The PCB also banned former captain Shoaib Malik and Rana Naved for one year, along with a fine of Rs two million, for breaking the team’s code of conduct during the tour of Australia. All-rounder Shahid Afridi has also been fined for involvement in ball tampering.

In an unprecedented move, PCB fined Naved, Malik and Umar Akmal Rs 2 million each while imposed Rs 3 mln fine on Kamran Akmal and Afridi each. The PCB took hard steps recognizing recommendations of its enquiry committee after Pakistan’s debacle in Australia tour and the open rebellion by several players during the trip.

The board banned two key players for life, Muhammad Yousuf and former captain Younis Khan for their disputes in the team “that has long been harming the overall performance of the squad.” PCB authorities affirmed that both the player were not able to represent Pakistan at any forum in future as “the team paid an enormous price in the differences between the two senior players.”

Earlier, the PCB inquiry committee had recommended disciplinary action against five players including former captain Shoaib Malik and Shahid Afridi. The captain, coach and the manager on the Australian tour had reported Malik and Rana for misbehavior and not cooperating with the management.

He said the inquiry committee had also advised the Board to make no compromise on discipline and not select any player who was found guilty of violating the code of conduct.

Faraj al-Haidari, who heads the Independent High Electoral Commission, told American news agency that the exact figures would be released later Monday at a news conference.

That’s down from the previous parliamentary election in December 2005, when roughly 76 percent of voters turned out, but higher than last year’s provincial elections when just over half of voters went to the polls.

All figures are from Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission, which oversees the country’s voting process.

The violence in three mostly Christian villages Sunday appeared to be reprisal attacks following the January unrest in Jos — when most of the victims were Muslims, said Red Cross spokesman Robin Waubo. State officials did not comment on the cause of the latest attacks.

Plateau State spokesman Gregory Yenlong said officials would conduct mass burials for the victims on Monday.

The bodies of the dead lined dusty streets in three villages south of the regional capital of Jos, local journalists and a civil rights group said Sunday. They said at least 200 bodies had been counted by Sunday afternoon.

The bodies of children tangled with each other in a local morgue, including a diaper-clad toddler. Another young victim appeared to have been scalped, while others had severed hands and feet. One woman victim in the morgue appeared to have been stripped below the waist, but later covered by a strip of black cloth.

Jos has been under a dusk-til-dawn curfew enforced by the military since January’s religious-based violence. It was not clear how the attackers managed to elude the military curfew early Sunday.

Acting President Goodluck Jonathan said security agencies would be stationed along Plateau state’s borders to keep outsiders from coming in with more weapons and fighters.

“(We will) undertake strategic initiatives to confront and defeat these roving bands of killers,” he said in a statement. “While it is too early to state categorically what is responsible for this renewed wave of violence, we want to inform Nigerians that the security services are on top of the situation.”

More than 600 people fled to a makeshift camp that still held victims from January’s violence, said Red Cross official Adamu Abubakar. He expected more to come, putting an even bigger strain on the already limited humanitarian aid for those fleeing the violence.

The killings represent the latest religious violence in an area once known as Nigeria’s top tourist destination, adding to the tally of thousands already killed in the last decade in the name of religious and political ambitions.

Jos lies in Nigeria’s “middle belt,” where dozens of ethnic groups mingle in a band of fertile and hotly contested land separating the Muslim north from the predominantly Christian south.

In Jos, Muslims have complained about being denied jobs and other benefits by the Christian-dominated government. However, many Muslims also operate shops and businesses in a nearby town where the tourist trade has dried up and the surrounding tin mines have been abandoned, stoking fears for Christians about retaliation from Muslim neighbors.

In Dogo Nahawa, a village three miles (five kilometers) south of Jos, residents said the dead included a 4-day-old infant.

Yenlong, the state government spokesman, also said police were seeking to arrest Saleh Bayari, the regional leader of the Fulanis, because Bayari’s comments incited the attack. He offered no other details.

But the chairman of the local Fulani organization denied that his people were involved in the attack.

Nigerian military units began surrounding the affected villages Sunday afternoon, Waubo, the Red Cross spokesman, said. He said the agency did not know how many people may have died in the fighting but workers have been sent to local morgues and hospitals to check.

Some 60 people were reported injured.TV reports said the dead included four young sisters trapped in the rubble in their sleep. Rescue workers were trying to pull out one other people from debris in Okcular village. The Istanbul-based Kandilli Observatory said the quake in Elazig province happened at 4:32 am (0232 GMT) on Monday and was centred near the village of Basyurt.

It was followed by some 20 aftershocks, the strongest measuring 4.1.

Mottaki’s comments came as US Defence Secretary Robert Gates made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan ahead of a trip to Kabul by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“I accuse the US, Britain and their forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan of fomenting terrorist acts in the region,” Mottaki told a regional energy conference in Tehran.

Ahmadinejad was to visit Iran’s eastern neighbour later on Monday to discuss with his counterpart Hamid Karzai how to stabilise the war-torn nation.

