Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, was found responsible for gassings on Tokyo rush-hour trains that killed 12 and sickened thousands, and was sentenced to death by a Tokyo court in February 2004 for murder and attempted murder.

The attack injured about 5,500 people, some permanently, when members of the cult released sarin, a lethal nerve gas first developed but not used by the Nazis in World War Two.

Japan does not announce dates of executions, which are by hanging, in advance of them being carried out.

The gassing, with its images of bodies lying across platforms and soldiers in gas masks sealing off Tokyo subway stations, stunned the Japanese public and shattered the country's self-image as a haven of public safety.

"I really have long wanted this death penalty verdict. I really feel it's been a long time," said Shizue Takahashi, 59, a representative of the Subway Sarin Incident Victims Association, who lost her husband in the attack.

The nearly blind Asahara was also found guilty of other charges including a series of crimes that killed 15 people.

The son of a poor maker of "tatami" straw mats, Asahara graduated from a school for the blind before working as an acupuncturist and amassing wealth with sales of Chinese medicine in the early 1980s.

He later studied yoga and started a school to teach it, going on to set up the cult in 1987, mixing Buddhist and Hindu meditation with apocalyptic teachings.

Under Asahara, who had predicted that the United States would attack Japan and turn it into a nuclear wasteland, followers submitted to an ascetic communal life and performed rites such as swallowing water and then vomiting it up to "purify" them.

At its peak, the cult boasted at least 10,000 members in Japan and overseas, including some who had studied science at the nation's elite universities.

Raids on the cult's sprawling complexes at the foot of Mount Fuji after the subway attack uncovered stockpiles of high-tech equipment and dangerous chemicals.

Aum Shinri Kyo, which admitted involvement in the subway gassing, later changed its name to Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its leaders insist the cult is now benign, but Japanese authorities still keep its membership of more than 1,000 under surveillance.

In 2004, a Tokyo university revoked its acceptance of a 20-year-old woman after discovering she was Asahara's daughter, saying her presence could be disruptive.

"I would argue whether it has to be as authoritarian as it has been and I would certainly argue that at the stage of success they have reached, they would do much better for themselves with a more visionary approach to the process."

He said the bar on entry for some activists was "a violation of the understanding that we had drawn up" with Singapore.

Singapore objected to at least 27 activists who were accredited to the meetings on the grounds they posed a threat to security and public order, putting them on a blacklist of people to be assessed by immigration and possibly refused entry.

Some would-be participants in the have already been deported or refused entry.

Asked by a civil society activist whether the IMF and World Bank would consider postponing the meeting and hold it somewhere "where it can be held with proper conditions," Wolfowitz said: "I honestly don't think that is feasible or I would consider it."

Responding to appeals, Singapore said it would allow 22 of the blacklisted activists to enter, but the remaining five would be "subject to interview and may not be allowed in."

Garry Rodan, of Murdoch University, Australia, said the World Bank and IMF had been naive about Singapore.

"Singapore has always made a virtue out of the fact it is different, and sticks to its guns, no matter how controversial, examples being the caning and execution of foreign nationals."

"PR DISASTER"

While Wolfowitz and Rato were speaking, about two dozen activists staged a protest in the 8 x 8 meter (8.7 x 8.7 yard) area the authorities had set aside for protest in the cavernous Suntec City hall where the meetings take place.

Activist lined up wearing gags inscribed "NO VOICE," after duly registering with the authorities one by one.

"These limits are ridiculous. Singapore is a developed country; it needs a developed perspective on citizens speaking up," said Haidy Ear-Dupuy of the NGO Forum on Cambodia.

On Batam, an Indonesian island a 40-minute ferry ride south of Singapore, a few hundred activists held a protest meeting because of the curbs on protest in Singapore.

Analysts said the meeting is turning out to be a public relations disaster for Singapore, which has spent about S$135 million ($85 million) on the event, hoping to showcase its financial industry and tourism appeal.

Instead, the world press has focused on Singapore's restrictions on free speech and right of assembly.

"It is a PR disaster. It represents a certain blindness on the part of the Singapore government toward matters of public opinion, which can be traced to the fact that they are so used to ignoring it," said Singapore political commentator Alex Au.

Rodan said Singapore would have expected lots of feelgood stories about the financial sector and investment opportunities.

"But it appears to have backfired," he said.

In May, the journal Foreign Policy named Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan one of the six most important U.S. military bases in the world. The base was originally established as a hub for multinational operations following the September 11th attacks five years ago.

