North Korea said Friday it will maintain its war mobilisation posture against feared US attacks, despite this week’s deal aimed at dismantling its nuclear weapons programmes.
   A senior official also praised the country’s nuclear weapons, just days after the North agreed in principle to give them up.
   In a joint letter to leader Kim Jong-Il on his 65th birthday, state media said the communist country’s party, government, military and people vowed to follow his guidance to build a ‘powerful socialist state.’
   ‘People’s Army soldiers and the people will maintain war preparedness to the full to deal with US imperialists’ manoeuvres for aggression,’ said the letter, according to the Korean Central News Agency.
   ‘If the enemies dare ignite the fire of war, we will mobilise all our powerful combat potential built up through the maelstrom of Songun (army-first) revolution, mercilessly crush the enemies and achieve the historic task of national unification,’ it said.
   Such rhetoric is not unusual in a country which since its founding has regarded Washington as its principal foe.
   North Korea, the United States and four other nations agreed in Beijing Tuesday on disabling the North’s nuclear programme in exchange for aid and diplomatic benefits.
   The letter was adopted at a meeting of representatives of the communist party, government and army late Thursday on the eve of Kim’s birthday. At the meeting, parliament speaker Choe Thae-Bok said its nuclear weapons helped maintain peace and security in Northeast Asia.
   ‘The successful nuclear test last year represents a proud victory of Songun politics, a historic event in the 5,000 years of the Korean nation and a thrilling demonstration of the greatness and might of the socialist North Korea,’ he said.
   ‘By proudly ascending to the status of a nuclear-armed state... we are now able to defend the socialist fatherland against any nuclear war threats or aggression from any enemies and contribute to protecting peace and security in the Northeast Asian region.’
   Choe said the North was closely watching with heightened alarm the US attempt to ‘stifle’ it.
   ‘Our army and the people will never sit idle should anyone dare attempt to hurt the sovereignty and dignity of the republic,’ he was quoted by the official news agency as saying.
   
   North Korea likely forced into nuclear deal: S Korea
   North Korea was probably pushed to take a deal to shut down its nuclear reactor in return for aid because of its faltering economy and limited diplomatic options, a senior South Korean official said on Friday.
   In a breakthrough deal, impoverished North Korea agreed this week to seal its main nuclear reactor and the source of its weapons-grade plutonium in return for an initial 50,000 tonnes of fuel or economic aid of equivalent value.
   ‘I think they may have exhausted all the cards they had with the nuclear test,’ South Korea’s chief nuclear envoy, Chun Yung-woo, told a forum.

