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as some called it - is settled. Reports that President-Elect Barack Obama is actually a Microsoft Zune user have been crushed last night by one of Obama’s spokesmen. “Not true, the President-Elect uses and iPod,” addressed the spokesman to Philadelphia City Paper - Neal Santos’ accusations.

It all started with a blog entry on the Philadelphia’s newspaper website of Santos saying that Obama “hopped on the machine next to me [at the gym] and broke a mean sweat while reading a copy of USA Today and listening to his Zune.” After that, Zune fans were “claiming the President-Elect as one of our own” thinking that “This is probably the best endorsement Zune could’ve gotten — for free.”

However, Apple iPod fans weren’t too happy with the news either, some of them even flaming in comments “I want my vote back!” During the campaign, Obama and now Vice-President-Elect Joe Biden, both claimed to use Apple computers and music players.

Now, with Obama denying of actually having a Zune, Neil Santos is saying, ” I don’t know for sure that it was his. It could belong to one of the many Secret Service dudes that were at the gym, Michelle, or even one of his daughters.”

On a lighter note, some commentators are still poking fun at the past election campaign, with one claiming he/she is John McCain saying “Obama’s not in for proprietary formats,” while another one claiming he/she is Sarah Palin asking “What’s a Zune?”

Hundreds of Congolese soldiers rampaged through several villages in eastern Congo, raping women and pillaging homes as they pulled back ahead of a feared rebel advance, the UN reported.

Meanwhile, neighboring Angola said it was mobilising troops to send to Congo, though Angolan Deputy Foreign Minister Georges Chicoty did not specify how many or what their mission will be.

Southern African regional leaders meeting at a summit Sunday had discussed sending troops to reinforce the scattered Congolese army near Goma. The provincial capital has been besieged by rebels loyal to renegade Gen. Laurent Nkunda since he reached the outskirts.

The rebels have promised to fight any African troops that aid the Congolese army.

Chicoty made the announcement on Angolan national radio after attending a meeting in Brussels with European foreign ministers yesterday. He said the troops were going to Congo under the auspices of the Southern African Development Community and the European Union.

The reporters have already seen in the country Portuguese-speaking black soldiers wearing green berets with pins in the shape of a map of Angola. But the UN has said it did not have direct independent confirmation that Angolan troops were already in Congo.

The presence of Angolans in the volatile region could be seen as a provocation by neighboring Rwanda, raising tensions and fears that the fighting could spill over Congo’s borders.

Iraqi officials Wednesday reported finding mass graves with remains of 34 people, most believed to have been Iraqi army recruits waylaid three years ago by al-Qaida gunmen as they traveled to a training base near the Syrian border.

Farmers tipped off authorities last week about the graves, located in the Euphrates River valley near Syria about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad, according to a local mayor, Farhan Fitaghan.

Fitaghan told The Associated Press that two of the remains were women.

Most of the victims were believed to have been army recruits from the southern Shiite city of Karbala who were traveling by bus in September 2005 to a training camp in an abandoned phosphate plant in Qaim when they were stopped by gunmen and taken away, the mayor said.

“We informed the Karbala authorities and invited their families to come and identify their relatives,” said Fitaghan, the mayor of Qaim. “We held an official funeral procession today and paid all expenses to send the coffins to Karbala.”

A tiny, egg-robbing dinosaur that lived more than 150 million years ago could help explain a key phase in the evolution of birds, scientists reported on Wednesday.

In unusual language for a high-brow journal, Chinese palaeontologists admit the wee dino was, frankly, “bizarre”.

The beast was a distant relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex but was no bigger than a kitten. And it was covered in feathers but couldn’t fly.

The creature lived between 152 and 168 million years ago, according to analysis of its fossil, found in Daohugou in Inner Mongolia, northern China.

Dubbed Epidexipteryx hui, the mini-dino was a two-footed predator, known as a therapod, that lived in the Middle to Late Jurassic era between 152 and 168 million years ago.

It probably weighed no more than 164 grammes, or just over five ounces, and fed opportunistically on eggs it found or stole, according to the paper, which appears in the British weekly journal Nature.

E. hui lived shortly before the famous Archaeopteryx, which arrived on the scene around 150 million years ago and is generally considered to be the first bird.

Despite its many dinosaur features, Archaeopteryx is believed to have been capable of powered flight.

Yet one of the many questions about the “early bird” scenario is exactly why dinosaurs evolved feathers.

Did feathers provide warmth, for instance, or a means of flight, enabling a tree-living dino to jump or glide to safety from a perch or to find food?

The Chinese team, led by the fossil-hunter Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropoloy in Beijing, say a clutch of long, ribbon-like feathers on E. hui’s tale points to a different function.

They believe the unusual plumage was “integumentary ornamentation” — a decorative attachment that helped in mating.

Rather like the peacock spreads out his tail fan to lure a female, the dinosaur would show his feathers in courtship to demonstrate his fitness.

