The bombs coincided with a regional general strike called by Batasuna -- a separatist party outlawed for its links to ETA -- to protest against the Basque government's ban on people publicly paying tribute to two ETA members who died in jail last week.

A woman telephoned the Basque road assistance group in the name of ETA to warn them about the bombs. Later, another call came through about a bomb in a post office in Lasarte, near San Sebastian.

After months of relative quiet, ETA has resumed its bombing campaign in the last few weeks, scotching hopes fanned by Spain's Socialist government that the group could be close to calling a truce.

"ETA has no political or social mileage left in the Basque country," Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso told reporters.

On Wednesday, ETA set off a bomb and injured one person outside a northern office of the strongly nationalist Falange party, a hangover from the reign of dictator Francisco Franco.

ETA has killed about 800 people since 1968 in its fight to carve out an independent Basque state straddling northern Spain and southwestern France.

The group, branded a terrorist group by the European Union and United States, has not killed anybody since 2003.

"The recent intensified bombing campaign could mean that ETA wants to show that if it lays down arms it is not because it has run out of options but that it is voluntarily renouncing violence," a spokesman for the moderate Basque party PNV told Spanish radio.

"That's the positive way of thinking about it because the more pessimistic way simply shows the terrorists have not taken on board the fact that Basques want them to abandon the armed struggle once and for all," Josu Erkoreka added.

The Madrid government has been criticized by the right-wing opposition and families of ETA victims as being too soft on the group and having contacts with them.

Last month, ETA released a statement saying "dialogue and negotiation are the only paths toward a solution of the conflict" but it stopped short of calling a ceasefire.

The report issued by China's cabinet, the State Council, on Thursday listed "a multitude of cases to show the serious violations of human rights both in and outside the US," according to state news agency Xinhua.

"As in previous years, the US State Department pointed the finger at human rights situations in more than 190 countries and regions, but kept silent on the violations of human rights in the United States," the report said.

It described alleged abuses including secret surveillance, police abuse, racial discrimination and wrongful convictions.

"The United States has always boasted itself as the model of democracy, and hawked its mode of democracy to the rest of the world, but in fact, American 'democracy' is always one for the wealthy and a 'game for the rich'," it added.

Increased censorship

In its own report, issued on Wednesday, Washington was equally scathing about Beijing's human rights record, saying it "remained poor".

The report accused the Chinese government of "serious abuses" and noted a trend towards increased "harassment, detention and imprisonment, by government and security authorities, of those perceived as threatening".

It also detailed a "significant" increase in protests and public disturbances, saying that "several incidents were violently suppressed", and accused China of increasing censorship of the internet.

But the State Department report did mention that there were "notable developments" in Chinese legal reforms, as well as greater personal freedoms and increased protection of some religious activities.

At a House of Representatives hearing on Wednesday, US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian affairs Christopher Hill that that when President Hu visited Washington in April, he hoped to engage the Chinese leader "on a broad range of human rights and religious freedom topics".

The US report also singled out Burma and North Korea for criticism.

In Burma, extrajudicial killings, rape, torture and beatings of prisoners and detainees continued, the report said.

In North Korea, "extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and arbitrary detention, including many political prisoners" continued, it said.

The US, it noted, had found that "its own journey towards liberty and justice for all has been long and difficult" and was still "far from complete". The report also cited widespread abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, both client states of the US.

The most striking section deals with China, whose human rights record is described as "poor". Censorship of the press, radio, television and the internet had grown last year, as had the suppression - "at times violent" - of protests by those attempting to secure redress of grievances.

Russia too is censured for the increasing "erosion of the accountability of government leaders to the people". Just four months before the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, hosts the G8 summit in St Petersburg, the State Department singles out continuing corruption, the selective use of the law as a political weapon by the authorities and the political pressures on the judiciary.

Another target is the United Arab Emirates, at the centre of the controversy over the planned takeover of US port management operations by a Dubai company. The UAE, says the report, has no democratic institutions and no general elections. It also curtails personal liberties, as well as freedom of speech and assembly.

Pakistan, billed as a key US ally in the war on terror, also comes in for strong criticism. Its security forces routinely carried out unauthorised killings and indulged in torture and rape, the State Department said.

In an interview to mark both his birthday and the 20th anniversary of the speech he made to the communist party congress announcing the first elements of perestroika, Mr Gorbachev echoed opinions broadly shared in Russian society.

