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No one has claimed responsibility, but the explosion came straightforward weeks subsequent to the terrorist group threatened Denmark to boot caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad reprinted earlier this year in newspapers in that country.

The Danish Security and Intelligence Service, known as PET, declared in a statement late Monday that the commission was probably the target.

“It is PET’s assessment that al-Qaida or an al-Qaida-related group likely is behind the attack,” agency director Jakob Scharf said. He added that “a succession of other militant Islamic groups and networks in Pakistan in like manner could have the intention and the capacity to hit Danish targets in Pakistan.”

The explosion wounded at least 35 people, left a deep crater on the road outside the embassy, rigorously damaged the nearby office of a development group and devastated trees and cars. The embassy building remained standing, though its windows were shattered.

A team of treaty investigators sifted through the rubble. Barricades blocked access to the area, hearthstone to several diplomatic buildings and residences.

“We are just trying to find any clue, a single one evidence,” federal searcher Muhammad Mustafa said. “You know yesterday it was panic here. Usually we miss weighty things in panic.”

Officials were trying to influence if the bomb was a suicide have at and looked at heedlessness footage. Senior police officer Ahmed Latif said the attacker clearly used a fake diplomatic license plate to get the car near the embassy.

The six dead include two Pakistani policemen, a cleaner and a handyman employed by the embassy. One was Pakistani-born with a Danish passport, the Foreign Ministry in Copenhagen said.

Denmark has faced threats at its embassies following the reprinting in February by about a dozen newspapers of a cartoon that depicted Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban. That and other images in a Danish paper sparked riots in the Muslim world in 2006.

A communication onward the embassy’s telephone answering system said it was closed Tuesday. On the embassy’s Web site, Danes were advised contrary to traveling to Pakistan and those already in the country were told to “drill particular vigilance.”

Denmark’s Politiken newspaper said in an editorial Tuesday: “We knew it could happen but abruptly the menace became reality.”

The Berlingske Tidende daily lashed completely in a comment titled “Pakistan’s poor security.”

“We have simply trusted the Pakistanis’ ability to protect us too much,” it said.

The explosion could heighten pressure on Pakistan to stop striking peace deals with militants in the border regions, where al-Qaida and Taliban fighters are believed to have set up sanctuary.

Pakistan insists it is not talking to “terrorists” boundary rather militants willing to lay down their weapons. But the U.S. has warned the deals could barely give militants time to rebuild strength.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said in a statement Monday the blast would “redouble our make ready in mind” to “continue on our avowed path to fight terrorism and extremism.” Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik aforesaid the have at would not affect the stillness talks.

Ben Venzke, CEO of IntelCenter, a U.S. group that monitors al-Qaida messages, said the bombing was likely the labor of the terror group or an take.

He said al-Qaida called for attacks against Danish diplomatic facilities and personnel in a video last August, and repeated its threat in April.

“I urge and incite every Muslim who can harm Denmark to do in this way in support of the Prophet, God’s quietness and prayers be upon him, and in defense of his noble stature,” IntelCenter quoted al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri as saying in an April 21 video.

But analysts reported it was possible groups other than al-Qaida who also were angry in an opposite direction the cartoons could be behind the blast. Islam generally forbids in any degree depiction of the prophet, just positive, for apprehension it could conduct to idolatry.

Mahmood Shah, a author security master for the tribal regions, said al-Qaida attacks tend to subsist in greater numbers lethal. Radical local clerics could have inspired it, although if it was a suicide bombing, it likely originated from the unruly border regions, he uttered.

Even if the attack isn’t linked to the tribal regions, the U.S. and the West “will use this … to say look, your policy (on repose deals) is not working,” algebraist Talat Masood aforesaid.

Monday’s attack follows a bombing in March at a restaurant in Islamabad that killed a Turkish aid worker and wounded at least 12 others, including at least four FBI personnel.

The U.S. advised Americans to be cautious in moving through the usually tranquil principal, but in that place was no near indication that it or any other foreign governments or aid agencies would evacuate their personnel after the new engage. Copenhagen contributed to this mention.

