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Sri Lanka’s ruling alliance lost its majority in parliament Friday after an ethnic Tamil party withdrew its support, putting the country in a state of political uncertainty as it recovers from the Asian tsunami.
   The development comes as parliament prepares to debate a bill on the December 26 tsunami, which killed more than 31,000 people in Sri Lanka and left 1 million homeless. The bill would establish a national council for disaster management to formulate national policy on the effective use of resources for relief and reconstruction work.
   It was not immediately clear if the political uncertainty would affect the flow of foreign aid and tsunami reconstruction efforts.
   The Ceylon Workers Congress, which has eight seats in the 225-member legislature, said it was joining the opposition because of unspecified disagreements with president Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government. The move left the ruling alliance with 111 seats — two short of a majority.
   Though the loss weakens the government, it’s unlikely to cause its downfall. However, the alliance could collapse if its key partner, the Marxist People’s Liberation Front, follows through on a threat it made Thursday to also withdraw because of a dispute over the peace process with Tamil rebels.
   The Ceylon Workers Congress party is backed by Sri Lanka’s minority ethnic Tamils, who remain loyal to the government. It had supported Kumaratunga’s efforts to end the two-decade war with Tamil Tiger rebels.

Pakistan is still waiting for India to show flexibility in solving their dispute over Kashmir, despite last week’s agreement on a bus service across the divided region, the president, Pervez Musharraf, said on Thursday.
   Pakistan had suggested areas where flexibility could be shown, but any move away from stated positions should be made by both countries together, Musharraf said.
   ‘We have not shown flexibility on Kashmir, neither have we changed our stance on Kashmir. We have just given, I have given some ideas on flexibility,’ he told media representatives at the inauguration of a government Web site in the president’s official Islamabad residence.
   ‘Let’s see if the ideas are looked into,’ he said. For now, Musharraf said, Pakistan was sticking to a long-held demand for Kashmiris to be allowed to hold an UN-mandated plebiscite to decide their future.
   Speaking to Reuters in December 2003, weeks before embarking on a peace process with India, Musharraf said he would be prepared to set aside the demand for a plebiscite, which was backed by a series of UN resolutions in the late 1940s.

Israel plans to build more than 6,000 homes in Jewish settlements in the West Bank this year, a sharp boost in its construction in the occupied territory, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.
   The reported settlement expansion project by the Israel Lands Administration, a government agency, would coincide with Israel’s plan to pull out of the Gaza Strip this summer and defy US calls for a freeze in ‘settlement activity.’
   The US-backed roadmap requires a halt to settlement building on land Israel captured in 1967 and where Palestinians want statehood. Palestinians are worried that Israel wants to quit Gaza only to annex areas around more populous West Bank settlement blocs.
   The international community regards settlements as illegal under international law. Israel disputes this.
   The Yedioth Ahronoth daily reported the ILA’s working plan for 2005 calls for 6,391 homes to be built in existing West Bank settlements. The newspaper said the defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, had given the go-ahead for the marketing of the housing projects.
   In addition, the report said, the government planned to ‘legitimise’ 120 unauthorised settlement outposts in the West Bank which it has promised the United States to dismantle.
   An ILA spokeswoman could not be reached and a defence ministry spokesman declined immediate comment.
   Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat urged the US president, George W Bush, to press Israel ‘to make sure such a plan is not implemented and that his call for a freeze in all settlement activity is implemented.’
   Israel has said it would continue to build in existing settlements to accommodate what it calls the natural growth of their populations.
   The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, called on the United States and Europe to translate their pledges to support the Middle East peace process into concrete action on the ground.
   He made the appeal during a meeting in Cairo with visiting Belgian foreign minister, Karel de Gucht, presidential spokesman Suleiman Awad told reporters Thursday.
   The US president, George W Bush, and the British prime minister, Tony Blair renewed support for the Middle East peace process during this week’s EU and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summits in Brussels.
   Mubarak emphasised that the ‘positive signals that came out of the Brussels summit should be translated into movement on the ground,’ according to Awad.
   Such action should include lending ‘political support for the peace process and economic support and necessary aid to the Palestinian Authority and to improve the daily lives of the Palestinian people,’ he added.

