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''More than 35 are killed,'' said Ali Shah Paktiawal, chief of the Kabul police's criminal branch. ''Police officers are among the dead.'' An Interior Ministry official could not confirm the death toll, saying around 30 were dead or wounded.

The Interior Ministry said five of the wounded were foreigners, including two Japanese, a Korean and two Pakistanis. Earlier reports that foreigners had been killed proved false.

If the death toll is confirmed, this would be the deadliest suicide attack to hit the country since the ouster of Taliban from power.

The attack appears to signal an escalation of such strikes.

At least 14 people were killed in four other suicide bombings over the past three days. Responsibility for all five attacks was claimed by Taliban insurgents. The previous deadliest bombing in Kabul, in 2002, killed 26 people.

A police eyewitness at the scene, outside the Kabul police chief's headquarters, said he had seen the bomber leap on to the bus as it was moving slowly away, its door wide open.

''It was a very, very successful suicide attack,'' a Taliban commander, Mullah Hayatullah Khan, told Reuters by satellite phone. ''We have plans for more successful attacks in future.'' The Taliban and their al Qaeda allies have adopted the tactics of Iraq's bloody insurgency to try to dispel the notion that government and foreign security forces are in control of the country.

Eighteen bodies, mostly police officers, and 10 wounded had been taken to nearby Jamhuriat Hospital, a doctor there said.

The bomb exploded during the morning rush hour, at a time when buses are ferrying police officers to their beats. On Friday and Saturday there were four suicide attacks in the south, centre and north of the country, including a blast in Kabul yesterday.

The truck that was loaded with explosives and rammed into a convoy of navy vehicles was obliterated in the attack. ( Photo Courtesy Buddhika Weerasinghe/Reuters)

The government blamed the rebels, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, for the attack, a charge the group neither acknowledged nor denied. The vast majority of those killed and wounded were sailors, but a military spokesman said some civilians were caught in the explosion.

“This is a barbaric terrorist act,” said Keheliya Rambukwella, the government’s military spokesman. “It clearly shows that peace is not on the agenda of the L.T.T.E. and they don’t care about international opinion.”

But he said the government still planned to attend peace talks with the rebels, which are being brokered by Norway and are to resume Oct. 28 in Geneva after an eight-month hiatus. The separatists have said they may back out of the talks.

Monday’s attack was yet another sign that the four-year-old cease-fire was no longer being observed, even though neither the government nor the rebels have publicly disavowed it. It was also part of an increase in violence over the last year: more than 2,000 people, half of them civilians, have been killed in fighting since April, according to the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission.

The explosion occurred on the day that Japan’s special envoy to Sri Lanka, Yasushi Akashi, met with President Mahinda Rajapaksa to shore up support for the peace talks. Norway’s envoy, Jon Hanssen-Bauer, and an American assistant secretary of state, Richard A. Boucher, are to arrive later in the week to try to ensure that the talks go ahead.

Mr. Hanssen-Bauer is to meet with separatist leaders on Thursday to encourage them to attend; the rebels said they would give their final answer then.

The truck bomber on Monday crashed into a convoy of 24 buses carrying unarmed navy personnel going on leave or returning to duty. The convoy was stopped at a transit center outside Habarana. About 340 navy personnel were at the center.

Brig. Prasad Samarasinghe, a military spokesman, said he believed that the attack was an act of revenge against the navy, which he said had succeeded in many recent attempts to stop the rebels from smuggling arms and explosives. On Sunday, the navy sank a suspected Tiger vessel that it said was transporting weapons off the northwestern coast.

Hours after the attack, Kfir fighter jets attacked a northern rebel stronghold, said Air Chief Marshal Donald Perera, head of Sri Lanka’s armed forces.

Tamil rebels say they need their own state because the Sinhalese majority discriminates against Tamils.