Three decades after "paperless office" entered the business lexicon, the financial and environmental penury to shape paper is greater than ever

by Arik Hesseldahl

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Thirty-three years since this month the phrase "paperless office" entered the business vocabulary in a BusinessWeek article titled "The Office of the Future." In the article, George Pake, the legendary head of the Xerox (XRX) Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), foresaw technology that by 1995 would let computer users summon on-screen documents "by constraining a button," eliminating the necessity with a view to much if not totally the printed paper cluttering workspaces.

Pake’s vision was half-right. Offices brim by network-linked computers, loaded with software that lets users make, read, duplicate, and distribute digital documents. But the dream of a workplace where all that technology would get rid of the need for printed documents remains just that—a dream.

Indeed, some of the very machinery that makes paper theoretically obsolete has helped make it all the more ubiquitous. Devices that scan and convert documents to a digital format double as printers and copiers—and they’ve become so small, inferior, and easy to use that they’re put on—or near—each desktop. "The decision to print has gotten much closer to the owner of the document," says David Pineault, a paper economist and analyst at consulting firm InfoTrends. According to RISI, a exploration confirmed that tracks forest products, in 1975 the average U.S. office laborer used 62 pounds of paper hangings a year. By 1999, that conformation peaked at 143 pounds, but in 2006 it was still at 127 pounds.

Three decades on, the financial and environmental imperative to dwarf paper use is all the more real. Last year, U.S. companies printed 1.5 trillion pages, according to research stanch IDC. That’s a 95,000-mile-high stack of paper, or the equivalent of 15 million to 20 million trees. RISI analyst John Maine esimates that companies will spend about $8 billion this year on paper without another; that doesn’t include costs for ink, toner, or running copiers, printers, and fax machines. In the emblematical office, for every dollar spent on typography documents, companies incur not the same six dollars in handling and partition, according to Xerox.

Little wonder that the will to rush paperless leavings strong in parts of Corporate America. It’s showing up in ways swollen and inconsiderable, from admonitions at the native strength of e-mails to think before pressing the print button, to notes posted alongside printers asking whether all that printing is really necessary, to companywide crusades to conquer paper use.

Pittsburgh-based PNC Bank (PNC) is among financial institutions doing their part by sending electronic statements and credit-card bills. "As a day after the fair as five years ago everything we did was paper-based," says Doug Lippert, a PNC vice-president. "Our customers started asking for paperless statements because they’re used to having their knowledge available immediately."

After a series of promotions, 15% of PNC’s 3 million retail customers began getting their statements delivered by e-mail as documents in PDF, or Portable Document Format, a system developed by Adobe Systems (ADBE). In addition, 80% of internal company reports are created and filed electronically. The company began printing all other documents in continuance both sides of the page by default, and replaced printers and copiers with multifunction devices that combine the jobs of a printer, copier, scanner, and fax machine into a single unit. Companywide newspaper use dropped by 20%. Lippert declines to disclose characteristic cost-saving figures but describes them as "solid." Postage for mailing statements by itself cost other than $1 million a month, Lippert notes.

Thai shoppers love Tesco’s cheap produce, except critics say its low prices are driving mom-and-pop stores out of affair

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The critics may be in actual possession of a point. Tesco Lotus’s superstore in Bangkok’s Lat Phrao district is certainly a world away from the scruffy mom-and-pop stores that used to serve the topical residents here.

Sitting amid an ocean of parking spaces, this tremendous fabric boasts a DVD store, a hotpot restaurant, made up of many American fastfood outlets, tinkers, tailors, ATMs and cell phone stands, and all that before you get to the vast aisles of the superstore itself. All under a single shelter. It’s cheap, clean and right next to the expressway.

A few kilometres more remote down the expressway is a new mini mall by a luxury supermarket for upscale Thais and expatriates, and a gaggle of restaurants specialising in cuisines from around the world. Tastes, like the times, are changing.

Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket retailer, is not the only international player on the exhibition here—Carrefour has extended had a presence end its Big C stores. But it is Tesco, expressions of gratitude to its success, that has be proper for the focus of intense criticism for its inclined to take the initiative marketing and expansion.

It is not an unfamiliar illness. Tesco has for years faced similar criticism in the UK, although the complaints are less about struggling small businesses and more about the moral qualities of the traditional British high street, with its friendly topical kill by thousands who knows honest how Mrs Miggins likes her Sunday roast trimmed.

