The High Court in Taiwan has ordered the ballot boxes from Saturday's controversial Presidential election sealed in advance of a possible recount as opposition candidate Lien Chan charged possible voter fraud and tacitly suggested that Friday's attempted assassination of President Chen Shui-bian and running mate Annette Lu may have been an inside job ... In Afghanistan, Aviation Minister Mirwais Sadiq was killed in an ambush set by what appears to be tribal rivals ... The continuing and likely-to-expand A.Q. Khan scandal in Pakistan leaves Musharraf in a bind between the Scylla of Islamism and the Charybdis of American leverage ... A Kashmiri columnist says Musharraf has alienated too many of his countrymen by accepting American power in the South Asian theatre ... In addition to their humanitarian work in Iraq, the Japanese may advise the INC on how to try Saddam Hussein and other Baathist figures ...

Rahul Gandhi has entered Indian politics as the fifth generation of Gandhis to do so ... Hindu nationalists believe that if Vajpayee is elected PM again, they will be able to proceed with the controversial Ram Temple construction in Ayodhya (and here)
... In Nepal, 500 Maoist rebels were reportedly killed and 200 injured during an attempted strike against Myagdi province (and here) ... Chaos rules in Jammu-Kashmir, where Pakistani-funded terrorists are torturing and mutilating civilians in a bid to gain more power in the troubled province through terror ...

Two Russian military operatives jailed in Qatar since February have reportedly confessed to assassinating former Chechen President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev on the orders of Moscow ... Algeria is said to be close to a $1.5 billion deal with MiG Corporation for 50 advanced MiG-29 fighters ... Renewed Albanian-on-Serb violence in Kosovo leads the Duma to ask whether Russia should grant asylum to Kosovo Serbs, while B92 says the rumors of Serb attacks on Albanian children that started the violence are false (photos here) ... A Pravda columnist attacks German influence in the Czech Republic, calling the EU an incarnation of the Third Reich's "Final Solution" ... LUKoil has signed a deal with Refinery Associates of Texas to supply POL to northern Iraq, with quarterly supplies of 180,000 tons of gas and 130,000 tons of diesel fuel to be delivered by the Russian company ...

A Saudi columnist has called terrorists the "public enemy of humanity", while still reserving blame for Shia clerics ... Arial Sharon is working to secure American and Binyamin Netanyahu's support for the unilateral disengagement from the West Bank by Israeli forces ... Independent Iranian news agencies have gone largely silent in recent weeks ...

In Venezuela, the government of Hugo Chavez has fired government workers who signed a demand for a presidential recall, prompting NGOs and intellectuals to savage Chavez's increasingly autocratic rule ... political tensions between the branches of government grew as the Electoral Chamber of the country's Supreme Tribunal of Justice issued a ruling that effectively placed the number of accepted recall signatures at 2.7 million, more than needed to initiate the recall process; the Constitutional Chamber of the TSJ then took over the case, creating more uncertainty as to the future of Hugo Chavez.