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Eighteen Palestinians have died in 24 hours of fighting between warring factions in the Gaza Strip, with shootings, mortar attacks and the storming of a university torpedoing yet another truce.
   Sustained clashes between Hamas and Fatah were raging across the territory Friday on what should have been the fourth day of a ceasefire aimed at halting the bloodletting that has boiled over from a year-long power struggle.
   Three members of the mainstream Palestinian intelligence service, including a deputy chief commander, were killed in fighting with Hamas militants in the Jabaliya refugee camp, security and medical sources said.
   Another four bodies were discovered on Friday and around 170 Palestinians have been wounded in violence over the last 24 hours, said a medical source, with clashes most concentrated on Friday in the Jabaliya refugee camp.
   Dozens of members of Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas’s presidential guard were wounded when Hamas militants and members of a controversial ‘executive force’ controlled by the Islamist government fired a mortar into their training camp in Gaza City.
   ‘Between 40 and 50 new recruits of the presidential guard were wounded and there are perhaps some killed,’ a Force 17 official said.
   Presidential guards had overnight stormed the Islamic University in Gaza City, a known Hamas bastion and the most prestigious centre of higher education in the impoverished territory largely sealed off from the outside world.
   Several gunmen were detained, while weapons and explosives were confiscated during a sweep of the campus, a security source said.
   Fatah said the operation had been ordered after Hamas militants apparently hunkered down at the university fired mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades towards Gaza’s main presidential compound.
   The fighting deteriorated as the four sponsors of the stalled Middle East peace process, the European Union, Russia, United Nations and United States, were to meet in Washington Friday in a bid to fast-track peace efforts.
   Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers shot dead two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Friday, a local security source said.
   Khamdan Shoman, 34, and Mohammed Arab, 30, who were both officers in the preventive security service loyal to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, were killed after getting out of a car in Beitunia near Ramallah, the source said.
   
   US present fresh ME peace
   initiative to Quartet partners
   The United States presents its latest plan to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts to major power allies Friday, with a flare-up in Palestinian factional violence adding new urgency to the task.
   The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, will press her Russian, European and UN counterparts–the so-called Quartet of Mideast mediators–to endorse an accelerated approach to the group’s moribund ‘roadmap’ for achieving Palestinian statehood, officials said.
   The US initiative involves a two-track effort that would tackle security and counter-terrorism issues which have dominated US diplomacy in the region since 2001 in parallel with long-neglected ‘final status’ questions like the borders of a future Palestinian state, they said.
   ‘The secretary Rice has staked out a position that she’s going to be deeply involved in trying to move the process forward,’ said US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.
   Friday’s meeting is ‘an important get-together at an important moment in that there are opportunities to mobilise support for an energized push to see what the Israelis and Palestinians together can accomplish,’ he said.

Afghanistan’s warlord-filled parliament has approved a bill ruling out judicial proceedings against men accused of rights abuses in the past 25 years of conflict, a spokesman said.
   The lower house approved the legislation on Wednesday saying it was in the interests of peace and reconciliation, parliament secretariat spokesman Haseeb Noori said on Thursday.
   It has to be passed by the upper house before being sent to the president Hamid Karzai for signing into law.
   The move is controversial in Afghanistan where commanders of the Soviet resistance of the 1980s have been accused of war crimes and abuses including murder and torture during the country’s 1992-1996 civil war.
   It was criticised by the country’s top rights body and by outspoken legislator Malalai Joya, one of the few MPs that did not approve the bill, who said unity would not be brought about by ‘forgiving national traitors.’
   International watchdog Human Rights Watch called last month for a truth and reconciliation court to deal with war crimes and human rights abuses, including by some who still ‘hold high office’.
   The National Reconciliation Bill says the ‘defenders’ of the jihad ‘must be treated with respect and be defended against any kind of offence,’ Noori said.
   ‘In a move to reconcile different communities, the law states that no political party or groups involved in the past two and a half decades of war will be pursued by the judiciary,’ he said.
   A translation of the first article reads: ‘Jihad, resistance and our people’s rightful wars for defending their country and religion are counted as vital national pride and must be honoured... and appreciated by suitable privileges.’
   The bill also calls on people who oppose Karzai’s government, including the extremist Taliban movement waging a bloody insurgency, to join a process to bring peace to the war-battered country.
   Joya, known for standing up to the jihadi commanders who occupy many of the seats in parliament, said the draft was unjust and went ‘against the will of the people.’
   ‘National unity cannot be achieved through forgiving national traitors,’ she said.
   ‘They must be tried. In fact, they have already been tried in the minds and hearts of people and they should be tried officially,’ she said. .

