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Immigration curbs on foreign workers, including those from India, will cut the number of immigrants to Britain by just 14,000, it was announced on Wednesday.

The Home Office announced 800,000 jobs on its “shortage list” - posts for which employers will be allowed to recruit from outside the European Economic Area (EEA).

The aim of the list is to restrict the number of foreign workers taking jobs here, especially as unemployment rises in the economic downturn.

However, the government watered down the initiative by announcing a longer list than the one proposed by its migration experts earlier this year.

The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) estimates that the changes to the list mean a potential cut of just 14,000 from current levels.

Non-EEA workers entering Britain must conform to one of the five categories: highly skilled, skilled in a profession that has shortages, students, temporary workers, or low skilled. This last group has temporarily been suspended.

The new list, which comes into force on November 27, applies to the second category, and indicates that construction managers, geologists, civil and chemical engineers, and senior nurses get jobs in which there are a shortfall of British employees.

Social workers and skilled chefs will be reviewed by the Migration Advisory Committee, which will also re-examine evidence for demand in all teaching-related jobs by March next.

A month ago, Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said that Britain would adopt tougher restrictions on immigration as the global financial crisis lifted unemployment to the highest rate in nearly a decade.

A Dubai radio station fired a South African drive-time DJ for mocking religion and impersonating God on the air, the show’s management said Wednesday.

The Arabian Radio Network said in a statement Revin John had been “let go” over a sketch Monday on Virgin Radio Dubai in which he quoted an article about a U.S. court throwing out a lawsuit against God.

John then pretended to act out a telephone conversation with God, prompting complaints from listeners of “diverse faiths and nationalities,” said a statement written in reponse to questions from The Associated Press.

“He intended to be funny, not to offend anybody,” said Arabian Radio Network Chief Operating Officer Steve Smith. “However, what he did was highly offensive to the Muslim and Christian community in the UAE.”

Abdullatif al-Sayegh, chief executive of Arab Media Group, which operates the only Middle East outpost of Richard Branson’s Virgin Radio brand, said John was allowed back on air to apologize Tuesday, then was dismissed.

John did not respond to a requests for comment.

In June, John told Dubai English-language newspaper Gulf News he researched the Middle Eastern market thoroughly before arriving. “The adage ‘know your audience’ was my starting point,” he was quoted as saying.

Virgin Radio Dubai went on air earlier this year, playing mostly European and American pop music from Dizzee Rascal to Britney Spears. Its parent, Arabian Radio Network, is a division of Dubai-based conglomerate Arab Media Group, which operates more than a dozen radio and TV stations, including MTV Arabia.

Mariam Zarouni, a 20-year-old chemical engineering student at the American University of Sharjah, said she was so offended by John’s comments that she formed a group to protest the incident on the social networking Web site Facebook. It had 569 members by Wednesday evening.

“When somebody crosses the line, then you have to defend your religion,” Zarouni said. “Honestly … how can he do this? We’re in a Muslim county. But even Christians would take offense to that. You can’t insult God.”

Dubai is the most liberal of the seven semiautonomous states that make up the United Arab Emirates, a conservative Muslim country overlooking the Persian Gulf. Alcohol flows freely in the booming city-state’s many hotel bars, and fully veiled women shop alongside much less modestly dressed Westerners amid ads for risque lingerie and nightclub wear.

Yet tensions surface when the country’s many foreign residents breach the limits of what is considered acceptable here. The issue is particularly raw in the wake after two Britons received jail time this week after being convicted of having sex on a Dubai beach in July.

Fewer foreign fighters are slipping into Afghanistan since Pakistan launched its offensive in August against Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in border tribal regions, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

In a media briefing, US Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell welcomed “stepped-up operations” by the Pakistani military in Peshawar, and in Swat in particular, over the past two months.

“It is stepped up not just in terms of tempo, but in terms of effectiveness,” Morrell said. “As a result, we have seen some improvement in the flow of foreign fighters across the border into Afghanistan.”

