India confident of resolving all Indo-Pak issues: PM

MOSCOW, Jan 24 (UNI): Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has ruled out any third party mediation between India and Pakistan for the resolution of their differences and expressed confidence that the two countries can resolve them bilaterally.

"While India values Russia as a trusted friend, we are confident that all the issues between India and Pakistan can be resolved bilaterally in a spirit of goodwill and friendship," Dr Singh said.

He was answering a question by Russian mass media whether India needed Russian help and assistance in normalising the relations between the two neighbours on the eve of President Vladimir Putin's two-day official visit to India from tomorrow.

He said India and Pakistan had been engaged in a constructive dialogue since 2004 after a commitment was given at the highest level by Pakistan that no territory under its control will be used to support terrorism.

"Three rounds of the composite dialogue between India and Pakistanhave concluded successfully and we will be commencing the fourth round in February 2007," the Prime Minister said.

"A wide spectrum of bilateral issues is being discussed with Pakistan and significant progress has been achieved," he said .

"This process is anchored in people-to-people interaction and we have established transport links across the border and the Line of Control to facilitate this," he added.

"It is important that an environment of trust and confidence is created and the constituency of peace is expanded, which is integral to the process of building friendly relations," he noted, pointing out, "Despite the threat of terrorism across the borders, we are moving ahead in the right direction." He said economic cooperation was taking place and the joint commission that remained dormant for 16 years had been revived in order to give an institutional and sustained basis to the improving relations.

Bilateral trade had also grown at an impressive rate of about 40 per cent in 2005-06 over the previous year, he added.

"We intend to maintain our efforts to improve our ties with our neighbour Pakistan," Dr Singh said.

On Russia-India-China triangular cooperation, the Prime Minister welcomed the trilateral cooperation, saying, "We are all neighbours and all three countries want to play a major role in the global economy." "As Russia, China and India move ahead of their respective growth curves, a great challenge today is to find means to draw on the vast geo-economic potential that remains unexploited in our common neighbourhood.

So we welcome this tri-partite cooperation," he said.

"There is a need to allow our key economic and commercial sectors to interact with each other in the trilateral framework.

In this endeavour, our vibrant private sectors have to be encouraged to interact more frequently," he said.

"In this context, i would like to mention energy as a critical sector in which the three countries should build sustainable long-term trilateral cooperation," the Prime Minister noted.

Iran says "wise" Americans will bar any attack TEHRAN, Jan 24 (Reuters): Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said he did not expect a US attack on Iran because there were plenty of "wise people" in the United States who would not let it happen.

Iran and the United States are at loggerheads over Tehran's nuclear programme, which Washington says is a cover for making bombs, and over Iraq, where U S officials say Iran is fuelling sectarian violence.

Tehran denies both charges.

Washington says it wants to solve the nuclear standoff by diplomacy but has not ruled out strikes if that fails.

"They are not in a position to carry out that measure although they may like to ...

because there are many wise people in America who will not let this happen," the president said in an interview on Iranian television yesterday.

The United States has sent a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf, a move analysts interpreted as a warning to Iran.

U S officials say the step was taken to increase operational flexibility and to provide deterrence in the region.

Ahmadinejad, who has said an attack is a US "dream", said President George W Bush wanted to cause trouble to help solve his own difficulties.

"Bush is interested in making a rumpus in order to save himself, but the conditions do not let him," he said.

Some Iranian politicians have voiced concerns that the United States might contemplate an attack because it feels it can only resolve its problems in Iraq, which is on the verge of civil war, by targetting the Islamic Republic.

US intelligence report casts doubt on Iraq strategy WASHINGTON, Jan 24 (Reuters): The Bush administration has came under fire on Tuesday for its failure to produce a key intelligence report that casts doubt on whether the Iraqi government is capable of taking steps to ensure the success of President George W Bush's strategy.

The classified document, known as a national intelligence estimate, would represent the 16-agency espionage community's consensus views on the stability of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government and prospects for controlling sectarian violence in Iraq.

U S intelligence chief John Negroponte's office was ordered by Congress to produce the document in late September, but is not expected to do so until after the Senate takes up two measures opposing Bush's plan to send another 21,500 troops to Iraq to try to quell the violence.

"Here we are with the president's program laid down, about to go into a considerable debate which I think is important for the nation, and yet this document is continued to be worked on," Republican Sen.

John Warner of Virginia said at a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday.

Thomas Fingar, Negroponte's deputy for intelligence analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said the new document's conclusions have already been made available in other reports.

