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Sri Lanka’s government faces growing pressure from nationalists and key allies to declare the Tamil Tiger rebels a terrorist group and end Norwegian-backed peace efforts, officials said.
   Anti-Tiger groups held rallies and put up posters in the capital over the weekend demanding that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam be banned following a Friday assassination attempt by suspected rebels against the defence secretary.
   ‘The government discussed the issue on Saturday and there was no finality on the matter,’ a top government source said. ‘There is a strong feeling that we can’t ask others to ban the Tigers when we ourselves have not done it.’
   A ban on the Tigers was lifted in 2002 ahead of the first round of peace talks with them, in line with the Norwegian-backed peace initiative. The move paved the way for a ceasefire in the bitter ethnic conflict
   that has claimed more than 60,000 lives since 1972.
   But amid an escalation of violence in 2006, the 25-member European Union banned the Tigers in May this year. The guerrillas face bans in several other countries, including the US and Britain.
   Officials here said Sri Lanka outlawing the Tigers could mean an end to the current peace process.
   The nationalist JHU–or National Heritage Party of Buddhist monks, which is a key ally of the government–staged a demonstration Saturday demanding an end to the current peace process and a ban on the LTTE.
   The Marxist JVP, or People’s Liberation Front, made the same demand of president Mahinda Rajapakse.
   One of Norway’s top peace envoys, Jon Hanssen-Bauer, was currently in Sri Lanka to hold talks with both sides in a bid to salvage the teetering peace process, diplomats said.
   Hanssen-Bauer is due to travel to the rebel-held town of Kilinochchi Monday for talks with the LTTE. Press reports speculated he had been asked to cancel his visit, but there was no immediate word from the Norwegians here to the effect.
   A Friday suicide bomb attack against defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse, the president’s brother, came as Hannsen-Bauer was in Colombo meeting with officials. Two guards were killed and 14 others were wounded, but Rajapakse escaped unhurt.
   The attack followed a speech by rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran on Monday that the Oslo-arranged 2002 truce was ‘defunct’ and that he was resuming his campaign for an independent homeland for minority Tamils.
   
   Suicide bomber exposes dangerous SL security failings
   A daring suicide bombing against Sri Lanka’s top defence official has exposed gaping security gaps, stoking fears that Tiger rebels could resort to more spectacular strikes, officials and analysts say.
   The driver of an auto-rickshaw breached the tightest security and detonated explosives packed into his three-wheel contraption Friday as defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse drove past in a heavily armed convoy in Colombo.
   The attack was along a street where plain-clothed intelligence agents had been deployed to check for ‘suspicious activity.’ It is also regularly patrolled by troops, a security official said.
   Two motorcycle outriders and the bomber were blown to pieces while 14 others were wounded in what the security official described as a well-planned operation.
   ‘A big question is, if there was inside information, there will have to be a re-think of what has been done so far,’ the official said, declining to be named.
   Friday’s attack was the latest in a string of suicide bombings over the past few months.

UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei on Sunday warned against diplomatic isolation of North Korea and Iran, saying confrontation would only lead them to accelerate their nuclear programmes.
   Diplomacy was key to dealing with both countries, he said, although Iran’s case was different since, unlike North Korea, there was no evidence it had yet acquired the capacity to develop nuclear arms.
   Even if Iran intends to develop an atom bomb, intelligence suggests they are still four to nine years away from doing so, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency told a seminar at Kyoto University in western Japan.
   ‘That means we still have enough time for diplomacy. We need to reintegrate them into the international community and gradually try to change the hearts and minds in Iran through a process of reintegration,’ he said.
   North Korea came under fresh sanctions after testing an atom bomb on October 9, while Iran also faces threats of punitive measures for refusing to freeze nuclear enrichment.
   ‘We should not talk about changing the government in Iran. We should not talk about use of military force in Iran, because the more you talk about that the more the Iranians or the (North) Koreans will feel threatened and will continue to accelerate their nuclear weapon programme,’ ElBaradei warned.
   The UN nuclear watchdog chief argued that sanctions alone would not resolve the Iran or North Korea situations.
   ‘I’ve always said that sanctions alone will never resolve a conflict. In many cases sanctions harden the resolve of a country,’ he said.
   ‘You have, in addition to sanctions, to provide incentives. You have to work with a stick and a carrot.’