Osama bin Laden, Mr. Chertoff said, has made it clear that scaring the United States into an unsustainable spending spree is one of his aims. In a 2004 video, Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, spoke of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” “He understood that one tool he had in waging war against the United States was to drive us crazy, into bankruptcy, trying to defend ourselves against every conceivable threat,” Mr. Chertoff said at a hearing of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“We have to be realistic about what we expect and what we do. We do have limits, and we do have choices to make.” “I put my daughter in my car,” Mr. Chertoff told Mr. Lautenberg. “If I wanted my daughter to be 100 percent safe, I’d put a five-mile-an-hour speed limit cap on the car.” But that is not an option, he added, “because that’s more safety than we can afford.” The list of initiatives cannot be limitless, Mr. Chertoff said. A mandate, for example, that every cargo container headed into the United States be X-rayed and subject to a radiation scan before it leaves a foreign port to search for a possible nuclear bomb is not now feasible, he said. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, was trying on Tuesday to persuade him to consider such an effort.

The direct reference to Mr. bin Laden echoes what is now a week’s worth of tough talk by the Bush administration about him, a move Democrats call a politically motivated effort to refocus the nation, and its voters, on the war on terror instead of the troubled conflict in Iraq. Mr. Chertoff said his message was not political, but simply a recognition of reality and the tough choices he must make.

In the second part of his interview to Rediff India Abroad Managing Editor [Features] Arthur J Pais, he also says Musharraf in a way exploits the Muslim extremists' presence in Pakistan to gain American support for his regime.

In his new book The Age of Fallibility, he discusses how the open society in America has been endangered in the last five years and lays greater blame on President Bush and less on the 9/11 terrorists.

'By declaring war on terror, he (Bush) suspended the critical mode of thinking that is at the core of an open society,' Soros writes in his new book. 'Criticism of the President's policies was denounced as unpatriotic. Congress passed the USA Patriotic Act without even having time to read it.'

US President George W Bush's assasination in October 2007 - From Channel 4, UK.

LONDON, Sept. 1 — The time is October 2007, and America is in anguish, rent by the war in Iraq and by a combustive restiveness at home. Leaving a hotel in Chicago after making a speech while a huge antiwar protest rages nearby, President Bush is suddenly struck down, killed by a sniper’s bullet.

That is the arresting beginning of “Death of a President,” a 90-minute film that is to be broadcast in October on More4, a British digital television station. And while depicting the assassination of a sitting president is provocative in itself, this film is doubly so because it has been made to look like a documentary.

Using archival film as well as computer-generated imagery that, for instance, attaches the president’s face to the body of the actor playing him, the film leaves no doubt that the victim is Mr. Bush rather than some generic president.

HIZBUL Mujahideen chief commander Syed Salahuddin favours self-rule to resolve the Kashmir dispute, but says it wouldn't be possible without complete demilitarisation.

In an exclusive telephone interview with The Indian Express from Muzaffarabad in Pakistan occupied Kashmir, Salahuddin one of India's most wanted Kashmiri militants explained that demilitarisation means, as President Musharraf puts it, both Pakistan and India call back their forces from all regions of Jammu and Kashmir''. He says ceasefire will not be a problem if the Government of India releases all innocent people in jails, stops its operations and takes the Army to a pre-1989 position.

On Al-Qaeda in Kashmir?
I say with full authority that it is purely a disinformation campaign. Al-Qaeda neither has any role in Kashmir nor any target. I can say with full confidence that they are not present in Kashmir. After the Mumbai serial blast, Indian agencies are misguiding the international community, especially the US, to get their support and malign our legitimate movement.

On London blasts and the Kashmir link?
As far as I know, nobody has related it (London Blasts) to Kashmir and it has nothing to do with Kashmir. It has been said that the people who were involved in the plot and who were arrested were of Pakistani origin and were supported by Pakistanis.

On accusations of diversion of quake relief funds
This is a disinformation campaign. Be it the London blasts or the Mumbai blasts, the Government of India is trying to relate it to Kashmir so that it can malign our movement.

Thirteen people were also injured in the blast at the market in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province, said provincial government spokesman Dawood Ahmadi.

Some of the victims were children, said Interior Ministry spokesman Yousef Stanezai.

A spokesman for NATOled Canadian forces in Kandahar, Major Scott Lundy, said NATO troops had a patrol moving through the area where the blast happened, but no troops were hurt.

``They were close enough to hear the blast,'' he said, adding it was impossible to determine if the convoy was the target.

The attack, one of the deadliest bombings in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, came just days after NATO forces took charge of security in the volatile south from a US-led coalition.