Sri Lanka stepped up already tight security in the capital Colombo on Friday amid fears of Tamil rebel attacks ahead of Independence Day celebrations, officials said.
   Security forces armed with tough anti-terror laws increased road blocks and random checks within the city of 600,000 people and carried out searches against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a police official said.
   ‘We have got thousands of constables and troops from the provinces to beef up security in Colombo,’ a police officer said. ‘We are maintaining a high
   state of alert.’
   Some roads in the capital were also closed as security forces rehearsed for Sunday’s Independence Day commemorations along Colombo’s sea-front Galle Face promenade.
   Sri Lanka won independence from Britain in 1948. With the ending of 133 years of British rule, ethnic tensions between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils erupted into the open and spawned Tamil Tiger rebels in 1972.
   More than 60,000 people have since been killed in the Tamil separatist conflict led by the LTTE. Diplomatic attempts to bring the two sides to the negotiating table have ended in failure.
   Tiger guerrillas carried out two suicide bombings killing more than 20 people ahead of the 50th Independence Day in 1998.

Israeli warplanes are still flying over southern Lebanon despite appeals for them to halt the missions, the outgoing commander of a United Nations peacekeeping mission said on Friday.
   ‘They are continuing to do (overflights) on a daily basis ... sometimes five or six a day,’ Major-General Alain Pellegrini told Europe 1 radio.
   Asked what was the point of the flights, Pellegrini said: ‘It’s obviously to control the territory, but it could also be to provoke.’
   France said in November its peacekeepers came close to firing on Israeli warplanes flying low over their position in southern Lebanon and asked the United States to put pressure on Israel to end the flights.
   Israel says it will not stop the overflights until it is sure that the guerrilla group Hezbollah was not rearming via neighbouring Syria.
   Pellegrini, who is due to be replaced by an Italian general later this month, said arms might be reaching Hezbollah, but added that he had no evidence of this.
   ‘I cannot confirm it. It is something that is possible.’
   The UN peacekeepers have helped enforce a UN-brokered ceasefire that took effect on August 14, ending a 34-day war between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas.
   The UN Security Council has authorized a force of up to 15,000 troops for the region. Pellegrini said at present there were just over 12,000 UN troops in southern Lebanon, adding that this would rise to 13,000 by the end of February.
   He said he did not believe his Italian successor would need any more peacekeepers to carry out the UN mission.

International pressure was on China to try its hand at peace diplomacy Friday as the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, arrived in war-wracked Sudan, the highlight of an eight-nation tour of Africa.
   During his two-day visit to Khartoum, Hu was expected to hold talks with President Omar al-Beshir on the situation in the western region of Darfur, where a conflict between the government and rebels has been raging unabated.
   In a statement handed out to reporters at Khartoum airport, Hu said the visit was ‘expected to cement the friendship and expand cooperation between China and Sudan.’
   China’s energy-hungry economy–the fourth-largest in the world–is badly in need of Sudan and other African countries’ resources.
   ‘I believe this visit will not only boost bilateral ties, but also peace and stability in this region,’ Assistant Foreign Minister Zhai Jun told journalists before Hu set off on his tour.
   No other country has more clout over the Khartoum government than China, which absorbs 60 percent of Sudan’s total oil output and has repeatedly used its UN Security Council veto power to block further sanctions on the regime.
   Led by Washington, the international community has been pressing Khartoum to accept the deployment of UN peacekeepers in Darfur, where African Union troops have failed to quell the bloodshed.
   But Beshir has consistently rejected such a move, accusing the United Nations and Western powers of seeking to invade his country and plunder its resources.
   ‘If the Chinese put some pressure on Khartoum, it might have some potential,’ said the Save Darfur coalition’s Larry Rossin, who recently travelled to Khartoum with US envoy Bill Richardson.