Sri Lanka’s navy destroyed two suspected Tamil Tiger boats off the island’s northwest coast on Friday, killing four fighters, a military official said.
   Navy patrol boats sank the two small boats near a series of small islands off the coastal district of Puttalam, and said diver’s recovered bomb-making equipment they were carrying.
   ‘The navy detected two suspicious boats this morning coming from the Indian side and ordered them to stop. They fired at us and we destroyed the two with four occupants on board,’ said navy spokesman Commander D KP Dassanayake.
   ‘Navy divers recovered 28 bags which contained 1.5 million steel balls made in India, which are used for Claymore mines,’ Dassanayake added.
   Suspected Tiger bombers have used Claymore fragmentation mines in a series of deadly ambushes in the past year amid a new chapter in a two-decade civil war.
   The Tigers were not immediately available for comment.
   In a separate incident, air force jets bombed a suspected Tiger mortar position near the border that separates the rebels’ northeastern de facto state from the besieged army-held northern Jaffna peninsula.
   More than 67,000 people have been killed since the war began in earnest in 1983–around 4,000 of those in the last year alone.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said his government was taking measures to stop terror groups from covertly raising funds for their operations on India’s sizzling stock markets.
   ‘Whatever precautionary measures are needed to deal with this type of worries that you have, they will be taken and had been taken,’ premier Singh said, without elaborating.
   ‘I do not want to contribute to further turbulence in the (Indian) stock markets,’ the premier said on the sidelines of a meeting with his Italian counterpart Romano Prodi in New Delhi.
   The comments came following a warning from Singh’s National Security Adviser MK Narayanan that terrorists were investing in the stock markets to fund their operations.
   ‘Isolated instances of terrorist outfits manipulating the stock markets to raise funds for their operations have been reported,’ Narayanan said in a speech posted online Thursday. ‘Stock exchanges in Mumbai and Chennai have, on occasions, reported that fictitious or notional companies were engaging in stock market operations. Some of these companies were later traced to terrorist outfits.’
   He called for the lifting of ‘banking secrecy’ and the ‘corporate veil’ in terrorist-related cases to combat the financing of attacks.
   Narayanan first made the comments at a high-level gathering on international security in Munich on Sunday.
   An Indian terrorism expert said that while groups had targeted domestic stock exchanges in the past, using them to fund attacks appeared to be a new tactic.
   ‘Attacking the stock market, dislocating, that has been tried in the past,’ Bahukutumbi Raman, former head of the counter-terrorism wing of India’s overseas intelligence service, said Thursday.
   ‘This kind of thing has not come to light yet. It is a new development apparently.’
   India accuses nuclear-armed rival Pakistan of fomenting Islamic militancy in disputed Kashmir, where the armed rebellion has claimed more than 44,000 lives since 1989.

The United States has failed to investigate and prosecute ‘numerous’ cases of abuse and killings of Afghan detainees implicating US military and CIA personnel, a rights group said.
   Human Rights Watch welcomed this week’s jail sentence against a CIA contractor who was convicted of beating an Afghan detainee, but the New York-based group said it was ‘singular exception to an otherwise poor record of accountability.’
   ‘No one should be above the law in Afghanistan,’ Sam Zarifi, Human Rights Watch’s Asia research director, said in a statement on Thursday.
   ‘The United States and its allies have promised to reform the rule of law and the justice system in Afghanistan, but until the US is willing to provide accountability for its own forces, these pledges are not credible,’ he said.
   A North Carolina judge on Tuesday sentenced former CIA contractor David Passaro, who was convicted of beating an Afghan detainee with a flashlight, to eight years and four months in prison.
   Passaro’s victim, a farmer named Abdul Wali, died within 48 hours of a two-day interrogation at a US military base in Afghanistan in July 2003.
   ‘One person going to prison is not accountability for widespread abuse,’ Zarifi said.
   ‘Numerous other US personnel have been implicated in detainee killings in Afghanistan, yet few have been punished — and most of those punished have received only slaps on the wrist.’
   HRW said the US military had not ‘adequately investigated numerous other cases of abuse implicating military personnel, including several killings of detainees in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003.’
   ‘Nor has the military sought to prosecute senior officers on the grounds of command responsibility for failing to stop abuses that they knew or should have known was occurring.’
   The rights group also slammed the US Justice Department ‘for failing to investigate whether civilian leadership in the CIA and military committed crimes by authorising abusive interrogations in Afghanistan.’
   ‘The failure to investigate senior US officials for their role in authorising detainee abuse is not for lack of evidence but for lack of political will,’ Zarifi said.
   ‘Only an independent prosecutor can mount credible investigations into detainee abuse issues, and Congress should press the administration to appoint one.’