E. hui’s name derives from a Greek composite meaning “feather display” and from Yaoming Hu, a Chinese expert in Mesozoic mammals who died in April this year after a long illness, aged only 42.

A 33-year-old Indian worker was killed in a construction site accident in Bahrain, media reports said Friday.

Vijay Kumar was trying to get into his excavator’s loader when he was hit by a massive drilling machine Thursday at Tubli, south of Manama, the Gulf Daily News reported.

According to the report, as the drilling machine operated by another worker identified as Mohammed Hafiz Abdul swung to expel material, Kumar got in its way. He died instantly after being hit on the head and chest.

“As the driller was taking the swing, Mr. Kumar was trying to get into his machine. He got sandwiched between the two machines,” Imtiaz Ahmed, general manager of Keller Grundbau, of which Abdul was an employee, said.

Kumar worked for Al Hadriya Contractors.

Police have launched an investigation into the incident and have arrested Abdul.

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has declared that India ‘has never been a threat’ to his country, and has termed militants operating in Kashmir as ‘terrorists’, though previous regimes in Pakistan called them freedom fighters.

‘I, for one, and our democratic government is not scared of Indian influence abroad,’ said Zardari in an interview to the Wall Street Journal.

Neither has he any objection to the India-US civilian nuclear cooperation pact, so long as Pakistan is treated ‘at par’, Zardari said. The US has, however, ruled out an India-like nuclear deal with Pakistan for now.

‘Why would we begrudge the largest democracy in the world getting friendly with one of the oldest democracies in the world?’ Zardari said.

Not only is Zardari looking to improve ties with Delhi, he notes that ‘there is no other economic survival for nations like us. We have to trade with our neighbours first.’

Similar sentiments were expressed at the meeting between by Zardari and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly late in September.

Zardari imagined Pakistani cement factories being constructed to provide for India’s huge infrastructure needs, Pakistani textile mills meeting Indian demand for blue jeans, Pakistani ports being used to relieve the congestion at Indian ones, the Wall Street Journal said.

For a country that spent most of its existence trying to show that it is the military equal of its neighbour, the new president’s agenda amounts to a remarkable recognition of the strides India has made in becoming a true world power, the Journal commented.

The parliament of the Central African Republic (CAR) on Monday adopted an amnesty law aimed at laying the foundations for a process of “inclusive political dialogue” between the government and rebels.

The legislation will protect both rebels and certain government officials from prosecution for crimes, official sources said.

Seventy-two out of the 104-member parliament voted to adopt the law, while one deputy abstained and 31 opposition members who refused to participate were counted as “absent.”

Peace talks here have hit numerous obstacles along the way and this amnesty law was the latest stumbling block, although the government and rebels resumed talks in Gabon in September.

On August 1, the rebel Popular Army for the Restoration of Democracy (APRD) withdrew from peace discussions, after opposing the draft amnesty legislation being discussed in parliament among other grievances.

“I want to see the text in detail before making a decision about it,” APRD leader Jean-Jacques Demafouth told AFP in a telephone interview from Paris, where he has been living in exile. He expressed misgivings about several parts of the legislation.

Demafouth heads both the APRD and the New Alliance for Progress (NAP) party, the creation of which Central African authorities approved in August.

One of the world’s poorest nations, the CAR is plagued by insecurity in its northern territories, where rebels and bandits have been battling government troops since President Francois Bozize’s election victory in 2005.

Recent discussions about national geopolitical concerns and spheres of interest have predictably reached the issue of Russia’s northern border. President Dmitry Medvedev set the task of formalizing Russia’s right to a considerable part of the Arctic shelf at the Sep 17 meeting of the country’s Security Council. This will ‘turn the Arctic into Russia’s resource base of the 21st century’, he said at the meeting held to discuss protection of Russia’s national interests in the Arctic.

According to experts, that part of the Arctic Ocean, which Russia has always considered within its national territory, contains about 25 percent of the world’s shelf hydrocarbon resources. Huge offshore deposits of natural gas have been discovered in the Barents and Kara seas.

Russia reels in one-sixth of its fishing output there, and the region also has the Northern Sea Route, the shortest way from Europe to America and Asia, including for the transportation of oil and gas from Arctic deposits.

That region and the adjacent northern territories have enough resources to maintain humankind for decades.

It is therefore not surprising that many countries have laid claim to its wealth.

Russia has always considered the vast triangle of 1.2 million sq km between the North Pole at its top and Russia’s shoreline between the Kola Peninsula and Chukotka at its bottom as its own.

But the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was adopted in December 1982 and came into force in November 1996, ruled that the five Arctic Circle countries - the US, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia - will each have a 322-km economic zone in the Arctic Ocean.

To regain its loss, Russia needs to prove that its continental shelf, or more precisely the Lomonosov Ridge, is the direct continuation of the Siberian continental crust. Several Russian expeditions have been sent there to prove the point in the last two years.

