Kashmir

NEW DELHI, India -- A series of bomb blasts shook the heart of the Indian capital yesterday evening, killing more than 50 people in crowded marketplaces and a public bus in an apparent coordinated attack on the eve of a national Hindu holiday. Three explosions went off within minutes of each other starting about 5:30 p.m., during peak shopping hours. The first hit a busy market directly across from the central railway station, in an area popular with backpacking tourists. It was closely followed by two more blasts, one aboard a bus in the southeastern part of the city and another - the most lethal of the three - in a south Delhi marketplace, where at least 36 people died.

WASHINGTON -- The number of casualties from the powerful Oct. 8 earthquake that struck the Kashmir region of Pakistan and India in the western Himalayas still is rising. But some good might emerge from the disaster. The quake's epicenter lay near Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan's part of disputed Kashmir. At least 40,000 people died, nearly twice that many were injured and another 2 million left homeless. Damage in Indian Kashmir, across the unofficial border called the Line of Control, was less catastrophic but still severe.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- United Nations and private aid workers said yesterday that the pressing need to shelter up to 3 million Pakistani earthquake survivors before the harsh Himalayan winter sets in is threatening to become one of the greatest human disasters the world has ever faced. Compounding the problems posed by the sheer number of people displaced - three times as many as were affected by the Indian Ocean tsunamis in December - are the mountainous terrain and the onset of a winter that is likely to arrive in less than three weeks and sever the stricken mountain hamlets of the north from the rest of the country until spring.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Three powerful aftershocks of the Oct. 8 earthquake triggered fresh landslides and panic across stricken northern Pakistan yesterday as relief workers warned that thousands more deaths from disease and exposure could occur among the 500,000 still stranded in mountain villages. The new setbacks in getting aid to cold and injured survivors dampened spirits in the hardest-hit areas where a day earlier President Pervez Musharraf proposed opening the divided Kashmir to allow family contacts and better aid flows.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistan's army and international relief agencies delivered a first trickle of food, medicine and tents yesterday to some areas shattered by Saturday's earthquake, but most of the devastated region remained isolated by rockslides and broken bridges. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Pakistanis who survived the earthquake are struggling to survive exposure outdoors as nighttime temperatures plunge to near-freezing in mountain valleys. On the third day of the disaster, its scale remained uncertain.

BALAKOT, Pakistan -- More than 18,000 people were killed when a powerful earthquake struck northern Pakistan, a military spokesman said today, in a disaster that entombed hundreds of children in their schools, flattened a high-rise apartment building in the Pakistani capital and devastated an untold number of villages. The 7.6-magnitude quake struck about 8:50 a.m. yesterday in the disputed territory of Kashmir, and reverberated across a swath of northern Pakistan, India and Afghanistan.

NOVEL SHALIMAR THE CLOWN By Salman Rushdie. Random House. 416 pages. It circumnavigates the globe and the last half of the 20th century like a hyperactive satellite, but Salman Rushdie's rich and restless new novel, Shalimar the Clown, has an ominous stillness at its center. Its title character is a dangerous cipher. We are supposed to believe that he is driven to homicidal monomania by romantic betrayal, but the heart of this Muslim Kashmiri is opaque. Shalimar the Clown makes vivid stopovers in 1990s Los Angeles and resistance-era France, but the novel's true home is the gorgeous, viciously contested land of Kashmir.

NEW DELHI - India and Pakistan nudged their peace effort forward yesterday with agreements to improve trade and travel links. "I want to say that I am happy that the talks were held in a positive atmosphere and with an optimistic note," Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said after meeting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for more than two hours yesterday. "In my view there has been progress on all issues." In an apparent softening of his position, Musharraf did not publicly repeat his demand for an early solution to the long-running conflict over the divided territory of Jammu and Kashmir.

NEW DELHI, India - India proposed seven steps to improve ties across the heavily fortified front line dividing Kashmir yesterday as Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made his first visit here since a bitter summit four years ago. Musharraf is set to hold talks on the Kashmir dispute and other issues with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today after attending a cricket match between India and Pakistan in the Indian capital. The Indian proposals include setting up several meeting points along the divide to reunite families, increasing bus service and communication links, renewing trade and taking steps to promote tourism in the long-disputed territory.

URI, India - Sajad Ahmad Lone flipped through a photo album of 22 pictures, of his cousin in a pilot's cap, of his only living uncle in owl-like glasses. He looked at weddings and babies. He recited the names of his relatives, memorized from the backs of their photographs. They were strangers. These people lived only about 200 miles away, but for Lone, sitting in his family's restaurant in a border town of Indian-controlled Kashmir, they could be on the other side of the world. He met just a few of them when he was a child, when his family made its only trip to Pakistan.