LONDON (AP) _ Britain's foreign policy chief said Friday that Iran continues to pose the most serious threat to the world, warning that Tehran's suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons risks an arms race across the Middle East.

David Miliband said in a speech that the standoff over Iran's nuclear program -- which Tehran insists is aimed at developing a civilian energy program but which Western leaders say is an effort to make nuclear weapons -- must be quickly resolved.

"In the next year, the most pressing threat to global order ... comes from the actions of Iran," said Miliband, Britain's foreign secretary. "Its refusal to address the international community's concerns about its pursuit of nuclear enrichment threatens to spark a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East."

Miliband said that if Iran persists, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others could be forced to consider whether they also need nuclear weapons to defend their interests. Israel is widely considered to have nuclear arms but has a "no tell" policy on the issue.

Venezuelans are voting in elections to choose new state governors and more than 300 mayors across the country.

The polls are being seen as a critical test for President Hugo Chavez, whose allies won in all but two of the country's 23 states in 2004.

Such a margin of victory is unlikely this time, correspondents say.

Last year Mr Chavez suffered his first electoral defeat in almost 10 years, losing a referendum that would have let presidents seek indefinite re-election.

The first sign of friction in the Obama camp as Mrs Clinton demands - and gets - a purge of her critics before accepting Secretary of State role

Before Hillary Clinton has been formally offered the job as Secretary of State, a purge of Barack Obama's top foreign policy team has begun.

The advisers who helped trash the former First Lady's foreign policy credentials on the campaign trail are being brutally shunted aside, as the price of her accepting the job of being the public face of America to the world. In negotiations with Mr Obama this week before agreeing to take the job, she demanded and received assurances that she alone should appoint staff to the State Department. She also got assurances that she will have direct access to the President and will not have to go through his foreign policy advisers on the National Security Council, which is where many of her critics in the Obama team are expected to end up.

The first victims of Mrs Clinton's anticipated appointment will be those who defended Mr Obama's flanks on the campaign trail. By mocking Mrs Clinton's claims to have landed under sniper fire in Bosnia or pouring scorn on her much-ballyhooed claim to have visited 80 countries as First Lady they successfully deflected the damaging charge that he is a lightweight on international issues.

Five years after his last visit, our correspondent finds the Taliban back in charge of their spiritual home - and girls attacked with acid simply for attending school

There is a little girl in the Meir Wais hospital with livid scars and dead skin across her face, an obscene map of brown and pink tissue. Then there is another girl, a beautiful child, Khorea Horay, grimacing in pain, her leg amputated, her life destroyed after her foot was torn to pieces. In another ward, two girls lie on their backs, a tent above their limbs. One has lost an arm, another - a 16-year-old - a leg.

Then there is the grim young man with the beard, also in the darkest pain, who looks at me with suspicion and puzzlement. He has a bullet wound in the abdomen, a great incision sutured up after the doctors found it infected. Two other young men, also bearded, cowled in brown "patu" shawls, sit beside this suffering warrior. They, too, stare at me as if I am a visitor from Mars. Perhaps that's what I am in Kandahar. Better to be a Martian than a Westerner in a city which in all but name has fallen to the Taliban.

The black turbans are everywhere. So are the blue burkhas which we Westerners confidently - stupidly - believed would vanish from Afghan society. But the Taliban insist they were not responsible for throwing acid in the face of the little girl in the second-floor ward at Meir Wais hospital. You know what she is thinking. You know what her parents are thinking. Who will marry this girl now, with her patchwork face of pain? Four men on a motorcycle threw acid at her and 13 of her friends on their way to school. Four were brought here, two dispatched immediately to the eye department. The Taliban deny any involvement. But they would, wouldn't they?

ISLAMABAD: A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west.

That the map was first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some U.S. neoconservative circles matters little here. It has fueled a belief among Pakistanis, including members of the armed forces, that what the United States really wants is the breakup of Pakistan, the only Muslim country with nuclear arms.

"One of the biggest fears of the Pakistani military planners is the collaboration between India and Afghanistan to destroy Pakistan," said a senior Pakistani government official involved in strategic planning who insisted on anonymity in accordance with diplomatic rules. "Some people feel the United States is colluding in this."

That notion may strike Americans as strange coming from an ally of 50 years. But as the incoming Obama administration tries to coax greater cooperation from Pakistan in the fight against militancy, it can hardly be ignored.

GENEVA: Greece, Turkey and Belarus have all violated an international treaty by not destroying land mine stockpiles, and 15 other countries, including Britain, will miss their 2009 clearance targets, a coalition of monitors said Friday.

The coalition, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, said that more than 5,400 people were killed or maimed last year by antipersonnel mines, cluster munitions and other ordnance that can lie dormant for decades before exploding.

In its 1,155-page Landmine Monitor Report, the coalition of nongovernmental groups said that while trade in land mines was now "virtually nonexistent," many countries were moving too slowly to get rid of the crippling weapons.

Denmark, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru, Britain and Venezuela, which are among those seeking more time to clear their mined areas, should all have finished by now, said the ICBL, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

"Sir, you have done India proud." That was how the anchorman of a television channel in Delhi addressed the Indian navy chief, Admiral Sureesh Mehta, on the victorious sea battle by warship INS Tabar with would-be hijackers as dusk was falling on Tuesday evening in the Gulf of Aden.

Those words would have made Sir Francis Drake, the 16th-century British navigator and slaver-politician of the Elizabethan era, truly envious. Sir Francis had bigger claims to fame in a life cut short by dysentery while attacking San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1595.

Unsurprisingly, the patriotic Indian media dutifully expressed its gratitude and confidence once again in the armed forces. The armed forces, too, gained an opportunity to look away from a raging controversy over alleged involvement of servicemen in terrorist activities by Hindu fundamentalists. The Indian navy has seen "action" after a long interlude of 37 years since the Bangladesh war.

A carefully worded navy statement suggested that pirates attacked the Tabar and the latter "retaliated in self-defense" and opened fire on the mother vessel. The pirates "made good" their "escape into darkness" while the Indian warship sunk a pirate boat. The incident received wide international attention. But it also raises some questions.

* States and companies target developing nations

* Small farmers at risk from industrial-scale deals

Rich governments and corporations are triggering alarm for the poor as they buy up the rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in developing countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies.

The head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that the controversial rise in land deals could create a form of "neo-colonialism", with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.

Rising food prices have already set off a second "scramble for Africa". This week, the South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics announced plans to buy a 99-year lease on a million hectares in Madagascar. Its aim is to grow 5m tonnes of corn a year by 2023, and produce palm oil from a further lease of 120,000 hectares (296,000 acres), relying on a largely South African workforce. Production would be mainly earmarked for South Korea, which wants to lessen dependence on imports.

"These deals can be purely commercial ventures on one level, but sitting behind it is often a food security imperative backed by a government," said Carl Atkin, a consultant at Bidwells Agribusiness, a Cambridge firm helping to arrange some of the big international land deals.

CHINA is expected to add a melamine test to its quality inspection of tableware after an industry expert warned that substandard tableware made with melamine may pose a health risk.

The Ministry of Health and the General Administration of Quality Inspection, Supervision and Quarantine are paying close attention after Dong Jinshi, deputy director of the Beijing-based International Food-Packaging Association, said that tableware made with melamine plastics could pose a threat.

The health ministry is expected to revise the country's standards for tableware production, and the General Administration of Quality Inspection will begin spot checks in the market, Shanghai Evening News reported.

China has never capped the amount of melamine that can be used to make tableware. In Europe, only 30 milligrams per kilogram of melamine are permitted in tableware, the newspaper said. ...