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East Timor’s government accused the opposition Fretilin party of stoking security tensions in the restive country Wednesday, as Australia announced plans for a limited troop withdrawal.

Security strains similar to those that caused a surge in regional and ethnic violence in 2006 have been rising in East Timor over recent weeks as the government tries to root out police corruption and appoint a new commander.

An anonymous leaflet has been circulating throughout the capital Dili threatening more of the east versus west violence that flared in May 2006, killing 37 people and driving 150,000 from their homes, if an easterner gets the police job.

Government spokesman Agio Pereira said Fretilin, the main opposition party, was “not helping the country to consolidate peace, harmony and stability” with plans for a march supposedly in support of peace, but actually dividing security forces.

“Any step to revisit regional East-West hostilities in Timor-Leste is unfortunate and unacceptable,” Pereira said in a statement received by Reuters.

Also fuelling tensions was the arrest by United Nations police this month of Baucau police commander Aderito da Costa Ximenes over disciplinary issues in the country’s second biggest city, located east of Dili.

Pereira said security in Dili had now been stepped up, and while Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao was supportive of peaceful demonstrations, violence would not be tolerated.

Australia earlier Wednesday said it would reduce the number of peacekeeping troops it had in East Timor as security continued to improve.

“The East Timorese authorities have shown through their professional handling of the security situation that the time is now right for some drawdown,” Australian Defense Minister Joel Fitzgibbon said.

East Timor has struggled to achieve stability since independence from Indonesia in 2002. In February, rebel soldiers carried out an unsuccessful attempt to kill President Jose Ramos Horta, who was wounded and flown to Australia for surgery. Gusmao escaped injury in the attack.

Fitzgibbon said about 100 Australian soldiers would return home early in 2009, leaving 650 in East Timor, forming the bulk of a 790-strong stabilization force that includes troops from New Zealand.

More than 2,500 foreign troops and police remain in the country to help local security forces maintain stability.

Culture fans thousands of miles from Beijing can now visit its famous Forbidden City, through a three dimensional recreation of the vast palace that also allows them to dress up as an imperial eunuch and meet a courtesan.

One of the jewels in China’s cultural crown, the sprawling complex in the heart of the capital already gets tens of thousands of real-life visitors each day.

But now online tourists can also watch the Qing dynasty emperor feast at dinner, train fighting crickets and feed them with blood-fattened mosquitoes, or practice archery with the help of a courtesan.

At the virtual palace, unveiled on Friday, they can also dress up as part of the huge imperial entourage.

“When you enter the Forbidden City you choose one of nine historical costumes, which is to give a sense of history but also keep a sense of decorum,” said John Tolva, program manager at IBM who led the project, dubbed “Beyond Space and Time.”

“You can’t run and you can’t fly,” he added, a restriction that aims to prevent other virtual visitors, whom you can see and interact with, being distracted.

The program does not shy away from the racier sides of imperial history, shaped in part by the legions of eunuchs who controlled portions of court life and could rise to great power.

“One of the costumes you can chose is a eunuch,” said IBM Vice President Paula W. Baker — though to spare blushes that avatar is only labeled “imperial servant.”

They also appear in some of the bureaucratic roles they might have filled hundreds of years ago.

“There are eunuchs, for instance in the ‘approving imperial memorials’ scenes,” Tolva added.

Those who are interested in other intimate aspects of the emperor’s life have a chance to get an up close look at the women chosen to serve him.

“There is a painting being done of the emperor and the courtesans are there, orbiting about tending to him while the painter does his job,” Tolva said.

“And for all the activities where you actually do something there is an attendant who is styled as a courtesan.”

The museum hopes the program (www.beyondspaceandtime.com), which is based on computer gaming software, will earn new fans for a cultural landmark which survived China’s tumultuous 20th century in remarkably good form.

It has been over three years in the making and cost over $3 million, provided by IBM as part of a community program.

Exacting curators feel the result offers a good introduction to the palace, but worry there has been a certain sacrifice of historical accuracy for the convenience of a modern visitor.

“You wouldn’t have been able to just wander around like this,” said Hu Chui, director of the Information Department, gesturing at a soldier avatar striding toward a central hall.

“You would have been kowtowing and anyway, he is on the imperial pathway. You would get arrested for that.”

