Pakistani premier survives assassination bid

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani escaped an apparent assassination attempt when two shots hit his motorcade Wednesday, just three days before the country's presidential election.

Officials said Gilani was not in the targeted car at the time, but the brazen daytime attack underscored the political turmoil and violence that have been shadowing the world's only nuclear-armed Islamic nation.

Gilani's spokesman initially said he was in the stricken vehicle but later declined to confirm that, amid the confusion surrounding the shooting in Rawalpindi, the garrison town that is home to Pakistan's military headquarters.

"Two bullets hit the window glass of the bulletproof car," the spokesman, Zahid Bashir, told AFP."By the grace of God, the prime minister is safe."

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Twin suicide blasts kill 64 at Pakistan munitions factory

Two suicide bombers blew themselves up outside Pakistan's main army munitions factory Thursday, killing 64 workers in the deadliest attack on a military installation in the country's history.

In the second bombing to rock the feuding coalition government since President Pervez Musharraf resigned Monday, the attackers struck a crowd of workers leaving the huge complex in Wah, near Islamabad.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the atrocity and threatened to carry out further attacks if an army offensive against militants near the Afghan border is not stopped.

It's a massive attack," local police chief Nasir Durrani told AFP. "Two men apparently blew themselves up outside the factory during a shift change.

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Food crisis pushes weak states toward brink of collapse - report

Weak states already close to collapse at the end of 2006 moved closer to the brink last year, even before the latest explosion of food and fuel prices that are certain to feed instability in vulnerable countries, according to the latest edition of the annual "Failed States Index" released here Monday by Foreign Policy magazine.

The Index, a collaborative effort of Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace (FFP), found that Somalia replaced Sudan as the world's most unstable country in 2007 after US-backed Ethiopian troops routed Islamist forces which had given the strife-torn East African nation its first semblance of stability in more than 15 years.

Sudan, which had topped the list for the previous two years, fell into second place,while Zimbabwe, where a government sponsored campaign of violence forced the opposition candidate Sunday to withdraw from presidential elections scheduled for later this week, moved up to third from the fourth rank it held in the 2006 Index.

Sudan's western neighbor, Chad, was ranked fourth for 2007, just above US-occupied Iraq, which last year held the second-ranked position amid indications that sectarian violence was moving the country into a full-scale civil war.

The Index's compilers credited the US "surge" – the addition of some 30,000 US troops and the adoption of a more aggressive counter-insurgency strategy – in part for Baghdad's improvement over the course of the year, although it underlined, as have US commanders and officials, the fragility of the country's advance.

"Progress in Iraq last year was negligible at best and deeply susceptible to reversal should the country suffer the kind of shock – a food shortage, a high-level assassination, an attack that unleashes ethnic hatreds – that has exposed so many states' deep vulnerabilities in recent months," according to the Index analysis published in Foreign Policy.

The Index, which is based on a dozen social, economic and political indicators, each of which is assigned a numerical score, also found major improvements in 2007 in stability for Cote d'Ivoire, which ranked eighth this year, Haiti (14) and Liberia (34),among other countries, compared to 2006.

At the same time, several key countries became substantially more insecure in 2007, according to the Index, which cited in particular Bangladesh (12), where a state of emergency has lasted nearly two years, Pakistan (9), where former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's assassination closed out the year

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Up to eight dead as massive bomb targets Danish Embassy in Pakistan

A suicide car bomb outside Denmark's embassy in Pakistan killed up to eight people and wounded 27 Monday in a possible new backlash over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, state media and officials said.

The massive blast damaged the mission in central Islamabad and nearly destroyed a nearby UN agency. Dozens of cars were also wrecked by the force of the explosion, which gouged a huge crater out of the road.

There was no claim of responsibility but officials said the attack was likely linked to the row over the Prophet cartoons, which Danish newspapers first published in 2005 and then reprinted in February.

Pakistani Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik said the "dastardly" bombing "could be a reaction to blasphemous sketches published in Denmark" and pledged that the culprits would be caught.

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