Myanmar’s junta was interrogating 13 activists arrested for organising a rally against the regime over its massive hike in fuel prices ahead of likely legal action, state media said Saturday.
   Since first taking to the streets last Sunday, a series of peaceful protests over the fuel hikes have been held in Yangon but the military has quickly clamped down on dissent by hauling off demonstrators.
   ‘The 13 persons including Min Ko Naing are being interrogated and action will be taken against them in accordance with the law,’ said the state-run New Light of Myanmar daily.
   The junta has detained more than 50 protesters over the past week, it said.
   Min Ko Naing is considered Myanmar’s most prominent pro-democracy leader after detained opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
   The paper accused the 13 protesters of ‘agitating to undermine stability and security of the state’ in the first official word on the fate of the detained activists.
   Myanmar, under military rule since 1962, tolerates little public opposition.
   The 13 activists were arrested Tuesday for leading a peaceful march Sunday through Yangon, which drew 500 protesters in the biggest anti-government rally here in at least nine years.
   Earlier, a source close to Min Ko Naing said the prominent democracy activist and 12 others were sent to Myanmar’s notorious Insein prison in northern Yangon this week. The source declined to give further details.
   The prison is home to some of the nation’s estimated 1,100 political prisoners, and international rights groups have alleged abuse and torture were rampant there.
   The 13 were members of the pro-democracy 88 Generation Students group, which is made up of former student leaders who led an uprising against military rule in 1988.
   That uprising, which initially began as a protest over Myanmar’s harsh economic conditions, ended with soldiers firing into a crowd of students, killing hundreds if not thousands.
   Min Ko Naing spent 15 years in jail for his role in the uprising and was released in November 2004. Since then, he has again spent another four months in detention due to his civil disobedience against the junta.
   On Friday, authorities dragged some defiant demonstrators, mainly women, into trucks as they gathered near Yangon’s city hall. They were arrested before launching any action.
   Several police cars stood guard near city hall Saturday, with plain-clothes security officials patrolling the streets.
   Two men were also arrested near a busy market Saturday, sources said, adding authorities pushed them in a car before the pair would take any action.

President George W Bush, lawmakers, members of the US military and veterans were locked Saturday in an escalating political war of words over whether to reduce US troop levels in Iraq.
   With just weeks before a key September 15 progress report on the unpopular war, Bush faced mounting pressure to announce that he would bring home at least some of the roughly 160,000 US troops in Iraq.
   A grim formal report from the 16 US intelligence agencies found that Iraq’s political leaders are ‘unable to govern’ effectively but warned that a drawdown of US forces could dramatically increase sectarian violence.
   Bush’s Democratic critics have redoubled their calls for him to pull US forces out of Iraq, while he has accused his political foes of wanting to ‘pull the rug out’ from under US troops on the front lines.
   And the White House has set the emotionally loaded date of September 11 for the top US commander in Iraq, general David Petraeus, and the US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, to testify to Congress about the war.
   The outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, general Peter Pace, denied a report that he was poised to urge Bush to cut US force levels in Iraq by nearly half next year to ease the strain the war has placed on the military.
   The Los Angeles Times, citing administration and military officials, said Pace was likely to advise Bush that maintaining more than 100,000 of the 162,000 troops in Iraq through 2008 would place severe strains on the military.
   Meanwhile, a senior US commander said any reduction of US troops in his area of Iraq this year would be ‘a giant step backwards,’ allowing insurgents to regain sanctuaries wrested from them in hard fighting.
   Army major general Rick Lynch, who commands a division in volatile central Iraq in Baghdad’s southern outskirts, said Iraqi security forces will not be ready to take over security in the area before the spring or summer of 2008.

Israeli soldiers shot and killed two armed Palestinians heading for a kibbutz after infiltrating Israel on Saturday, during a surge in clashes that has left up to eight Palestinians dead.
   The Israeli army said one of its soldiers was also wounded in a shootout with the infiltrators who attacked an Israeli liaison office near the Erez border crossing with Gaza with firearms and grenades.
   Soldiers from Israel’s elite Golani regiment moved in as reinforcement and killed the two, he added.
   ‘With the help of the morning fog, two armed Palestinians managed to infiltrate Saturday into Israeli terrority in the area of the Erez and Netiv Haassarah kibbutzim,’ Tal Lev-Ram, an Israeli officer, said.

