Israeli troops killed a Palestinian father in Nablus on Monday as the army pressed on with its biggest crackdown on militants in the northern West Bank city in nearly a year.
   Anan al-Tibi, 41, was shot in the neck and killed and his 22-year-old son Ashraf was wounded when Israeli soldiers stormed their home in Nablus’s Old City, Palestinian medical sources said.
   The densely populated warren of pedestrian streets, shops and sweet vendors for which Nablus is renowned, was sealed off and under curfew for the second straight day as the army continued to search house-to-house for weapons caches and wanted militants in a city the Jewish state considers a ‘terrorist hub.’
   The Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, condemned the operation, in which 11 people have also been wounded, and warned that it threatens to hobble a renewed peace push in the region by the United States.
   ‘This operation is unacceptable and violates the spirit of the trilateral meeting with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert,’ Abbas said according to his spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina.
   Bursts of gunfire and the blare of army loudspeakers demanding residents evacuate buildings and militants surrender echoed through otherwise empty streets as Operation ‘Hot Winter’ kept the West Bank’s second largest city under siege.
   Palestinian security sources said troops broke into the local television station Senabel overnight, confiscating transmitters, computers, videos and arresting its owner, 43-year-old Nabigh Breik. The Israeli army had no immediate confirmation.
   Some residents continued to fight back, throwing rocks, bottles, small explosives and a rubbish bin at Israeli soldiers. Nine Palestinians were lightly wounded by rubber bullets in the clashes, medics said, while two Israeli soldiers were wounded by a small pipe bomb, according to the army.
   The army has detained around 30 Palestinians since pouring dozens of jeeps and armoured vehicles into the city centre early on Sunday. Five of those detained were wanted men and remain in custody, while the others were released, the army said.
   On Sunday, the army discovered an explosives lab in Nablus, the second uncovered in two days. The lab contained an Israeli army missile, pipe bombs, and fertilizers used for making explosives, army spokeswoman major Avital Leibovich said.
   The crackdown in Nablus, which comes on the heels of a foiled suicide bomb attack against Tel Aviv last week, is the largest operation in the West Bank since a raid in Ramallah on January 4 left four Palestinians dead.
   Hamas chief in Moscow
   to drum up support
   Khaled Meshaal, political leader of militant group Hamas, began a mission here on Monday to enlist Russia’s support for lifting international sanctions on the incoming Palestinian government.
   Arriving from Damascus, where he lives in exile, Meshaal said he hoped Russia could help secure the ending of the economic blockade imposed on the Palestinian government by the Middle East diplomatic Quartet–Russia, the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.

An Israeli cabinet minister has been questioned over corruption allegations, the police said on Monday, the latest in a string of scandals implicating top officials in the Jewish state.
   Yaacov Edery, minister for Jerusalem affairs, was questioned under caution for several hours by national police and fraud department officials on Sunday, the police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
   ‘Edery is suspected of having received bribes several years ago when he was deputy public security minister,’ he said. ‘The questioning took place, at his request, in a location selected by him.’
   Local media reported that Edery, a member of prime minister Ehud Olmert’s centrist Kadima party, was questioned about his role in an embezzlement scandal linked to clerks at the rabbinical court in Israel’s northern city of Haifa.
   The allegation against Edery is the latest in a series of scandals to strike the country’s leadership.
   Olmert himself faces a criminal graft probe. A corruption investigation into the tax authority has implicated his personal secretary and graft allegations have also been brought against finance minister Avraham Hirshson.
   In the most series charges ever levelled against an Israeli leader, president Moshe Katsav faces indictment for rape and sexual harassment.
   Last month, former justice minister Haim Ramon was also found guilty under sexual harassment law for forcibly kissing a woman soldier.

Raucous opposition MPs disrupted parliament on Monday, accusing the ruling Congress of trying to avoid extraditing an Italian businessman wanted in an arms scandal and known to be a friend of party chief Sonia Gandhi.
   Ottavio Quattrocchi, a key accused in the Bofors gun bribery scandal, has been wanted in India for questioning for years and was held at an Argentine airport on February 6 under an Interpol arrest warrant.
   It took more than two weeks for the news to be made public, and that too through a government leak, sparking allegations that the Congress-led coalition was hiding it to allow the one-month deadline to seek Quattrocchi’s extradition to pass.
   On Monday, opposition lawmakers forced both houses of parliament to be adjourned briefly as they accused the government of a cover-up.
   ‘Sonia Gandhi is a thief, Congress party is a thief,’ opposition lawmakers shouted.
   Italian-born Gandhi is the widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, whose reputation suffered over charges he profited from the arms deal. The scandal contributed to the fall of his government in 1989.
   Quattrocchi is accused of receiving $7 million in bribes as a middleman in the $1.2 billion purchase of artillery from Swedish arms maker Bofors AB in 1986 for the Indian army.
   Quattrocchi, who has denied any wrongdoing, left India in the early 1990s and lived in Malaysia and Europe.
   A previous attempt to extradite him from Malaysia failed as a court there turned down a petition by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation.
   The CBI last week said it would make a fresh attempt and is planning to send a team of officers to Argentina.
   A Delhi court exonerated Rajiv Gandhi of any wrongdoing in 2004. Rajiv was assassinated in 1991 by a suspected Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger suicide bomber.
   Other key figures in the case have also since died and Bofors has changed its name. But the scandal is still fodder for opposition parties who use it to attack Sonia and Congress.
   Newspapers criticised the government as well as Congress.
   ‘This time, the Congress and the government have been found to be hiding the fact from the nation that ... Quattrocchi ... has been caught in Argentina,’ the Asian Age said.

