New Delhi

NEW DELHI -- Members of India's lowest castes have struggled for generations for dignity and a better chance in life. But job and education quotas aimed at helping them have unintentionally spawned a new phenomenon: The eager downwardly mobile. Over the past week, tens of thousands of members of India's Gujjar community -- politically powerful traditional farmers and shepherds from India's Rajastan state -- have burned buses, shut down interstate highways and sparked clashes that killed 25 people, all in an effort to be downgraded in caste.

NEW DELHI -- Communist rebels besieged a police outpost in eastern India yesterday, killing 54 people and wounding nearly a dozen more before fleeing into the surrounding jungle under cover of darkness. The early morning raid was one of the bloodiest attacks in years by the so-called Naxalites, Maoist insurgents who have waged an armed campaign against the Indian government for four decades. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the group the nation's No. 1 threat to public security.

NEW DELHI -- The street protests roiling military-ruled Myanmar turned deadly yesterday when at least one anti-government demonstrator was killed after security forces cracked down on the growing unrest, according to news and witness accounts trickling out of the closed-off country. Dozens of protesters, many of them Buddhist monks clad in burgundy robes, were said to have been beaten and dragged off by authorities as they rallied in the capital, Yangon, for the ninth straight day. Protests were also reported in Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

NEW DELHI -- The streets of India's sprawling capital are not for the faint of heart. Platoons of motorcycles, ramshackle buses, fume-spewing trucks and struggling bicycle-rickshaw riders jostle for space with wandering sacred cows, motorized rickshaw taxis, legions of cars, magazine-waving vendors, horse-drawn carts and the occasional plodding elephant. Motor-scooter drivers, fed up with traffic jams, roar down the sidewalks, threatening to flatten pedestrians. Everybody honks, all the time.

NEW DELHI -- At least two powerful explosions ripped through the Southern India high-tech city of Hyderabad yesterday evening, killing more than 30 people and injuring dozens more. The blasts struck an outdoor laser show and a popular restaurant around 7:30 p.m., leaving bodies and pools of blood amid smoking rubble and shattered glass. Some 50 people were injured. "This is a terrorist act," said Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, chief minister of Andhra Pradesh state, to reporters. While Indian officials often blame Muslim militants for bomb attacks, there were no immediate accusations against Islamic groups in the blasts.

NEW DELHI, India -- Scorching temperatures hit several states in India, killing at least 40 people, Press Trust of India news agency said yesterday.The worst hit was the eastern coastal state of Orissa, where 28 people died in the past week as daytime temperatures soared to 111 degrees, PTI said.Ten deaths were reported in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh and two in Gujarat state in western India in the past two days, PTI said.India suffers frequent power outages and insufficient drinking water in most cities and towns during the summer.

NEW DELHI, India -- Prashant Vyas, a chemical plant manager, has spent most days over the past three months assembling puzzles, stringing beads and filling in coloring books with his 3-year-old son, Sumant. Sometimes they even recite poems together. It is not for the fun of it. It is a grind.Vyas saved vacation time to stay home so he could prepare his child to pass entrance tests for kindergarten. Before bedtime, he and his wife, Alpana, rehearse answers to questions that might crop up during interviews with admission committees.

NEW DELHI, India -- A prominent Pakistani journalist who has been harshly critical of the government has been detained by Pakistani authorities and is being held at an unknown location. His wife said yesterday that the police dragged him from his bedroom, shoeless and without his eyeglasses, early Saturday morning.The journalist, Najam Sethi, is one of several who have been arrested, interrogated and harassed in Pakistan over the past week. Pakistani journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York, say the government is apparently retaliating against editors and writers who have given interviews to BBC reporters investigating high-level corruption.

NEW DELHI, India -- Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said yesterday that India would continue airstrikes against what he described as Pakistani-backed infiltrators dug into Indian territory, and would be willing to hold talks with Pakistan about the conflict only if they were not conditional on a halt to the air raids.Vajpayee's remarks came in response to a telephone call Friday from Pakistan's prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who offered to send Pakistan's foreign minister to New Delhi to meet with his Indian counterpart.

NEW DELHI, India -- Salman Rushdie has been granted a visa to return to India, his native land, whose banning of his novel "The Satanic Verses" began a chain of events that led to death threats by offended Muslims and a life in hiding for a writer with a price on his head.The decision was confirmed yesterday by a spokesman for the Ministry of External Affairs and prompted immediate threats of violent demonstrations. "We will protest within a constitutional framework, but I warn the government of India that a righteous follower of the Holy Prophet may make an attempt on Rushdie's life, and each Muslim will be proud of this person," said Syed Ahmad Bukhari, deputy priest of Jama Masjid, the best-known mosque in new Delhi.