A historic nuclear energy deal between India and the United States is hanging in the balance due to political opposition in New Delhi, but could still be saved if it reaches the US Congress early next year, analysts said.
   Communist allies of prime minister Manmohan Singh’s coalition have demanded the deal be put on hold until their concerns are addressed and have implied they would end their support for the government, triggering fears for the pact.
   Both sides are trying to buy time, looking for a face-saving way out of the crisis as neither is considered keen to see the government fall or face polls at the moment.
   But having come this far, neither is blinking either.
   The deal needs one final approval from the US Congress to go through. But with Washington entering an election year in 2008, the clock is ticking fast, officials and analysts in New Delhi and Washington said.
   The communists have demanded India put off negotiations for key global approvals for the deal, required before it can be presented to Congress.
   But a delay would imperil the agreement, which would then have to struggle to make it over the din of the US election campaign and tight Congressional schedules.
   ‘If we don’t get the agreement up to Congress by April at the very latest, it is unlikely to be acted on (during) the remainder of the Congress,’ said a congressional aide.
   ‘The presidential campaign is just going to swamp everything else and crowd things out for the calendar,’ he said, noting Congress was likely to give precedence to spending bills needed to keep the government running.

A book of letters written by Mother Teresa of Calcutta reveals for the first time that she was deeply tormented about her faith and suffered periods of doubt about God.
   ‘Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear,’ she wrote to the Rev. Michael van der Peet in September 1979.
   Due out on September 4, ‘Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light’ is a collection of letters written to colleagues and superiors over 66 years. In the United States it will be published by Doubleday, an imprint of Random House, which is owned by German media group Bertelsmann.
   The ethnic Albanian Roman Catholic nun, who dedicated her life to poor, sick and dying in India, died in 1997 aged 87.
   Mother Teresa had wanted all her letters destroyed, but the Vatican ordered they be preserved as potential relics of a saint, a spokeswoman for Doubleday said.
   Mother Teresa has been beatified but not yet canonised.
   Time magazine, which has first serial rights, published excerpts on its Web site.
   ‘I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God – tender, personal love,’ she wrote to one adviser. ‘If you were (there), you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.’
   The book was compiled and edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a proponent of her sainthood and senior member of the Missionaries of Charity order that she founded.
   The letters likely would do little to affect her cause for sainthood as church history is dotted with saints who have been tormented about their faith.
   Saint Thomas the Apostle – the ‘Doubting Thomas’ – doubted that Jesus had risen from the dead until, according to scripture, he touches the wound of a resurrected Jesus. Christ himself wondered ‘God, why have you forsaken me’ while on the cross, the Bible says.
   But the Mother Teresa letters nonetheless stand in marked contrast to her public image as a selfless and tireless minister for the poor who was driven by faith.
   ‘I’ve never read a saint’s life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented,’ the Rev. James Martin, an editor at Jesuit magazine America and the author of ‘My Life with the Saints,’ told Time.
   The writings address numerous topics, but the ones most likely to create a stir are what Doubleday called the ‘dark letters.’
   ‘Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself – for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead,’ she wrote in 1953. ‘It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.’
   Then in 1956: ‘Such deep longing for God – and ... repulsed – empty – no faith – no love – no zeal. (Saving) souls holds no attraction – Heaven means nothing – pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything.’

Suspected militants have kidnapped a senior Pakistani army officer and three others in a restive tribal region bordering Afghanistan, officials said Saturday.
   Colonel Shahid Kiyani of Bajaur Scouts, two soldiers and an administration official were seized at gunpoint in the town of Ladha in South Waziristan late Friday.
   ‘They were on their
   way to a seminary to meet with some religious leaders when gunmen in two vehicles intercepted them,’ local administration chief Rasool Khan said.
   He said the local authorities and tribal elders are trying to secure the release of the kidnapped officials through talks with the leaders of the powerful Mehsud tribe.
   The authorities are also trying to free 15 paramilitary soldiers kidnapped earlier this month in the same region. Militants beheaded one of them two weeks ago. In neighbouring North Waziristan, meanwhile, three tribesmen were killed Saturday when an army attack helicopter fired on a vehicle after shots were fired at an army convoy from a hotel.

Investigations were under way Saturday into the killing of three British soldiers in a bomb dropped by a US fighter jet and intended for Afghanistan’s Taliban rebels.
   The ‘friendly fire’ incident in the southern province of Helmand late Thursday was one of the deadliest in a string of such mistakes in the intensifying international campaign against the al-Qaeda-backed Taliban. The British soldiers were struck by a bomb dropped by a US F-15 jet called in to help during a fierce battle near the massive Kajaki Dam, which troops are fighting to secure from the hardline Taliban militia.
   Three were killed outright and two wounded. The injured were Saturday at the main British base in Afghanistan, Camp Bastion in Helmand, awaiting repatriation. The United States confirmed the deaths had been caused by a US bomb and said an inquiry would be launched.
   The United States was ‘deeply saddened,’ said Kurt Volker, the US principal deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs.

At least 41 people have died in two violent fires raging in the Peloponnese peninsula of southern Greece, officials said Saturday, warning that the death toll could climb as the search goes on for more victims and fires continue to burn.
   Among the latest fatalities were a mother and her four children, aged five to 15, who were engulfed by flames on the road near the village of Mahista, along with seven other victims, the police said. So far seven children have died in the disaster since Friday.