Moscow (AFP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin in a documentary broadcast Sunday accused the United States of directly contacting and providing logistical support to North Caucasus separatist militants.

In the documentary "President," which has already been broadcast in far eastern Russia on Rossiya 1 television, Putin made the claim, citing intelligence from Russian special services, to state that it occurred in the early 2000s.

The documentary will air Sunday evening in Western Russia. It is being to shown to mark 15 years since Putin became president in 2000.

"Once our special services documented what were simply direct contacts between fighters from the North Caucasus and representatives of US special forces in Azerbaijan," Putin said.

The US side "helped even with transport", he added.

Putin said he told the US president of the day who told him: "I'll kick their ass." He did not give the name of the president.

"But within 10 days, our -- my subordinates, the FSB heads, received a letter from their colleagues in Washington saying: 'We have had and will have relations with all the opposition forces in Russia and we consider we have the right to do this and we will do this in the future'," Putin said.

As prime minister from 1999, Putin launched the second Chechen War, which did not officially end until 2009. The first Chechen war which began in 1994 ended with Russia pulling out its troops in 1996, leaving the region with de facto independence.

Putin said Western special services apparently supported the militants because they believed that any opponent of Russia should be treated as an ally.

"Some people, especially special forces of Western countries, thought that if someone is working to destabilise their main geopolitical opponent -- which as we realise now has always been Russia in their minds -- then it is generally to their benefit.

"It turned out that's not the case," Putin added.

The Russian president insisted governments should never work with "terrorists".

"Absolutely not, never and nowhere. You mustn't even try to use terrorists to solve transitory political and even geopolitical tasks.

"Because if you support them in one place, they will raise their head in another place and they will definitely strike those who supported them yesterday."

After the second Chechen war, Moscow installed a pro-Kremlin regime in the republic, first headed by rebel-turned-Moscow-ally Akhmad Kadyrov and then after his murder, by his son Ramzan Kadyrov.

The military claims to have stopped an attack after seeing "a group of armed terrorists" with an explosive device.
Bitter enemies

Rescuers struggle to reach remote Nepal areas as toll rises

Associated Press Videos
Raw: 3,300 Known Dead in Nepal

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — The death toll from Nepal's earthquake soared past 3,700 Monday, and how much higher it would rise depended largely on the condition of vulnerable mountain villages that rescue workers were still struggling to reach two days after the disaster.

Reports received so far by the government and aid groups suggest that many communities perched on mountainsides are devastated or struggling to cope. Udav Prashad Timalsina, the top official for the Gorkha district, near the epicenter of Saturday's quake, said he was in desperate need of help.

"There are people who are not getting food and shelter. I've had reports of villages where 70 percent of the houses have been destroyed," he said.

He said 223 people had been confirmed dead in the district but he presumed "the number would go up because there are thousands who are injured."

Saturday's magnitude 7.8 earthquake spread horror from Kathmandu to small villages and to the slopes of Mount Everest, triggering an avalanche that buried part of the base camp packed with foreign climbers preparing to make their summit attempts.

Timalsina said his district had not received enough help from the central government, but Jagdish Pokhrel, the clearly exhausted army spokesman, said nearly the entire 100,000-soldier army was involved in rescue operations.

View gallery

In this Sunday, April 26, 2015 photo, people critically injured in an avalanche are wrapped to be ev …

"We have 90 percent of the army out there working on search and rescue," he said. "We are focusing our efforts on that, on saving lives."

Nepal police said in a statement Monday that the country's death toll had risen to 3,617 people. That does not include the 18 people killed in the avalanche, which were counted by the mountaineering association. Another 61 people were killed in neighboring India, and China reported 20 people dead in Tibet.

Well over 1,000 of the victims were in Kathmandu, the capital, where an eerie calm prevailed Monday.

Tens of thousands of families slept outdoors for a second night, fearful of aftershocks that have not ceased. Camped in parks, open squares and a golf course, they cuddled children or pets against chilly Himalayan nighttime temperatures.

They woke to the sound of dogs yelping and jackhammers. As the dawn light crawled across toppled building sites, volunteers and rescue workers carefully shifted broken concrete slabs and crumbled bricks mixed together with humble household items: pots and pans; a purple notebook decorated with butterflies; a framed poster of a bodybuilder; so many shoes.

View gallery

A rescue chopper prepares to land, carrying people from higher camps to Everest Base Camp, Nepal, Mo …

"It's overwhelming. It's too much to think about," said 55-year-old Bijay Nakarmi, mourning his parents, whose bodies recovered from the rubble of what once was a three-story building.

He could tell how they died from their injuries. His mother was electrocuted by a live wire on the roof top. His father was cut down by falling beams on the staircase.

He had last seen them a few days earlier — on Nepal's Mothers' Day — for a cheerful family meal.

"I have their bodies by the river. They are resting until relatives can come to the funeral," Nakarmi said as workers continued searching for another five people buried underneath the wreckage.

Kathmandu district chief administrator Ek Narayan Aryal said tents and water were being handed out Monday at 10 locations in Kathmandu, but that aftershocks were leaving everyone jittery. The largest, on Sunday, was magnitude 6.7.

View gallery

A portrait of Hindu Goddess Lakshmi hangs on the remains of a house that was damaged in Saturday’s e …

"There have been nearly 100 earthquakes and aftershocks, which is making rescue work difficult. Even the rescuers are scared and running because of them," he said.

"We don't feel safe at all. There have been so many aftershocks. It doesn't stop," said Rajendra Dhungana, 34, who spent Sunday with his niece's family for her cremation at the Pashuputi Nath Temple.

Acrid, white smoke rose above the Hindu temple, Nepal's most revered. "I've watched hundreds of bodies burn," Dhungana said.