Lebanon’s political rift has deepened as a protest led by the Shia militant group Hezbollah entered its third day, with the Western-backed government vowing to resist calls to resign.
   The open-ended rally aims to bring down the government of the prime minister, Fuad Siniora, whose cabinet was deserted by six pro-Syrian ministers last month amid accusations of corruption and impotence after the July-August war with Israel.
   Siniora and other leading lawmakers in the anti-Syrian parliament majority have pledged to maintain their elected posts as the deadlock tightened in Lebanon’s fierce power struggle between pro- and anti-Syrian camps.
   Several hundred opposition protesters from various Shia and Christian factions camped on the doorstep of the government for a second straight night, an AFP correspondent said, following a mass protest Friday calling for a new national unity government.
   Several thousand people have been attending the rallies during the daytime hours, with fewer electing to sleep overnight in tents set up by Hezbollah-led organisers. Hundreds of thousands took part in Friday’s march.
   Late Saturday, several thousand demonstrators blocked at least two main roads leading to Siniora’s offices, after the overall blockade was eased to allow access from side streets.
   The rally continued into the night, as mainly Shia demonstrators waved Lebanese flags to the tune of Hezbollah war hymns and most Christian protesters formed a camp a short distance away on Martyrs Square.
   Traffic ground to a halt early Sunday in central Beirut and many roads were closed as organisers staged Lebanon’s annual marathon in spite of the protest.
   Parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri, son of slain former premier Rafiq Hariri, has vowed ‘the Siniora government will not fall because of pressure from the street. However long they continue their protest, it will not fall.’

Young men and women sit around learning how to shoot and clean guns at a muddy camp set up by communist rebels on the edge of this Himalayan village.
   Those are basic soldiering skills that the young people presumably would know if they were longtime insurgents, as their rebel commanders claim.
   Government officials, diplomats and aid workers say that despite a peace deal signed by the Maoist rebels last month to end Nepal’s decade-old conflict, the guerrillas are still recruiting – and sometimes pressing – villagers into service.
   The rebels also are reported taxing peasant farmers and businessmen as they jockey to bolster their position in the new unity government being formed under the peace accord – and to hedge their bets in case they feel a need to resume the war.
   ‘The Maoists are behaving like they are still free to take what they want,’ said Man Bahadur Budhamagar, who runs a small guesthouse in the nearby town of Chhinchu.

North Korea has offered Russia exclusive rights to its natural uranium deposits in exchange for Moscow’s support at six-party talks aimed at denuclearising Pyongyang, a report said Sunday.
   Russia had requested that North Korea give Moscow exclusive rights to import Pyongyang’s natural uranium, with plans to profit by enriching and exporting it as nuclear fuel to China and Vietnam, the Tokyo Shimbun reported in a dispatch from Vladivostok in eastern Russia.
   The two countries have been secretly in talks since 2002 on the deal, but Pyongyang only recently showed a positive attitude on the deal, demanding Russian support its position in the stalled six-party talks as a precondition for the deal, the newspaper said, citing unnamed Russian government sources.
   The multi-lateral talks, which started in 2003, broke down late last year when North Korea walked out over separate financial sanctions imposed on it by the United States for money laundering and counterfeiting.

India has developed an anti-missile defence system which could be put in place in 3 to 5 years, the country’s top defence research body said on Saturday.
   Earlier this week, India conducted a mid-air collision of two nuclear-capable ballistic missiles in a successful test of an interception programme.
   ‘We have made a very good beginning,’ said VK Saraswat, an official of the Defence Research and Development Organisation.
   ‘We have successfully developed technology for anti-ballistic missile defence system. As and when the country needs it, we can have our anti-missile defence system but it may take at least three to five years,’ he added.
   Analysts said the DRDO has missed many project deadlines in the past.

India’s railway safety chief was set to begin an inquiry into the partial collapse of a 140-year-old bridge on top of an inter-city passenger train in eastern India that killed 34 people, officials said.
   ‘Commissioner of Railway Safety RP Agarwal has reached the site of the accident,’ Soumitra K Majumdar, chief spokesman for Eastern Railway, said in Kolkata, the state-run company’s headquarters.
   ‘He will stay there for the next two days to conduct the inquiry.’
   Portions of the old bridge in the town of Bhagalpur, in the eastern state of Bihar, had fallen on the railway tracks just two days before Saturday’s accident.
   India’s railway minister, who was greeted by an angry crowd waving black flags on a visit Sunday to a hospital where the injured were being treated, called the accident a ‘blemish’ on the reputation of India’s state-run rail service.
   ‘The railways have been defamed because of negligence on the part of its officials. I am not going to spare anybody found responsible for the mishap,’ Lalu Prasad Yadav said.
   Two engineers overseeing the dismantling of the now-collapsed bridge were suspended Sunday.