The text message from the elephant flashed across Richard Lesowapir’s screen: Kimani was heading for neighboring farms.

The huge bull elephant had a long history of raiding villagers’ crops during the harvest, sometimes wiping out six months of income at a time. But this time a mobile phone card inserted in his collar sent rangers a text message. Lesowapir, an armed guard and a driver arrived in a jeep bristling with spotlights to frighten Kimani back into the Ol Pejeta conservancy.

Kenya is the first country to try elephant texting as a way to protect both a growing human population and the wild animals that now have less room to roam. Elephants are ranked as “near threatened” in the Red List, an index of vulnerable species published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The race to save Kimani began two years ago. The Kenya Wildlife Service had already reluctantly shot five elephants from the conservancy who refused to stop crop-raiding, and Kimani was the last of the regular raiders. The Save the Elephants group wanted to see if he could break the habit.

So they placed a mobile phone SIM card in Kimani’s collar, then set up a virtual “geofence” using a global positioning system that mirrored the conservatory’s boundaries. Whenever Kimani approaches the virtual fence, his collar texts rangers.

They have intercepted Kimani 15 times since the project began. Once almost a nightly raider, he last went near a farmer’s field four months ago.

It’s a huge relief to the small farmers who rely on their crops for food and cash for school fees. Basila Mwasu, a 31-year-old mother of two, lives a stone’s throw from the conservancy fence. She and her neighbors used to drum through the night on pots and pans in front of flaming bonfires to try to frighten the elephants away.

Once an elephant stuck its trunk through a window into a room where her baby daughter was sleeping and the family had stored some corn. She beat it back with a burning stick. Another time, an elephant killed a neighbor who was defending his crop.

“We had to go into town to tell the game (wardens) to chase the elephants away or we’re going to kill them all,” Mwasu remembered.

But the elephants kept coming back.

Batian Craig, the conservation and security manager at the 90,000 acre Ol Pejeta conservancy, says community development programs are of little use if farmers don’t have crops. He recalled the time when 15 families had their harvests wiped out.

“As soon as a farmer has lost his livelihood for six months, he doesn’t give a damn whether he has a school or a road or water or whatever,” he said.

Iain Douglas-Hamilton, founder of Save the Elephants, said the project is still in its infancy — so far only two geofences have been set up in Kenya — and it has its problems.

Collar batteries wear out every few years. Sometimes communities think placing a collar on an elephant implies ownership and responsibility for the havoc it causes. And it’s expensive work — Ol Pejeta has five full-time staff and a standby vehicle to respond when a message flashes across a ranger’s screen.

But the experiment with Kimani has been a success, and last month another geofence was set up in another part of the country for an elephant known as Mountain Bull. Moses Litoroh, the coordinator of Kenya Wildlife Service’s elephant program, hopes the project might help resolve some of the 1,300 complaints the Service receives every year over crop raiding.

The elephants can be tracked through Google Earth software, helping to map and conserve the corridors they use to move from one protected area to another. The tracking also helps prevent poaching, as rangers know where to deploy resources to guard valuable animals.

But the biggest bonus so far has been the drop in crop raiding. Douglas-Hamilton says elephants, like teenagers, learn from each other, so tracking and controlling one habitual crop raider can make a whole group change its habits.

Mwasu’s two young daughters play under the banana trees these sultry evenings without their mother worrying about elephants.

“We can live together,” she said. “Elephants have the right to live, and we have the right to live too.”

About 100 people were feared drowned off the coast of Yemen after they were forced to swim ashore by smugglers, the UN refugee agency said Friday citing reports by survivors.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said 47 Somalis survived the ordeal after the smugglers forced all 150 people aboard off the boat that left the Somali port of Marera, near Bossaro Monday.

The boat spent three days crossing the Gulf of Aden and was five km off

the Yemeni coast when the smugglers forced their human cargo to swim.

The UNHCR said 12 people that were put on a smaller boat arrived safely.

‘The 12 were placed in a smaller boat, while the others had to try to swim to shore,’ UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva.

‘Survivors said they counted a total of 47 people reaching shore, and later saw Yemeni authorities burying five bodies,’ he said.

