The interim government in Honduras confirmed on Wednesday that a fresh round of talks with the country’s ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, would be delayed, after efforts to break the political stalemate fell apart late Tuesday night. The present Honduran foreign minister, Carlos Lopez Contreras, told local television reporters that talks would be put off pending a new proposal from the mediator, President Óscar Arias of Costa Rica, the Associated Press reported.

The delay came about following the refusal by the leaders of the interim government to accept a proposal by Mr. López, the head of their own negotiating team,  that would have permitted Mr. Zelaya to return to power.

According to the plan, the presidential election would be moved up one month, to October, and Mr. Zelaya would be prohibited from trying to alter the Constitution to allow him to run for a second term. He also could not be prosecuted for at least six months for crimes that were cited when troops detained him in his home June 28 and then loaded him on a plane out of the country.

But that limited period of amnesty, according to sources close to the acting president, Roberto Micheletti, was rejected by members of the country’s Supreme Court.

President Zelaya’s opponents accuse him of attempting to change the Constitution in order to extend his time in office, a move that they said was illegal and that led to his ouster. Those opponents have said that Mr. Zelaya should be allowed back into Honduras only if he agrees to face prosecution for that conduct.

The proposal would have barred for at least six months all political prosecutions involving people on both sides of the coup and would have laid the way for the formation of a truth commission to investigate the acts that led to Mr. Zelaya’s removal.

Early in the day officials hailed the proposal as the first sign that at least some leaders in Mr. Micheletti’s camp were willing to accept Mr.Zelaya back as President. But the rejection Tuesday night made it clear that after two rounds of talks, Mr. Micheletti — along with members of the Supreme Court, the Congress and the business community — had not changed their stance and that prospects for a negotiated solution remained slim.

The opposition Democratic Party in Japan has condemned what it has called a misleading negative campaign by the ruling party just at the forefront of an election that Prime Minister Taro Aso’s coalition runs the risk of losing.

Analysts say Aso’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), traumatized by internal disagreement and also in the face of an imminent defeat in an August 30 poll, is indulging in attacks on the Democrats as weak on security policy and irresponsible on public finances.

On Wednesday, the LDP ran a full-page advertisement in the conservative Sankei newspaper, with a big, bold-faced headline that states: “The Future of Japan is in Danger.”

Democratic Party Secretary-General Katsuya Okada has condemned the ad, as well as recent televised remarks by his LDP counterpart, as containing misleading statements about his party’s policies.

“It is natural for there to be healthy criticism and debate about policies, but the stance of the LDP, which is stressing partial, biased information and is not engaging in serious debate, is extremely regrettable and sad,” Okada told a news conference.

Victory of the opposition Democratic Party victory would bring in a government that promises to pay more attention to consumers than companies, wrest control of policy from bureaucrats to reduce waste, and adopt a diplomatic stance less subservient to ally the United States.

It would also increase the chances of ending a political deadlock resulting from a divided parliament in which the opposition controls the upper house, which has delayed policy implementation as Japan struggles to emerge from a deep recession.

Indonesia’s election saw President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono winning by a more than two-to-one edge over his nearest opponent. Yudhoyono clinched 60.8 percent of the vote, compared with 26.8 percent for former President Megawati Sukarnoputri and 12.4 percent for Vice President Yusuf Kalla, according to numbers released Friday by Indonesia’s National Election Commission.

Counting took place under heavy security after the terrorist attacks on two Jakarta hotels July 17. Roads to the electoral commission building were cordoned off and phone signals were blocked inside the building.

The official announcement will happen on Saturday.

“We thank God that the electoral commission has successfully finished the vote recap with the results that we expected,” said Andi Mallaranggeng, chairman of Yudhoyono’s Democrat Party. “Now is the time for national reconciliation. There’s time for competition and there’s time to unite.”

Megawati, who was President of Indonesia from 2001 to 2004, did not accept the final results and has pledged to contest them before the elections supervisory board and constitutional court.

Vice President Kalla also refused to accept the results. He accused of irregularities in voter rolls even before the balloting and demanded that counting be stopped. The election commission however rejected Kalla’s objections.

Mallaranggeng approved of the opposition’s rights to protest but said he did not “believe that anything significant will come out of it that will influence the result of the election.”

Indonesia has more than 175 million registered voters spread over 17,000 islands. The election commission counted roughly 121 million votes, tossing 6.5 million ballots for irregularities. An additional 50 million registered voters stayed home. 