With India’s Himalayan glaciers melting, its eastern islands sinking and freak rain flooding deserts, environmentalists say global warming is already taking its toll on this populous Asian nation.
   The UN climate panel issued its strongest warning yet on Friday that human activities are heating the planet, forecasting that temperatures would rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 Celsius (3.2 and 7.8 Fahrenheit) in the 21st century.
   In India, the signs already back up forecasts that as the mercury raises the Indian subcontinent, home to one-sixth of humanity, will be one of the worst-affected regions.
   ‘We are already seeing glaciers are receding at a faster rate and islands have disappeared and then there is all this freak weather phenomena,’ said Shruti Shukla, climate change officer for WWF India.
   Experts say the melting of Himalayan glaciers could have serious consequences as more than 500 million residents–almost half of India’s total population–of the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra river basins rely on them for water supply.
   Research about the Gangotri glacier–which feeds the Ganges–has found the average rate of retreat has almost doubled to 34 metres per year compared to 19 metres in 1971.
   ‘Glaciers are like a frozen reservoir of water, so when glaciers recede–proportionally, there will be a decrease in the water, which affects drinking water supply, irrigation, hydropower,’ said glaciologist Jagdish Bahadur.
   This is likely to exacerbate already widespread water shortages.
   Rising temperatures will also hurt the annual June-September monsoon rains, which India is heavily dependent on for its crops.
   It is estimated that a temperature rise of between 2 and 3.5 Celsius would result in a loss of between 9 and 25 percent of revenue from agriculture–which makes up 22 percent of India’s GDP and employs 70 percent of the workforce.
   Besides, researchers say rising temperatures will mean vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will spread to higher altitudes known for being free of mosquitoes.
   In the Sunderbans, off India’s east coast, scientists say two of the 104 islands have disappeared over the past decade partially due to rising sea levels.
   ‘Both islands were inhabited and thousands of people were forced to relocate to some of the other islands,’ said Sugata Hazra, who teaches oceanography at Jadhavpur University in West Bengal, adding that 12 more islands were vulnerable.

US-led troops and aircraft Friday attacked a group of militants preparing to launch a rocket attack in eastern Afghanistan and killed twenty seven rebels, the military said.
   The attack happened in eastern Paktika province’s Bermel district, the coalition forces said in a statement.
   ‘A ground patrol moved to the site and confirmed that two were killed and another five are suspected dead,’ the statement said.
   Separately a militant was killed and another was injured when a bomb they were planting on a roadside went off prematurely in eastern Kunar province late Thursday, a police official said.
   The injured man was detained by US-led troops for questioning, the official said.

When Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa called women ‘birth-giving machines’ he outraged the many Japanese who have shed traditional gender stereotypes, confirming their suspicions that Japan’s leaders are out of step with the times.
   The gaffe–which coincides with a slump in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s popularity–has prompted opposition party calls for Yanagisawa to step down and has given the ruling camp another headache as it gears up for an upper house election in July.
   ‘My wife scolded me,’ Yanagisawa told Japanese reporters this week after having told local party faithful on Saturday: ‘Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head.’

Egypt’s politically active blogger community has brought to light another torture case against the regime’s security services amid a rising tide of outrage over police brutality.
   On Saturday, lawyers from the Association for Human Rights and Legal Aid will go to court in a last-ditch effort to keep alive the case against a state security officer accused of torturing to death a man he arrested three and a half years ago.
   ‘The most significant aspect of the case is this is the first state security officer to truly be put in front of a criminal court,’ said Mohsen Bahnasi, a member of AHRLA’s board, referring to the country’s feared plainclothes security service.
   Mohammed Abdel Qader and his brother were summoned to a Cairo police station on Septem-ber 16, 2003 by Safwat.

Floods blocked roads and railways in Jakarta and thousands of people abandoned their homes in low-lying areas as torrential downpours virtually paralysed the Indonesian capital Friday.
   Streets normally jammed with traffic were quiet as floods brought public transport to a near-standstill, preventing many people from getting to work or school.
   ‘I have been waiting for my bus for almost an hour. They are very few and far between and, when it comes, it is packed,’ said Hana, waiting in Kampung Melayu bus terminal for a bus to her office in central Jakarta.
   The president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was also reportedly working from home.
   Sutiyoso, the governor of Jakarta, put the entire city on emergency alert, with the worst-hit areas in the west on the highest warning level.
   ‘All places are in the third alert situation except west Jakarta area like Angke where–it is in the first alert situation as it has been inundated by three-metre (ten-foot) waters,’ he said, according to the state Antara news agency.
   The floods have forced thousands of people to flee homes in lower-lying areas and districts along river banks, following heavy rains that have lashed the capital since Wednesday.

