Briefly: A judge throws out Anwar sodomy charge
International Herald Tribune
November 6, 2006
The Associated Press

KUALA LUMPUR 

ASIA/PACIFIC
Prosecutors Monday dropped charges against the adopted brother of former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim that the two had engaged in sodomy - accusations that led to Anwar's 1998 removal during a feud with Mahathir bin Mohamad.
The charge was among several sodomy allegations cited by Mahathir, who was prime minister at the time, to claim that Anwar was a homosexual and that he was thus unfit to be a leader of the Muslim- majority country. The other charges have since been dropped.
Judge Nursinah Adzmi acquitted and discharged Sukma Dermawan after the deputy public prosecutor, Hanafiah Zakaria, told the court there was no evidence to support the charge of sodomy, said a defense lawyer, Gobind Singh Deo. 
JAKARTA,
Fires and smoke take a toll on orangutans
About 1,000 orangutans are estimated to have died in Indonesia during the dry season this year as raging forest fires have produced thick smoke across huge areas of Southeast Asia, a conservationist said Monday.
The fires in the Indonesian part of Borneo have deprived the endangered apes of food and forced them to encroach on human settlements, where they are often attacked for damaging crops, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation said.
"Orangutans are starving," said Willie Smits, an ecologist at the foundation. "They are sick and many of those we are treating were injured after being attacked by machetes." He estimated that 1,000 orangutans had died over this year's dry season. (Reuters)
TOKYO
5-way talks proposed on N. Korean impasse
Japan and the United States are backing five-nation talks on the nuclear standoff with North Korea at an upcoming international conference, the Japanese foreign minister said Monday.
Taro Aso said that a five-way meeting - between Japan, the United States, South Korea, China and Russia - would be proposed at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum meeting, which begins in Hanoi on Nov. 18.
The plan was discussed in a meeting with R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, in Tokyo. Burns was on a tour of the region to coordinate policy on North Korea, which last week announced it would return to six-party nuclear talks that have been stalled for a year.
Burns rejected a North Korean call over the weekend for Japan to be excluded from the six-party talks because of its demand, reiterated on Monday, that Pyongyang not attend the talks as a declared nuclear power. North Korea on Oct. 9 tested an underground nuclear device, triggering sanctions from the UN Security Council.(AP)
BEIJING: Chinese scientists have rejected the results of a study that reported a prevalent new strain of bird flu in China, saying that they had not found significant variants to the virus, state media said Monday. "Gene sequence analysis of the virus shows that it shares high conformity with the H5N1 virus that was isolated in Hunan when bird flu broke out in early 2004," said Chen Hualan, director of the National Bird Flu Reference Laboratory, whose lab does genetic analysis on samples from every domestic bird-flu outbreak. He was quoted in The China Daily. (AP)
ISLAMABAD: The Muslim world must correct Western misperceptions created by "semiliterate clerics" that Islam is a religion that fosters militant extremism, President Pervez Musharraf said Monday. "We need to inform the world of the reality of Islam," Musharraf told a meeting of the World Islamic Economic Forum. (AP)
TANGERANG, Indonesia: Indonesian courts handed Dutch, French and Chinese nationals to sentences from 20 years in prison to life on Monday for ties to a factory capable of producing millions of illegal Ecstasy pills a year. Presiding judge Mulyanto told the Tangerang District Court that Serge Areski Atloui of France and Garnick Josephus Nicolaas of the Netherlands were given life behind bars for helping produce ingredients used to make the drug. Five Chinese men each got 20 years for producing methamphetamines, another judge said. $@(AP)
COLOMBO: Two members of a Tamil political party were killed over the weekend by Sri Lankan separatist rebels, party officials and the military said Monday. An official of the Eelam Peoples' Democratic Party, an ethnic-Tamil party opposed to the Tamil Tiger guerrillas, said that rebels had shot party member Silvarajah Raju, 29, in Batticaloa District on Sunday. Separately, Ragini Devi, 31, was shot by suspected rebels in Jaffna on Saturday.(AP

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