Sudan miner search ends, 100 believed dead

THE search for about 100 workers believed to have died inside a collapsed gold mine in Sudan's Darfur region has ended after nine rescuers also became trapped, a colleague of the miners said on Saturday.

"Today the searching has stopped because it was too dangerous," the man said from the scene of the tragedy in Jebel Amir district, more than 200 kilometres northwest of North Darfur state capital El Fasher.

The unlicensed desert mine began to collapse on Monday and several days later the stench of death was seeping out of the baked earth.

Nine rescuers disappeared on Thursday when the earth collapsed around them, the miner said, adding that eight bodies had been recovered.

It was not clear whether they were rescuers or miners.

Nobody else had been found, alive or dead, said the miner, who asked to remain anonymous.

"According to what I got from my people here yesterday, they didn't find anybody (else)," he told AFP on Saturday.

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Karzai denies CIA cash buys off warlords

CIA cash delivered each month to Afghan President Hamid Karzai office was not used to buy the support of warlords who could tip the country back into civil war, he says.

The US Central Intelligence Agency has secretly handed over tens of millions of dollars to Karzai's office over the last decade, the New York Times said recently in a revelation that provoked anger in both Washington and Kabul.

But Karzai said the bundles of cash, allegedly packed in suitcases, backpacks and plastic shopping bags, were used for health care and scholarships and that full receipts are issued to the Americans.

"This money was not given to warlords," the president told a press conference in Kabul.

"The major part of this money was spent on government employees such as our guards... it has been paid to individuals not movements.

"It is used for different issues such as treating patients, scholarships for youths... we give receipts for all these expenditures to the US government."

The New York Times alleged that some of the funds were used to bribe warlords into supporting Karzai's US-backed government as the international coalition tries to stabilise the country before NATO troops withdraw next year.

Warlords who fought against both the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and the Taliban regime retain huge influence and many have close links to Karzai's government which rose to power after the Taliban were ousted in 2001.

With the NATO-led mission winding down after more than 11 years of fighting, the warlords look set to renew their battle for power in Afghanistan and the weak central government faces a tough challenge to impose stability.

Karzai, who is due to step down next year, declined to confirm how much his office received each month from the CIA and he repeated his gratitude to the US spy agency.

He said he had met on Saturday with US officials and asked them not to halt the cash despite protests in Washington and criticism from Afghan opposition groups.

"This is a valuable support to us. In Afghanistan's situation there is so much needed. It proves extremely helpful," the president said.

"This financial assistance should continue, we thank them for it."

Cash gifts fuel endemic corruption and this is a prime threat to Afghanistan establishing an effective state, critics of the government and the Americans claim.

When news of the CIA payments broke, Karzai immediately confirmed the reports and claimed they were part of the international aid effort to help his country recover from decades of war.

"This is an official deal between two governments," he said.

"I say that we should take every drop of money that comes to us so that our budget can be saved."

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Pakistan court extends Musharraf's remand

Pervez Musharraf's political party says it will boycott next week's historical Pakistan elections. Source: AAP

A PAKISTANI anti-terrorism court has ordered former military ruler Pervez Musharraf to remain in custody for a further two weeks ahead of his trial for unlawfully sacking judges during his rule, officials say.

"Pervez Musharraf's remand is extended for judicial lock-up for 14 days, he should be presented before the court on May 18," Judge Kausar Abbas Zaidi, ordered on Saturday.

Police had asked the judge to grant the custodial extension saying the investigation into Musharraf's activities was still under way.

Lawyers for Musharraf, who is locked in his own home, which has been declared a sub-jail while he is awaiting trial, filed a bail application in the court and the judge fixed a hearing for May 6.

The court was also asked if Musharraf's trial could be held inside his plush villa, citing security reasons, but the matter was left pending.

"It has been brought into my notice that the Chief Commissioner of Islamabad issued a notification for the jail trial, but approval from Islamabad high court is needed in this regard," the judge said.

Musharraf was placed in police custody at his home following his arrest on April 19, in an unprecedented move against a former army chief of staff ahead of key elections.

He was arrested for making a decision to sack judges when he imposed emergency rule in November 2007 - a move that hastened his downfall.

He also faces charges of conspiracy to murder opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in 2007 and over the death of a rebel leader during a 2006 military operation.

The retired general has been humiliated since returning in March from self-imposed exile to contest elections.

However, his party on Friday announced it will boycott next week's historic election after a court on Tuesday banned him from standing for the rest of his life.

The May 11 polls for the national and regional assemblies mark the first time that a civilian government completes a full-term and hands over to another at the ballot box, in a country that has been ruled by the military for half its life.

