-tainted President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo might be attacked by terrorists.

Major General Fernando Mesa, chief of military forces in Manila, said they have information that al-Qaeda-linked Muslim Abu Sayyaf rebels or communist guerrillas might launch attacks during the demonstrations scheduled on Friday.

“We received information, although it is still in the process of validation, about the terrorist plan,” he said. “Terrorists look for opportunities where they can inflict most harm, the more the victims, the better for them.” Organisers said they expect at least 20,000 people to join the rally in the financial district of Makati on Friday evening.

Mesa said that while the forces of communist and Abu Sayyaf rebels have been diminished over the past years by continued military offensives, they are still capable of launching attacks;-At least 5,000 policemen will be deployed to secure the rally and other key facilities in Manila on Friday, while some 3,000 soldiers will be utilised to augment the security for the protest, according to authorities.

Amid rumours that disgruntled junior officers will be joining the anti-Arroyo protest, Mesa warned that soldiers who join the demonstration will be apprehended. “Even if he is a soldier if he violates the law, the police is mandated to do something about it,” he said.

Calls for Arroyo to quit have intensified since a witness told a Senate inquiry earlier in the month that Arroyo’s husband and a key ally demanded multimillion-dollar kickbacks from a scrapped government contract with a Chinese firm.

On Tuesday, another witness testified that Arroyo and her husband received at least five million dollars in kickbacks from the controversial government contract with China’s ZTE Corp;-The deal was signed in April 2007, but Arroyo scrapped the contract five months later after a Senate inquiry uncovered alleged anomalies in the deal. Arroyo, her husband and accused allies have denied any wrongdoing.

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 President Vladimir Putin’s Russia resembles Germany in the years before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, Estonia’s president said in an interview published yesterday by The Moscow Times daily.

President Toomas Hendrik Ilves told the newspaper that Russia had “a mentality of being stabbed in the back that reminds me of the Weimar Republic.”

“The Weimar mentality is so similar that I really hope that we do not go off in the wrong direction,” he was quoted as saying by the English-language Moscow daily. The Weimar Republic is the name given to the period in Germany from the end of World War I in 1918 to the 1930s. It was during this period of economic crisis that Hitler rose to power on a wave of nationalism and the desire to avenge the military humiliation of World War I.

Estonia, which was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union during World War II, became independent with the Soviet collapse in 1991;-Relations between Tallinn and Moscow remain tense. Russia rejects Estonia’s accusations of occupation and human rights abuses, saying that the Red Army in fact liberated the Baltic country from Nazi Germany.

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A golden fence surrounding Sri Lanka’s sacred Sri Maha Bodi tree in Anuradhapura.

ANURADHAPURA, Sri Lanka =-

Buddhism’s holiest tree in Sri Lanka’s ancient capital, tightly guarded by monks and security forces after Tamil rebels attacked it 23 years ago, is under threat again – this time from monkeys.

Pilgrims are frisked and scanned by metal detectors before being allowed to worship the “Sri Maha Bodi”, grown from a sapling of a tree in India that sheltered the Buddha when he attained enlightenment more than 2,550 years ago.

But primates in the temple compound are free to swing from tree-to-tree, grab sweet offerings and in the process endanger what Sri Lankan Buddhists believe is the world’s oldest religiously significant tree, a Banyan species propped up by iron supports at temple ruins dating back 2,300 years;-In the mainly Buddhist nation, the tree is not only an object of worship, but a symbol of national sovereignty. Buddhist devotees from India, Myanmar, Thailand, Korea and Japan visit to pay homage, while tourists also flock to the scene despite the security procedures.

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 New polls Monday suggested Hillary Clinton’s national support was collapsing, as her aides battled angrily with surging Barack Obama’s camp before a key debate in her last-stand state Ohio.

Clinton, once the runaway Democratic front-runner, issued a fierce attack on Obama’s foreign policy credentials and frustration boiled over within her team at what her aides say is the Illinois senator’s easy ride from the media;-Just a week before pivotal nominating clashes in Texas and Ohio, the Obama team accused Clinton of “shameful” conduct, after a picture of him in African dress appeared on the Internet. Clinton’s team denied it was guilty of a smear.

In an ominous sign for Clinton, a new CBS News/New York Times survey found Obama with a 16-point lead over the New York senator among Democratic primary voters nationwide, 54 percent to 38 percent.

Three weeks ago, before Obama reeled off 11 straight nominating wins, the rivals were level at 41 percent, and Clinton was 15 points up last month.

In another sign of Obama’s accelarating momentum, a USA Today poll had him up 51 percent to 39 percent nationally among Democratic voters. A Gallup tracking poll, however, had Obama only two points up in the race for the right to battle presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. A day before the rivals clash in a debate in Ohio, which along with Texas on March 4 holds must-win nominating contests for Clinton, the former first lady warned Obama was a risky choice as he was inexperienced on the global stage.

Her voice at times reduced to a croak from non-stop campaigning, she said in a speech here she did not need “a foreign policy instruction manual” to cope with a diplomatic crisis.

She took fresh aim at Obama’s proposal for summit talks with sworn US foes such as Cuba, Iran and North Korea, but Obama aides accused Clinton of joining a “neo-conservative drumbeat” for war with Iran.

The sparring came as a photograph emerged of Obama in African dress, at the start of the candidates’ final week of campaigning before primaries in Ohio and Texas on March 4 that are must-win nominating contests for Clinton.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton camp of “shameful, offensive fear-mongering” after the picture of Obama dressed in a Somali robe and turban appeared on gossip website Drudge Report. The picture of Obama, who is bidding to be the first African-American president, was taken during an emotional visit by the candidate to his father’s homeland of Kenya in 2006.

The website said the photo had been circulated by Clinton aides, a claim denied by her campaign, which said the Obama team should be “ashamed” for suggesting the image could prove divisive in the hard-fought election.

Clinton’s communications chief Howard Wolfson let his frustration show in a tirade against the media.

“I think it is true that every time the Obama campaign in this campaign has attacked Senator Clinton in the worst kind of personal ways, attacked her veracity, attacked her credibility, said that she would say or do anything to get elected, the press has largely applauded him,” Wolfson said.

“I think Senator Obama’s entire campaign against Senator Clinton is negative,” Wolfson said during a conference call. ;-”He has run against her as the status quo, he has essentially called her divisive, he has called her untruthful, he has questioned her credibility. He has said she will do or say anything to get elected.”

“Now, if that’s not negative, I don’t know what negative is.” New polls in Ohio and Texas cast doubt on Clinton’s capacity to pull off the emphatic victories she needs to chase down Obama’s lead in nominating delegates.

A CNN, Opinion Research survey found Obama leading in Texas for the first time, with 50 percent of likely Democratic primary voters backing him, compared to 46 percent for Clinton;-Given the poll’s 3.5 percentage point margin of error, however, the race was still a statistical tie, in line with other state surveys.

In Ohio, a Quinnipiac University survey showed Clinton leading 51 percent to 40 percent among likely Democratic primary voters – down from her 55-34 percent lead in a poll by the same organisation 11 days before.

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