Shell-shocked Baghdadis on Sunday cleared the bloody wreckage from the latest deadly bomb attack on their city, as the United States sought a new strategy to pull Iraq back from the abyss.
   The death toll from Saturday’s triple car bombing rose to 60 overnight as more men, women and children succumbed to wounds suffered when the blasts ripped through a crowded shopping street at nightfall, medics said.
   After more than three-and-a-half years of mounting sectarian conflict, the attack, while vicious, was neither unexpected nor especially deadly; more than 1,800 Iraqi civilians were slaughtered in November alone.
   But each new massacre hammers a wedge deeper between Iraq’s Sunni and Shia communities and chips away at the credibility of the country’s beleaguered unity government and the US-led coalition force propping it up.
   The bombers were back at work Sunday, when an insurgent wearing an explosive belt detonated himself next to a police station near the northern oil city of Kirkuk, killing three officers, Major General Torhan Yussef said.
   A sniper killed a civilian in Sinea, an insurgent stronghold in northern Iraq, police Captain Saad Nuri said, while three civilians were gunned down in a mixed area just south of Baghdad, according to a security official.
   American soldiers killed six suspected guerrillas, two women and a child when they called in an air strike to dislodge gunmen from a safehouse west of Baghdad late Saturday, the US military said in a statement.
   British troops, meanwhile, clashed with Shia militia during a search operation in the southern city of Basra, Iraqi police said.
   Amid the carnage, there is a growing realisation in Washington that the current US strategy is failing and pressure is mounting for either a major change of course or rapid pullout of the 138,000 US troops deployed in theatre.
   A leaked memo from former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, written in his last few days in office before resigning last month, revealed the administration has long known of the need for a change in Iraq plan.
   Rumsfeld’s rambling three-page memo cites a shopping list of possible tactical and strategic changes, some of them mutually exclusive, but admits: ‘In my view it is time for a major adjustment.
   ‘Clearly, what US forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough,’ Rumsfeld wrote, in a document passed to the New York Times and later confirmed as genuine by the Pentagon.
   The former secretary’s main ideas have been much discussed in recent weeks and may well figure among Baker’s recommendations, or those of a parallel Pentagon review of the operation also expected imminently.
   In particular, Rumsfeld favours placing more US trainers directly with Iraqi units, withdrawing other American troops from combat into five large bases by July next year, and sending commandos to hunt down al-Qaeda and Iranian agents.
   He also implicitly criticises other US government departments when he says the Pentagon should ‘give up’ asking them for help and hire retired soldiers to advise Iraqi ministries.
   Instead of spending money rebuilding cities like Fallujah that rebelled and were recaptured by US forces–‘rewarding bad behaviour’–, Rumsfeld suggests paying off political and religious leaders ‘as Saddam Hussein did’.
   Judging by leaks to the US media, Baker will also recommend increasing the number of US army trainers, while withdrawing troops from combat and by early 2008 leaving only 70,000 in Iraq in a support role.

Fiji’s military commander said Sunday he would quickly remove the government of the prime minister, Laisenia Qarase, from power if he refused to resign, but rejected talk of imminent military action.
   Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama said a report in the Sunday Post newspaper, which claimed military action would begin early Monday, was ‘rumours’.
   ‘That is not true. We don’t announce our intentions,’ he said in a Fijian language interview shown on television.
   But Bainimarama, who hasrepeatedly warned the government to quit or face being replaced, said Qarase should resign now or the military would force him to do so.
   Asked how long the military would wait before acting, he said: ‘Im telling you the quicker we do it, the better.’
   He refused to reveal any plans the military would have for taking power in what he has described as a ‘peaceful transition.’
   Bainimarama had set a deadline of noon Friday for the government to bow to the miltiary’s demands, which include scrapping controversial legislation.

The United States said Saturday that the Cuban regime must take steps toward democracy before Washington would consider any ‘deepening’ of bilateral relations, responding to Raul Castro’s invitation to come to the negotiating table.
   ‘The dialogue that needs to take place is one between the Cuban regime and the Cuban people about the democratic future of the island,’ Janelle Hironimus, a State Department spokeswoman, said.
   ‘As we have consistently stated, any deepening of our engagement with Cuba depends on that dialogue and the Cuban regime’s willingness to take concrete steps toward a political opening and a
   transition to democracy,’ she said.
   Raul Castro, Cuba’s defence minister and interim leader since his ailing brother Fidel underwent surgery in July, said in a speech to troops earlier Saturday: ‘Let me take this opportunity to express our willingness to settle the long US-Cuba disagreement at the negotiating table.’
   ‘Of course, that is, as long as they accept that we are a country that does not tolerate any reduction of its independence, and based on the principles of equality, reciprocity, non-interference and mutual respect,’ he told Communist Party and military leaders at Cuba’s first military parade in a decade.

US investigators are now involved in the police probe into the apparent radiation death of a former spy, amid claims he planned to blackmail Russian security and business figures, The Observer said Sunday.
   The newspaper said British police and US Federal Bureau of Investigation officers had interviewed former KGB agent Yuri Shvets in Washington after he said he had information on what happened to Alexander Litvinenko.
   Shvets allegedly compiled a dossier Litvinenko said he had in his possession containing potentially damaging revelations about Moscow and the break-up of the oil company Yukos, one of his business associates.