A Russian flag was planted on the seabed during an expedition to the North Pole in August 2007 at the initiative of Artur Chilingarov, a Russian lawmaker who headed the symbolic dive beneath the North Pole last August.

The mission did not provide any additional scientific arguments in favour of Russia’s claim, but it has increased interest in the Arctic shelf’s resources and sparked off numerous international discussions.

These expeditions also encouraged the interest of other claimants in the Arctic pie.

Canada has long laid claim to the North Pole and the resource-rich Lomonosov Ridge that lies beneath. Denmark says the disputed ridge - a 1,500-km undersea mountain range that runs past the pole between Siberia and North America - is a geological extension of the northern coast of Greenland.

The United States, Norway and other countries have also joined the fray. Everyone wants a piece of the Arctic pie, the larger the better.

Protecting its right to the ridge is a matter of principle for Russia, for the country which gets the bulk of the Arctic shelf hydrocarbon resources will play the dominant role in the world for the next several decades.

However, the political aspect of developing undersea territories is no less important than the economic reasons, as deputy prime minister Sergei Ivanov said at a meeting of Russia’s Naval Board last April.

‘Legalization of Russia’s right to its continental shelf will increase the national territory,’ he said.

The political and defence aspects of the problem were also discussed at the meeting of Russia’s Security Council held Sep 12 at Russia’s northernmost border station on Franz-Josef Land.

The meeting later continued in Moscow, where President Medvedev said: ‘This region is of strategic importance for the country. We must reliably ensure Russia’s national interests in the Arctic for a long term.’

To do this, the country should focus on the development of its Arctic territories and the economic revival of the Extreme North, which has been regarded as a burden on the budget since the 1980s.

The government only sent there what meagre funds had been left after all other regions and sectors received their due. As a result, its infrastructure has become dilapidated, depreciation of equipment has reached a critical point, and standards of living are inadmissibly low - with the exception of a few ‘oases’ prospering on hydrocarbon revenues.

Left without the financial assistance of the state, Russia’s fleet, including icebreakers, has degenerated so much that foreign shipping companies may soon take over control of the Northern Sea Route. Many countries have already expressed their intention to do so.

The northern territories and the Northern Sea route are crucial for Russia’s expansion in the Arctic. The country must revive them, and do it soon.

During the Security Council meeting, President Medvedev instructed the government to draft the fundamentals of Russian state policy in the Arctic.

Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said the policy would also include delineating the country’s new northern border.

Marking borders on a map is easily done, but getting international recognition for them is quite another matter.

Russia may have a chance to do so only after it files a new claim to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.

India Monday said it would convey a pointed message on ending cross-border terrorism and ceasefire violations by Pakistan, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meets President Asif Ali Zardari in New York this week.

“We will discuss entire gamut of relationship (between India and Pakistan),” Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon told reporters on board the special aircraft carrying prime minister to New York via Frankfurt.

“These issues are part of the relationship. But the relationship is much more than that,” Menon said.

Manmohan Singh will meet Zardari at United Nations headquarters in New York Thursday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. This will be the first meeting between the two leaders since Zardari was elected Pakistan president Sep 9.

Menon said that the prime minister’s meeting with Zardari would be an occasion to give a push to the peace process between the two countries.

The meeting will also give Manmohan Singh a sense of Zardari’s position, the foreign secretary said.

Being old is apparently no bar to finding favour with the young — at least in the world of Japanese politics.

From $6 bean buns to $1,200 kimono belts, a souvenir shop in Tokyo is offering a range of items all bearing the grinning face of “cool old dude” Taro Aso, 68-year-old frontrunner in the race to be Japan’s next prime minister.

Fans of Aso and droves of curious shoppers were drawn into the store on Saturday in Akihabara, a shopping district in central Tokyo, two days before the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) picks a new leader for Japan.

The winner of the party poll, which comes after a sudden resignation by Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda this month, is sure to become the next prime minister because of the party’s majority in the Japanese parliament’s lower house.

“Aso is popular among my crowd of friends, too… I think it’s his policies and his leadership that draws popularity,” said Takayuki Hirano, a 20-year-old college student who bought plastic folders featuring the former foreign minister’s face.

An avid reader of youth-oriented “manga” comics and known for his dapper suits, the outspoken Aso has charmed some young Japanese, who find him different from Japan’s otherwise largely grey lawmakers.

Media polls suggest Aso has enough support around the country to become the next prime minister.

But while the shop labels Aso a “cool old dude” in its signs, not all his young backers are convinced he will be able to provide answers for a country sliding towards recession amid a global financial crisis.

“The election feels like it’s nothing related to me,” said 21-year-old university student Shiori Sato, as she clutched a bag with a box of Aso buns she had just bought.

“I don’t think I’ll vote because nothing is going to change even if I do.”