Japan’s palace has gone public with its accusations against Australian journalist Ben Hills, accusing him of distorting the role of the imperial family in his biography of Crown Princess Masako.
   The Japanese government has demanded an apology and corrections from Hill for the book, which blames overbearing palace minders for plunging the career woman-turned-princess into depression.
   ‘The government became alarmed to see how distorted a picture of the imperial family this book draws,’ Makoto Watanabe, the grand chamberlain to Emperor Akihito, said in a letter to Hills released on the palace website.
   Watanabe said an unnamed veteran reporter covering the imperial family told him that ‘almost every page seems to contain an error.’
   He pointed to a passage saying the imperial family attends only uncontroversial events and would not champion a cause such as leprosy victims. Hills drew a contrast with Britain’s late Princess Diana, to whom Masako is sometimes compared.
   Watanabe said the imperial family has been involved with leprosy victims for 40 years. He also pointed to the emperor’s visits to see World War II battlefields and earthquake victims.
   ‘If all of what the emperor and empress do were meaningless formalities, as you seem to imply, why (do) more than 75 per cent of people constantly support the imperial family?’ Watanabe said.
   Hills has stood by his tome, ‘Princess Masako: Prisoner of the Chrysanthemum Throne,’ and refused demands for an apology.

Predominantly Buddhist Thailand, hit by three-year separatist insurgency in which more than 2,000 people have been killed, plans to hold talks with the Muslim rebels, Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont said on Friday. ‘It is not a negotiation, but more of a dialogue to build understanding with them, which Malaysia has supported as a good idea,’ Surayud told reporters when asked if Bangkok would formally ask Kuala Lumpur to be a mediator. But Surayud, who agreed with Malaysian counterpart Abdullah Ahamd Badawi this week to speed up attempts to develop their common border area to help end the violence, declined to say where or when the talks would be held or who would be involved.
   ‘We need to proceed step by step since we don’t want to talk about rice growing with mango farmers,’ said Surayud, who acknowledged on Tuesday his peace campaign in the Muslim south was making no headway.
   The Thai Foreign Ministry denied a report by Malaysian state news agency Bernama quoting Abdullah as saying Thailand would make a formal request to ask Malaysia to mediate talks with the separatist groups.
   ‘We believe His Excellency the prime minister of Malaysia has been misquoted,’ Thai Foreign Minister Nitya Pibulsonggram said in a statement. ‘There is no plan for such mediation that would necessiate any request,’ he said.
   After replacing Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted by a coup last year, the military-appointed government embarked on a peace offensive in the rebellious Muslim far south near the Malaysian border, but insurgent attacks have not diminished.
   Surayud went to apologise for the hard line taken by Thaksin. He also promised a place for Islamic Sharia law and development aid for one of the poorer areas of Thailand, which annexed the former sultanate a century ago.
   On Friday, eight security men were wounded in a double attack in Yala, one of the three provinces hit by daily gun and bomb attacks, police said.

The parents of 24,000 children in northwest Pakistan have refused to give them polio vaccine, often because of rumours that the drops are a US plot to sterilise them, officials said Friday.
   Government and UN agencies have asked Muslim clerics in the deeply conservative region to change people’s minds about the vaccination, said Waheed Khan, deputy director of North West Frontier Province health department.
   Pakistan last year confirmed 40 cases of crippling polio disease, the World Health Organisation says. Polio is endemic in Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

A Chinese man has been sentenced to death for conning people out of 3 billion yuan ($387 million) in a giant scam to breed ants, local media said Thursday.
   Wang Zhendong, from the northeastern province of Liaoning, fabricated a business purported to be making wine, tea and medical elixirs using mature ants, the Beijing News said.
   In parts of China, black ants are sold by the bagful to be steeped in tea or soaked in liquor as a natural remedy for ailments such as arthritis.
   Wang sold packages of ants to the investors for up to as much as 10,000 yuan ($1,290) when they were only worth 200 yuan, China Central Television reported.
   More than 10,000 people, lured by the promise of returns of up to 60 per cent, signed 100,000 contracts with Wang’s bogus company before the case came under investigation in June 2005.
   Investigators could only recover 10 million yuan of the money raised by Wang, the Beijing News said. One investor was so distraught at losing his money he killed himself, the newspaper said.

