Felipe Calderon, 43, of outgoing President Vicente Fox's National Action Party, had been running an exceedingly close race with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, 52, of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party. The Institutional Revolutionary Party's Roberto Madrazo, 53, had been trailing in third place.

Fox appealed for calm amid fears that a close result would raise the potential for violence.

Thousands of Lopez Obrador supporters, waiting for hours in the cold rain in Mexico City's central plaza, began shouting "Fraud! Fraud!" when Ugalde came on live television to announce the delay. Lopez Obrador said late Sunday that he would respect the delay in declaring a winner, "but I want the Mexican people to know that our figures show we won."

Calderon spoke minutes later, saying he too will respect the results _ but that the official preliminary results, as well as the exit polls, show that he's the winner.

"We have no doubt that we have won," he said.

The race exposed deep divisions between Mexico's rich and poor in a nation desperately trying to match the success of its northern neighbor.

Tokyo failed to get a formal commitment of support from Washington for its bid to obtain a permanent seat on the Council, which was blocked by China.

The Mainichi said that failure had "exposed the limits of Koizumi's diplomacy, that depended on his personal relationship and lacked strategies".

One of Japan's leading dailies, Asahi Shimbun, praised Koizumi for tackling several thorny issues left over from previous administrations, including the controversial realignment of US troops stationed in Japan.

But the liberal daily also said he had failed to resolve several key issues before handing the reins to his successor in September.

"Koizumi lacked strategies to finish up the breakthrough (on key issues) to the final stage," the Asahi said.

Meanwhile, the Tokyo Shimbun daily called for a better balance in US-Japanese relations, warning the government against ever revising its pacifist constitution to satisfy the needs of Washington.

"It should be noted that the joint statement (issued after the latest Japan-US summit) did not mention the (Japanese) constitution," it said.

"Japan is bound by a limit it cannot not cross. Japan should have made sure the United States will not overly expect" military cooperation from Japan, the paper said.

Koizumi returned home Saturday from a five-day visit to Canada and the United States that was heavy on symbolism as he wraps up his premiership.

Bush and Koizumi warned North Korea over its weapons programs at a White House summit before heading to Graceland on Friday to visit Presley's estate.

The remains of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in a U.S. air strike last month, have been buried in Iraq in a secret grave after the U.S. military handed over the body to the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and the U.S. military said.

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had called on the U.S. military to release the body of Jordanian Zarqawi to his family in a Web site audio tape on Friday and said Jordan's King Abdullah should allow him to be buried in his home town, Zarqa.

Iraqi, U.S. and Jordanian authorities have been anxious, however, that the tomb of a man hailed by bin Laden as a "lion of Jihad" not become a place of pilgrimage for militants.

National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie announced the list of 41 "most wanted" a day after a car bomb devastated a market in a Shi'ite district of Baghdad in the deadliest attack since a Shi'ite-led unity government was formed six weeks ago.

The blast in the Shi'ite militia stronghold of Sadr City drew angry responses from radical Shi'ites against Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's national reconciliation plan and his efforts to reach out to the once-dominant Sunni minority.

The carnage, by far the worst since Zarqawi was killed on June 7, has raised the prospect of sectarian civil war.

The list, which offers a $10 million bounty for former Saddam deputy Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, accuses Saddam's daughter, Raghd, and her mother of using millions stolen by the former Iraqi leader to finance the Sunni insurgency.

Raghd has taken a leading role in organizing her father's legal defense in his trial for crimes against humanity. Aged about 40, she lives in Jordan having been granted asylum there, along with her sister Rana and their children, in 2003.

Raghd and Rana's husbands, both brothers and themselves related to Saddam, were killed by fellow tribesmen on returning to Iraq in 1996 after having defected and betrayed Saddam.

BOUNTY

His first wife Sajida, mother of Raghd, is also on the list, which includes the new head of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri. The Iraqi government also offered a $50,000 reward for Masri -- far less than the $5 million bounty the United States placed on the man named to succeed Zarqawi.

"We are releasing this list so that our people can know their enemies," Rubaie said.

He declined to say if arrest warrants had been issued for Raghd and Sajida but said Interpol had received the list.

Also included in the document was a former Saddam intelligence chief as well as senior Baathists, who fled their posts in the wake of invading U.S. forces and are now playing a key role in the insurgency that has killed over 2,500 Americans.

Some, like Douri, are still on the three-year-old "deck of cards," a list of 55 wanted Baathist officials issued by the U.S. military. Most of the 55 are dead or in captivity but Douri, at times reported killed, appears still to be at liberty.

ZARQAWI

Rubaie told Reuters Zarqawi, who led a bloody campaign against Shi'ites in a bid to ignite civil war in Iraq, had been buried in a secret location somewhere in Iraq.

"The Iraqi authorities recently buried the body of Zarqawi in a marked but secret place," Rubaie said.

A U.S. military spokesman said Zarqawi's body had been turned over to the Iraqi government and buried in accordance with Muslim custom. He declined further comment.

The Jordanian government also refused to comment. Zarqawi's family had asked that the former militant be buried in Jordan.

Bin Laden endorsed him in an Internet recording on Saturday and warned Iraqi Shi'ites they would face "retribution."

A Shi'ite member of Iraq's parliament escaped an attempt to kidnap her on Sunday but several bodyguards were abducted in the second such attack on a woman lawmaker around Baghdad in as many days. Another woman lawmaker, a Sunni, was kidnapped on Saturday, prompting colleagues to walk out of parliament.