The United Nations urged China to better safeguard constitutionally protected rights and criticised Beijing for rbitrarily jailing those who peacefully voice religious and political views in a report seen Friday.
   The working group on arbitrary detention also condemned China for jailing citizens without trial through its ‘re-education through labour’ system in the report on a September visit by the UN High Commission for Human Rights.
   The document lamented China’s widespread use of vaguely defined terms in its criminal law, such as ‘disrupting social order’ and ‘endangering national security’ to imprison citizens for political purposes.
   ‘Definitions in criminal law legislation having such vague, imprecise or sweeping elements ... shall not be used to punish the peaceful expression of the rights and freedoms that the Declaration of Human Rights grants to everyone,’ the report urged.
   ‘Persons charged often invoke their freedom of opinion, expression, religion or belief, freedom of association or assembly, or the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs of the country as a legal basis for their conduct and exempting them from criminal responsibility,’ it said.
   The working group called on China to give ‘proper weight to the rights of the individual’ in such cases and better protect such fundamental rights guaranteed by the country’s own constitution.
   The report, seen on the UNHCR website, complained that official interference in the September visit to the notorious Drachpi prison in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, was unacceptable.
   UN investigators were told that prison regulations prohibited certain prisoners from being interviewed by ‘foreigners.’
   ‘The working group wishes to express its dissatisfaction with regard to this incident,’ it said.
   ‘It is unacceptable that a (UN) Member State should impose limitations on human rights mechanisms under the pretext that their members are ‘foreigners’.’ China has been widely accused of rampant rights violations in Tibet, where Tibetan religious figures are routinely jailed for voicing opposition to Chinese rule in the region.
   The visit was the second by the working group to China, following an earlier visit in 1996 which came to many of the same conclusions.
   ‘None of the recommendations that the working group formulated in its earlier report (1996) have been followed,’ the report said.
   ‘No legislative measures have been taken to make a clear-cut exemption from criminal responsibility of those who peacefully exercise their rights guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’

A huge international aid effort struggled to reach remote South Asian villages ravaged by disease and flattened by avalanches Friday, as the death toll from one of the harshest winters in living memory across India, Afghanistan and Pakistan neared 1,400.
   US Black Hawk helicopters defied icy conditions to get food and medicine to cut-off parts of Afghanistan, where hundreds of children have died from disease and starvation, while Indian army teams arrived in villages buried by walls of snow nearly a week ago.
   ‘My daughter was only five months old and she got sick in the cold and died,’ said 29-year-old Mohammed Asar as he waited for American food handouts in stricken Tulak district, in western Afghanistan’s badly-hit province of Ghor.
   In Afghanistan, where figures were hard to confirm because communications are poor and many areas remain stranded, at least 580 and possibly as many as 778 people have died during a month and a half of appalling conditions.
   More than 300 people have died in Saghar, another village in Ghor which US helicopters reached on Friday, district chief Ali Khan said. Ghor’s deputy governor said earlier that at least 192 people had died mostly from disease in the province, 90 of whom were children.

The world’s population will increase by 40 per cent to 9.1 billion in 2050, but virtually all the growth will be in the developing world, especially in the 50 poorest countries, the UN Population Division said.
   In a report Thursday, the division said the population in less developed countries is expected to swell from 5.3 billion today to 7.8 billion in 2050. By contrast, the population of richer developed countries will remain mostly unchanged, at 1.2 billion.
   ‘It is going to be a strain on the world,’ said Hania Zlotnik, the division’s new director. She said the expected growth will be concentrated in countries that already struggle to provide adequate shelter, health care and education.
   The report reconfirmed many trends, including an increasingly aging population in developed countries. But it said immigration would prevent the overall population in richer countries from declining.
   The United States is projected to be the major net recipient of international migrants, 1.1 million annually, with its population increasing from 298 million in 2005 to 394 million in 2050, the report said.
   Between 2005 and 2050, population growth in eight countries — India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Congo, Bangladesh, Uganda, the United States, Ethiopia and China — is likely to make up half the world’s increase, the report said.
   Median fertility is expected to decline from 2.6 children per woman today to slightly over 2 children per woman in 2050.
   Zlotnik said India’s population will surpass China’s in the coming decades because its fertility, currently at 3 children per woman, is higher than China’s, estimated at 1.7 children per woman.
   In 2000-2005, fertility levels remained above 5 children per woman in 35 of the 148 developing countries, including 30 of the poorest nations. The pace of decline in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia was slower than anticipated.
   In southern Africa, the region with the highest AIDS prevalence, life expectancy has fallen from 62 years in 1995 to 48 years in 2000-2005, and is projected to decrease further to 43 years over the next decade before a slow recovery starts, it said.