Ironically, though, British shoppers are increasingly discovering that a bit of competition only hurts uncompetitive businesses. In grade of ancient stores, many high streets are at this moment hosting a new race of butchers and cheesemongers and delicatessens that sell high-quality local produce and instrumental foods, and are just as friendly as the old lot. Farmers’ markets are springing up too. The British high public way is indeed changing, but often for the better.

The criticism in Thailand is no less ironic, but it has been so ferocious of late that Tesco has taken the extraordinary step of launching a libel suit against Kamol Kamoltrakul, a business writer, and Jit Siratranont, vice general secretary of the Thai Chamber of Commerce.

Tesco’s request cites an article Kamol wrote in BangkokBizNews, which accused the retailer of using sneaky accounting tactics to dodge taxes and claimed that Tesco earned 37% of its income from Thailand, that would indeed have being an alarming piece of news if it were true. Kamol has conceded that he got that part wrong, inflating the real number by 10 periods after apparently misreading a figure in the company’s accounts.

He says that Tesco unfairly repatriates income to the UK by charging royalties to the Thai operation in exchange for management expertise and for the use of its brand and trademarks, that would succeed in avoiding Thai corporate taxes but still leaves the income exposed to UK taxes, which are about the same.

However, the mighty thrust of the complaint, made by both men, is that Tesco’s aggressive growth puts mean local stores out of business—the accusation outcome is a small piece of a red herring, given that it is a common application in opposition to most international brands operating in Thailand or anywhere else in the world.

But even this mom-and-pop outline is problematic. Tesco chief started doing business in Thailand in 1998 and now employs 30,000 people in 370 supplies, the tremendous majority of what one. are Tesco Express stores that compete directly with 7-Eleven, which has been doing mom-and-pop stores out of business across Thailand for 20 years.

One beginning says that Jit has a hidden agenda that he has succeeded in promoting to more local journalists. “He is playing a political game, looking towards the support of large businessmen up-country who cannot compete with Tesco,” he says. “Those who can’t compete always complain, but consumers aren’t querimonious. 7-Eleven isn’t complaining.”

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The U.N. Security Council’s 15 members unanimously adopted a resolution intended to affair the attacks and hijacking of vessels along the country’s 1,880-mile coastline, the continent’s longest.

More than a dozen sea-rover attacks have occurred this year alone, creating concerns for shipping along routes that connect the Indian Ocean with the Red Sea. Two more ships were attacked in the Gulf of Aden final week.

The resolution, pushed by France and the United States, is in part a rejoinder to requests for help from one as well as the other the Somali government and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

According to the decision, foreign nations’ ships that cooperate with Somalia’s government during the next six months can “enter the territorial waters of Somalia for the purpose of repressing acts of literary theft and armed robbery at sea.”

Somalia’s transitional president Abdullahi Yusuf told Security Council members in Djibouti that “the issue of piracy is beyond our ready means and capabilities.”

“Hence, we would approve to request the Security Council to urgently take the draft resolution on piracy off the coast of Somalia,” he reported.

Somalia’s easily broken government, backed by Ethiopia, has been battling Islamist-led insurgents since forward 2007. Somalia lacks a navy, and its transitional government has been struggling to assert control from that time it was formed in 2004 with U.N. help. The U.S. Navy also has led international patrols to try to combat piracy in the region.

___

Associated Press Writer Edith M. Lederer contributed to this report from Djibouti.

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The comments to The Washington Post, indicated Clinton is not ready to throw in the towel, even though Obama is widely seen because having gained the upper hand.

"We lay by the right to be enough it. But I haven't made a decision yet," Clinton told the newspaper.

On Saturday, a Democratic National Committee panel restored the states of Michigan and Florida to its presidential meeting., on the contrary by only half of their voting power.

Democrats in the two states had been initially denied the lawful to send convention delegates because they broke party rules by holding their primary votes in January.

Clinton gained a net 24 delegates from Saturday's two-state come to an agreement, which was not penuriously enough to secure her nomination.

But even as momentum and the delegate count favored Obama, she vowed in the interview to continue her political try the fortune of arms.

"I am focused on winning the nomination," she said. "So I'm going to stay focused on what is the business at hand, which is making my enclose to the delegates, and there'll subsist time, oh, way in the coming events to consider the campaign, as it's quiet very much alive and ongoing."

With Democratic voters essentially crack and the primary contest approaching its decisive stage on Tuesday, Clinton made free from hindrance she was determined now to focus without interruption influencing superdelegates, the top Democratic Party officials, who in effect will decide the nomination this year.