Pakistani police Friday arrested three suspected suicide bombers linked to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban who were planning attacks in the southern city of Karachi, officials said.
   Agents raided their house in the city and after a shootout recovered suicide jackets and other weapons including hand grenades, investigation chief Javed Bukhari said.
   Six other suspects managed to escape, he said.
   During the initial interrogation the suspects disclosed their plans including attacks on foreigners, police and other government officials, he said.
   ‘All three were suicide bombers and we have also recovered explosives and jackets used for suicide bombing and other weapons,’ including two Kalashnikovs, two pistols and three hand grenades, Bukhari said.
   ‘They were all trained by foreign militants in Wana,’ the main town in the semi-autonomous tribal region of South Waziristan, where Pakistani forces have battled militants.

A strike called by separatist militants to protest against Israeli excavations near Islam's third holiest shrine in Jerusalem closed most shops and businesses in Srinagar on Friday.
   Traffic was thin and most streets in the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir were deserted in response to the call by Islamist militants fighting New Delhi's rule in the disputed region.
   'We appeal to Kashmiri Muslims to protest against the nefarious designs of Israel,' Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, a hardline militant group, said in a statement. Al-Badr, another militant group, backed the call.
   Scores of Muslims shouting 'al-Aqsa mosque is crying ... down with Israel' took to streets of Srinagar and also burnt Israeli flags.
   The dig near Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque complex, known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as Temple Mount, began last week and sparked fears across the Muslim world that it could harm the mosque.
   Israel denies any harm would come to the mosque or the Dome of the Rock that stands on the site of two destroyed biblical Jewish Temples.
   Life in Srinagar, a scenic city of 1.1 million, is frequently disrupted by strikes and protests over Islamic issues, separatist causes or alleged rights violations by Indian troops.

The UN Security Council could override local objections and impose an international court to try suspects in the murder of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri, his son has told Al-Arabiya television.
   ‘If obstacles continue to block the creation of an international tribunal, I think the Security Council will impose it, invoking Chapter VII’ of the UN Charter, Saad Hariri, who is the Lebanese parliament’s majority leader, said Thursday night.
   Under Chapter VII, the Security Council can impose sanctions, or even resort to military force, if it determines the ‘existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression.’
   Lebanon is politically paralysed because the country’s pro-Syrian opposition objects to way the government has handled plans to create a Hariri court under UN auspices.
   Rafiq Hariri and 22 other people were killed in a massive car bombing in Beirut on February 14, 2005, and a preliminary UN investigation has pointed the finger at the Syrian regime and accomplices in Lebanon.
   Damascus has consistently denied any hand in the assassination of Hariri, or other prominent anti-Syrian figures since then.
   ‘It is clear,’ the younger Hariri said, ‘that Syria does not want this tribunal.

Democrats stepped up pressure on Thursday for the president, George W Bush, to halt his Iraq troop build-up, and the president warned Congress against undercutting his military strategy.
   Republican John Murtha, a war critic who chairs the House of Representatives panel that oversees military spending, said he planned to restrict war funding in a way that would effectively stop the 21,500 US troop build-up, and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid scheduled a new vote to confront Bush over Iraq.
   The political manoeuvring came as a new poll showed public support for the Iraq war continuing to fall, with 53 per cent of Americans believing the United States should bring its troops home as soon as possible, a five percentage point jump in one month and the highest level since the war began.
   Bush, in an address in Washington, warned US lawmakers against taking action that would restrict his $93.4 billion emergency troop funding measure.
   ‘Our men and women in uniform are counting on their elected leaders to provide them with the support they need to accomplish their mission,’ he said. ‘Republicans and Democrats have a responsibility to give our troops the resources they need.’
   With opposition to the Iraq war beginning to run deep in Congress, Democrats now in control of the House of Representatives and Senate are trying to assert their power of the purse in ways that they think could diminish the US military involvement, while also providing funds to support troops already there.
   Murtha hopes to choke off the 4-year-old war in Iraq by placing four conditions on combat funds through September 30. ‘We’re trying to force redeployment not by taking money away, by redirecting money,’ the Pennsylvania Democrat said.