Sri Lanka has started imposing fines on foreigners overstaying their visas in a bid to crack down on illegal employment, the top immigration controller said Friday.
   Foreigners who overstay face fines between 25 to 100 dollars under the new laws which went into effect from Thursday, said Controller of Immigration and Emigration B Abeykoon.
   ‘Around 600 foreigners were deported last year without a fine but we believe the actual number of those overstaying is much higher,’ Abeykoon said adding that the figure could be more than 10,000.
   Most foreign nationals are given a 30-day visa on arrival in Colombo. Sri Lanka recently relaxed visa restrictions on nationals from South Asian nations as part of moves to encourage regional tourism.
   Those overstaying have been caught working illegally at construction sites, in farms and even operating casinos and massage parlours.
   Last year, immigration authorities busted an Internet-based commercial sex service run by foreign nationals.

More than 30 people were killed Friday when a truck exploded in the southern Philippines, destroying a passing bus packed with passengers, officials said.
   Body parts were scattered over a wide area after the massive blast, which killed the truck driver and an unknown number of bus passengers. The death toll could reach 50 with bodies difficult to count, officials said.
   An AFP reporter at the scene said he saw a leg hanging from a tree and a severed head in a ravine, with pieces of flesh and intestines lying on the road.
   Only the smouldering chassis of the truck remained, making it difficult to determine the kind of vehicle involved.
   Regional military chief Colonel Emmanuel Sison said explosives experts indicated that the tanker may have been carrying carbon dioxide and caustic soda rather than liquefied gas as had been thought at first.
   Sison said the truck swerved and slammed into a hillside. While bystanders tried to help the driver and his passenger, a commuter bus was passing the area when the truck’s cargo suddenly exploded.
   Survivor Dexter Yabo said he and his brother were in a car heading to Pagadian when they witnessed the explosion.
   ‘The truck suddenly swerved. We got off our vehicle and tried to help but when we were some 30 meters (yards) away, we heard someone yelling, ‘It’s exploding’. And then there was a powerful blast,’ Yabo said as he was being treated in hospital.

Fighting between warring Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip raged overnight and into Saturday morning, wounding eight people and shattering an embryonic ceasefire, doctors and witnesses said.
   The Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, and exiled Hamas political supremo Khaled Meshaal declared the now dormant ceasefire between the feuding rivals on Friday after internecine fighting killed 25 people in just 24 hours. The duelling factions agreed to meet again in Gaza on Saturday in a bid to revive the truce–the second ceasefire to collapse in a week.
   Fighting in Gaza City between the ruling Islamist Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah faction included fierce skirmishes near the headquarters of the Fatah-dominated security services where five people were wounded, medical sources said.
   Two others were wounded in clashes along Gaza City’s seafront, where many of the city’s finest hotels are located.
   Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan blamed Fatah for ‘violating’ the truce by launching grenades at the ministry of information and opening fire on the agriculture ministry.
   Explosions rocked the city where the once-bustling streets remained quiet and deserted after days of fighting, save for nervous-eyed militants manning fortified positions amid the sporadic rattle of gunfire.
   In the south Gaza town of Khan Yunis, one person was wounded when gunmen set fire to the campus of the Al Quds University, which has strong ties to Fatah, a day after Abbas’s presidential guard stormed Gaza’s Islamic University, sending plumes of black smoke billowing into the sky.
   Sixty people have been killed since January 25 in the deadliest factional fighting since Hamas won a general election last year, limiting the once-dominant Fatah’s grip on Palestinian power to the presidency.
   The latest bout of bloodletting began on Thursday when Hamas ambushed a presidential guard convoy it said was shipping weapo-ns–a charge flatly denied by Fatah.
   Six Palestinians, including four pro-Fatah security officers and a Hamas militant, were killed on Thursday. Another 19 died on Friday, including a seven-year-old child, a 38-year-old woman, two teenagers, three presidential guardsmen and a deputy intelligence commander.
   As the two sides continued to battle, Abbas and Meshaal agreed to meet in the Muslim holy city of Mecca next Tuesday on the initiative of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
   The Abbas-Meshaal summit will be a second rare meeting for the two leaders after talks in Damascus on January 21 ended without a breakthrough to halt the Palestinian power struggle.
   ‘King Abdullah’s call for dialogue in Mecca is very important and we are going to respond favourably as soon as we receive an official invitation from the kingdom,’ Abbas said on Friday.
   Fatah, moderate and secular, and Hamas, radical and Islamist, have tried for months to form a national unity government acceptable to Western donors in the hope of ending a crippling aid freeze.

The Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, said on Friday Pakistan and India should stay steadfast against hardliners and militants opposed to a peace process between the two old rivals.
   Musharraf told a news conference relations with India had never been better and he was ‘reasonably optimistic’ about their three-year-old peace process but there was a danger of setbacks.
   ‘I think there is good optimism towards a resolution but we have to tread the ground carefully so that we don’t slide back,’ he said.
   The nuclear-armed neighbours have fought three wars since their independence in 1947 and nearly went to war a fourth time in 2002.
   Tension has eased since they began peace talks in early 2004 but progress has been slow, including on their core dispute over the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, where Muslim militants have been fighting Indian rule since 1989.
   Musharraf, in an apparent reference to the militants who have for years enjoyed Pakistani support, said some people were opposed to the peace process.
   ‘We cannot take the people who are on confrontationist course, who think that it is only military, it is only militancy, which will solve the problem,’ he said.
   ‘They can’t be on board. So they will remain opposed to whatever we do and they will create all obstacles. We have to be steadfast against what they all do.’

At least five people were killed in floods in Jakarta with more than 100,000 others forced to camp out at roadsides and in emergency shelters after days of torrential downpours, officials said Saturday.
   With more rain forecast, disaster officials said they were struggling to cope. Hundreds of troops and navy personnel equipped with inflatable boats and rafts were deployed to help the capital’s worst-hit areas.
   ‘We have done the optimum effort to evacuate people but because of the number and the vast area to cover we hope people understand (the problems we are facing),’ Sugeng Triutomo from the national disaster management body (Bakornas) told ElShinta radio.
   More than 100,000 people had been displaced by the rainy-season floods, the state Antara news agency reported, citing Bakornas figures.
   Bakornas official Sunardi said five people were killed and tens of thousands of homes flooded.
   ‘We have yet to count offices, school buildings and hospitals inundated by the floods because we are still focusing on evacuating flood victims,’ he told Antara as the rains started again Saturday evening.
   Hundreds of families were seen huddled together by roads on higher ground after fleeing their flooded homes in the city, which is criss-crossed by 13 rivers.

Even if the US president, George W Bush’s new Iraq plan succeeds militarily by quelling violence in Baghdad, US spy agencies warn, the war-torn country’s political leaders may fail to avert disaster.
   Declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate, the consensus view of all 16 US spy agencies, painted a grim picture Friday of the prospects for the embattled president’s ‘new way forward.’
   The publicly-released NIE ‘key judgments’ buttress Bush’s position in some ways—cautioning against a hasty US withdrawal—but challenge some of the basic underpinnings of the revamped strategy he unveiled January 10.
   Bush has ordered 21,500 more US combat troops to Iraq in an effort to pacify the capital and al-Anbar province and give the fledgling Baghdad government breathing room to pursue last-ditch efforts at political reconciliation.
   But where the president’s plan calls for handing Iraq’s security forces control over their country by November, the NIE warns they ‘will be hard-pressed in the next 12-18 months’ to take on key new roles.
   And ‘even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation,’ it said.
   The White House pounced on the report’s dire warning of ‘spiralling violence and political disarray,’ with possible intervention by Iraq’s neighbours and increased attacks by al-Qaeda if US forces stage a hasty withdrawal.
   ‘Stepping back now would be a prescription for fast failure and a chaos that would envelope not only Iraq, but also the region, and could potentially, by giving al-Qaeda a safe haven in Iraq, result in risk and threats to the United States,’ said national security adviser Stephen Hadley.
   At the same time, Hadley and other top senior national security aides quickly found themselves on the defensive over whether, as the report warns, the nearly four-year-old conflict bears the hallmarks of civil war.
   ‘It’s not an adequate description of the situation we find ourselves,’ he said, quoting the NIE’s findings that ‘the term ‘civil war’ does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq.’
   But the report went on to say that ‘the term ‘civil war’ accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization, and population displacements.’
   ‘It’s not, I think, just a matter of politics or semantics. I think it oversimplifies it. It’s a bumper sticker answer to what’s going on in Iraq,’ said US Defence Secretary Robert Gates.

