‘Mexico drenched in blood’

MEXICO CITY: A fierce struggle between rival drug gangs and police in Mexico is drenching the country in blood, with violence becoming especially intense in the capital and along the border with the United States. This week has seen about 100 people killed, including several key crime-fighting officials, according to authorities. So far this year, more than 1,100 have lost their lives. The new wave of violence shows no sign of being quelled, despite a massive military operation targeting the deadliest zones. Mexico City, previously spared the worst of clashes, has now been swept up in the conflagration, which is also deeply unsettling the United States. On Friday, the White House called on the US Congress to approve funds for a $1.55 billion logistics and equipment programme to help Mexico and Central America fight the illegal drug trade.



Russian police kill two rebels

MOSCOW: Russian police killed two gunmen during an operation in the southern region of Ingushetia, Russian news agencies reported on Saturday. Another was injured and detained when police stormed a house in a village in the region, which borders the volatile Russian province of Chechnya. The Interfax news agency quoted Ingushetia’s interior ministry as saying that the dead men, both Ingush, belonged to armed groups suspected of recent attacks on police and other acts of violence.



US diplomat

PANMUNJOM, Korea: A US diplomat left North Korea on Saturday with boxes of documents detailing two decades of activities at the nuclear reactor that has been at the heart of the communist country’s nuclear weapons programme. Washington plans to scrutinise the technical logs from the Yongbyon reactor to see if North Korea is telling the truth about a bomb programme that it has agreed to trade away for economic and political rewards. Sung Kim, the US State Department’s top Korea specialist, returned to South Korea by land after collecting approximately 18,000 secret papers during a three-day visit to Pyongyang. The State Department said North Korea provided the records on Thursday.



US scientists

WASHINGTON: Daniel Suson has a doctorate in astrophysics and has worked on the superconducting super collider and a forthcoming Nasa probe. Now he’s heading back to school to take on an even trickier task getting elected to public office. He is among a growing number of scientists who feel slighted and abused in the public debate in recent years and are mobilising for a new effort to inject evidence-based decision making” into public policy. On Saturday, Suson, dean of engineering, mathematics and science at Purdue University Calumet, will join more than 70 other scientists, engineers and students at a hotel at Georgetown University for a crash course on elective politics.



Bird flu hits India

KOLKATA: Bird flu has spread to the hilly Darjeeling district of eastern India which has been hit by avian influenza several times already this year, a minister said on Saturday. Blood samples from dead chickens from the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal state tested positive for the H5N1 strain, the state’s animal resources development minister Anisur Rahaman said. A mass cull of some 20,000 chickens would begin soon, he added. West Bengal borders Bangladesh, where the virus has been detected in poultry in more than half of the country’s 64 districts. The disease was first detected in Bangladesh in February 2007 near the capital Dhaka. It was almost dormant by late 2007 but made a forceful comeback in January this year.



Obama aide steps down

WASHINGTON: An adviser to Democratic White House hopeful Barack Obama has left the campaign after a British newspaper asked him about meetings with the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, media reports said on Friday. Robert Malley, who works for the International Crisis Group, said he served as an “informal” Middle East advisor to Obama and told NBC News he decided to step down after the Times of London inquired about his contacts with Hamas. “I decided based on the fact that this was becoming a distraction that it was best that I remove myself from any association with the campaign,” Malley told NBC.