Diplomats who reached a breakthrough agreement with North Korea earlier this month backed down on demanding Pyongyang give up nuclear weapons immediately, a Japanese press report said Monday.
   A first draft at the six-nation talks in Beijing had called on North Korea to abandon nuclear weapons and the facilities which produce them as ‘initial’ steps in return for fuel aid, Kyodo News reported.
   But after North Korea rejected the draft, the United States agreed to put the onus on the communist state shutting down its main nuclear reactor, the Japanese agency said, quoting unnamed ‘negotiation sources.’
   Under the deal, energy-starved North Korea–one of the most impoverished regimes in the world–stands to receive an eventual one million tonnes of fuel oil if it permanently disables its Yongbyon reactor.
   The agreement has been unpopular in Japan and among some US conservatives who wanted more forceful action on the nuclear arsenal of North Korea, which tested an atom bomb in October for the first time.
   The lengthy negotiations two weeks ago showed that the focus of the six-way talks ‘has apparently shifted from denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula to nonproliferation of nuclear materials,’ Kyodo News said.
   Its report said Japan pressed for a tougher stance but had limited influence due to its own tense relations with North Korea.
   The final agreement referred to nuclear weapons by reiterating a commitment to a September 2005 statement, under which North Korea agreed in general terms to give up its nuclear arsenal in return for aid and security guarantees.
   The latest round also set up five working groups including one on the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.
   The six-way talks include China, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia and the United States.
   
   Japan urges N Korea to
   come clean on uranium
   Japan urged North Korea Monday to come clean on its suspected secret atomic programme based on enriched uranium after reaching a breakthrough nuclear deal at six-nation talks.
   The February 13 agreement, which initially binds North Korea to shut key nuclear facilities in exchange for energy aid, requires Pyongyang to produce a list of all nuclear programmes.
   Asked if the suspected highly enriched uranium programme will be addressed in the next round of talks, the chief cabinet secretary, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, said, ‘It is a matter of course to include it.’
   ‘We hope they come forth to have in-depth talks,’ said Shiozaki, the top government spokesman said.
   Japan has tense relations with North Korea and has refused to fund the six-way deal.

The US ambassador on Monday called on the Philippines to end extra-judicial killings following two reports implicating top military commanders in a wave of political assassinations.
   ‘Human rights are critical to every country that is a democracy and I think the important thing now is the government of the Philippines has put together some very good ideas. Let’s get them into action,’ Kristie Kenney told reporters.
   ‘Let’s beef up the human rights in the Armed Forces of the Philippines and make every effort to investigate, prosecute those responsible, exonerate the innocent,’ she remarked.
   Local rights groups say more than 800 people have been murdered for political reasons since Arroyo took office in 2001.
   Kenny did not say whether the United States, the Philippines’ main defence ally, would play a role in the reform effort.
   Her remarks came after a government commission and a United Nations rapporteur last week both said the armed forces, one of the most powerful institutions in the country, were behind many of the murders.
   Presidential spokesman said Sunday the government would follow the recommendations of the special government commission on extrajudicial killings.
   The commission recommended the introduction of a witness protection programme and said a special court should be established to try those involved.
   UN envoy said last Wednesday the military were in ‘almost total denial’ about the need to take action on the murders, which have tarnished Arroyo’s administration and drawn international criticism.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il remains firmly in control of the communist state despite economic woes and an influx of foreign culture, South Korea’s intelligence chief said Monday.
   Kim ‘is maintaining strong control of the regime overall, as seen in the fact that his grip on power is firm and there are no factions within the ruling class,’ Kim Man-Bok, head of the National Intelligence Service, was quoted by his agency officials as saying.
   Kim, speaking at an annual forum for Seoul’s diplomats, said rumours of a failed coup or a mass escape from a concentration camp were ‘distorted information from brokers’.
   The rumours were sparked off by an annual winter exercise and inspections of border patrol guards which had taken place since December, he said.
   Kim’s grip on power remains strong despite prolonged economic troubles and the growing influx of foreign culture, the intelligence chief said.
   The communist nation suffered a prolonged famine in the mid-1990s in which hundreds of thousands died and it still experiences severe food shortages.
   The state-run economy collapsed in the same decade, partly due to a decline in aid and trade as the Soviet bloc disintegrated. Despite modest growth in recent years, output and living standards remain far below 1990 levels, according to a US State Department report.