The British prime minister, Tony Blair, will seek to rally members of his Labour Party Saturday, calling for a focus on policy rather than a police corruption probe that has seen him quizzed twice and two senior aides arrested.
   ‘The fourth (general) election (due before 2010 at the latest) will not be decided by current events,’ he was to tell Labour’s national policy forum, according to extracts of his speech released by his office in advance.
   ‘It will be about whether we have the dynamism, energy, vision and above all clear, well-thought-out policies for Britain’s future.’
   Blair is currently in the eye of a storm over the ‘cash for honours’ investigation, which centres on whether political parties illegally offered seats in the unelected upper House of Lords for financial donations.
   In a BBC radio interview Friday, the prime minister defied opposition calls for him to quit because of the row and open concern from within the Labour ranks about its effects on party support and trust in the political process.
   As the British media sensed blood, Blair will refocus attention on policy, telling Labour members that the next general election would be about ‘who understands the modern world best and who can change it for the better’.
   ‘It will be about things that endure, not controversy that passes,’ he was to say.
   Blair has pledged to stand down between July and September but observers believe he could go sooner because the row is damaging his political stock and undermining his authority.

Sex, corruption scandals and a full-blown inquiry into the failures of the Lebanon war are tightening the noose around the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and his Kadima party.
   President Moshe Katsav has suspended himself pending rape and sexual harassment indictments, ex-justice minister Haim Ramon has been found guilty of an ‘indecent act’ and Olmert grilled for hours about the war against Hezbollah.
   ‘Ramon’s conviction will help weaken Olmert, who was already in a difficult situation, even more,’ said Efraim Inbar, political studies professor at Israel’s Bar Ilan University.
   ‘Ramon was one of the Kadima pillars, a political strategist. He brought many voters to Kadima because of his popularity. He’s now totally out of the game,’ the academic added.
   The 56-year-old former minister was found guilty on Wednesday under sexual harassment laws of forcibly kissing a woman soldier 35 years his junior at a party on July 12, the day the Hezbollah-Israel war broke out.
   His political career in tatters, Ramon’s departure as one of the premier’s most gifted allies, the political brains behind Kadima and stalled plans to withdraw from much of the occupied West Bank, has hit Olmert hard.
   Even before Ramon’s conviction, one opinion poll found that if snap elections were held today, the right-wing Likud party would win at least 32 seats in the 120-member parliament while Kadima’s share would crash to nine.
   The same poll found that 77 per cent of respondents want an official investigation into the conduct of the Lebanon war to recommend that Olmert and his deeply unpopular defence minister Amir Peretz resign.
   Olmert himself faced a six-hour grilling on Thursday by the Israeli commission, which will now draft its preliminary report by March. If found directly responsible for failings, it could seal his political fate.
   Kadima–which Olmert inherited when his long-time mentor and then prime minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke six weeks after founding it–has always been an unwieldy melange of miss-matched elements.
   Uniting dissidents from the Likud and the centre-left Labour party, Kadima won fewer seats than predicted without Sharon at the helm, and since the Lebanon war, has shelved its main policy platform of drawing Israel’s permanent borders.
   ‘Some Kadima officials, like (foreign minister) Tzipi Livni are already making moves to succeed Olmert. Others, on the right wing of Kadima, are preparing their comeback to the Likud,’ said Inbar.
   ‘Kadima doesn’t have a real political structure. It has no activists on the ground. It’s a possible scenario that it would disappear like many centrist parties did in the past.’
   On top of that, the prime minister is facing increasingly uncomfortable corruption allegations despite his flat denials of any wrongdoing.
   He is suspected of intervening to help a friend while acting finance minister in 2005 during the privatisation of Israel’s second-largest bank. He faces allegations of nepotism and Jerusalem property scams.
   Another corruption probe into the tax authority has implicated Olmert’s personal secretary. The finance minister, Avraham Hirshson, faces graft allegations.
   None of that is particularly new, says political analyst Ilan Greilsammer, pointing to years of malaise in Israeli politics.
   ‘Without doubt there is a build-up of sex and corruption scandals affecting the political class and disgusting the public, hand in hand with the war in Lebanon which was perceived as a failure,’ he said.
   ‘But we have always had this in Israel. Just look back 10 or 15 years.’

Sri Lanka’s president Mahinda Rajapakse visited a former Tamil Tiger bastion and offered fresh peace talks on Saturday to end decades of ethnic bloodshed.
   The president said he was ready to offer a political package to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to halt the separatist violence and asked the guerrillas to lay down weapons and return to talks.
   ‘They must begin surrendering weapons and come for talks,’ Rajapakse said while visiting this town wrested from rebel control two weeks ago after fighting that killed 45 troops and 331 rebels by official count.
   Top presidential aide, Basil Rajapakse, a brother of the president, said the guerrillas could lay down arms in a phased manner if they gave an initial firm commitment to decommission.
   ‘The laying down of arms can be done in a stage-by-stage basis,’ said the president’s brother who was accompanying Rajapakse along with officials and journalists.
   The rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam held Vakarai, 330 kilometres east of Colombo, as a de facto separate state for over 10 years before being driven out two weeks ago.
   ‘What we have done is to liberate the people from terrorists,’ Rajapakse said of the estimated 30,000 residents here.
   ‘I am here to thank the troops for their action without causing a single civilian casualty.’