Syria, under intense international pressure to end its tight military and political grip on neighbouring Lebanon, prepared to redeploy its troops toward the border, Lebanese officials said.
   That news came as Al-Arabiya television said the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, had demanded that Damascus pull its troops out of Lebanon by April or face ‘measures’ from the Security Council. But Annan’s spokesman denied the report, issuing a clarification.
   Damascus’ move comes as the Syrian-backed Beirut government was braced for a parliamentary no-confidence vote, which could bring to a head a crisis sparked by last week’s assassination of former premier Rafiq Hariri.
   The troops will move into the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon near the border with Syria ‘within hours,’ the Lebanese defence minister Abdel Rahim Mrad, said.
   But it was unclear if this action, in line with the 1989 Taef accord that ended Lebanon’s civil war, would lead to a full withdrawal after nearly three decades as demanded by UN Security Council Resolution 1559 in September.
   Dubai-based Al-Arabiya, flagging an interview to be aired in full on Friday, said Annan ‘called on Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon before April, when he is due to present a report to the Security Council about Damascus’ compliance with Resolution 1559.’
   It said the UN chief warned that ‘the Security Council could take measures against Syria if it does not implement the resolution.’

A total of 602 people are known to have died in the earthquake that hit south-eastern Iran this week, and the number of injured has risen to 991, state television reported on Friday.
   The last figures provided by officials from the Kerman governor’s office had put the death toll at 549, plus 900 injured.
   Survivors of continued their search for loved ones Thursday, while others dug with their bare hands to salvage household items buried in this disaster.

European trip of the US president, George W Bush, may have taken the edge off of transatlantic tensions, but relations are still dogged by lingering post-Iraq resentments and new potential rows, analysts said.
   If Bush appeared to make modest headway in calming European anger over the 2003 invasion of Iraq, they said, he faced new frictions over arms sales to China and how to deal with Iran’s suspected nuclear arms programme.
   Jeremy Shapiro, European expert at the Brookings Institution think tank, said that Bush ‘set expectations low and met them’ in toning down the bitterness over Iraq and promoting a new chapter in the US-European ties.
   But Shapiro added that neither side showed much inclination to compromise on core disagreements. ‘I don’t think that there has been much movement on substantive issues that divided the United States and Europe,’ he said.
   The US president, making his first trip abroad since starting a second term in office, reassured his allies that he supported a strong and united Europe. He also lined up behind the Europeans’ drive to settle the Middle East conflict.
   In return, Bush succeeded in mustering support from each of his 25 partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation for efforts to train local security forces in Iraq who will eventually replace US troops.
   But if the pledges provided useful political cover for the US operation, the contributions by some countries were little more than token, with France, Germany and others still refusing to send trainers into Iraq.
   More fundamentally, Bush left Brussels with admonitions ringing in his ear from France and Germany about the need to reshape the transatlantic dialogue to take into account a European Union increasingly flexing its muscles.
   Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, and Charles Kupchan, of the New-York based Council for Foreign Relations, hammered home the new equation facing Bush in a commentary piece for the German daily Die Welt.
   They said Bush must ‘recognise the fact that there can be no return to the days when the United States, due to its dominant position within NATO, could tell the Europeans exactly what to do.’
   If leaders on both sides of the Atlantic appeared eager to get past their differences over Iraq, there was no lack of issues that could provide a new background for a transatlantic test of wills.
   Tensions have risen over negotiations by Britain, France and Germany to wean Iran off its suspected nuclear weapons ambitions. The US officials have been openly sceptical of the effort and have sought to move the matter to the UN Security Council.
   Bush insisted Thursday they were all ‘on the same page’ and the European initiative ‘represents not only the EU and NATO but the United States’ as well. But he has still refused to rule out the eventual use of force against Tehran.
   One potential feud looming large was over the prospect of the EU lifting a 15-year-old arms embargo on China, a move vehemently opposed by Washington which fears it could change the military equation involving Taiwan.

Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani said Friday the Kurds had not decided who to back in the race for Iraq’s prime minister, as negotiations over the formation of the government looked set to be protracted.
   ‘No decision has been made,’ he told Reuters Television when asked if the Kurds were planning to ally with the Islamist Shia politician Ibrahim al-Jaafari or secular Shia Iyad Allawi, who is fighting to keep his job as prime minister.
   Iraqi politicians are engaged in intense post-election horse-trading for the top positions in the next government and the heads of ministries, negotiations complicated by delicate ethnic and sectarian issues.
   The Kurdish coalition is in a strong bargaining position after coming second in last month’s ballot, with 25 per cent of the vote giving it 75 seats in the 275-seat national assembly.
   Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), one of the two main parties in the Kurdish coalition, said the Kurds would seek important posts in the new government.
   He was diplomatic but firm on the sensitive issue of oil-rich Kirkuk, the most ethnically diverse and hotly contested city in the country.
   ‘In the future we want Kirkuk to be an example of ethnic, religious and national coexistence. But this is after Kirkuk’s identity is fixed as (part of) Kurdistan,’ he said.
   Thursday, Nechirvan Barzani, Masoud’s nephew and prime minister of the Kurdish regional government, said the Kurds would only agree to a deal on the formation of a new national government if they were given control of disputed areas in the north of the country, including Kirkuk.
   Thousands of Iraqi Kurds were pushed out of their homes by Saddam Hussein as part of his ‘Arabisation’ programme, when he sought to move Arabs into Kirkuk and the surrounding area to increase his influence and change the region’s ethnic makeup.