Mouwafak al-Rabaie gave no other details about the burial of the Jordanian-born militant, who was killed June 7 in a U.S. air strike.

In a statement e-mailed to the Associated Press, the U.S. military confirmed the national security adviser's statement.

"The remains of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were turned over the appropriate government of Iraq officials and buried in accordance with Muslim custom and traditions," the statement said.

Al-Zarqawi, head of the organization Al Qaeda in Iraq, was the most wanted insurgent in the country. He died in combined U.S. Iraqi military operation that included air strikes to enable ground troops to launch an assault on a group of buildings northeast of Baghdad, where the militant leader had been in hiding.

An autopsy performed by U.S. military doctors listed the cause of death as "primary blast injury of the lung," and it later emerged that he survived for nearly an hour after the air strike.

Neither the Iraqis nor the Americans said why a secret burial was thought necessary but fears that a public funeral might become a rallying point for insurgents have been expressed by officials.

Elsewhere in Iraq, violence continued in and around Baghdad.

Small arms and rocket fire were reported in the Sunni Muslim neighbourhood of Adhamiya, while a car bombing in the town of Mahmoudiya, just south of the capital, killed three people at an outdoor market.

On Saturday, a bomb in a pickup truck exploded in Sadr City, a Shia district in Baghdad, leaving nearly 70 dead and 80 wounded.

The research, performed by Drs. Ehud Weiss and Anat Hartmann of BIU's department of Land of Israel studies and Prof. Mordechai Kislev of the faculty of life sciences, appears in the June 16 edition of the prestigious journal Science.

It is the second time in two weeks that Kislev and Hartmann have had an article in Science. They recently wrote about their discovery of 10,000-year-old cultivated figs at the same Jordan Valley site.

According to the researchers, the newest find shows that the transition from nomadic food gathering and the beginning of agriculture were quite different than previously thought. Until now, the general assumption has been that agriculture was begun by a single line of human efforts in one specific area. But the BIU researchers found a much more complicated effort undertaken by different human populations in different regions, drawing a completely new picture of the origins of agriculture.

Agriculture, the BIU researchers suggest, originated through human manipulations of wild plants - sometimes involving the same species - that took place in various spatially and temporally distinct communities. Moreover, some of these occasions were found to be much earlier than previously thought possible.

The researchers analyzed archeo-botanical data from Near Eastern archeological sites to locate human attempts to grow early crops. Several plant species, which they term "pioneer crops," were found to be the earliest plants manipulated by humans. Some of these attempts succeeded, which means that domestication and continuity were achieved, while others were abandoned. They offer a model of a pioneer agriculture with its disappointments and achievements.

They were certain that the grains found at Gilgal were cultivated and not found naturally in the environment because they were found in such large quantities and because field observations showed that only moderate amounts could be gathered from natural growing sites in this part of the Jordan Valley, even in rainy years.

Although pioneer crops such as barley, lentils, rye and oats yielded satisfactory crops, early farmers faced the problem that their seeds would fall off immediately after ripening. One way to solve this problem was through domestication (causing a process by which plants would retain their seeds, rather than shedding them, to facilitate collection by farmers).

But the researchers found that not all crops were easily domesticated, causing our ancestors, the researchers maintain, to abandon certain crops (such as oats) for thousands of years, until different farmers in other parts of the world finally domesticated them.

This new hypothesis turns the spotlight on the peoples who were involved in creating a revolutionary new agricultural way of life. According to the researchers, it was not a particular individual or community who changed the way we live our lives today, but rather many human groups scattered throughout the world who manipulated several different local wild plants. Some of these groups failed in their attempts and some succeeded. Some plants were domesticated and some were abandoned.

Moreover, some of the plants abandoned during the Neolithic Period were later domesticated in other parts of the world. Barley and, most likely, oats, were cultivated in the Jordan Valley, represented by the early Neolithic site Gilgal.

However, domesticated oats appeared some seven thousand years later in Europe, several thousand kilometers away. Another domesticated plant - rye - was found to be cultivated by several Turkish communities, from the Neolithic Period onward, for several millennia. Some of these communities even succeeded in domesticating rye, but they apparently abandoned it. Rye apparently traveled from Turkey to Europe in the form of a weed that grew in fields of barley and wheat. As in the case of oats, the last stage of rye domestication occurred not in Turkey but in Europe, and several thousands of years later.

The wild lentil plant's path of domestication comprised two stages: loss of dormancy (most of the seeds do not germinate in the first year) and development of pod indehiscence (pods that do not spontaneously release their seeds). The researchers noted that the first evidence of lentil domestication - loss of dormancy - was found in the beginning of the Neolithic Period in Jerf el-Ahmar, Syria, and quickly spread south to Netiv Hagdud in the Jordan Valley.

Undoubtedly, the final stage of lentil domestication is represented by the huge, approximately 1.4 million lentil seed hoard found in later Neolithic Period Yiftah'el, near Nazareth, some 600 kilometers southwest of Jerf el-Ahmar.

According to the researchers, a similar phenomenon occurred in North America, where the chenopod, marsh elder, squash and sunflower became domesticated under indigenous group management between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago. The erect knotweed, little barley and maygrass were cultivated and later abandoned, eventually to be replace by maize-centered agriculture and the arrival of the common bean.