The UNHCR said a search was ordered for the rest of the passengers. The smuggling accident was the latest in a series of human smuggling cases. At least 52 Somalis died last month onboard their smuggling boat after it broke down and drifted for 18 days without food or water.

The UNHCR said about 32,000 people were safely smuggled into Yemen so far this year, while 230 people have died and 365 others were reported missing.

Child labour may be condemned as a gross abuse of human rights, but in Peru children are demanding their right to lawful employment as an alternative to labour exploitation, arguing if poverty persists, so will child labour.

The Manthoc Child and Adolescent Workers’ Association uses its scarce resources to promote the rights of children and a better quality of life for labourers under the legal working age.

They come together on their own initiative - with adults performing only minor roles - to demand recognition of child labour as a legal activity, in which children’s development is promoted and youths are protected from harm.

The members of Manthoc, aged six to 18, elect their leaders and make their own proposals, receiving assistance from adults on administrative and other matters, Manthoc’s national delegate, Fabiola Segura, said.

Speaking with a coherence and eloquence that belies her young age, Segura, who since the age of nine has been working as a baker, artisan and street vendor, said the rationale of child labour is apparent: children will have to work so long there is poverty.

‘Without alternative policies and dignified work, child workers will be exploited, and as long as wealth is not well distributed, poverty will continue to exist. Young people work illegally out of necessity and it’s there where (authorities) need to intervene,’ Segura said.

At her office in the poor Lima neighbourhood of Ciudad de Dios, which also serves as a school-workshop for child labourers, Segura said the group’s goal is to overturn legislation that - well-intentioned though - ignores a social and cultural reality in which children are part of the country’s productive work force.

At present, Peruvian legislation permits the employment of children at the age of 14, or 12 in some cases, although different non-government organizations estimate that the almost 2.5 million child labourers in Peru begin working at even younger ages.

Manthoc said the solution lies in establishing and enforcing dignified working conditions and ensuring that children are valued, protected and respected for the labour that they perform.

Although having to earn a livelihood means for children less time for rest, play and study and taking adult responsibilities, they say they are proud to be able to help their families and earn their own money.

Samuel Calderon, another Manthoc national delegate, said the difference between their organization and others that fight against child labour is that the latter only see the exploitation and the abuse and do not consider the positive aspects.

‘I’ve worked at the warehouse at my home when I was six, selling merchandise, and it’s a way to learn, each person getting something out of their work and developing skills,’ Calderon said.

According to Manthoc, for work to be ‘dignified’ it must be voluntary, suitable to the child’s age and allow the minor to attend school until he or she has completed basic educational requirements.

The Manthoc youths also offer assistance and training to other children who are victims of exploitation.

At their small workshops, the organization’s 3,500 children work in dignified conditions and receive food, help with schoolwork, psychological assistance and professional training while they make sweets, wooden toys or gift cards that they later sell.

All of Manthoc’s activities and policies have the same overarching goal: empowering children and giving them control over their future.

Segura said it was regrettable that ‘politicians make laws that in principle are to help children but in the end don’t benefit them at all, and that’s why we want to express our opinion.’

New Yorkers may be crazy about meeting U.S. Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, but not too many of them are in a mood to vote for her.This came to the fore when a look-alike of Palin named visited New York on Monday.

Kristy Webb, 29, elicited cheers, waves and shocked stares as she visited Madison Square Garden, Times Square, Rockefeller Center and Washington Square Park.

She was swarmed by flocks of camera-toting tourists at Madison Square Garden, where she signed a newspaper for an architect and a hockey puck for a student.

“She seems nice. She seems smart. She likes hockey,” the New York Daily News quoted student Joe Alianello, 19, as saying.

Queens resident Isabel Rijo, 78, whom faux-Palin greeted in Spanish, said: “I wish she was the vice president.”

In Times Square, too, Webb’s presence made tourists crane their necks and aim their cameras from tour buses. Some even stopped for a handshake and well wishes.

Fake-Palin also attempted meeting famous Doppelganger Tina Fey at NBC, but failed.

In Washington Square Park, NYU student Matt Hooper, 20, hollered “Obama ‘08″ as faux-Palin passed.

“I’m not a fan of her policies. In this park, I don’t think she’ll be very popular,” he said.

Marty Levinson, 68, let fake-Palin take a picture with his granddaughter, but only after he pinned an Obama button to the tot’s shirt.