He said the assessment came from US sources, but he gave no figures as to how many fewer foreign militants might be crossing the frontier since the Pakistani offensive — launched amid strong US pressure — began.

It appears that Pakistani operations are not only more frequent, but also “more effective,” with “more forces, more resources, perhaps a better strategy” being dedicated to the mission, he said.

The Pakistan military said in late September that more than 1,000 militants — including Al-Qaeda’s operational commander in the region, Egyptian Abu Saeed Al-Masri — have been killed in its offensive in Bajaur.

Washington and Kabul say Islamic militants use the remote border areas of Pakistan to launch attacks on US-led and NATO troops deployed in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s tribal regions have been wracked by violence since thousands of Taliban and Al-Qaeda rebels fled to the country after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Israeli police were on high alert in racially mixed Israeli cities Friday after two nights of the worst Arab-Jewish clashes in years in the northern port town of Acre.

Some 500 officers were deployed in Acre Friday to prevent a new outbreak of violence, Police Spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said.

Police arrested 12 of the rioters, who were to be produced in a court Friday morning to have their detention extended.

Some eight people were injured, including one man who was run over by a police horse and another who was hit in the head by a stone.

Damage was reported at as many as 40 shops, mostly Jewish-owned ones in the town’s central pedestrian shopping mall, Rosenfeld said.

Up to 100 cars were also damaged. Many shop windows and car windshields were shattered. A number of cars were also turned upside down.

The clashes broke out around midnight Wednesday on the eve of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday, or Day of Atonement, the holiest day on the Hebrew calender.

Israel comes to a 24-hour standstill for Yom Kippur, from sunset to sunset, with all shops closing for the day and streets empty of cars. Television and radio stations suspend their broadcasting.

The clashes were sparked by a violent confrontation between a local Jewish crowd and an Arab youth who, in alleged provocation, drove his car through a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood, playing loud music. Local Jews saw this as a desecration of the holiday and an argument erupted.

Hundreds of Arab residents then streamed to the town’s predominantly Jewish pedestrian mall, responding to a spreading rumour that Jews had attacked an Arab and to calls over mosque loudspeakers to react, Rosenfeld said.

Thursday night, dozens of Jewish residents gathered at the entrance to the town’s Arab neighbourhoods as the Yom Kippur holiday ended after sunset. They were blocked by police, who used tear gas and water cannons to prevent the crowd from storming the Arab

neighbourhoods. Youths from both sides hurled rocks during those clashes.

Jewish and Arab Israeli legislators strongly condemned the outbreak of violence, calling on local leaders to ’show responsibility.’ They also urged them to call for a return to coexistence and avoid inciting calls for revenge.

Acre, which has an historic, Roman-built city centre, is normally regarded as an example of peaceful Jewish-Arab coexistence.

Arab-Israeli clashes inside Israel have been extremely rare since October 2000, when Israeli police shot dead 13 Arab-Israeli youths in northern Israel during widespread rioting by local Arab Israelis who were acting in sympathy with the outbreak of that year’s Palestinian uprising.

An Israeli government-appointed commission of inquiry later strongly condemned the police handling of those clashes. Police in Israel were under strict orders not to use live ammunition this time, Israeli media reported.

Torrential rains in the Algerian Sahara created flash floods that killed 29 people and injured dozens more in a historic oasis region, officials in the North African nation said Thursday.

Hundreds of people had to be rescued by helicopter and up to 600 houses were destroyed in the rains Tuesday and Wednesday around the medieval town of Ghardaia, the official APS news agency said. Security services and the military were helping in the rescue operations.

“Following these floods, we can sadly declare that 29 people have died,” Ali Belkhir, the country’s head of public health, told national radio.

An Interior Ministry statement later confirmed the death toll of 29 and said another person was still missing. While Belkhir said 84 people had been injured, the Interior Ministry lowered that number to 48, including three people in serious condition in the hospital.

Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni had initially reported 13 dead after flying over the zone. Radio reports said there could be more damage in outlying oasis towns.

Phone lines to the area were disrupted Thursday, and local officials could not be reached for comment.

Ghardaia, 600 kilometers (370 miles) south of Algiers, is the seat of the Mozabite people, who practice a form of dissident Islam unique to their region. It lies on the edges of the Sahara Desert in a long and narrow valley known as the M’zab, which is listed as a world heritage site by UNESCO.

The storms this week caused a local wadi _or seasonal river that remains dry for most of the year — to rise at some points by 8 meters (26 feet) within hours, APS said.

In neighboring Morocco, the MAP news agency reported that two people drowned and several were missing in similar floods near the southern city of Marrakech.

African Union leaders are more interested in protecting Sudan’s president than its people and Southeast Asian leaders do the same when it comes to Myanmar, a group of women Nobel Prize winners said on Monday.

“All those clubs, the African Union, ASEAN, or the U.N. Human Rights Council club, recognize their job as protecting the state rather than protecting the human rights of people from states that violate them,” said Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for campaigning against land mines.

She said ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, should put more pressure on Myanmar over human rights and democracy rather than buying timber and gems that give the military junta money to support itself.

She criticized the African Union for siding with Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir over a request by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to charge Bashir with genocide in Darfur. Bashir and AU leaders have said the move would damage prospects for peace in the region.

“We need to put intense pressure on these institutions that are supposed to be having a role in protecting people,” Williams told a news conference at the United Nations, reporting on a fact-finding trip to south Sudan, Chad, the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa and the Thai border with Myanmar.

The trip was organized by the Nobel Women’s Initiative, which was founded in 2006 by six women Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

Williams said the reason for visiting refugees from both Myanmar and Sudan was to show the linkages between the two situations — especially the role of China in buying oil and providing weapons that helped support the governments.

Actress Mia Farrow, a vocal campaigner on Darfur who was part of the delegation on the trip, said AU officials had been “quite agitated” when she and the others raised the subject of the ICC indictment on Bashir when they met in Addis Ababa.

She said women she met in refugee camps in Chad who had fled Darfur were unanimous in supporting the indictment requested by ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

“Babies are being born, babies are being named Moreno Ocampo,” she told the news conference.

A British teaching council says it has lost track of a computer disk containing the names and addresses of more than 11,000 teachers.

The General Teaching Council for England says evidence suggests the disk was misplaced.

The disk is encrypted and does not contain any financial information, the group said Thursday detailing the situation.

The way in which personal information is stored and protected in Britain has come under increased scrutiny following a string of data blunders.

Private companies and government agencies have admitted to losing sensitive information about millions of people over the past year. Medical, prison, and military records have been stolen or disappeared.

From a country focused on self-defence against Pakistan and China, India has begun to refashion itself as an armed power with global reach. It is willing to dispatch troops in far away lands to protect its oil shipments, its expatriate population in the Middle East and shoulder international peacekeeping duties, the New York Times wrote Monday.

While world attention has focused on China’s military in recent years, ‘India sees itself in a different light - not looking so much inward and looking at Pakistan, but globally’, William S. Cohen, a secretary of defence in the Clinton administration told the Times.

‘It’s sending a signal that it’s going to be a big player,’ added Cohen, now a lobbyist representing US firms seeking weapons contracts in India.

India is now buying armaments that major powers like the US use to operate far from home - aircraft carriers, giant transport planes and airborne refuelling tankers, the newspaper said.

In modern India’s first military outpost on foreign soil, India has helped build a small air base in Tajikistan that it will share with its host country. India also appears to be positioning itself as a caretaker and patroller of the Indian Ocean region, which stretches from Africa’s coast to Australia’s and from the subcontinent southward to Antarctica, the New York daily wrote.

