In an audio file posted on jihadist Internet forums marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri said that building Iraq as a "fortress of Islam" is the "most important duty" for Muslims."We will only get our rights back with our own hands and not through beggary or fraudulent elections," he said, according to a summary by the SITE monitoring service.In the nearly 16 minute audio message released Thursday, Zawahiri, known as Al-Qaeda's ideological thinker, called on Muslims to fight for creating a greater Muslim state, according to SITE.

It was Zawahiri's second audio file released this month. In the first, posted April 2, he launched a blistering attack on the United Nations."The United Nations is an enemy of Islam and Muslims: it is the one which codified and legitimized the setting up of the state of Israel and its taking over of the Muslims' lands," Zawahiri said in that recorded talk.Zawahiri's latest talk, titled "Five years after the Invasion of Iraq and Decades of Injustice by the Tyrants," contains references to U.S. Iraqi commander General David Petraeus's April 8 testimony to the U.S. Congress, and to a textile worker strike in Egypt on April 6 as evidence that it was a recent recording, according to SITE.The monitoring service said he called on Muslims to make Iraq a "fortress of Islam" and, underscoring the Sunni Muslim orientation of al-Qaeda, he referred to a plot against Iraq by the United States together with Shiite Iran, which he said would lead to the Mideast region exploding.He also discussed the situation in Egypt, saying that Muslims there are deprived of wealth and basic necessities, according to SITE.

A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.
The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears, all of Lali's facial features are duplicated _ she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.
"My daughter is fine _ like any other child," said Vinod Singh, 23, a poor farm worker.
Lali has caused a sensation in the dusty village of Saini Sunpura, 25 miles east of New Delhi. When she left the hospital, eight hours after a normal delivery on March 11, she was swarmed by villagers, said Sabir Ali, the director of Saifi Hospital.
"She drinks milk from her two mouths and opens and shuts all the four eyes at one time," Ali said.
Rural India is deeply superstitious and the little girl is being hailed as a return of the Hindu goddess of valor, Durga, a fiery deity traditionally depicted with three eyes and many arms.
Up to 100 people have been visiting Lali at her home every day to touch her feet out of respect, offer money and receive blessings, Singh told The Associated Press.
"Lali is God's gift to us," said Jaipal Singh, a member of the local village council. "She has brought fame to our village."
Village chief Daulat Ram said he planned to build a temple to Durga in the village.
"I am writing to the state government to provide money to build the temple and help the parents look after their daughter," Ram said.
Lali's condition is often linked to serious health complications, but the doctor said she was doing well.
"She is leading a normal life with no breathing difficulties," said Ali, adding that he saw no need for surgery.
Lali's parents were married in February 2007. Lali is their first child.
Singh said he took his daughter to a hospital in New Delhi where doctors suggested a CT scan to determine whether her internal organs were normal, but Singh said he felt it was unnecessary.
"I don't feel the need of that at this stage as my daughter is behaving like a normal child, posing no problems," he said.

For the first time, a documentary about a Palestinian boy whose tragic death saved the lives of five Israeli children – thanks to his father – has been screened in the West Bank.The documentary -- "The Heart of Jenin" – tells the story of 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Ahmad al-Khatib, who was shot dead by Israeli troops when they mistook his toy gun for a real weapon.The shooting happened in the West Bank town of Jenin on Nov. 2, 2005. At the time, Israeli soldiers had orders to "shoot anything that moved," one soldier said in the documentary.

The shot to Ahmad's head proved fatal, killing the boy from Jenin refugee camp. Ahmad's father Ismael al-Khatib later decided to donate his boy's organs to patients at the Haifa hospital where his son was pronounced dead."If I can't help my son to recover, then may be I can help other kids," he says in the documentary. Five Israeli children received Ahmad's life-saving organs. The feature length documentary – directed by Marcus Vetter and Lior Geller –was screened at the German-French Cultural Center in Ramallah on March 27, the first time the film was shown in the Palestinian territories for a general audience.Palestinian cinemas refused the film because Geller is Israeli, said Farid Maajari, director of the cultural center.

Storyline
The Heart of Jenin follows Ahmad's father Ismael on his journey through Israel, visiting the children who found life through his son's death.Ahmad's kidneys went to the daughter of a Jewish settler in Occupied Jerusalem and a Bedouin boy from the Negev Desert region. His heart went to a Druze family in northern Israel. Two other beneficiaries chose not to participate in the documentary. The extraordinary donation was approved not only by the boy's grief-stricken mother and father, but religious and political scholars too. In the movie, Jenin's mufti approves organ donations. The opinion is backed by the Jenin commander of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. "We have no problem with Jews as Jews. There's no problem as long as this will save lives," says Zakaria Zubeidi.In the movie, the father of the Jewish girl said he did not want to meet the donor family and would have preferred if they were Jewish. He said Arabs only want to kill Israelis, apparently oblivious to the actions of Ahmad's father who donated his son's kidney to save the settler girl.After the screening in Ramallah, German director Vetter told the audience the film was banned from the Tel Aviv film festival allegedly for technical reasons. "Some people said the film is biased towards the Palestinians because it tackles the death of the child and focuses on checkpoints, collective punishment, and the destruction of Jenin refugee camp," Vetter said.Ismail al-Khatib now runs a music school for children in Jenin. "Without peace, only killing will remain. Children from Palestine and Israel and all the world will die," Khatib said.(Translated from Arabic by Sonia Farid).

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”

Moscow has no information that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.
But he said the Kremlin shared the West's concern that Tehran's nuclear programme should be "transparent".
Mr Putin was speaking after talks in Moscow with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said the two countries had made progress on the Iran issue.
Iran denies accusations that it is seeking to build a nuclear bomb, saying its programme is for civilian use.
"We do not have data that says Iran is trying to produce nuclear weapons," Mr Putin said at a joint news conference with Mr Sarkozy.
"Therefore we proceed from a position that Iran has no such plans but we share the concern of our partners that all programmes should be as transparent as possible," the Russian leader added.
Kosovo issue
Mr Sarkozy, for his part, said Paris and Moscow had made progress towards resolving differences over Iran.
He said their positions were moving "towards the same path", but gave no details.
Mr Sarkozy has been pushing for tougher sanctions against Tehran but Russia has opposed the move. Mr Putin is due to visit Iran next week.
Mr Sarkozy said earlier that the two leaders had also bridged differences over Kosovo's future status.
Russia is fiercely opposed to independence for Serbia's breakaway province, while France - along with other Western nations - supports it.
There was also a reminder of European concerns about Russia's human rights record, the BBC's James Rodgers in Moscow says.
Mr Sarkozy confirmed that he would meet members of a group critical of the situation in Chechnya, our correspondent says (BBC news)