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani on Saturday asserted that Tehran allows United Nations officials free reign to inspect the country’s atomic sites, amid claims it is blocking inspectors.
   ‘According to the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty–Iran allows the inspectors the freedom to carry out their inspections,’ Larijani was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.
   ‘Any type of cooperation is carried out on this basis,’ he said, adding, ‘We have said from the start that we accept all international arrangements to become a nuclear state.’
   He added that Iran supports ‘all peaceful methods to regulate the Iranian nuclear issue’ but cautioned, ‘The nuclear issue has completely become part of Iran’s fate and its development’ and that ‘no one can prevent it.’
   Diplomats at the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency told AFP Friday that Iran had begun installing 3,000 centrifuges, the machines which enrich uranium, in a huge underground bunker at its main nuclear facility in the central town of Natanz.

A senior Pentagon official responsible for Guantanamo detainees resigned Friday over his public criticism last month of lawyers who defended the prisoners, a Pentagon spokesman said.
   Cully Simon, deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affairs, ‘did submit his resignation and the Defence secretary, Gates accepted it,’ said Bryan Whitman.
   ‘Given the controversy surrounding him personally–he made the determination that it was going to hamper his ability to be effective in the position,’ the spokesman added.
   In a Federal News Radio interview on January 11, Simon said he found it ‘shocking’ that major US law firms were rushing to defend ‘terrorists’ locked up at the US facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He provided a list of firms.

Two crew members were killed when a US army helicopter crashed and burned north of Baghdad Friday, apparently brought down by enemy fire, the US Department of Defence said.
   The US military issued a statement confirming that a military helicopter went down northwest of Baghdad.
   ‘Two soldiers were killed when the helicopter went down. Their remains have been recovered and the site secured,’ the statement said.
   The military statement did not identify the type of helicopter or say what caused the crash, but a US defence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said it was an army AH-64 Apache gunship.
   ‘The initial report is that it was a shoot-down,’ said the official.

China has launched an experimental navigation satellite into space, state press reported, the nation’s first space launch since it tested a satellite-killing missile last month.
   The Beidou (Big Dipper) satellite was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launching Centre in southwest China’s Sichuan province aboard a Long March 3-A rocket, Xinhua news agency said.
   The satellite separated from the rocket 24 minutes into the flight and has successfully entered its planned orbit, the report said.
   The launch was the first since China shocked the world on January 11 with a successful missile test that destroyed an orbiting Chinese weather satellite.
   The satellite-killing missile raised global concerns of a renewed arms race to weaponise outer space.
   The test made China only the third country in the world–after the United States and the former Soviet Union–to down an object in space.
   Saturday’s satellite launch was the fourth in the nation’s Beidou (Big Dipper) experimental navigation satellite system that began in October 2000, Xinhua said.
   The system is expected to be fully operational for clients in China and Asia by 2008
   and according to current
   plans the network is to be expanded into a global positioning system in the future, it said.
   The system will provide ‘navigation and positioning services in transportation, meteorology, petroleum prospecting, forest fire monitoring, disaster forecast, telecommunications and public security among others,’ it said.
   China is one of several countries in the world capable of developing such a system on its own, it added.

Kashmir vows ‘iron hand’ in police killings
Indian Kashmir promised Friday to use an ‘iron hand’ against police who kill civilians and claim they are rebels in hopes of getting rewards or promotions. The pledge came a week after authorities began a probe into the alleged shooting death of a carpenter in a ‘false encounter’ with police in Kashmir, where an Islamic separatist revolt has been raging since 1989. The victim, Abdul Rahman Padder, was reportedly detained in the summer capital Srinagar in December 2006. He was killed and later described by police as a Pakistani militant. ‘It is the government’s firm resolve to deal with an iron hand with those policemen responsible for killing of innocents just for getting promotions or rewards,’ Indian Kashmir chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said.
— AFP