"The very short hand is that it will be very difficult for the Maliki government to do this, but not impossible," Fingar told the Senate panel.

"We judge that Maliki does not wish to fail in his role.

He does not wish to preside over the disintegration of Iraq.

He has some but not all the obvious requirements for success," Fingar said.

"The judgment is that gains in stability could open a window for gains in reconciliation among, between sectarian groups." Fingar admitted that the intelligence document was late because of demands on analysts who deal with Iraq.

He said it was expected to be completed by month's end.

"That's not acceptable," Sen.

Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, told Fingar and five other officials from Negroponte's office who appeared before the panel.

"To have maximum value, the intelligence that's furnished has got to be made available in a timely way," he said.

Fingar said the intelligence community deliberately took its time with the document to avoid the fate of a problem-plagued 2002 Iraq intelligence estimate.

That estimate helped justify Bush's decision to invade Iraq by claiming that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

No such weapons were ever found and the estimate was found to have been based on faulty intelligence.

Five killed in US helicopter in Baghdad BAGHDAD, Jan 24 (Reuters): Five people were killed when a civilian US helicopter went down in Baghdad, a U S official source said, but accounts from local residents in the city centre that it was shot down were not confirmed.

The U S military yesterday declined comment beyond saying it appeared to be a civilian aircraft.

Most private helicopters in Baghdad are operated by security contractors engaged to protect diplomats and businessmen and others in the Iraqi capital.

Residents in central Baghdad told Reuters earlier they saw a helicopter come down and some said it had been shot at first.

There were differing accounts of whether it crashed or made an emergency landing.

One resident said he saw four bodies.

On Saturday, a U S military Black Hawk helicopter came down north of Baghdad, killing all 12 on board.

U S officials were quoted as saying it was most likely brought down by a shoulder-fired missile.

Biggest threat to US drinking water? Rust CHICAGO, Jan 24 (Reuters): From an attack by militants to a decline in snow melt caused by global warming, public fears about the water supply have heightened in the United States.

So who would have thought the top worry among water experts turns out to be rusty pipes? "If you clean up water and then put it into a dirty pipe, there's not much point," said Timothy Ford, a microbiologist and water research scientist with Montana State University.

"I consider the distribution system to be the highest risk and the greatest problem we are going to be facing in the future," Ford said.

Towns and cities across the United States spend more than 50 billion dollars each year cleaning water sourced from rivers, lakes and underground aquifers.

More than 170,000 public water systems are at work to keep tap water flowing into American homes and meeting the standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974.

But after the extensive purifying process, water ends up in your glass after traveling through pipes laid under city streets 50, 60 or 100 years ago.

Those pipes - made mostly from iron until plastic was introduced 30 years ago - span almost one million miles in the United States.

As the iron pipes corrode and break, not only does water escape, but also diseases get in, experts say.

"Investigations conducted in the last five years suggest that a substantial proportion of waterborne disease outbreaks, both microbial and chemical, is attributable to problems within distribution systems," the National Research Council said in a study for the Environmental Protection Agency released in December.

The amount of water lost is a sign the system is aging, experts say.

The oldest, largest cities in the country - Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York - are all showing signs that their distribution systems are in need of repair, said Eric Goldstein, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group.

In New York City, for example, the biggest leak in its system loses 1 billion gallons of water a month, he said.

It's that aging infrastructure that poses a rising health threat to consumers, experts say.

More than 273 million Americans get their water from a public distribution system.

The other 10 per cent of Americans source their water from private, unregulated wells.

Fears about tap water quality are sparking more Americans to turn to bottled water or home filtration systems.

More than 40 per cent of American homes use some kind of water treatment product, according to NSF International, a not-for-profit public health and safety group.

EPA rules require that water leaving a city's water plant be tested for microorganisms like cryptosporidium and legionella that thrive in degraded water systems.

EPA also requires tests for a slew of other contaminants, including lead, copper and arsenic, which can lead to any number of gastrointestinal or other illnesses.

But once water has been purged of such impurities, different ones can enter the water supply as it courses through miles of old pipe.

"We estimate in the next 20 to 30 years water utilities will have to invest 250 dollars to 350 billion dllars just to replace the pipes that are in the ground today," said Jack Hossbuhr, executive director of the American Water Works Association, the industry's trade group.

The cost of improving US water infrastructure may triple the cost of water by 2030, according to the association.

"We committed 100 years ago to build a reliable, low-cost, high-quality municipal drinking water systems.

But there are no guarantees that will continue," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a research group in Oakland, California.