‘Ten years from now, India could be a real provider of security to all the ocean islands in the Indian Ocean,’ said Ashley J. Tellis, an India-born scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

It could also provide security in the Persian Gulf in collaboration with the US, Tellis said, adding: ‘India is slowly maturing into a conventional great power’.

In 2006, when conflict between Israel and Hezbollah put in peril Indian expatriates in Lebanon, four Indian warships, which happened to be in the region, rushed to Lebanon and rescued 2,000 people, not only Indians, but also Sri Lankans, Nepalese and Lebanese eager to escape the fighting.

In 2004, when the tsunami hit Asia, including its own southern coast, the Indian Navy dispatched 16,000 troops, 32 warships, 41 planes and a floating hospital for rescue operations.

It is all new for India, which gave the world the idea of Gandhian non-violence, and long derided the force-projecting ways of the great powers, Times said.

India’s Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee told the paper: ‘Naturally, a country of this size, a population of this size - we will be required to strengthen our security forces, modernize them, update them, upgrade our technology.’

‘We are ready to play a more responsible role,’ he added, ‘but we don’t want to impose ourselves on others.’

China, whose own military expansion outstrips India’s, has not raised alarm at India’s military modernization, but Pakistani officials ‘are paying attention to Indian plans to project India outside the South Asian region’, said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Pakistani defence expert.

China has sought to develop a powerful air force and navy that can extend far beyond its shores. It plans to spend $60 billion on its armed forces in 2008.

The Pentagon estimates that China’s actual military spending is perhaps twice the officially budgeted amount, as much as seven times India’s defence outlay. Besides, Beijing has alarmed New Delhi by courting allies in India’s neighbourhood and building military bases in Gwadar, Pakistan; Chittagong, Bangladesh; and Yangon, Myanmar.

‘There seems to be an emerging long-term competition between India and China for pre-eminence in the region,’ Jacqueline Newmyer, president of the Long Term Strategy Group, a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told the Times.

‘India is preparing slowly to claim its place as a pre-eminent power, and in the meantime China is working to complicate that for India.’

India has worked to close the gap with China by spending heavily on modern arms. Analysts estimate that India could spend as much as $40 billion on military modernisation in the next five years.

About the change in military strategy, Rahul Gandhi, the rising Congress party leader, said in parliament early this year: ‘What is important is that we stop worrying about how the world will impact us, we stop being scared about how the world will impact us, and we step out and worry about how we will impact the world.’

As financial workers suffer through tumultuous times on Wall Street, some are turning to an old source of solace: religion.

Religious leaders said attendance was up at lunchtime meetings in New York’s financial district last week, with many more people in business attire than usual.

That is hardly surprising, said Reverend Mark Bozzuti-Jones of Trinity Church Wall Street, given that people don’t know if their employers will survive from one day to the next.

“The economic financial crisis is a reminder that we cannot put our faith in riches, that we cannot put our faith in money,” Bozzuti-Jones said in his sermon at lunchtime on Friday, which he devoted to coping with the financial crisis.

A handful of men in suits and ties and women in business attire were among dozens of people at the Episcopal church, which was hit by debris from the World Trade Center collapse on Sept. 11, 2001.

The church, which normally attracts tourists and a few financial workers, experienced an upturn in visitors this week, Bozzuti-Jones said. In the past few days he had requests for help to pay rent from those who had lost their jobs.

“People are just sitting there, praying or crying and definitely exhausted. There has definitely been an increase in the number of people who have come in,” he said in his office after the service.

The church was putting on special workshops and seminars over the next few weeks including “Coping with stress in an uncertain time” and “Navigating career transitions.”

Just a few blocks away, St. Peter’s Church has seen “a slight uptick in attendance among people in suits,” said Father Peter Madigan. St. Peter’s, a Catholic church, displays a cross found in the rubble of Sept. 11.

“In the past couple of days there was high anxiety and trepidation,” Madigan said. “The situation we are faced with today by economic standards is very much unknown, uncharted territory and faith helps us deal with those situations.”