Also on Thursday in Kandahar province, two roadside bombs three hours apart killed one Canadian soldier and wounded four.

Ahmadi said nine shops were burned in fires caused by the explosion in Panjwayi, which happened at around 2:30 pm when the market was busy. He said authorities hadn't yet established the identity of the suicide bomber.

The attack in North Waziristan came a day after a militant commander said a month-long ceasefire had been called to give time for tribal elders to broker a settlement to end the conflict in the region.

``We can confirm at the moment that a car packed with explosives rammed a checkpost on the BannuMiranshah road,'' Ghafoor Shah, said a government official.

Two intelligence sources said seven troopers were killed in the blast, while a third said six were killed and five wounded. ``It was a white car and only one person, the driver, was in it,'' an Intelligence official said.

Security forces have killed more than 300 militants, including 75 foreigners, in North Waziristan since last year, after the military switched its offensive from South Waziristan.

Several Arab Lieutenants of alQaeda leader Osama bin Laden have been killed in North Waziristan, and US Drone aircraft have carried out missile strikes on al-Qaeda targets from across the border in Afghanistan.

Most of the casualties have occurred since March, when fighting escalated dramatically after militant Muslim clerics called on tribesmen to take up arms following a missile strike by Pakistani helicopters on a large al-Qaeda camp close to the Afghan border.

The approach to the site of the suicide attack, around 300km southwest of Islamabad, was cordoned off.

Maj-Gen Parami Kulatunga, who is the third-highest ranking officer in the army, was traveling to work when the suicide bomber banged his motor cycle against the officer's car at Pannipityita, a suburb of Colombo, during the morning rush hour traffic.

The General, two soldiers and a bystander were killed instantly. The suicide bomber's body was torn into pieces.

Eight persons were injured in the attack and hospitalised.

Kulatunga's car took the full impact of the blast and immediately caught fire, the police said. His bodyguards had no time to react.

Military spokesman Prasad Samarasinghe said the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) carried out the attack although there was no response from the guerrillas. Kulatunga is the senior most army officer to be killed in Sri Lanka's drawn out Tamil separatist campaign.

Two Major-Generals had been killed before him, but they were junior to him in rank at the time of their assassinations.

Two months ago, Tamil Tiger rebels carried out a suicide bomb attack against army chief Sarath Fonseka inside the army complex in Colombo leaving 11 dead. Fonseka is now in Singapore undergoing treatment.

Meanwhile, passengers in a pick-up truck, a three-wheel taxi and a van were taken to hospital when their vehicles were also hit by the bomb, which the police said was probably rigged up on a cycle parked on the side of the road.

The attack came as the LTTE rejected a peace overture by President Mahinda Rajapakse for a direct deal with the guerrillas.

The President had sent a message to the LTTE seeking a two-week truce over and above the Norwegian arranged ceasefire that is collapsing. The LTTE said they were opposed to any direct dealings with the Colombo Government and insisted working through peace broker Norway.

The LTTE's political wing leader S.P.Tamilselvan, said they were also concerned that Scandinavians would halt their truce monitoring work following a meeting scheduled for June 29 in Oslo.

The meeting was called by Oslo after the LTTE objected to three countries, Sweden, Finland and Denmark being in the monitoring mission after these three countries outlawed the LTTE last month.

The bomber exploded herself at the gate of the military hospital situated in the heavily guarded Army Headquarters compound. She is believed to have entered the complex with visitors to the military hospital.

"A powerful explosion activated by a woman Tamil Tiger suicide bomber claimed the lives of several army and civilian personnel near the military hospital gate this afternoon," the army said in a statement.

Besides the army chief, 26 other personnel were injured in the attack that came as the rebels stalled a second round of peace talks with increasing attacks on government troops.

General Fonseca, who suffered severe abdominal injuries, was rushed to the hospital where he underwent an emergency operation. He is said to be in serious condition.

Nearby roads were closed after the blast and the main highway connecting LTTE stronghold Jaffna to the rest of the rest of the country was cut off by the government troops.

The rebels have stepped up their attacks on military targets since the November election of President Mahinda Rajpakse. The Scandinavian truce monitoring mission said the bombing further undermined Norway's attempts to broker peace.