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AFGHANISTAN

• Afghanistan’s ex-king Mohammad Zahir Shah headed home on Thursday after 29 years exile in Italy adding an uncertain royal card to the nation’s ethnic powder keg. There were no signs in Kabul of a grand homecoming welcome for the king. In a sign of the sensitivity of the king’s return, there has been no announcement on radio and television of his homecoming. He was accompanied on the flight back home by Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai, who had come to Rome on Tuesday with six ministers to escort him back and provide assurances it was safe for him to return. (Reuters 180104 GMT Apr 02)

• A U.S. soldier in Afghanistan was wounded on Wednesday by a shot fired from a crowd in the southern city of Kandahar, the former stronghold of the vanquished Taliban regime, an Afghan official said. U.S military officers say they expect a resurgence of Taliban and bin Laden’s loyalists in Afghanistan with the approach of summer. (Reuters 171414 GMT Apr 02)

WAR ON TERRORISM

• Osama bin Laden appeared again in an undated videotape on Wednesday hailing the September 11 attacks and a spokesman for his al Qaeda network appeared to go another step towards clearly claiming responsibility for them. "More than US $1 trillion in losses resulted from these successful and blessed attacks and may God bless these martyrs and welcome them to paradise," bin Laden said in the footage aired by the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation (MBC). MBC said evidence on the tape suggested it was made in the first half of December. It did not say how it obtained the film, which resembled other footage aired on Monday by another Arabic channel, the Qatar-based satellite station al-Jazeera. (Reuters 172113 GMT Apr 02)

• Despite a massive number of tips, rumors and other intelligence, the U.S. military has never had good enough information on Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts to mount a mission to go after him, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday in Washington. Some intelligence officials disagree, saying bin Laden probably was at his Tora Bora stronghold during December airstrikes but escaped because too few American troops were committed to the hunt. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said in a separate news conference that bin Laden and his top lieutenants must be hunted down. "The bottom line is that we’ve got to find him," Daschle said, adding that the al-Qaida operatives at large are "still capable of inflicting real harm" on the United States. They were responding to a Washington Post report that the Bush administration believes the gravest error of the war was not sending more American troops into Tora Bora. (AP 172255 Apr 02)

• President Bush’s nominee as inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency promised senators on Wednesday that he would provide effective oversight over an agency whose ranks and budgets are swelling for the war on terrorism. John L. Helgerson, a longtime analyst and manager with experience at several U.S. intelligence agencies, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he brings "initiative, integrity and independence" to investigating allegations of wrongdoing at the CIA. The CIA budget is classified, but the Bush administration is believed to be proposing increasing it from its current US $3.5 billion to more than US $5 billion. To fill out its ranks, the agency is recalling retired officers. (AP 180014 Apr 02)

• In its latest rebuff to demands for an independent body to decide the legal status of captives being held here, the United States says the detainees have no right to lawyers now, and can be held as long as the U.S.-led war on terrorism presses ahead. The State Department statement, made available on Wednesday, was in response to a ruling from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which last month petitioned the U.S. government to clarify within 30 days the status of detained al-Qaida and Taliban suspects. (AP 172231 Apr 02)

NATO

• NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson called on Wednesday for an international security network to deal with the global threat that has emerged following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Lord Robertson said that globalization had allowed terrorist groups to expand, and combatting such threat a threat now "requires adaptable security structures." The NATO chief is on a three-day visit to Athens, during which he will also attend a military conference and meet Greek Premier Costas Simitis, Foreign Minister George Papandreou and Defense Minister Yannos Papantoniou. (AP 171742 Apr 02)

• Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi expressed support Wednesday for Romanian and Bulgarian membership in NATO and the European Union, calling the eastward expansion of Europe a "moral duty." "Europe must reunify," he told reporters after meeting his counterpart, Adrian Nastase, and President Ion Iliescu. (AP 171536 Apr 02)

• The United States told former autocratic Slovak Premier Vladimir Meciar, who tops polls ahead of September elections, that his victory would hurt Slovakia’s chances of NATO membership, the daily SME reported on Wednesday. The paper printed a transcript of Meciar’s meeting with U.S. officials during a March visit, aimed at persuading Washington that his nationalist party is now a viable partner for NATO. SME, a respected pro-western daily, did not say from where it received the transcript. The U.S. embassy in Bratislava said it had no information on the source of the transcripts. (Reuters 171431 GMT Apr 02)

• Canada said on Wednesday that talks on closer military co-operation with the United States might one day lead to the creation of a single command for the land and naval forces of both countries. "That may well be the end result, but we would obviously have to look at any such negotiations and have to determine what’s in our interests and whether it would be beneficial to Canada or not," Foreign Minister Bill Graham told reporters in Ottawa. But ministers in the federal government – already criticized by some for siding too closely with Washington after the Sept. 11 attacks - denied they would ever allow closer ties to infringe on Canada’s sovereignty. (Reuters 172058 GMT Apr 02)

• As part of efforts to modernize NATO’s military in the wake of Sept. 11, the alliance is studying a proposal from American and European defense companies for a sophisticated surveillance system that would enable allied forces to better pinpoint targets on the ground. The presentation of the plan this month has been welcomed as a possible solution to years of gridlock over which system the alliance would chose to provide battlefield reconnaissance - identified by alliance experts on Tuesday as an area where urgent action is needed. (AP 171503 Apr 02)

BALKANS

• The United Nations chief war crimes prosecutor said on Wednesday she believed wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic would be brought to the Hague court later this year. Carla del Ponte said she wanted Karadzic to face a joint trial in October together with Biljana Plavsic and Momcilo Krajisnik, his close allies during the 1992-95 war and like him indicted for genocide. She was speaking in Sarajevo during a Balkan trip that will take her to Belgrade on Thursday and Pristina on Friday. (Reuters 171811 GMT Apr 02)

• Yugoslavia’s government on Wednesday piled pressure on war crimes suspects, publishing the names of 23 people wanted by The Hague tribunal and calling on them to agree within three days to give themselves up. The government said it would start a legal procedure ultimately leading to arrests and handovers for those who did not heed its last-ditch appeal and surrender voluntarily. The appeal appeared designed to persuade suspects they had no choice but to surrender in the hope of avoiding unpopular arrest attempts which could also cause bloodshed. (Reuters 171742 GMT Apr 02)

• A Serb coalition has agreed to participate in Kosovo’s government after reaching a compromise deal with the UN mission administering the province, the mission’s top official said Wednesday in Pristina. Michael Steiner, chief UN administrator for the province, had originally insisted that the return of refugees falls under the mandate of the UN mission. As a compromise measure, however, he agreed to let the ethnic Serbs appoint an adviser to the UN office that deals with the matter. (AP 171425 Apr 02)

 FINAL ITEM