The Wall Street Synagogue is opening its doors nightly starting this week to accommodate Wall Street people. But rather than a rush of people last week, Rabbi Meyer Hager said he has noticed a change in his regular worshippers.

“I can see it on the faces of certain people who come here who are regular people — some work for AIG and other large banking houses — I can see the expression of strained concern,” he said.

He noted that the synagogue was founded in 1929, the year of the Wall Street crash.

A mosque located in the financial district about a mile from Wall Street did not return a call seeking comment.

Lou Janicek, who works as a financial adviser on Wall Street, said he had not considered attending a religious service, but said Wall Street would benefit if people applied the same morals they learned in church to the workplace.

“What you do at work matters as much as whether you regularly attend church or the synagogue or whatever,” said Janicek, who was brought up as a Christian. “If you are an accountant or you find yourself in an unethical situation, you can’t just stand by and let it happen — then you have another Enron.

China this week launches its most ambitious space mission yet, a sign of rising confidence as Beijing cements its status as a space power and potential future competitor to the United States.

The Shenzhou 7 mission, to launch as early as Thursday, will be the first to carry a full complement of three astronauts, one of whom will perform China’s first space walk, or EVA for “extra-vehicular activity.” It is China’s third manned mission.

The maneuver will help China master docking techniques needed for the construction of a space station, likely to be achieved initially by joining one Shenzhou orbiter to another.

The mission launches from the Jiuquan launch site in northwestern China. The lead astronaut, Zhai Zhigang, is expected to carry out the 40-minute spacewalk, which China will broadcast live.

“Shenzhou 7 is an incremental but important step forward,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert on the Chinese space program at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island.

Riding a wave of pride and patriotism after hosting the Olympics, China’s communist leaders face few of the public doubts or budgetary pressures constraining such programs elsewhere. That has allowed them to fuse political will and scientific gusto in a step-by-step process that could one day see Chinese astronauts landing on the moon.

Chinese space programs are methodically moving forward in a “very deliberate, graduated” manner, said Charles Vick, a space analyst for the Washington think tank GlobalSecurity.org. Beijing is accumulating the building blocks of a comprehensive program, demonstrating “caution but confidence” as it gains on the U.S. and other space powers, he said.

Future goals are believed to include an unmanned moon landing around 2012, a mission to return samples in 2015, and possibly a manned lunar mission by 2017 — three years ahead of the U.S. target date for returning to the moon.

A manned lunar program, although yet to be formally approved, is “certainly the ultimate goal,” Johnson-Freese said.

First, Chinese scientists need to put the final touches on the new generation Long March 5 rocket capable of launching 25-ton components for a space station or future lunar missions.

Once that happens, Johnson-Freese said she expects further progress to come rapidly.

“When the new vehicle is ready, China wants to be ready too,” she said. Shenzhou craft are currently flung into space by a Long March 2F rocket, the workhorse of the Chinese fleet, with 66 consecutive successful launches.

The first manned Shenzhou mission in 2003 saw China join the United States and former Soviet Union as the only nations capable of launching astronauts into space.

From the start, China has focused squarely on high-payoff areas where it can match or exceed the achievements of others. That garners new capabilities while maximizing the political impact, something observers sometimes call “techno-nationalism.”

All along, China has relied heavily on homegrown technology, partly out of necessity. China has trouble obtaining such technology abroad due to U.S. and European bans and is not a participant in the International Space Station.

The Shenzhou ships closely resemble Russia’s three-module Soyuz capsule, but have been completely re-engineered and enlarged. China’s team of 14 astronauts, sometimes called “taikonauts” from the Chinese word for outer space, are trained at Chinese facilities.

Veteran chief designer Qi Faren says China’s systems, while basic, have been carefully designed for safety and reliability.

“What we’re proud of is that, although we’re not the best, it’s our own and its very Chinese,” Qi, 75, said in an interview published in Monday’s Beijing News.