2 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, October 11, 2005 NATION/WORLD Pakistan to accept Indian aid NEWS IN BRIEF 0 Rebel commander reportedly orders suspension of violence in quake-ravaged Kashmir MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Setting aside decades-old rivalries, Pakistan said it would accept earthquake aid from India, and a top rebel command- er reportedly ordered the suspension of violence in earthquake-hit areas of Indian Kashmir. Authorities in New Delhi prom- ised delivery "on a very urgent basis." Eight U.S. military helicopters from Afghanistan arrived in Islamabad with provisions, and Washington pledged up to $50 million in relief and reconstruction aid, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said. "The magnitude of this disaster is utterly overwhelming," Crocker said. "We have underway the beginning of a very major relief effort." The United Nations said more than 2.5 million people were left homeless by Sat- urday's magnitude-7.6 quake, and doctors warned of an outbreak of disease unless more relief arrives soon. The hardest-hit area was the Himalayan region of Kash- mir, which is divided between Pakistan and India. Shopkeepers clashed with looters, and hungry families huddled under tents while waiting for relief supplies after Pakistan's worst earthquake razed entire villages and buried roads in rubble. Death toll esti- mates ranged from 20,000 to 30,000. British rescuers unearthed a man With the situation dire, Pakistan set aside politics and said it would accept relief aid for earthquake victims from India. The nuclear-armed neighbors have been bitter rivals since gaining indepen- dence from Britain in 1947, fighting three wars, but they have taken steps to improve relations since last year. India will send tents, food and medi- cine and other aid, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said in the capital, New Delhi. The chief commander of the largest Kashmiri rebel group, the Hezb-ul-Muja- hedeen, reportedly ordered a suspension of violence in devastated areas of India- controlled Kashmir. "We have directed our cadres to halt their operations in the affected areas," the private Kashmir News Service quoted Syed Salah-ud-Din as saying. The report could not be inde- pendently confirmed. Hezb-ul-Mujahedeen is one of more than a dozen rebel groups fight- ing since 1989 for Kashmir's inde- pendence from India or its merger with Pakistan. On Sunday night, suspected Islam- ic militants killed 10 people, includ- ing four Hindus in quake-hit villages whose throats were slit, said senior police superintendent J.P. Singh. In Balakot, a badly hit town in North West Frontier Province, townspeople broke through concrete to rescue two girls from a shattered school. Several men brushed dust from the clothes of one girl and gave her water. AP PHOTO Rescue workers of the British "RAPID UK Search and Rescue" team and local staff search for a boy and a woman in Islamabad yesterday. trapped in rubble for 54 hours, residents using their bare hands and crowbars freed two girls buried in a school for more than two days, and a woman and child were pulled to safety from a wrecked apart- ment building after 62 hours. With landslides blocking roads to many of the worst-hit areas, Pakistan's army air- lifted food, water and medicine into the disaster zone. International relief efforts cranked into action, and an American plane full of relief supplies landed at an air base near Pakistan's capital yester- day. Most of the dead were in Pakistan's mountainous north. India reported at least 865 deaths, but Home Secretary V.K. Duggal said it was not expected to rise much higher. Afghanistan reported four deaths. BAGHDAD Insurgents rally ahead of constitution vote Insurgents launched a new salvo of attacks five days ahead of a crucial constitu- tional referendum, killing at least 18 Iraqis and a U.S. soldier yesterday with suicide car bombs, roadside explosives and drive-by shootings, police said. Five mortar shells were fired at a hotel in the southern city of Hillah where a U.S. regional embassy office is based, with one round hitting the building and leaving a large hole in a wall, police said. No casualties were reported. Gunmen also opened fire on a convoy of cars carrying members of an Arab League delegation that is visiting Iraq, but no one was hurt, police said. The attacks came as Shiite and Kurdish officials continued to negotiate with Sunni Arab leaders over last-minute additions to the constitution, try- ing to win Sunni support ahead of Saturday's referendum. U.S. officials were acting as mediators. The sides appeared to remain far apart over basic issues and copies of the draft constitution already are being distributed to the public across the country. BERLIN Merkel to become German chancellor Conservative Angela Merkel struck a power-sharing deal yesterday that will make her the first woman and politician from the ex-communist east to serve as Germany's chancellor, forging a coalition with ousted leader Gerhard Schroeder's party to reform the faltering economy. The country's two biggest political forces were forced into talks on forming a joint government after a Sept. 18 election gave Merkel a victory - but with a margin so slim Schroeder's party demanded equal treatment in a "grand coalition." To resolve the impasse, the Social Democrats gave up Germany's leader- ship, but the party secured the bulk of the ministries, including the presti- gious Foreign Ministry. WASHINGTON Reservists shoulder most U.S. deaths The National Guard and Reserves are suffering a strikingly higher share of U.S. casual- ties in Iraq, their portion of total American military deaths nearly doubling since last year. Reservists have accounted for one-quarter of all U.S. deaths since the Iraq war began, but the proportion has grown over time. It was 10 percent for the five weeks it took to topple Baghdad in the spring of 2003, and 20 percent for 2004 as a whole. The trend accelerated this year. For the first nine months of 2005 reservists accounted for 36 percent of U.S. deaths, and for August and September it was 56 percent, according to Pentagon figures. The Army National Guard, Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve accounted for more than half of all U.S. deaths in August and in September - the first time that has happened in consecutive months. The only other month in which it even approached 50 percent was June 2004. Casualties in Iraq have shifted toward citizen soldiers as their combat role has grown to historic levels. National Guard officials say their soldiers have been sent into combat in Iraq in numbers not previously seen in modern times. STOCKHOLM Game theorists win economics Nobel * A pair of game theorists who defined chess-like strategies in politics and busi- ness that can be applied to arms races, price wars and actual warfare won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences yesterday. Israeli-American Robert Aumann and U.S. citizen Thomas Schelling won the award for research on game theory, a branch of applied mathematics that uses mod- els to study interactions between countries, businesses or people. The theory, which was devised in 1944 by John von Neumann and Oskar Mor- genstern, is often used in a political or military context to explain conflicts between countries but has been of late used to map trends in the business world, ranging from how cartels set prices to how companies can better sell their goods and ser- vices in new markets. - Compiled from Daily wire reports CORRECTIONS Please report any error in the Daily to corrections@michigandaily.com. r GW HIRING Start your Career at CarMax as a... CarMax is a FORTUNE 500 company and one of the FORTUNE 2005 "100 Best Companies to Work For. "We have opportu- nities for STRATEGY ANALYSTS at our offices in Richmond, VA and Atlanta, GA. 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