"In addition to its proximity to Afghanistan," the Foreign Policy article stated, "Manas is located near the immense energy reserves of the Caspian Basin, as well as the Russian and Chinese frontiers."

According to Jackie Cabasso, who heads up the Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland, California, "the United states had drawn up a battle plan for the potential use of nuclear weapons in Iraq and the Untied States has been involved in planning potential nuclear use scenarios for Iran."

"The United States is now involved in a massive program to overhaul its nuclear arsenal," she added. "In fact they're working to replace every nuclear warhead and all of the existing delivery systems in the arsenal to ensure prompt precision global strike capabilities. So the United States is openly using the threatened use of nuclear weapons around the world."

David Krieger of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation added that members of the Bush administration "like to talk about expanding the use of nuclear weapons and talk about the 'preventive use' of nuclear weapons [but seem] to be negative toward a group of countries trying to create a ban on nuclear weapons within their territory."

By contrast, arms control experts argue, former Soviet republics in Central Asia have every reason to want to rid themselves of their nuclear legacy.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union used a facility at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan to test new nuclear weapons. Between 1949 and 1989 almost 500 nuclear explosions were carried out there, equaling the explosive power of 20,000 Hiroshima bombs.

According to the country's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, those explosions caused irreparable damage to the health of more than 1.5 million Kazakh citizens, blighted lives, and rendered vast stretches of land useless for generations.

Western States Legal Foundation's Cabasso told OneWorld the central Asian nation has one of the strongest anti-nuclear movements in the world.

She described a visit to Kazakhstan, made in 1990 shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union.

"It was amazing," Cabasso said. "When we flew from Moscow to the capital Almaty, there were people on the run-way in traditional costumes holding signs like 'Let the Generals Build Their Summer Houses on the Nuclear Test Site.'"

Cabasso said the movement for a nuclear free Central Asia began with a poet and member of the Soviet Duma named Olzhas Suleimenov. In 1989, after discovering that some of the underground nuclear tests had leaked radiation into the atmosphere, he went on television and called for a mass meeting at the writers' union hall. Over 5,000 people showed up the next day.

"They organized on a massive scale," Cabasso said. "Ten thousand copper miners went out on strike, there were billboards at the airport. Imagine if you had anti-nuclear demonstrations going on during half-time at the Super Bowl. They were calling for a peaceful non-nuclear transition to the 21st century back in 1990 and now they have completed that transition in a way."

The treaty between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan created the first nuclear-weapons free zone in the Northern Hemisphere. Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Africa have already pledged to remain nuclear free.

The 78 year-old caused outrage when he said that "in France at least the German occupation was not especially inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses - inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometres."

The remarks drew immediate comparisons with Le Pen's oft-quoted description of the Jewish Holocaust as a "detail" of the war.

A Paris court has ordered Le Pen to stand trial on June 1 and 2 next year on charges of "complicity in apologising for war crime" and in disputing the facts of crimes against humanity by the Nazis.

Le Pen, as the NF party's candidate, made a surprise showing in 2002 when he made it through to the second round of the presidential election that Jacques Chirac went on to win by a landslide.

The 2007 French presidential election is due to be held in two rounds starting in April.

According to Le Pen's attorney, Wallerand de Saint-Just, the far-right leader's remarks were not intended for publication but were made off-the-cuff in a conversation with the journalist after the formal interview had ended.

During the 1940-1944 occupation of France, with the help of the collaborationist Vichy government, the German authorities deported more than 70,000 French Jews to death camps, and thousands of French civilians died in reprisals by the German army - especially towards the end of the war.

However historical debate has raged over the degree of French acceptance of the occupation, which for most of the time was relatively peaceful compared with the experiences of countries in eastern Europe.

The denial comes a day after a senior U.S. official said China's sales of weapons to certain countries are "dangerously short-sighted" and could make the world a more dangerous place.

China has a "general willingness to transfer a wide variety of technologies to customers around the world," Peter Rodman, the U.S. assistant secretary of defence for international security, said on Thursday.

He mentioned Iran, Sudan, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Venezuela during his address.

"China's proliferation behaviour, past and present, can come back to haunt it, even placing its own political interests in jeopardy," Rodman told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an advisory panel created by Congress.

Rodman urged China to rethink its relationship with Iran and North Korea, two countries Washington believes are pursuing nuclear programs in order to build nuclear weapons.

Beijing has said that it opposes the spread of weapons technology and materials, and that it forbids Chinese companies from transferring such material.