New Delhi

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 -- About 300 people were killed and more than 400 were injured early yesterday when a speeding passenger train in northern India plowed into another train that had stalled after hitting a cow, senior railroad officials said.The casualty toll is expected to rise, according to other officials and to news reports from the site.The New Delhi-bound Kalindi Express hit the cow about a half-mile from the Firozabad railroad station, and the cow's body became entangled in the engine and damaged the train's brake system, said V. K. Aggarwal, the general manager of the state-run northern railways.

NEW DELHI -- Pakistan's top envoy arrived in India's capital yesterday to nudge along a fitful peace process in the aftermath of a deadly firebombing aboard a train connecting the rival nations. The attack on the Samjhauta Express, in which at least 68 people burned to death, lent a greater sense of urgency to a previously scheduled visit by Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri. Most of the passengers who died in Sunday night's blazes, which devoured the interior of two crowded coaches, were Pakistanis returning home on the New Delhi-to-Lahore rail line.

NEW DELHI, India -- After nearly 30 months without formal talks, India and Pakistan appear ready to open a new dialogue.The breakthrough, if it materializes, will have been occasioned by the transfer of power in India to a new government headed by Prime Minister H. D. Deve Gowda.A conciliatory message to Deve Gowda last week from Pakistan's leader, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was followed by a letter from Deve Gowda to Bhutto, released yesterday. In it, he accepted Bhutto's proposal for a resumption of high-level talks, which were suspended in January 1994.

NEW DELHI, India -- On the eve of India's biggest Hindu festival, Diwali, police said yesterday that they had thwarted a terrorist attack on a high-end shopping center filled with holiday shoppers. The two would-be assailants, thought to be members of the Pakistan-based Islamic group, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, were killed yesterday by police in the shopping center's underground parking lot. No civilians or law enforcement officials were hurt, police said. Neeraj Kumar, commissioner of the police anti-terrorism forces in New Delhi, said the police had received information that there was going to be an attack on a shopping center around Diwali, the Indian festival of lights.

India seems not to have learned the lessons its own founding fathers taught their British rulers nearly 75 years ago. In brutally repressing the nationalist movement in Kashmir -- 34 peaceful demonstrators were killed a week ago by paramilitary police -- the Indian government is feeding the flames it wants to quench.It is reminiscent of the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British troops fired on peaceful Indian demonstrators trapped in a garden with the only exit blocked by soldiers. Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, wrote movingly about the effect of the massacre on his father.

NEW DELHI, India - Three suspected Islamic militants killed at least 30 people, including women and children, in an attack yesterday on a bus and an army camp in Kashmir, the Indian army said. The attack coincided with a visit to New Delhi by a U.S. official on a mission to defuse the tensions that have lingered between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. And it came a day after India's defense minister, George Fernandes, said in an interview that India had no plans to begin a military attack over the next few months against Pakistan, even if severely provoked.

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.

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.

Brajendra Singh, a 76, the last royal Maharaja of the Bharatpur area of northwestern India, died July 8 of a heart attack in Rajasthan state. He transformed marshland in his 2,000-square-mile territory into India's best-known bird sanctuary, Bharatpur, 125 miles south of New Delhi.Harry Guardino, 69, who co-starred with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren in "Houseboat" and also acted in "Dirty Harry" and "Lovers and Other Strangers," died Monday of lung cancer in Palm Springs, Calif. He was a tough-talking, tough-acting leading man and character actor whose career spanned films, stage and television.