■ WASHINGTON. Bush poised to issue mixed Iraq progress report. US President George W. Bush issued a report as early as Thursday likely to show only limited progress by Iraq’s government even as he scrambles to halt erosion of Republican support for an unpopular war. The interim assessment demanded by the US Congress could accelerate Democratic-led efforts to force Bush to start scaling back troop levels in Iraq more than four years after a US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. With Iraq still plagued by violence, the administration will have little choice but to concede that Iraqi leaders have not met some key security and political goals set for them by Bush and US lawmakers to promote national reconciliation. But the administration is expected to take a glass-half-full approach, emphasizing hopeful signs since Bush ordered a U.S. troop buildup six months ago, including a drop in sectarian killings in Baghdad and increased arms seizures.

■ KUALA LUMPUR. Malaysia to try to clone threatened turtles. Malaysia is launching a $9 million project to try to clone some of its threatened leatherback turtles in a last-ditch bid to save them from extinction. Malaysian agricultural and veterinary experts will join scientists in domestic and foreign universities on the five-year project, the “New Straits Times” reported on Thursday. Junaidi Che Ayub, chief of Malaysia’s fisheries department, said the cloning procedure would first be carried out on green turtles, which are abundant in Malaysia’s northeastern state of Terengganu, where the leatherbacks nest. “Once we have perfected the technique, we will apply it to leatherback turtles as they are a more complicated species in the turtle family,” the paper quoted Junaidi as saying. Rantau Abang in Terengganu used to be the nesting home of one of the seven largest leatherback populations in the world but its population has declined by more than 99 percent since the 1960s, global conservation group WWF says on its Malaysia Web site.

■ BASTI ABDULLAH. Prayers, “Jihad” chants for rebel Pakistani cleric. Chants of “al Jihad, al Jihad” rang out between prayers on Thursday at the funeral of rebel Pakistani cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, killed in a last stand by militants at an Islamabad mosque this week. Ghazi’s captured elder brother, Abdul Aziz, led prayers attended by more than a thousand mourners in Basti Abdullah, a village named after their father in the centre of Pakistan on the banks of the river Indus.

The two brothers headed a Taliban-style movement from the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, before commandos stormed the compound in the capital on Tuesday. Aziz had been the chief cleric. As Ghazi’s bullet riddled body was lowered into the grave in a locked wooden coffin, mourners broke the glass lid and tore off the white cloth from the face to check it really was the 43-year-old cleric.

Loudspeakers blared out jihadi songs, while enraged students chanted “al-Jihad, al-Jihad” and “God is Great” at the village seminary where the ceremony took place, before the burial in a graveyard surrounded by cotton fields.

■ JOHANNESBURG. South Africa disappointed over IMF post nomination. South Africa’s finance ministry was disappointed by the European Union’s nomination of a candidate for the top job at the International Monetary Fund without broader consultation, a spokeswoman said yesterday.

The EU said recently its finance ministers had agreed to support former French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn to head the IMF, a position Europeans have always held under an agreement where the top post at the World Bank also always goes to an American.