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Man dies after vehicle hits tree in Vic

A MAN has died after his vehicle hit a tree in Victoria's north west, the second road fatality in the state in one day.

Police believe the man was driving west on Polkemmet Road, near Horsham, when he lost control and died at the scene.

Emergency crews were called to the scene about 8.30pm (AEST) but police believe the incident happened on Saturday afternoon.

Victoria's road toll stands at 89 compared to 101 this time last year.

Earlier on Saturday, a motorcyclist died after colliding with a car in Victoria's northeast.

The man was travelling at Baranduda, near Wodonga, when he collided with a car turning onto the Kiewa Valley Highway on Saturday morning.

He died at the scene.

Three women who were in the car suffered minor injuries in the crash.

The man is yet to be formally identified.

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Hundreds protest China chemical plant

HUNDREDS of people have protested against a proposed chemical plant in southwest China, state media said.

Local residents have also accused authorities of preventing a similar protest in another city.

More than 200 protesters gathered in the city of Kunming to protest against plans for a factory which will produce paraxylene (PX), a toxic petrochemical used to make fabrics, China's official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday.

Around 1,000 people described as "onlookers" surrounded the protesters, some of whom wore face-masks and held banners, the report said.

Police also lined the streets of Chengdu, the capital of southwest China's Sichuan province, after locals planned a protest against a nearby chemical plant on Saturday, residents told AFP.

"There were a lot of police outside government offices, public spaces and important crossroads in the city," one resident surnamed Liu said, adding that fliers posted around the city in recent days had called for a protest.

"The fliers said the chemical plant has a big impact on people's health," he said.

The government responded with notices calling on people not to demonstrate, Liu said.

Photos posted online showed ranks of police lining the city's streets.

Local police on Saturday morning announced that they would be carrying out an earthquake protection drill, a claim dismissed by thousands of internet users.

"It's about preventing the protest," one user of the popular social networking website Sina Weibo wrote.

Locals online said that the protest did not take place.

China has seen a number of urban demonstrations against proposed chemical plants in recent years, in what analysts have identified as a rising trend of environmentally-motivated "not in my backyard" protests in China.

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Pakistan election candidate shot dead

A CANDIDATE running for parliament in next week's historic Pakistani election has been shot dead along with his three-year-old son after praying in a mosque in Karachi, police say.

It is the first time that a national assembly candidate has been killed in Pakistan's election campaign. Campaigning has been marred by Taliban threats and attacks, which have killed 62 people since April 11, according to an AFP tally.

The May 11 polls for the national and regional assemblies mark the first time that a civilian government completes a full-term and hands over to another at the ballot box, in a country that has been ruled by the military for half its life.

Saddiq Zaman Khattak was a businessman and a candidate for the Awami National Party (ANP), the leading secular party in Pakistan's ethnic Pastun northwest. A party leader said he had received threats.

"He was returning from a mosque after saying his Friday prayers with his three-year-old son when gunmen on a motorbike opened fire. Both were killed," police spokesman Imran Shaukat told AFP.

Senior ANP leader Bashir Jan confirmed the attack and the deaths.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but the Taliban has directly threatened the ANP and the two other main parties in the outgoing government, branding the democratic elections un-Islamic.

Karachi, a city of 18 million people, contributes 42 per cent of Pakistan's GDP but is rife with politically and ethnically linked violence.

Friday's assassination brings to three the number of constituencies where the May 11 election will now be delayed because candidates have been killed.

A man standing for the secular Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in the Sindh provincial assembly, of which Karachi is the capital, was shot dead in the southern city of Hyderabad on April 11.

An independent candidate for the Baluchistan provincial assembly was also killed in the southwestern town of Jhal Magsi on Tuesday.

Karachi has seen a string of attacks on the election campaign.

Late on Thursday, a bomb wounded at least five people near an election office for MQM, the party that dominates Karachi.

Three bombs, two of which targeted MQM and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), killed three people and wounded 49 others on Saturday.

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Fears over man-made hybrid bird flu virus

IMMUNOLOGISTS are concerned about the "dangerous" work of Chinese scientists in creating a hybrid bird flu virus able to spread in the air between guinea pigs, and now living in a lab freezer.

The team from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Gansu Agricultural University have written in the journal Science that they have created the new virus by mixing genes from H5N1 "bird flu" and H1N1 "swine flu".

H5N1, transmitted to people by birds, is fatal in about 60 per cent of cases but does not transmit between humans - a characteristic so far preventing a pandemic.

