Officials in Abdullah’s campaign team said the former foreign minister would announce he was pulling out of the November 7 contest on Sunday in the absence of any U-turn by Karzai on measures to combat fraud.

“If by the end of today we do not receive a positive response to our conditions from the government, then Dr. Abdullah himself will announce his reaction to it tomorrow,” Sayed Aqa Fazel Sancharaki, a spokesman for Abdullah’s campaign, told AFP.

At the heart of their story is the bizarre fact that there are more fine fish swimming in the tiny tanks than there are in the surrounding sea.

Having overfished and polluted its own waters to the point where they are home mainly to great ghosts of the past, Hong Kong now imports up to 90 percent of its seafood.

As the international community said a deadly Taliban attack on a UN hostel in Kabul would not disrupt the November 7 run-off, the Islamist militia said they had drawn up a battle plan designed to torpedo the process.

Organisers of the election meanwhile said they had agreed to a demand from President Hamid Karzai’s challenger, ex-foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, for 20,000 of his observers to be accredited to help prevent vote-rigging.

President Hamid Karzai ordered an urgent security upgrade for international organisations after the rampage, which left at least five expatriate UN staff dead in the worst assault on the world body’s Afghanistan mission since 2001.

A defence ministry official said the raid was the work of Pakistani Taliban dressed as police who struck the UN-approved Bekhtar Guesthouse before dawn.

Financial aid from the 27 country EU and other rich, but major polluting countries, to help developing nations confront the challenge of global warming has become a key issue, six weeks before the world climate summit in Denmark.

“We need to find a solution on financing, the internal burden-sharing,” Sweden’s European Affairs Minister Cecilia Malmstroem said Monday. “We need to do that very soon. I think our children cannot wait for us to get the figures right.”

The latest attacks, which were claimed by the Taliban, came the day after 14 US soldiers and narcotics agents died in helicopter crashes, piling pressure on US President Barack Obama as he mulls sending tens of thousands more troops.

Seven of the soldiers were killed along with an Afghan civilian in one attack in the south of the country, said NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The eighth died in a separate attack in another part of the south, said ISAF without giving further details about the locations.

As anti-US protests erupted in Kabul over the alleged burning of a Koran, Afghan President Hamid Karzai also questioned Washington’s commitment to the war-torn nation ahead of a run-off election in less than a fortnight.

Following a first round riddled with fraud, Karzai’s presidential rival Abdullah Abdullah called for the head of the country’s election commission to be sacked and three cabinet ministers to be suspended.

The two blasts shredded buildings and smoke billowed from the area near the Tigris River. The first bomb targeted the Justice Ministry and the second, minutes later, was aimed at the nearby provincial government building, police said.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s office said that the bombs were meant to sow chaos in Iraq similar to attacks on August 19 against the finance and foreign ministries, and were aimed at stopping an election in January.

While Western military chiefs say they can ensure the November 7 poll is conducted in a peaceful atmosphere, the warning from the Taliban threatens to further deflate turnout, which was less than 40 percent first time round.

“The Islamic emirate (of Afghanistan) once again informs all the people that no one should participate in this American process and should boycott the process,” said a Taliban statement emailed to AFP.