“If her parents see her with anyone who even looks like Palin, they’ll strangle me,” he said.

Webb was hired by the New York Daily News to walk in Palin’s patent leather pumps for a day, accompanied by two fake bodyguards, so as to determine what kind of welcome the Alaska Governor would actually get when she spent the day in New York on Tuesday.

The paper’s findings suggested that though New Yorkers could not wait to meet Palin, not too many of them were going to vote for her.

Scientists from Leeds University have discovered that the world was ruled by pig-like creatures for a million years.The “Age of the Porcine” occurred around 260 million years ago - when the creatures called lystrosaurs were the few survivors of a mass extinction.

Nearly 95 pct of the living species were destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions leaving behind pigs in a “golden age” of no predators.

They had Earth’s abundant plant-life all to themselves.

“We can only speculate on how lystrosaurs survived while the rest died. Perhaps its ability to burrow and hibernate protected it from the worst periods,” The Sun quoted Professor Paul Wignall of Leeds University, as saying

“The remarkable thing about the lystrosaurs was their size.

“Nothing else that big seems to have got through the destruction - and that is why they were able to dominate Earth for so long. They fed and spread.

“We think there were billions of them. Their fossils are everywhere,” he added

Lystrosaurs were similar in size to modern pigs, with snouts and small tusks for rooting around in vegetation.

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may be struggling to nudge ahead of his Republican rival in polls at home, but people across the world want him in the White House, a BBC poll said on Wednesday.All 22 countries covered in the poll would prefer to see Obama elected U.S. president ahead of Republican John McCain. And in 17 of the 22 nations, people expect relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world to improve if Obama wins.

More than 22,000 people were questioned by pollster GlobeScan in countries ranging from India to Australia, and across Africa, Europe and South America.

The margin in favour of Obama ranged from 9 percent in India to 82 percent in Kenya, while an average of 49 percent across the 22 countries preferred Obama compared with 12 percent preferring McCain. Some four in 10 did not take a view.

“Large numbers of people around the world clearly like what Barack Obama represents,” said GlobeScan chairman, Doug Miller.

“Given how negative America’s international image is at present, it is quite striking that only one in five think a McCain presidency would improve on the Bush administration’s relations with the world.”

In the United States, three polls taken since the Republican party convention ended on Thursday show McCain with a lead of 1 to 4 percentage points — within the margin of error — and two others show the two neck-and-neck.

The countries most optimistic that an Obama presidency would improve relations were America’s NATO allies — Canada (69 percent), France (62 percent), Germany (61 percent), Britain (54 percent), Italy (64 percent — as well as Australia (62 percent), Kenya (87 percent) and Nigeria (71 percent).

A similar BBC/Globescan poll conducted ahead of the 2004 U.S presidential election found that, of 35 countries polled, 30 would have preferred to see Democratic nominee John Kerry, rather than the incumbent George Bush, who was elected.

At the time, the Philippines, Nigeria and Poland were among the few countries to favour Bush’s re-election. Wednesday’s poll showed that all three now favour Obama over McCain.

A total of 23,531 people in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Turkey, the UAE, Britain and the United States were interviewed face-to-face or by telephone in July and August 2008 for the poll.

Russia and Georgia are to put their differences over Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Monday.The Hague-based ICJ, the highest UN court, seeks to resolve matters of international law disputed by state governments. From Monday until Wednesday next week it will hold a public hearing on proceedings instituted by Georgia against Russia.

Tbilisi has accused Russian forces of driving ethnic Georgians out of the two regions in a form of ethnic cleansing. Moscow has denied the allegations.

Last month Georgia and Russia fought a brief conflict over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, resulting in the routing of the Georgian forces. Moscow has since formally recognized the independence of the two regions despite Western criticism.

A judgement from the ICJ is not expected for several weeks. Its judgements have no legally binding effect.

Israeli agents who kidnapped Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960 found the notorious death camp doctor Josef Mengele but let him get away, one of the operatives said Tuesday.

Mengele was one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, a doctor who conducted cruel experiments on twins and dwarves at the Auschwitz concentration camp and killed children with lethal injections. He selected prisoners who would be subjected to his experiments and sent others straight to their death in gas chambers.