Britain was to release details Monday of a new deployment to Afghanistan to bolster its 5,600-strong force in the troubled country.
   The defence secretary, Des Browne, was to tell parliament in depth why more troops were to be sent to the restive southern Helmand province–after last week criticising some other NATO countries for not doing enough to help.
   Nearly 50 British troops have died in Afghanistan since the US-led war was launched in October 2001, many of them since last summer when Britain took over NATO command spearheading a push into the volatile south of the country.
   With a renewed spring offensive from the Taliban expected, Browne said Friday that more troops were vital in places like Helmand.

Some 300 people in Thailand’s violence-torn southern province of Yala protested Monday to demand that the government do more to halt a spiralling Islamic insurgency.
   Local business people led the march through Yala town, which in recent months has become a focal point in the three-year conflict that has left nearly 2,000 people dead.
   ‘The government is trying to solve our problems in the wrong way. These voices are coming from the private sector to show what should be done,’ the town’s mayor, Pongsak Yingpon-gcharoen, told reporters.

The British foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, was due to meet the president, Pervez Musharraf, and other Pakistani officials here Monday for talks on the fight against Taliban militants on the Afghan border.
   The visit by Beckett, who arrived late Sunday, comes as Islamabad faces pressure from its western allies to curb the cross-frontier movement of insurgents ahead of an expected spring offensive by the Taliban.
   Pakistani foreign office spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam confirmed Beckett would meet her Pakistani counterpart Khurshid Kasuri for talks on ‘bilateral relations, the situation in Afghanistan and the Pakistan-India peace process.’
   Other senior officials said the British minister would meet Musharraf, a key ally in the US-led ‘war on terror’, and the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz.
   ‘It is in the context of recent efforts by the international community to help Pakistan tackle the border regions and make a collective push against the Taliban spring offensive,’ added another official.

Human bones stacked up around Cambodia as monuments to Khmer Rouge victims will not be cremated, the country’s premier vowed Monday, saying they must be kept as evidence of the regime’s atrocities.
   The prime minister, Hun Sen, rejected calls to burn the victims’ remains according to Buddhist tradition, saying this would hamper efforts to try the former regime leaders.
   His comments came as a United Nations-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal continues to flounder amid allegations of graft and infighting over the trials’ internal rules.
   ‘We really don’t want to keep the corpses of our people for tourists to see, but it is evidence of genocidal crime,’ Hun Sen said in a speech delivered near the Choeung Ek killing fields, where thousands were slaughtered.
   ‘There are demands to cremate (the bones) in order for the victims’ souls to be reborn. But if the bones are gone, the Khmer Rouge trials cannot be done,’ he added.
   Up to two million people died under the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge regime, which abolished religion, property rights, currency and schools in its drive to create an agrarian utopia
   Regime leader Pol Pot died in 1998, and so far only one potential defendant is in custody awaiting trials that could start later this year.

A sick woman in Orissa was beaten to death by her in-laws because they suspected she had AIDS and feared she would infect the rest of the family, a newspaper said on Monday.
   Sabita Behera, a 30-year-old widow from a village in Puri district in Orissa, was suffering from a fever for several days which her in-laws believed was due to the deadly virus, the Asian Age reported.
   There was no test conducted to determine the cause of her illness, the newspaper said.
   The woman’s husband died three years ago of a liver-related disease which his family believed was also linked to AIDS, the daily said.
   Fearing that the rest of the family would contract the disease, her in-laws killed her late on Saturday, the newspaper quoted police officer GS Nanda as saying. Two members of the husband’s family have been detained.
   AIDS activists say a lack of awareness and widespread stigma and discrimination has
   contributed to paranoia about the virus and also forced thousands of patients to hide their infection and shy away from social life.