The borders of a heavily contested oil-rich region between north and south Sudan were redefined by an international hearing on Wednesday. The decision marks an  attempt to resolve a sensitive issue in the 2005 peace agreement that ended one of Africa’s longest civil wars by dividing the contested zone between the two sides. In its decision, the tribunal, seated at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, overruled a decision by an international commission that Sudan’s government rejected four years ago.

The new decision includes important concessions for both sides, assigning the government in the north control of the region’s richest oil fields, but consolidating control of the remaining region under the Ngok Dinka, an ethnic group loyal to southern Sudan and likely to vote to join it in a coming referendum.

Both parties to conflict — President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s government in the north, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which controls the south — said Wednesday that they would abide by the decision, which was hailed by representatives of the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.

BY reframing the borders of the region, the ruling gives the north unquestioned rights to rich oil deposits like the Heglig oil field, which had previously been placed within Abyei.

But the decision leaves at least one oil field in Abyei and gives a symbolic victory to the Ngok Dinka, affirming their claims to the heartland of the fertile region.

Recent fights over the region led to a May 2008 battle which saw most of the town getting burnt to the ground and 50,000 residents had to flee. Following that flare-up, the north and the south agreed to submit the issue of Abyei’s borders before the arbitration panel in The Hague.

Until the 2011 referendum on self-determination, Abyei will formally remain a part of northern Sudan, presenting security concerns for ethnic groups loyal to the south. The United States and the European Union issued a joint statement urging both sides to follow the ruling immediately: “Both parties must use their authority and influence to ensure that the court’s decision is respected and peacefully implemented.”

An indefinite strike by the operators of private buses and taxis in India’s third most populous city, Calcutta, has plagued normal life.

The strike is in protest against a decision by the West Bengal government to execute a ban on commercial vehicles more than 15 years old.

The ban, ordered by Calcutta’s high court, is an attempt to bring down pollution.

The ban will be in effect from 1 August. But with some 60,000 taxis and 10,000 buses currently standing idle, the strike seems to be having a major impact.

Huge crowds are gathering at metro stations and schools and universities have been closed down.

The state transport minister Subhas Chakrabarty has said that efforts to prevent the strike were not successful because the transport operators were unreasonable.

“I wanted the issue to be amicably settled. But they insist on going ahead with the strike, so we will take very tough action,” Mr. Chakrabarty said.

The city’s ageing vehicles are looked upon as a major reason of air pollution and responsible for the sharp rise in lung cancer and similar diseases in the city.

Mr. Chakrabarty said that nearly 3000 buses and mini-buses and almost 6500 taxis will have to go off the roads or convert to green fuel because they were purchased more than 15 years ago.

Operators say they would have no hesitation in switching to green fuels or buying new vehicles but they say they need soft loans and easy repayment terms to help them make the switch.

Countering a latest rejection by North Korea of the idea to give up its nuclear weapons program, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that the communist regime has ”no friends left” to shield it from receiving United Nations’ penalties.

”North Korea’s continued pursuit of its nuclear ambitions is sure to elevate tensions on the Korean peninsula and could provoke an arms race in the region,” Clinton told a news conference after conferring with officials from 26 other countries and organizations. She clear said that the participating countries were unanimous on completely enforcing the latest U.N. sanctions against North Korea for its repeated nuclear and missile tests.

Clinton said the U.S. will continue to be firm that North Korea return to the bargaining table and verifiably dismantle its nuclear program. She also held out the possibility of restoring U.S. diplomatic ties to North Korea and other incentives — actions the Obama administration would be willing to consider only if the North Korea takes irreversible steps towards denuclearization.

Just back after a weeklong trip o India and Thailand, Clinton offered a somewhat more hopeful message about another fragile area on the U.S. foreign policy agenda: Myanmar.

”There is a positive direction that we see with Burma,” she said. She offered praises for Myanmar’s government for committing to enforce the U.N. sanctions against North Korea.

And she suggested Myanmar may have played a role this month in coercing a North Korean cargo ship that was supposed to have been carrying weaponry flouting the sanctions to return home instead of continuing to its destination, which U.S. officials said was probably Myanmar.

Clinton also called on Myanmar to unconditionally release democracy leader Aung Suu Kyi, who has been charged of violating the terms of her house arrest.

She said the world — including China, which has been North Korea’s most loyal supporter — has made it clear to Pyongyang that it has ”no place to go.”

”They have no friends left that will protect them from the international community’s efforts to move toward denuclearization,” she said.