New Delhi

NEW DELHI, India -- New Delhi is a city under siege as it braces for an enormous demonstration by Hindu fundamentalists to be held Thursday.The government has banned the demonstration, and fears of violent confrontations between fervent Hindu militants and the police are sweeping the city even as security forces try to seal this capital off from the rest of India.Thousands of Hindu leaders and potential demonstrators are being rounded up by police, trains pulling into the city's three stations are being checked for Hindu protesters, and the roads into the capital have been sealed to motor caravans of Hindus militants.

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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.

Gov. Martin O'Malley departed Friday night on a trade mission to India — the first by a Maryland governor to the world's second-most-populous nation — with a stop along the way in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. The governor is heading a delegation of more than 100 state officials, business leaders and educators on a trip that will include stops in Hyderabad, Mumbai and New Delhi. On the way, the governor will stop in Doha, Qatar, where he is scheduled to discuss investment opportunities.

Gov. Martin O'Malley departed Friday night on a trade mission to India — the first by a Maryland governor to the world's second-most-populous nation — with a stop along the way in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. The governor is heading a delegation of more than 100 state officials, business leaders and educators on a trip that will include stops in Hyderabad, Mumbai and New Delhi. On the way, the governor will stop in Doha, Qatar, where he is scheduled to discuss investment opportunities.

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.

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, India -- Crouched on his haunches beneath a blue plastic tarp, Mohamad Harun swiftly sifts through the heaps around him. A mean pre-monsoon sun pours down, but Harun works quickly, without break.From the sacks piled behind him, he pulls newspapers and plastic bags, jars and cans, string and uneaten bread. With barely a glance, he twitches his wrist and the mishmash of junk behind him gets sorted in piles before him.Thousands of so-called ragpickers like Harun work the dumps and slums of Delhi.

Swaran Singh, 87, foreign minister of India when it backed East Pakistan's breaking away from West Pakistan to form Bangladesh, died Sunday in New Delhi, where he lived. A Sikh from Punjab province in northwestern India, he was foreign minister from 1964 to 1966 and from 1970 to 1974.

NEW DELHI, India -- The first high-level talks between India and Pakistan in more than three years ended yesterday without any announced breakthroughs on issues that have divided the two nations for half a century, but with both sides saying they planned to continue the effort.After more than a dozen hours of meetings over four days in New Delhi, the foreign secretaries of the two nations said their discussions had covered Kashmir, the disputed territory that has twice been the cause of war between the two countries, and a range of other military, economic and humanitarian issues.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.