Voting got under way Sunday morning in Venezuela, where US President Hugo Chavez was confident of winning another six-year term.
   Voter intention polls conducted before the presidential election gave the firebrand leftist leader a lead of up to 30 points over his rival, Zulia state Governor Manuel Rosales.
   Voting started at 6:00am and was due to conclude 10 hours later, though by law polling stations cannot shut their doors as long as voters are still waiting in line to cast their ballots. Chavez, who has been in office for eight years, has pledged to consolidate his self-styled revolution and launch a new socialist era in Venezuela.

The life of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet ‘is in danger’ following a heart attack he suffered earlier in the day, one of his doctors said Sunday.
   The family spokesman, general Guillermo Garin, said the hospital was expected to release ‘more complete information’ at 9:00am.
   Pinochet’s wife, Lucia Hiriart, and two of his five sons were at the hospital, awaiting information about the retired general’s health.
   Pinochet, who ruled Chile for 17 years after seizing power in a 1973 military coup, turned 91 on November 25.
   He was placed under house arrest last week by a judge investigating the disappearance of two of the thousands of people who went missing under his regime.
   Accused of fraud and human rights abuses during his 1973-1990 regime, Pinochet was first ordered under house arrest in late October on other charges only to be released on parole a few days later in deference to his advanced age and ill health.
   The latest arrest warrant by judge Victor Montiglio is linked to the disappearance of two security guards of socialist president Salvador Allende, who committed suicide during the September 1973 military coup.
   The guards disappeared during the notorious ‘Caravan of Death,’ an effort by a band of Chilean soldiers to purge the country of regime opponents shortly after the coup, killing 75 people.

Three killed in
south Thailand
Three people, including two members of Thailand’s security forces, have been killed in the latest attacks by suspected Islamic separatists, the police said. A policeman and a defence volunteer, both Muslims, were killed shortly after they left a tea shop early Sunday in Yala, one of three provinces rocked by insurgent violence over nearly three years, the police said. Four militants followed them from the shop and gunned them down just 200 meters away from a rural police station, the police said. In neighbouring Narathiwat province, a 35-year-old rubber tapper was shot dead early Sunday while he was working on a plantation, the police said.
— AFP

S Arabia detains 136 suspected militants
Saudi Arabia, fighting a violent campaign by al-Qaeda supporters, has detained 136 suspected Islamist militants including a would-be suicide bomber, an Interior Ministry source said on Saturday. The militants included both Saudi nationals and foreigners arrested over a period of more than two months, the source said in comments published on the official Saudi Press Agency. It gave no names and did not specify the nationalities of the foreign militants but said they were smuggling people abroad as pilgrims for training before they returned to the conservative Muslim kingdom to carry out attacks.
— Reuters

Iraq conjoined twins separated in Saudi Arabia
Two Iraqi conjoined twins have been successfully separated in a lengthy operation in a Riyadh hospital, official SPA news agency said Sunday, quoting the surgeon who headed the delicate procedure. ‘The operation has ended successfully,’ said Dr Abdullah al-Rabeeah, chief executive of the Saudi National Guard Health Affairs. ‘The two sisters are stable and are under medical observation,’ he said. The operation, financed by Saudi King Abdullah, was performed at the National Guard’s King Abdul Aziz Medical City, where Rabeeah has led 10 previous operations, each lasting between 12 and 24 hours. The twins, Fatima and Zahra, were born on January 25.
— AFP

UN tribunal suspends trial of Serb
The Hague has suspended the trial of a prominent Serb suspect, who is on a hunger strike, due to his weakening health. In the decision dated Friday, judges said Vojislav Seselj would likely be too weak to instruct his lawyer next week and ordered ‘postponement of the presentation of evidence in this case until further notice.’ Seselj, 52, is accused of conspiring with former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and other leaders to purge non-Serbs from parts of Croatia and Bosnia to create a ‘Greater Serbia’ during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Seselj has been on a hunger strike since November 11, protesting a court-appointed legal adviser who was to step in if Seselj were stripped of his right to act as his own lawyer.
— AP

Madagascar elects new president
Voting is under way in Madagascar’s presidential election. In the last poll, in 2001, the island nation was pushed to the brink of civil war after then-incumbent Didier Ratsiraka refused to accept defeat. Eventually Ratsiraka went into exile to France and the current leader, Marc Ravalomanana, took over. He is widely expected to defeat his challengers. More than 14,000 observers are overseeing the vote, but some have warned of possible fraud. Ravalomanana, for his part, has said it will be a model of democracy and transparency for Africa and the world. His opponents include Roland Ratsiraka, the nephew of the former president.
— BBC