The capital city is largely a collection of small, poorly constructed brick apartment buildings. The earthquake destroyed swaths of the oldest neighborhoods, but many were surprised by how few modern structures collapsed in the quake.

On Monday morning, some pharmacies and shops for basic provisions opened while bakeries began offering fresh bread. With power lines down, spotty phone connections and almost no Internet connectivity, residents were particularly anxious to buy morning newspapers.

View gallery

A Nepalese elderly man prays next to a building damaged in Saturday's earthquake, not pictured, …

Huge lines of people desperate to secure fuel lined up outside gasoline pumps; prices were the same as they were before the earthquake struck.

"We are not raising prices," fruit seller Shyam Jaiswal said. "That would be illegal, immoral profit."

As aid began pouring in from more than a dozen countries, aid workers warned that the situation could be far worse near the epicenter. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake was centered near Lamjung, a district about 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Kathmandu. While not far away, poor roads and steep mountains make Lamjung difficult to reach. Even before the quake, it could take six hours to drive from Kathmandu to parts of the area. Now, many of the few roads are believed to be cut off by small landslides.

The earthquake was the worst to hit the South Asian nation in more than 80 years. It and was strong enough to be felt all across parts of India, Bangladesh, China's region of Tibet and Pakistan. Nepal's worst recorded earthquake in 1934 measured 8.0 and all but destroyed the cities of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan.

The quake has put a huge strain on the resources of this impoverished country best known for Everest, the highest mountain in the world. The economy of Nepal, a nation of 27.8 million people, relies heavily on tourism, principally trekking and Himalayan mountain climbing.

___

Associated Press writers Muneeza Naqvi and Tim Sullivan in New Delhi contributed to this report.

Related Video:

Un alpiniste allemand filme une violente avalanche dans l'Everest

Devastation caused by the earthquake extends well into mountain villages, where access is limited.
Dozens of aftershocks

WASHINGTON (AP) — With debate gearing up over the coming expiration of the Patriot Act surveillance law, the Obama administration on Saturday unveiled a 6-year-old report examining the once-secret program to collect information on Americans' calls and emails.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence publicly released the redacted report following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the New York Times. The basics of the National Security Agency program had already been declassified, but the lengthy report includes some new details about the secrecy surrounding it.

President George W. Bush authorized the "President's Surveillance Program" in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The review was completed in July 2009 by inspectors general from the Justice Department, Pentagon, CIA, NSA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

They found that while many senior intelligence officials believe the program filled a gap by increasing access to international communications, others including FBI agents, CIA analysts and managers "had difficulty evaluating the precise contribution of the PSP to counterterrorism efforts because it was most often viewed as one source among many available analytic and intelligence-gathering tools in these efforts."

Critics of the phone records program, which allows the NSA to hunt for communications between terrorists abroad and U.S. residents, argue it has not proven to be an effective counterterrorism tool. They also say an intelligence agency has no business possessing the deeply personal records of Americans. Many favor a system under which the NSA can obtain court orders to query records held by the phone companies.

The Patriot Act expires on June 1, and Senate Republicans have introduced a bill that would allow continued collection of call records of nearly every American. The legislation would reauthorize sections of the Patriot Act, including the provision under which the NSA requires phone companies to turn over the "to and from" records of most domestic landline calls.

After the program was disclosed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, President Barack Obama and many lawmakers called for legislation to end that collection, but a bill to do so failed last year. Proponents had hoped that the expiration of the Patriot Act provisions on June 1 would force consideration of such a measure.

A bipartisan group of House members has been working on such legislation, dubbed the USA Freedom Act. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday that Obama is pleased the efforts are restarting in the House.

"Hopefully, the next place where Democrats and Republicans will turn their attention and try to work together is on this issue of putting in place important reforms to the Patriot Act," Earnest said.

If no legislation is passed, the Patriot Act provisions would expire. That would affect not only the NSA surveillance but other programs used by the FBI to investigate domestic crimes, which puts considerable pressure on lawmakers to pass some sort of extension.

___

Follow Pickler on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/nedrapickler

Review of NSA surveillance made public

The government report finds that analysts had a hard time quantifying the benefits of the program.

'One source among many'

NEW YORK (AP) — Global activists presented 8 million petitions to the U.N. disarmament chief on Sunday demanding a world free of nuclear weapons, kicking off a conference by world powers to review progress toward eventually achieving total disarmament.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran's foreign minister are both expected to speak at the conference Monday amid intense interest in the fate of negotiations over Iran's nuclear program.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or NPT, Review Conference happens every five years, and experts have warned that little progress is expected this time, especially with relations cool between the two largest nuclear powers, Russia and the United States.

The more than a thousand demonstrators demanded that the world's nine nuclear-armed countries do far more toward cutting stockpiles.

Many protesters were from Japan, the only country ever hit by a nuclear attack. Fragile survivors of the U.S. attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago led the way in wheelchairs.

"I hope we don't have to have the NPT five years from now!" said 83-year-old Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow.

View gallery

A woman holds a fan with a message during an anti-nuclear rally in Union Square in New York, Sunday, …

The U.N. disarmament chief, Angela Kane, stood by the wall of boxes of petitions and told the crowd that receiving the millions of names was "very humbling." She said she had signed one of the petitions herself when she was in Japan.

Kane said she spoke Friday with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and told the crowd, "He's with you."

As the march made its way uptown past the Manhattan brunch crowd, some bystanders showed little grasp of the number of nuclear weapons remaining around the world today.

Guesses ranged from 120 to 150,000 to "no idea whatsoever." Experts estimate it's more like 16,000.

"Hundreds. Thousands. Doesn't matter. They're all bad," said Hal Alterwein, 75. "All you need is one nut case to blow it up."

The other nuclear-armed countries are Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Only the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China have signed on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.