The violence in Chad could turn into genocide similar to that in Rwanda in 1994, the UN refugee agency has warned, the BBC reports on Friday.
   The UNHCR said the killing tactics from neighbouring Darfur in Sudan have been transported to eastern Chad in full.
   The warning comes as Chad, Sudan and the Central African Republic signed a deal not to support rebels attacking each other’s neighbouring territory.
   African Union head, the Ghana president, John Kufuor, said they seemed ready to agree to an AU/UN border peace force.
   ‘They seem to be ready to accept a beefed-up force from the African Union and the United Nations to take control of the borders among them,’ Kufuor told reporters at the French-African summit in Cannes where the declaration was signed.
   More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5m displaced since war broke out in Darfur four years ago.
   Concern is now growing for the 200,000 refugees who sought shelter in eastern Chad.
   The conflict in Darfur has followed them across the border with attacks by Janjaweed Arab militia on camels and horseback leaving hundreds dead and 110,000 people homeless. The BBC’s Orla Guerin in eastern Chad says at first, the Janjaweed came from Sudan; later, locals joined in–neighbour killing neighbour.
   ‘We are seeing elements that closely resemble what we saw in Rwanda in the genocide in 1994 and I think we have an opportunity here to avoid such a tragedy from occurring again,’ UNHCR’s Matthew Conway said.
   A UN human rights mission to Darfur has been denied visas, despite a promise otherwise from President Omar al-Bashir
   UN special envoy to Darfur Jan Eliasson is trying to arrange face-to-face talks between the Sudanese government and the rebels in Darfur
   A faction of the Sudan Liberation Army that did not sign last year’s peace deal has reportedly agreed to a ceasefire and talks
   UN head Ban Ki-moon said the deteriorating situation in Darfur was unacceptable and he was still awaiting a reply from Khartoum on a UN peacekeeping force for Darfur.
   Eastern Chad and Darfur have a similar ethnic make-up, with nomadic Arab groups and black African farmers both seeking access to land and scarce water points.
   Our reporter says the violence in Chad follows the same pattern as in Darfur - mostly Arabs on camels and horseback attacking non-Arab villages.

NATO military chief General John Craddock on Thursday said US plans to put a missile defence system on Russia’s doorstep were moving forward transparently and did not target Russia.
   ‘I think it has been clearly stated as to what the United States’ intent is and that is to provide defence capability against missile attacks from a rogue nation, if you like,’ Craddock told a press conference in Warsaw.
   Washington last month announced it had begun formal talks with Poland and the Czech Republic on the defence shield, which US officials say is aimed at thwarting missile attacks from Iran or North Korea.
   At a security conference in Munich last week, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, questioned why the US missile shield had to be so close to Russia’s border.
   And on Thursday, Russian army chief Yury Baluevsky warned that Russia could withdraw from a treaty limiting short and medium-range missiles if the United States places the missile defence system in the Czech Republic and Poland, both former communist states and now members of NATO and the EU.
   ‘NATO will obviously watch this... but it will be by negotiations among nations that reasonable men will reach reasonable conclusions,’ Craddock said.
   The Polish prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said Thursday he was in favour, under certain conditions, of Poland housing missiles for the defence shield.
   His Czech counterpart, Mirek Topolanek, has given his backing to the Czech Republic housing radars for the facility.
   Craddock also said he could not understand why in his speech last week in Munich Putin had expressed strong opposition to further expansion of NATO.
   ‘The NATO alliance is composed of 26 nations and they are all democracies,’ the four-star US general said.
   ‘If there is an expansion to the border of Russia by democratic nations, I do not understand why that should be something to fear.’