A US navy missile over the Pacific intercepted a target missile, which the military on Thursday said was the fifth successful test of a system to shield North America.
   The navy said the Standard Missile 3 interceptor is designed to destroy medium- to long-range missiles on the fly.
   The navy launched the target missile from the Hawaiian island of Kauai and launched the Standard Missile 3 from the USS Lake Erie about 160 kilometres away, according to a statement.
   The Aegis missiles collided, using the same technology as a ground-based system designed to destroy long-range missiles and used by army’s Patriot system.
   Also Thursday, Canada announced that it would not participate in the US system because of broad domestic opposition.
   Ottawa had been mulling its stand on the US missile defence programme for more than a year, and political analysts expected the decision.
   The Pentagon is seeking a 20 per cent boost in funding for the programme, from 7.7 billion dollars this year to 9.2 billion dollars in 2005.
   Plans calls for deploying 20 ground-based interceptor missiles and up to 10 sea-based missiles by the end of fiscal 2005.

Proposed British anti-terror laws allowing suspects to be put under house arrest without trial received a fresh blow Friday as an influential committee of lawmakers warned they went against constitutional norms.
   There was ‘no justification’ for the planned new powers, which may in any case breach the European Convention on Human Rights, parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights warned.
   Although the anti-terror bill allowed politicians ‘wide and unprecedented’ scope to order detention, it was being ‘rushed through parliament at a speed which prevents proper scrutiny’, the committee said.
   The possible use of house arrest is among a series of measures put forwards by the home secretary, Charles Clarke, to replace earlier anti-terror laws ruled illegal by Britain’s highest court of appeal.
   Late last year, the Law Lords said the indefinite detention in prison without trial of some foreign terrorism suspects breached human rights obligations.
   On Tuesday, Clarke unveiled the proposed replacement legislation, which would make the house arrest powers subject to judicial review.
   Both opposition politicians and human rights groups have condemned the government for seeking to push through the measures in only a week, without the usual examination by a parliamentary committee.

Ukraine’s defence minister expressed alarm Thursday at the apparent theft of two anti-aircraft missiles and a launch system from a Ukrainian naval base in the Crimean peninsula.
   ‘This is a critical situation for the armed forces, particularly with such a class of weaponry,’ the Interfax news agency quoted the defence minister, Anatoly Hrytsenko, as saying.
   However, Ukrainian navy chief Ihor Kynaz denied any missiles had gone missing, saying it could be a problem of a faulty inventory at the arms depot after the transfer by the Russian Black Sea fleet in Crimea of some weaponry to the Ukrainian fleet.
   Guards came across two unidentified persons breaking into a weapons depot near Chernomorskoye, western Crimea, early Tuesday morning.

Canada’s minority Liberal government, in a snub to the US president, George W Bush, said on Thursday it would not take part in the controversial US missile defence system, which is unpopular with many Canadian voters.
   Washington’s ambassador to Ottawa said he found the decision ‘very perplexing’ and said the United States would press ahead with the system, which is designed to shoot down ballistic missiles from adversaries such as North Korea.
   The announcement marks an abrupt change in policy by the prime minister, Paul Martin, who came to power in December 2003.
   But the idea makes little political sense now. Martin lost his parliamentary majority in the June 2004 election, some Liberal legislators dislike missile defence and the survival of Martin’s government depends on a minority party opposed to the system.

Palestinian truce talks on March 5
Palestinian officials will meet militant leaders in Cairo on March 5 to discuss whether the factions will formalise their de facto truce with Israel, officials and militants said Friday. The Palestinian Authority and Israel agreed a ceasefire at a summit in Egypt on February 8. But the armed groups say they are not bound by it, though they continue to maintain calm. ‘We will evaluate the current calm and the developments in recent weeks in order to shape a national position regarding the whole issue and the issue of a truce,’ said Mushir al-Masri, a spokesman for the Hamas Islamic militant group in Gaza. Hamas and other factions at the forefront of a four-year-old uprising say they are still not satisfied with Israeli gestures meant to build confidence—such as prisoner releases and an end to army raids and assassinations.
— Reuters