Rafi Eitan, now an 81-year-old Israeli Cabinet minister, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he and other Mossad agents located Mengele living in a Buenos Aires apartment with his wife at the time of Eichmann’s capture in 1960.

But they decided that trying to nab him would risk sabotaging the capture of Eichmann, who implemented Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” to kill European Jewry and was deemed a more important target.

It was known that Mengele was living in Buenos Aires around the time of Eichmann’s capture. But Eitan’s comments indicated the Israelis were closer to him than had been previously thought — and shed light on why they decided to abandon an attempt to catch him.

“When you have one operation, you’re taking a certain level of risk. If you’re doing a second operation at the same time, you double the risk … not only for the second operation but for the first one, as well,” Eitan said.

Eichmann was responsible for implementing Hitler’s plan that exterminated 6 million Jews during World War II. After his capture, he was spirited to Israel, tried and executed.

Mengele was infamous for his sadistic experiments in the death camps. He injected dye into the eyes of twins to change their color and sewed them together to try to create artificially conjoined twins. He ordered twins killed simultaneously and then dissected for examination of their organs. His horrors earned him the title “Angel of Death.”

After the war, Mengele fled Germany under an assumed name and ended up in Argentina, a popular refuge for many senior Nazi officials. Informants working with the Mossad had seen him while the agents were in Buenos Aires, Eitan said.

The Mossad men located Mengele’s apartment, and on one specific day even knew he was at home, Eitan said. But the next day, Mengele left with his wife for what the agents believed would be a temporary absence.

At the time, the Israelis had already snatched Eichmann and were holding him in a safe house while they waited to whisk him out of the country. They feared that if they waited for Mengele to come back, the Eichmann operation would be discovered. Eitan said they decided it was not worth the risk.

“When I have a bird in my hand, I don’t start looking for the bird in the bush. I’ll take the bird in my hand, put it in a cage, and then deal with the one in the bush,” Eitan said.

By the time the Mossad sent a team back to Buenos Aires a few weeks later, it was too late.

“After Eichmann’s capture was made public, he disappeared entirely,” Eitan said.

After missing him in Argentina, the Mossad had another shot at catching Mengele in Sao Paolo, Brazil, two years later, Eitan said. But the organization had other “operational priorities,” and Mengele got away again. He would not say what those priorities were and the Mossad then lost track of Mengele.

Having eluded capture for 34 years, Mengele drowned in Brazil in early 1979 and experts identified the body as his six years later.

An October 1992 U.S. Justice Department report on Mengele’s whereabouts and activities after World War II provides a timeline that raises questions about Mengele’s whereabouts in 1960. It says Mengele arrived in Argentina in 1949 but left in 1959 and became a naturalized citizen of Paraguay. After Eichmann was captured in May 1960, Mengele moved to Brazil, according to the report by the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which tracks Nazis.

David Marwell, a former chief investigator at the OSI, said Mengele did move around South America and even if he left for Paraguay in 1959, he could have been moving between Paraguay and Argentina until Eichman’s capture, which forced him underground.

Marwell said it has long been known that Mengele escaped from Argentina and Eitan’s claim that the Israelis had known his whereabouts but let him get away was virtually impossible to verify.

“It does not add much to our understanding of it and it would be impossible to research because you’re talking about an internal decision, so you take him at his word,” he told the AP.

OSI documents also show that Isser Harel, who oversaw the kidnap operation, told the OSI the Israelis attempted to capture Mengele in May 1960 at the same time they caught Eichmann. According to Harel, Mengele was able to escape, going underground after reports of his whereabouts appeared in the media, the OSI documents say.

Asked about Eitan’s account which first appeared in Israeli media this week, historian Avner Shalev, chairman of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial authority, said the Mossad made the right decision to concentrate on Eichmann because he was more important than Mengele.

After Eichmann was caught, the Mossad considered expanding its activities targeting Nazis, said Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter who heads the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office. But the organization eventually shifted its resources elsewhere, he said, and Eichmann remained one of only two significant Nazi captures the Israeli secret service had.

Eitan, who headed the shadowy “Lekem” unit of the defense ministry, took responsibility for the operation that recruited Jonathan Pollard, an American naval analyst who was caught spying for Israel and sentenced to life in prison in one of the most damaging episodes in Israel-American relations.