Pakistan confirms arrest in India attacks NEW DELHI : A senior Pakistani official confirmed yesterday the arrest of the suspected mastermind behind November's terrorist attacks in Mumbai as Indian authorities publicly identified all the known assailants as young men from Pakistan. After a day of contradictory news reports and official silence, Pakistani Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar acknowledged that Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi had "been picked up" during a raid on an alleged militant camp in the Pakistani-controlled portion of Kashmir.

MUMBAI, India - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged Pakistan and India yesterday to cooperate with "urgency and resolve" to catch and prosecute those behind last week's terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed more than 170 people and wounded hundreds. As Rice met with Indian leaders in New Delhi, police in Mumbai discovered two bombs at the Chhatrapati Shivaji train station - nearly a week after they had been placed there by gunmen. While searching through about 150 bags, which police thought had been left by the dozens of victims in the train station, an officer found a suspicious-looking bag and called the bomb squad, said Assistant Commissioner of Police Bapu Domre.

MUMBAI, India - Facing mounting public anger over the response of his government and security forces to last week's assault on Mumbai, India's prime minister vowed yesterday to beef up anti-terror measures, and a top police official more pointedly fixed blame on a Pakistani group for the violence that left nearly 200 dead. But analysts and citizens alike questioned whether the government's promise of reform would lead to serious changes in an anti-terrorism effort whose systemic problems were laid bare by the assault.

NEW DELHI - Brajveer Singh does not own a wide-brimmed hat, leather boots or a pair of jeans. He has never ridden a mechanical bull. But he can lay claim to being a real-life urban cowboy. Singh is among the dozens of men who spend their days roping cattle on the streets of this city as part of a long and frustrating battle to rid India's capital of stray cows. There is perhaps no more stereotypical image of India than that of a stray cow sauntering down the middle of a busy city street, seemingly oblivious to the traffic swerving around it. Hindus consider cows sacred animals, and their slaughter is banned throughout most of India.

Charges dropped against 5 detainees Rocked by allegations of political meddling and misconduct, officials at the troubled war-crimes tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, announced yesterday that charges have been dropped against five terrorism suspects the Pentagon has said are dangerous al-Qaida operatives. All five had alleged ties to terrorism kingpin Abu Zubaydah, the Saudi-born militant believed to have served as a recruiter for al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden. Four of the men, whose charge sheets were expunged from the Pentagon's records even before the announcement of their dismissal, were reported accomplices of "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla, who was convicted last year on identical charges in U.S. federal district court in Miami.

NEW DELHI -- Defying nearly everyone's expectations but their own, Nepal's former Maoist rebels took a commanding lead yesterday in partial results from last week's election, a showing that could have profound effects on the Himalayan nation. With the votes tabulated in more than two-thirds of the 240 seats contested by direct election for an assembly charged with writing a new constitution, the Maoists have won 105 and are ahead in seven more districts, Nepal's Election Commission reported.

NEW DELHI -- A landmark India-U.S. nuclear power deal, considered the key emblem of deepening strategic ties between the two nations, might be headed for the scrap heap because of opposition objections, Indian analysts said yesterday. The contentious deal, backed by the Bush administration and Congress, would give India access to U.S. technology and fuel for nuclear power plants without clearly restricting its right to reprocess the spent fuel into weapons-grade material or carry out nuclear weapons tests.

NEW DELHI -- A U.N. special envoy arrived in Myanmar yesterday for talks with the country's military rulers, whose ruthless crackdown on anti-government protesters has sparked international outrage. The streets of Myanmar's main city, Yangon, were virtually empty of demonstrators for the first time in nearly two weeks and devoid of the gunfire and chaos that marked three days of violent suppression by soldiers and police. Security forces continued to patrol and seal off parts of the city, including the monasteries whose monks spearheaded protests.

NEW DELHI -- The military regime in Myanmar yesterday tried to shut down the Internet and cell-phone service in a bid to block news and images of the third day of its violent clampdown on dissent from being sent outside the tightly controlled country. Such images have been crucial in galvanizing international condemnation of the military's iron-fisted response to the largely peaceful protests, which pose the stiffest challenge to the government since 1988, when thousands of pro-democracy protesters were massacred.

NEW DELHI -- The street protests roiling military-ruled Myanmar turned deadly yesterday when at least one anti-government demonstrator was killed after security forces cracked down on the growing unrest, according to news and witness accounts trickling out of the closed-off country. Dozens of protesters, many of them Buddhist monks clad in burgundy robes, were said to have been beaten and dragged off by authorities as they rallied in the capital, Yangon, for the ninth straight day. Protests were also reported in Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.