More bones found at ‘House of Horrors’
Parents of children allegedly butchered in an Indian bungalow found more bones overnight, sparking fresh protests Friday over the serial rape and murder of 21 people near this northern village. Police officers outside the shuttered bungalow of the main accused Moninder Singh Pandher said the bones were found in silt dug out from a drain where 42 bags filled with human body parts were recovered earlier. ‘They appear to be part of lower human jaws but we are not sure,’ inspector Jagdish Singh said at the site. Pandher and his servant, Surinder Koli, face 21 charges of rape and murder. Villagers say that as many as 40 children have disappeared since 2004.
— Reuters/ bdnews24.com

Thailand eyes insurgent link in New Year blasts
Thai investigators said Friday that a suspect in the deadly New Year’s Eve blasts in Bangkok may have links to the Islamic separatist insurgency raging in southern Thailand. Until now, Thailand’s government has denied any link to the southern unrest and insisted that the blasts were the work of factions in the military or police linked to oust prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. But the head of the Department of Special Investigation, Sunai Manomai-udom, told local television that one suspect seen on security cameras was also wanted in connection with attacks in Muslim-majority provinces of southern Thailand.
— AP

Bus crash kills 19 in Indian Kashmir
At least 19 passengers died and 23 were injured when an overcrowded mini-bus skidded off a highway and plunged down a steep gorge in Indian Kashmir on Friday. The passengers were travelling to a religious function when the vehicle crashed, witnesses said. ‘Rescue workers have lifted 19 dead bodies from under the wreckage,’ said senior police superintendent Farooq Khan. Thirteen of the injured were in critical condition. The cause of the accident near Dabbar village in Rajouri district, northwest of Indian Kashmir’s winter capital Jammu, was not immediately known.
— AFP

15 crushed to death in wall collapse in Mumbai
At least 15 labourers were crushed to death Saturday when a wall they were building collapsed near India’s financial capital Mumbai, the police said. ‘Fifteen workers died when one of the walls of the warehouse suddenly gave way,’ said Ramrao Wagh, police chief of Navi Mumbai, which neighbours the city. ‘We have six labourers injured. They appear to be out of danger,’ Wagh said. It was not immediately known how many workers were at the site when the wall collapsed or whether other workers might be trapped. Rescuers dug through the debris with bare hands and shovels while others used earth-moving equipment to shift the rubble.

Ten held in KSA on funding terror charges
Saudi authorities have arrested 10 people suspected of illegally collecting money to fund terror-related activities, the interior ministry has said. Seven Saudis and a foreign resident were detained late Friday after they were caught ‘undertaking these activities’ in Jeddah province in the west of the kingdom, a ministry spokesman said, quoted by the state SPA news agency. Two other Saudis linked to the group were arrested separately in Jeddah and the Muslim holy city of Medina, the spokesman said. The detainees are suspected of ‘carrying out banned activities, including collecting donations in an illegal way and smuggling the funds to suspicious sides that use them to lure to trouble spots,’ the spokesman said.

Serbia to hold crisis talks over Kosovo
Belgrade was on Saturday seeking a new strategy after admitting that a United Nations plan for Kosovo paved the way for it to achieve independence, against the will of Serbs who see the province as their historic heartland. UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari’s Kosovo plan, which he delivered to Belgrade on Friday, avoided the word ‘independence’ but offered the trappings of statehood to the ethnic Albanian-dominated province. The Pro-Western Serbian president, Boris Tadic, dismissed the plan as ‘unacceptable’ before calling a crisis meeting on Monday of all parliamentary parties to urgently discuss the matter.

UN stresses urgency for AU mission to Somalia
The UN Security Council Friday said it was urgent for the African Union to deploy its peacekeeping mission to Somalia in order to speed up the evacuation of all other foreign forces from the violence-torn region. After consultations on Somalia, the Slovak ambassador Peter Burian, council president for February, told reporters the panel ‘welcomed the African Union’s intention to establish such a mission in Somalia,’ as expressed at the AU summit this week in Addis Ababa. Council members, he added, ‘underlined the urgency of its deployment in order to help create the conditions for the withdrawal of all other foreign forces from Somalia and the lifting of emergency security measures currently in place.’

US expects progress in N Korea talks
The chief US negotiator with North Korea said Saturday he expects progress in next week’s multinational talks on scrapping its nuclear weapons. The assistant secretary of state, Christopher Hill, urged the communist state, which staged its first nuclear test last October, to make ‘some real changes on the ground’ towards disarmament. Hill, speaking on arrival in South Korea for preparatory talks before the December 8 six-party meeting in Beijing, did not elaborate. Experts believe the two sides have discussed a freeze of activities at the North’s plutonium-producing Yongbyon nuclear reactor in return for economic benefits.
— AFP