9 cops, 10 Taliban killed in Afghanistan
Nine Afghan policemen and 10 Taliban died in two separate ambushes, US and Afghan officials said Friday, in a burst of violence that could herald more fighting as the winter weather gets warmer. The police officers died late Thursday when their patrol was ambushed by suspected militants from the ousted regime in Chakul, one of the most violence-prone areas in restive south-eastern Helmand province, officials said. ‘The policemen were on a routine patrol when they were attacked—nine policemen were killed,’ provincial spokesman Wali Mohammad said. He blamed the attack on remnants of Taliban, who are waging a revolt against government and foreign troops more than three years after they were toppled by a US-led invasion for refusing to hand over Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. ‘It is the work of the Taliban,’ he said.
— AFP

North Korea ready to return to talks
North Korea is committed to a nuclear-free status of the Korean peninsula and is prepared to resume its participation in six-party negotiations on this issue, the Chinese foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, said Friday. ‘I believe the conditions are there for continuing the negotiations,’ Li said following talks here with his counterparts of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation which also groups Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The Chinese president, Hu Jintao, had recently transmitted a message to the North Korean leadership stressing the need for nuclear-free status, security and peace on the Korean peninsula and calling on Pyongyang to return to the six-party talks as soon as possible, Li said.
— AFP

Bashir wraps up in fiery fashion
The terrorism trial of Indonesia’s Abu Bakar Bashir wrapped up Friday in characteristically fiery fashion; with the Muslim cleric telling judges they would face God’s punishment if they convicted him. The 66-year-old preacher has been on trial since October and is facing charges linked to a series of attacks blamed on the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah.
— AFP

Nicaragua pressured to destroy missiles
The United States kept up its pressure on Nicaragua on Thursday to destroy a mass of Soviet-made anti-aircraft missiles that Washington fears could be sold to terrorists on the black market. The Nicaraguan government has destroyed some 1,000 of the missiles, left in army stockpiles from the country’s civil war in the 1980s, but said on Wednesday it might struggle to win approval from Congress to destroy any more. Rose Likins, of the State Department, one of a group of the US officials who visited Nicaragua this week to urge the destruction of the 1,000 or so missiles still in government stockpiles, said the president, Enrique Bolanos, had reaffirmed to her his promise to get rid of them.
— AFP

30 rebels killed in Uganda unrest
The rebel Lord’s Resistance Army has stepped up attacks in northern Uganda, killing or mutilating nearly 30 people since a government ceasefire expired this week, officials said Friday. Rebels have killed at least 21 people in four northern districts since the truce ended on Tuesday and, in a brutal incident on Thursday, sliced the lips off of eight women, the officials said. The women had left a camp for war-displaced people in Kitgum district to get water from a well three kilometres away when they were accosted by LRA gunmen, according to a military spokesman and a local official. The rebels group has gained infamy for its brutal treatment of the civilian population in northern Uganda, particularly the abduction of children, but Ojwee said attacks had been on the decline amid halting peace talks.
— AFP

3 cops killed in clash with Chechen rebels
Three pro-Russian policemen were killed in a clash with rebel guerrillas in southeast Chechnya, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported Friday quoting a police source. The source said the clash occurred Thursday while police and the Chechen president’s security guard ‘were conducting patrols in the Nozhay Yurt region’. One policeman and two presidential guards were also wounded, the report said. ‘The site of the incident has been blocked off and the guerrilla losses are being estimated,’ the source added. Russian troops poured into breakaway Chechnya in October 1999 in what was billed as a ‘lightning anti-terrorist operation,’ though a festering guerrilla conflict continues to claim lives daily more than five years later.
— AFP

Mexican governor killed in plane crash
The Governor of Mexico’s Colima state and several other people were killed late Thursday in a plane crash in central Mexico, the interior minister, Santiago Creel, said. ‘I have been told, so far, that there are no survivors,’ he told reporters, while refusing to provide the number of passengers aboard the small jet plane. Mexican television said six people were flying from Toluca to Colima when the plane went down in Michoacan state. Colima Governor Gustavo Alberto Vazques, 42, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, took office last year.
— AFP

Pope has operation, condition ‘regular’
Pope John Paul has had a successful operation to help him breathe more easily following a recurrence of acute respiratory problems, the Vatican said in a statement on Thursday. The statement said the immediate post-operation condition of the Pope was ‘regular’. It said surgeons at Rome’s Gemelli hospital had performed a tracheotomy on the Pontiff, cutting a small opening into his neck and windpipe to allow air to flow directly into the lungs. The operation lasted 30 minutes. The Pope, who gave his consent for the operation, will spend the night in his hospital room, the statement added, implying he did not need to be treated in an intensive care ward.
— Reuters