Some argue hybrid studies like these shed light on how the virus could mutate in nature to cause a human epidemic, and may help us prepare.

Since 2003, H5N1 has infected 628 people, killing 374, according to the World Health Organisation.

H1N1, which erupted in Mexico, is highly transmissible and infected a fifth of the world's population in a 2009-10 pandemic, but is about as lethal as ordinary flu.

The new mutant virus was easily transmitted between guinea pigs through respiratory droplets - which the Chinese team said proved the deadly H5N1 virus may need but a simple genetic mutation to "acquire mammalian transmissibility".

Flu hybrids can arise in nature when two virus strains infect the same cell and exchange genes in a process known as reassortment, but there is no evidence that H1N1 and H5N1 have done so yet.

Some observers fear science is putting mankind at risk by pre-emptively creating such mutants.

"These are manmade viruses, they have never been made in Nature. They are now sitting in a freezer," virology professor Simon Wain-Hobson of France's Pasteur Institute told AFP.

He pointed to a laboratory leak of foot and mouth, a cattle disease, which caused an outbreak in Britain six years ago.

It was unclear how the flu hybrid, which is not deadly in guinea pigs, would affect people - but Wain-Hobson warned: "These could be pandemic viruses.

"That is, if there was ever an error or they got out or there was a leak or whatever, this could infect people and cause anywhere between 100,000 and 100 million deaths."

Wain-Hobson and others fear the risk may far outweigh the scientific value of the research.

The findings held little value for finding a vaccine or treatment that would take years to develop - probably long after an outbreak, they argue.

"The record of containment in the highest containment laboratories is not good. There have been repeated leaks," said Robert May, a former president of Britain's Royal Society of science.

"You do not do these things unless there is some call of extreme emergency," he said.

"We are encountering a real and present danger with extremely dubious benefits to the public."

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Eurozone recession to continue in 2013: EU

RECESSION in the crisis-hit eurozone will continue unabated for the rest of the year with unemployment remaining at record levels, the EU warns, though signs of recovery could emerge in 2014.

Economic output in the 17-nation area - home to 340 million people and a global rival to the United States, Japan and emerging giants - will shrink by 0.4 per cent this year, the European Commission said on Friday, worse than the 0.3 per cent forecast in February and after a 0.6 contraction last year.

Record unemployment in the single currency area will endure, the Commission's spring forecasts showed, with strong divergence between richer eurozone states to the north and members to the south mired in deep recession.

Repeating its last estimate, the Commission said eurozone joblessness this year would hit a record 12 per cent and 11 per cent across the whole 27-member EU. The rates vary hugely, with an alarming 27 per cent in Spain and a low 4.7 per cent in Austria.

"In view of the protracted recession, we must do whatever it takes to overcome the unemployment crisis in Europe," EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Ollie Rehn said in statement accompanying the Commission's latest economic forecast for the eurozone and full European Union.

"In Spain and Greece unemployment rates are at unbearably high levels," Rehn said at a news conference.

France, which has barely avoided recession despite significant headwinds, will in the end shrink by 0.1 per cent in 2013 as weakness in household demand, a key economic driver, finally takes its toll. France will then rebound to 1.1 per cent growth in 2014, the data said.

But France will widely miss its commitment to meet the EU's 3 per cent of GDP deficit ceiling and will post a 3.9 per cent deficit this year and 4.2 per cent shortfall next year.

Spain will continue a hard slog from its crisis, brought on by the 2008 implosion of a decade-long housing bubble, and should contract by 1.5 per cent in 2013 before reversing to 1.4 per cent in growth in 2014.

But Spanish public finances will remain dire well into next year with a government deficit of 6.5 per cent in 2013 expected to worsen in 2014 to 7.0 per cent as certain measures expire.

The crisis will be hugely felt in recently bailed out Cyprus where output is expected to contract by 8.7 per cent this year in the wake of a severe restructuring of the island nation's key banking sector, including a controversial "haircut" on deposits.

The Cypriot recession will prolong into 2014 and beyond, the Commission said, with the economy expected to contract by an overall 15 per cent between 2012 and 2015.

In a rare glimpse of encouragement, the Commission saw recovery in Greece by the end of the year after six consecutive years of recession. The country is forecast to eke out 0.6 per cent growth in 2014, after contracting sharply by 4.2 per cent this year.

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Boston bombing suspect's remains claimed

The body of suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev will be released to his family. Source: AAP

A FUNERAL home has claimed the body of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a gunbattle with police after an intense manhunt.