He defended his cold war legacy and remained intensely suspicious of the west. He claimed British intelligence helped falsify data over weapons of mass destruction and that the invasion of Iraq was "a blow against the Security Council and international law and now we have a terrible degradation of the situation in the Middle East".

He said the biggest threat to Russia's political stability in the next two years, as a successor is sought to replace Vladimir Putin in 2008, would come from outside the country because the west wanted to keep Russia weak.

Russian officials have echoed such concerns, citing western support for non-governmental organisations as one possible way the US and EU might try to influence their domestic politics through fomenting civil dissent.

Mr Gorbachev said: "There are those - not only the US but also our closest western friends - who like to keep Russia in a semi-strangulated state. Sometimes they are ... afraid of competitors. As Russia becomes stronger suddenly our friends in the west begin to get excited.

"'Maybe they are again building an empire?' And you think this is threatening? How do you think we feel, having all these [US] military bases that are being deployed closer and closer to our borders?" he asks.

Some Russians dislike Mr Gorbachev and see him as the man who foolishly gave away the USSR's superpower status to the US, sparking a decade of economic and political chaos.

Yet on his 75th birthday last week he was congratulated by Vladimir Putin for making "the changes that allowed our country to make a decisive step towards democratic reforms". The president was not, however, invited to attend a dinner at a Moscow restaurant to mark the occasion.

At times, Mr Gorbachev voiced the same suspicions and criticisms of western policy heard from some Kremlin apparatchiks today. He heavily criticised the Bush administration's new security doctrine as "in complete contradiction to what we agreed with Reagan".

The pair historically agreed there could not be victors in nuclear war. "But now they [the US] are saying again that nuclear arms can be used as a first-strike weapon," he added.

Mr Gorbachev dismissed western criticism at how democracy is "backsliding" under Mr Putin's authoritarian rule, during which the Kremlin has replaced the election of regional governors with presidential appointment and held two elections criticised by western observers.

"All you westerners are torturing us with this question [about Russian democracy]," he said. "This is a transition from a state that is moving from totalitarianism to democracy. Democracy is not a thing that can be delivered in the morning in a cup, like a man brings coffee to his wife or mistress."

He expressed his exasperation at the west's black and white approach to Russia's democratic development. "Certainly there are some authoritarian flashbacks, some rolling back from democracy, but do you think we have to shoot ourselves because of it? Nothing can drag us back to the past. The population has felt the taste of liberty."

He said the Americans took 200 years to build their democracy, but expected Russia to do it in 200 days. "I tell the Americans: 'we are more capable than you are. I think we'll do it in 20 years - 10 times quicker than you have done'."

Speaking in the plush offices that his Gorbachev Foundation shares with a Moscow bank, he said the corrupt privatisations and currency defaults of the 1990s were the entire fault of the "Yeltsin era".

He said Mr Yeltsin left Russia to the peril of the free market, allowing a sell-off of state assets that was "simply theft. We'll deal with the consequences... for a long time in the future."

He praised Mr Putin for stabilising the situation. "He inherited chaos and disintegration everywhere," he added, referring to the increasing autonomy of Russia's regions that occurred towards the end of the 90s when Chechnya had been granted independence.

"I think that all the errors done during Putin's term would be forgotten, but never the fact that he has stopped the disintegration of the country."

Indeed, his most overt criticism of Mr Putin was for being too soft on four British diplomats accused in January of using a hi-tech transmitter hidden in a rock to spy on Russia.

"Putin decided to do nothing. I would act differently. You know we had a war with Margaret Thatcher - who could expel more spies? I let her know that I'd take it to the end."

He described the alleged spying as "impudent" and said: "Britain - you've got used to doing anything you like without being punished."

The drop continues an eight-year decline in cigarette smoking since the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between U.S. states and the tobacco industry that settled state lawsuits over the costs of treating smoking-related illnesses, the NAAG said.

Overall, cigarette sales have plunged more than 21 percent since the agreement, which raised cigarette prices and severely restricted industry marketing practices, the organization said.

"It is not a coincidence that cigarette sales are down and fewer people are smoking. The Master Settlement Agreement was designed to protect the public and reduce cigarette consumption -- and it does just that," said Vermont Attorney General Bill Sorrell.

The major companies that signed the MSA are Philip Morris, a unit of Altria Group Inc.; R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc.; British American Tobacco Plc's Brown & Williamson unit; and Lorillard, which trades as Carolina Group and is part of Loews Corp.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers cigarette smoking to be the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. About 440,000 people die each year from lung cancer and other diseases related to tobacco use.