US and Iraqi forces are meeting little resistance as they sweep through Baghdad, a US officer said on Friday, a day after Iraq’s president said a Shia militia had ordered its leaders to leave the country.
   The head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was wounded on Thursday when Iraqi forces intercepted a group of al-Qaeda militants heading to a volatile town north of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source said.
   Two Interior Ministry sources who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity declined to give details of Masri’s whereabouts or say how security forces knew he had been wounded.
   They said an aide of Masri had been killed in the clash, which one of the sources said occurred on a road when the militants were travelling to the town of Samarra. The US military said it was unable to confirm the reports.
   In Baghdad, Iraqi and US troops were out in force on Friday, manning checkpoints and searching vehicles for weapons under a new crackdown that exhausted Iraqis hope will stabilize the city after four years of war and worsening sectarian chaos.
   US major Steven Lamb, a spokesman for US forces stationed in Baghdad, said the offensive was going well.
   ‘I wouldn’t say there has been a high level of resistance. I mean if you take a look at the stuff that was going on yesterday, we had relatively few incidents, but that may change today,’ Lamb said.
   ‘It’s really too early to say if this is going to be a success or ... failure. But so far everyone is very pleased.’
   Lamb said sweeps had been conducted in known hot spots, such as the Shia stronghold of Kadhimiya, Sunni-dominated Adhamiya and the districts of Rusafa, Karrada and Rashid.
   Masri, an Egyptian, assumed the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq after Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a US air strike in June 2006.

The Sudanese president, Omar al-Beshir, on Friday rejected a UN peace force for Darfur
   and said he would not grant visas to UN rights monitors who want to visit the strife-torn region.
   Beshir said an international force in Darfur would remain under the aegis of the
   African Union and that the United Nations would be confined to a ‘technical and logistics role.’
   He also said that the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council, led by Nobel peace laureate and anti-landmines campaigner Jody Williams, would not be allowed to travel to Darfur because its members were biased.
   ‘There are members of that delegation who in our view are not impartial therefore it is difficult to say that they will be honest and reflect reality,’ said Beshir during a news conference on the final day of the Africa-France summit.

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, acclaimed for his leadership after the September 11 attacks, confirmed he is running for US president in 2008, eliminating any lingering doubt about his candidacy.
   ‘Yes, I’m running,’ Giuliani declared twice on Wednesday night on CNN’s ‘Larry King Live’ show.
   There have been doubts among Republicans about whether Giuliani was serious about a White House run in 2008.
   National polls have shown Giuliani leads eight other Republicans, in part because of his steely and comforting leadership amid the chaos of the 2001 hijacked plane attacks that brought down New York’s most visible landmark.

An Italian judge on Friday ordered 26 US intelligence agents, the former head of Italy’s military intelligence and eight others to stand trial over the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian imam.
   It will be the biggest case against US intelligence agents staged in an allied country and threatens embarrassing new revelations over the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme in which terror suspects were seized in one country and taken to another.
   Osama Mustafa Hassan, an Egyptian imam, was allegedly abducted on a Milan street on February 17, 2003 and taken to Egypt. He was only freed by Egypt on Sunday and has since alleged that he was tortured while in detention.
   Judge Caterina Interlandi ordered the trial to start on June 8 though none of the accused US agents are expected to return to Italy.
   The Italian government has not yet sought their extradition and Bob Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Milan and one of the defendants, said through his lawyer last month that he did not recognise the court.
   Another former CIA chief in Italy, Jeff Castelli, was also among the accused.
   Thirty-five people have been charged, 32 for kidnapping and three for complicity in the abduction.

Spanish police arrested the suspected hijacker of a Mauritanian plane who was knocked over by a hard landing and overpowered by passengers on Thursday, a source close to the Mauritanian presidency said.
   The Air Mauritania Boeing 737 was on an internal flight in Mauritania when the hijacker, armed with pistols, demanded to be flown to France, officials said. The pilot landed in Spain’s Canary Islands instead.
   ‘When the pilot landed he deliberately braked very hard. The man fell to the ground and was jumped on by passengers. He fired two bullets but there are no serious injuries,’ the Mauritanian source told Reuters.
   A spokeswoman for the Spanish emergency services said 20 people suffered minor cuts and bruises but added she knew of nobody being injured by gunfire, as one emergency services source had reported earlier.