Department of Public Safety spokesman Terrel Harris said on Thursday a funeral home retained by Tsarnaev's family had picked up the 26-year-old's remains.

Authorities are now closer to being able to make public Tsarnaev's cause of death.

The medical examiner determined Tsarnaev's cause of death on Monday, but officials said it wouldn't be disclosed until his remains were released and a death certificate was filed. It was unclear whether the death certificate had been filed.

Tsarnaev's widow, Katherine Russell, who has been living with her parents in Rhode Island, learned this week that the medical examiner was ready to release his body and wanted it turned over to his side of the family, her lawyer Amato DeLuca said days ago.

Tsarnaev's uncle Ruslan Tsarni, of Maryland, said on Tuesday night the family would take the body.

"Of course, family members will take possession of the body," Tsarni said.

After a hearse believed to be carrying Tsarnaev's body departed Boston, television stations reported that their helicopters followed it to the Dyer-Lake Funeral Home in North Attleboro.

About 20 protesters gathered outside the funeral home. An Associated Press photographer later saw a hearse leaving the home escorted by two police cars.

Dyer-Lake funeral director Tim Nye told The Sun-Chronicle newspaper late on Thursday that the body was only brought to his funeral home temporarily and was transported to another facility, but he didn't say where.

"He is not at our funeral home and we won't be handling final arrangements," Nye said.

Tsarnaev, who had appeared in surveillance photos wearing a black cap and was identified as Suspect No. 1, died three days after the bombing.

The April 15 bombing, using pressure cookers packed with explosives, nails, ball bearings and metal shards near the marathon's finish line, killed three people and injured more than 260 others. Authorities said Tsarnaev and his younger brother later killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer and carjacked a driver, who later escaped.

Authorities said that during the gunbattle with police, the Tsarnaev brothers, ethnic Chechens from Russia who came to the United States about a decade ago, set off another pressure cooker bomb and tossed grenades before the older brother ran out of ammunition.

Police said they tackled the older brother and began to handcuff him but had to dive out of the way at the last second when the younger brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, drove a stolen car at them. They said the younger brother ran over his brother's body as he drove away from the scene to escape.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured later, wounded and bloody, hiding in a tarp-covered boat in a suburban Boston backyard. He is in a federal prison and faces a charge of using a weapon of mass destruction to kill.

The Tsarnaev brothers' mother insists the allegations against them are lies.

Three of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's friends, college classmates, were arrested on Wednesday and accused of helping after the marathon bombing to remove a laptop and backpack from his dormitory room before the FBI searched it.

A top Republican senator on Thursday asked President Barack Obama's administration to explain how one of the students entered the United States without a valid student visa.

Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, in a three-page letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, asked for additional details about the student visa applications for Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, college roommates from Kazakhstan charged with obstruction of justice in the marathon bombing case, and how Tazhayakov was allowed to re-enter the United States in January.

Tazhayakov was a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth when he left the US in December. In early January, his student visa status was terminated because he was academically dismissed by the university.

Peter Boogaard, a DHS spokesman, said on Wednesday that when Tazhayakov arrived in January Customs and Border Protection had not been alerted that he was no longer a student. Boogaard said the department was working on a fix to the student visa system.

The third student arrested, Robel Phillipos, was charged with willfully making materially false statements to federal law enforcement officials during a terrorism investigation.

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Indonesia jails two foreigners over drugs

AN Indonesian court has sentenced a German man and a South African woman to life in prison for attempting to smuggle drugs into a resort island in two separate cases, a judge says.

Rolf Oskar Josef Schweikert, 57, was caught trying to smuggle 3.7 kilogrammes of hashish into the island of Lombok, just east of Bali, in October as he arrived on a Silk Air flight from Singapore.

He was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday at the district court in the city of Mataram, judge Pastra Joseph Ziralluo told AFP on Friday.

Kathlyn Dunn, 28, was arrested arriving on a Silk Air flight from Singapore two days before the German, attempting to smuggle in 2.6 kilogrammes of crystal methamphetamine, said the judge.

She "was given the same sentence" on Wednesday, Ziralluo said. However, he stressed that the court had not made any connection between the cases and the pair were tried separately.

The two were both charged with "attempting to import drugs", but they avoided the maximum sentence of death by firing squad.

Customs officials found hashish in the lining of Schweikert's suitcase with a street value of $US730,000 ($A715,370), while Dunn was caught with crystal methamphetamine valued at $US500,000.

Indonesia enforces some of the stiffest drug laws in the world. In March, it resumed executions after a hiatus of several years when a Malawian drug smuggler was put to death.

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