Pakistan

During the stormy years Benazir Bhutto ruled Pakistan, her husband was a top power broker and a prime target of corruption allegations that toppled her. The assassination of the former prime minister has pushed her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, back into the heart of the storm. Their political party this week named Zardari to run its day-to-day affairs while appointing the couple's 19-year-old son to the ceremonial role of chairman.

Scotland Yard investigators arrived Friday in Pakistan to help investigate the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, although the extent of their mandate was unclear. The team of British anti-terrorism officers was dispatched after President Pervez Musharraf, under intense criticism over the handling of the Bhutto inquiry, agreed to accept outside assistance. Musharraf's government initially had rebuffed international participation of any kind in the investigation.

Candles flicker, petals scatter and bouquets slowly wilt at the spot where Benazir Bhutto was slain. Although some passers-by still break down in tears at the sight of this makeshift shrine, the pressing question for many Pakistanis as the outpouring of grief over her assassination subsides is whether President Pervez Musharraf will manage to survive this crisis, as he has so many others. In the first days after the Dec.

An American scholar and freelance journalist who recently wrote about the growing strength of Taliban militants in Pakistan has been expelled, a media rights group said Saturday. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern that the deportation of Nicholas Schmidle, who has written recently for the New York Times Magazine and the online magazine Slate, could presage heavier pressure on foreign journalists working in Pakistan.

In a nondescript strip mall in Inglewood, the political debate was as heated as the chilies in Arif Malik Awan's fragrant Pakistani curries. As customers gathered at Awan's Bilal restaurant, where Pakistani satellite TV piped out religious advice from an Urdu-speaking imam, the talk was of dictators, death and democracy.

Ten people were killed and more than 40 injured when a bomb exploded here Monday on a path crowded with food and vegetable vendors, police said. The device, reportedly rigged to a motorcycle left near a fruit cart, rocked the working-class neighborhood in Pakistan's largest city, police said. The rush-hour blast was the latest in a wave of violence, including the Dec.

Islamic extremists attacked and seized a small Pakistani army fort near the Afghan border, leaving at least 22 soldiers dead or missing. A military spokesman said this morning that the militants had left the fort and disappeared into the surrounding hills. Although the fighters did not gain significant ground in the attack Tuesday night on Sararogha Fort, they did further erode confidence in the U.S.

Nine people were killed and at least 25 wounded Thursday night when a teenage suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded Shiite Muslim prayer hall in this border region. The attack marked the onset of sectarian violence that often flares in Pakistan during Ashura, the annual religious holiday when Shiites mourn the death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad. Shiites are a minority in Pakistan.

Pakistani authorities said they killed more than 70 Islamist militants in two separate clashes Friday and recaptured a fort in the largely lawless tribal region near the Afghan border. At last 50 militants who had assembled to attack a fort in the town of Laddah were killed by barrages of mortar and artillery fire, officials said. Meanwhile, army troops took back the abandoned Sipla Toi fort in the South Waziristan tribal region, the sources said.

Authorities said they had arrested a teenager who told them he would have been the next suicide bomber sent to target former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had she survived the Dec. 27 attack. The teen, identified as Aitzaz Shah, was arrested Friday in a mountainous region of the North-West Frontier Province and told investigators that he was not in Rawalpindi on the day Bhutto was slain.