The two leaders are to “examine solutions to Afghanistan’s problems” as Iran seeks to boost relations, Iran’s Mehr news agency reported on Sunday.

Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials have repeatedly called for the withdrawal of US-led forces from Afghanistan, saying their presence is stoking the Taliban insurgency.

But despite their rivalry, Washington and Tehran are both sworn enemies of the extremist Sunni Muslim militia which ruled in Kabul from 1996 to 2001, before being overthrown in the US-led invasion.

The United States has made a number of efforts to involve all of Afghanistan’s neighbours, including Iran, in restoring stability to the country.

But they have been complicated by the lack of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington and the standoff over Iran’s nuclear programme.

Shiite Iran, which has close ethnic and religious ties with Afghanistan, has long suffered from the effects of opium production in its eastern neighbour, with easily available heroin fuelling a big rise in drug use at home.

Afghanistan is the source of 90 percent of the world’s heroin.

Shandar, one of Kamaal Amrohi’s three children, has now filed a case against his sister Rukhsar and brother Wasim stating that they have falsely pledged his shares in ‘Mahal Pictures Pvt Ltd’ (that owns the famous Kamaal Amrohi studio), to a company in Pune. As he was struggling his way through the cops to file a complaint, entered Preity Zinta, his ‘adopted’ daughter (who, of late has been tweeting about how difficult it is to file an FIR these days), who offered to shoulder his cause ahead.

For starters, Shandar always took Preity Zinta as his daughter ever since he saw her films. No wonder then, he had announced that he would pass on all his property to Preity. Shandar, on his part, opined that he is battling not for money but for justice and that Preity is helping him fight it, despite strong opposition from the other family members.

Even as we publish this news, we just got the update that the High Court has adjourned further hearing on Shandar’s plea till March 11. Watch this space for further updates.

It is reported that Kareena is gifting a Mercedez to her elder sister Karisma, who is due to deliver her second child. She admitted that she has been looking at the various models of luxury cars in the market but she doesn’t want to reveal the details.

Well, Karisma will be very happy at the gesture of her younger sister.

“The more people have access to a range of Internet technology and services, the harder it’s going to be for the Iranian government to clamp down on their speech and free expression,” a senior administration official told the paper.

The Treasury Department will issue a general license on Monday for exports of free personal Internet services such as instant messaging, chat and photo sharing as well as software to all three countries, said the unnamed official.

The move will allow Microsoft, Yahoo and other Internet services providers to get around strict export restrictions, the report said. Until now they had resisted offering such services for fear of violating existing sanctions.

But there have been growing calls in Congress and elsewhere to lift the restrictions, particularly after Iran’s post-election protests illustrated the power of Internet-based services such as Facebook and Twitter, The Times said.

Hannes Rakoczy from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany tested 44 children aged three and four years.

The children were shown a video of an invented game called Daxing, in which either a boy or a man argued over the correct way to ‘dax’. The child was then asked to ‘dax’, and the method they chose to use was recorded.

Children were also shown a puppet, who said it was his time to ‘dax’. The puppet performed ‘daxing’ either in the way the boy in the film or the man in the film did it, and the children’s reactions were recorded.

Researchers found that the children imitated the adult’s method of ‘daxing’ significantly more often than they imitated the boy’s method.

Children were also more likely to intervene when the puppet performed ‘daxing’ using the boy’s method – protesting that the puppet was ‘daxing’ wrongly.

Rakoczy said: “The results from our study suggest that children prefer to learn from adults rather than other children when it comes to rule-governed activities like learning a new game.”

“They also expect other people to learn and perform actions in the way that the adults do, demonstrated by the expectation that the puppet would also follow the adult actor’s actions and not the boy’s,” Rakoczy added, according to a release of the British Psychological Society.

“These findings tell us that young children will accept adult’s behaviour as being right, and that adults behaviour should be followed. This could have implications for wider social learning of both good and bad behaviour,” he said.

These findings were published online in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology

The KCCA has sent a complaint letter to the chairman of the Pakistan cricket Board (PCB), outlining its concerns over some poor umpiring and Rana’s tampering with the ball with his nails during a match between Sialkot Stallions and Karachi Zebras at the National Stadium.

“I don’t know from where they got this notion that I was tampering with the ball. I play my cricket as fair as everyone else,” Rana said.

“I think it would be better for the KCCA to concentrate on their own affairs and selection matters. They should focus on selecting their best team,” he said.

Rana said he viewed the KCCA complaint as a case of sour grapes as their team had lost the match to Sialkot.

The head of domestic cricket operations, Sultan Rana confirmed that the KCCA had sent a letter to the chairman of the board.

“But the KCCA surprisingly didn’t submit any report about their complaints on the umpiring or any other issue to the match referee which is the right procedure to follow for all teams,” he said.

Sultan added if the match referee or umpires come out with any reports, the board would deal with it accordingly.

“But as far as the PCB chairman is concerned, he has the authority to take any decision on the KCCA letter.”