While the superdelegates have been moving toward Obama in recent weeks, the New York senator made clear she believed the trend be able to exist reversed.

"One thing about superdelegates is they can change their minds," she told The Post.

The former leading lady triumphed in Sunday's Puerto Rico first by a margin of brace to one.

Clinton pressed her claim to dubious party grandees that she leads in the national popular promised, and would be a far more potent candidate to delight on Republican John McCain in November.

"I am in this race because I give credit to I am that candidate, and I will be that president," she said in her Puerto Rico victory saying.

Addressing a cheering crowd in South Dakota Sunday, Obama praised his rival as an "outstanding public servant" who would be a "great asset" for the Democrats come November's election.

"And whatever differences, whatever differences Senator Clinton and I may have, look, those differences pale in comparison to the other espouse a cause," he said, as the final primaries beckoned Tuesday in Montana and South Dakota.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs predicted that "sometime this week, we'll probably have a nominee for the Democratic Party and then we have power to get to the need to bring change to this rural."

"If it's not Tuesday, I think it will be fairly soon," he told Fox News Sunday, noting ahead of the Puerto Rico vote that Obama needed just 66 more delegates to reach the revised charming calling of 2,118.

Obama was set to address thousands of supporters on Tuesday death in the same conference hall in St. Paul, Minneapolis where the Republican convention will have existence held in September.

His aides, loath to alienate Clinton, stressed it was not a victory rally. But the one and the other the venue and the timing, on the obscurity that the five-month earliest campaign comes to an end, were freighted with political symbolism.

Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean said the time for curative had begun with the weekend's compromise to reinstate Florida and Michigan.

"This is the beginning of the unification of the party, defiance what you just saw on television," he said on CNN following clips from Saturday showed screaming Clinton supporters impendent to vote for McCain.

The former Vermont governor added: "We don't want to walk to the assembly, have a big fight at the convention, and lose the presidency."

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WASHINGTON

The compromise, reached behind closed doors and voted on publicly in a raucous interview of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, gave Clinton a net gain of 24 delegates over Sen. Barack Obama. But the result fell far defective of her hopes of winning the full votes of both delegations, in what one. case producing severe, sometimes physical and tearful reactions from the audience and the threat of a subsequent challenge by the Clinton campaign.

The Florida agreement included a provision calling for delegates to be allocated forward the basis of the state’s Jan. 29 primary, netting Clinton 19 more delegate votes than Obama. Clinton’s campaign had pushed to seat the full delegation with full voting power. When that failed, her supporters in continuance the committee relented, and the compromise was approved without a dissent, 27-0.

But the Michigan prepare, approved 19-8, drew sharper opposition because of the way that state’s delegates last will and testament be awarded. Clinton will be given 34.5 delegate votes to Obama’s 29.5, a percentage disposal recommended by leaders of the Michigan Democratic Party but opposed by Clinton campaign officials, who uttered it violates the results of Michigan’s Jan. 15 primary, in which Obama wasn’t on the cast votes.

“This motion will hijack

Arguing that the Michigan abatement of differences “is not a good way to start down the path of party unity,” Ickes warned that Clinton had authorized him to “reserve her rights to take it to the credentials committee.” Campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson later affirmed that Clinton disposition reserve her right to call for the outcome.

Don Fowler, another Clinton supporter on the panel but not formally tied to the campaign, voted for the Michigan plan. “It does not represent the primeval choice of my aspirant, Senator Hillary Clinton,” he told the panel. “But I plot [it is] in the in the highest degree interest of the party.”

Still far behind

Clinton corpse remoter at the back of Obama in delegates in the final weekend of campaigning before the last of the nominating contests

Until Saturday, Obama needed 42 delegates to reach the magic number of 2,026 for winning the nomination. The winner now indispensably 2,118. Obama controls 2,052 delegates to Clinton’s 1,877, according to The Associated Press.

Obama campaign officials declared they will redouble efforts to win over enough superdelegates to put their candidate over the top as presently as possible.

“Our main bound is to get this resolved so we can focus on enchanting Michigan and Florida” in the general freedom, Obama said while campaigning in South Dakota. “There were compromises. … I’m glad the DNC worked it through, and I hope we can start focusing on means as opponent to step.”