Iran said on Monday it was up to the West to give ground and end the standoff over its nuclear programme as world powers met in London to discuss further punitive measures against Tehran.
   ‘The great powers have to put an end to our worries and respect the right of Iran,’ said the deputy foreign minister, Saeed Jalili, according to the Fars news agency.
   ‘We have done what was necessary to put an end to their worries. It is their job now to end our worries and win our confidence,’ he added.
   Jalili’s reaffirmation of Iran’s position that it has done all it can and that the ball is now in the court of Western powers came a day after the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, vowed Tehran would not retreat over its nuclear drive.
   Ahmadinejad compared the Iranian nuclear programme to a ‘train without brakes or reverse gear,’ in a graphic metaphor of his government’s refusal to bend to Western pressure.
   In December the UN Security Council imposed limited sanctions against Tehran over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment, a process that the West fears could be used to make nuclear weapons.
   Diplomats from Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States were to meet in London later on Monday in a bid to thrash out a consensus on how to bring Tehran into compliance.
   Washington has never ruled out the prospect of military action to halt Iran’s nuclear programme, and US Vice President Dick Cheney said in Australia at the weekend that ‘all options are still on the table.’
   The United States and Israel accuse Iran of seeking nuclear weapons. Tehran denies the charges, insisting that its atomic programme is peaceful in nature.
   Russia ‘worried’ about Iran attack
   The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said on Monday that Moscow was ‘worried’ about the possibility of US military action against Iran.
   ‘We are worried that the forecasts and suppositions of a possible attack on Iran have become more frequent,’ Lavrov said at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin shown on state television.
   Lavrov referred in particular to comments made last week by the US vice president, Dick Cheney, who said that ‘all options are still on the table’ for Washington to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The highest UN court cleared the Serbian state on Monday of direct responsibility for genocide in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war, but said it had violated its responsibility to prevent genocide.
   Bosnia had asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to rule on whether Serbia committed genocide through the killing, rape and ethnic cleansing that ravaged Bosnia during the war, in one of the court’s biggest cases in its 60-year history.
   It was the first time a state had been tried for genocide, outlawed in a UN convention in 1948 after the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. A judgment in Bosnia’s favour could have allowed it to seek billions of dollars of compensation from Serbia.
   ICJ president Judge Rosalyn Higgins said the court concluded that the Srebrenica massacre did constitute genocide, but that other mass killings of Bosnian Muslims did not.
   But she said the court ruled that the Serbian state could not be held directly responsible for genocide, so paying reparations to Bosnia would be inappropriate even though Serbia had failed to prevent genocide and punish the perpetrators.
   ‘The court finds by 13 votes to 2 that Serbia has not committed genocide,’ she said.

Sudan on Monday rejected the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court in pressing charges over the conflict in Darfur, still ravaged by war and famine four years after the violence erupted.
   Last week the ICC—which is authorised to judge war crimes or crimes against humanity if national jurisdiction lacks the ability to do so—announced that its prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo will present evidence on Tuesday of alleged war crimes committed in Darfur.
   The judges will then decide whether to open an inquiry against the suspects with the aim of eventually issuing international arrest warrants. But Sudan has rejected the ICC’s authority, arguing that the country’s judiciary is perfectly capable of trying its own criminals.
   ‘The position of Sudan is that this court has no jurisdiction when it comes to trying Sudanese,’ Minister of Justice Mohammed Ali al-Mardhi was quoted by the Akhbar al-Yom as saying.
   This applies to Sudanese officials, members of the security forces as well as the rebel groups in the troubled western Sudanese region, Mardhi said.

Guinea’s embattled president Lansana Conte has agreed to change his prime minister, prompting trade unions in the west African country to end a crippling general strike, a top union leader said Sunday.
   ‘President Conte has agreed to a scenario that ends the crisis by naming a consensus prime minister by March 2’ from among candidates proposed by the trade unions and civil society leaders, Ibrahima Fofana said.
   Fofana, head of the National Union of Workers of Guinea, added that representatives of his labour body had, along with others who launched a crippling general strike on January 10, voted to suspend the stoppage from Tuesday.

The Iraqi vice-president, Adel Abdel Mahdi, and a cabinet minster were wounded in a Baghdad attack on Monday when a bomb hidden in a ceiling at the public works ministry exploded, killing four people.
   Abdel Mahdi, who was visiting the ministry at the time, was lightly wounded when the device went off in a meeting room.
   The attack came as a city-wide security plan failed to halt the vicious sectarian carnage between hardline Sunni and Shia factions in Baghdad, with at least eight other people killed in attacks in and around the capital.
   ‘The vice president got a scratch on his foot,’ said Shia lawmaker Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a member of the vice president’s political coalition.
   ‘He went to the Ibn Sina Hospital and he was given the normal tests. He left immediately afterwards and he’s in his office,’ he said.

Fourteen Iranian military personnel were killed in a helicopter crash last week during an operation against rebels close to the Turkish border, the Revolutionary Guards confirmed on Monday.
   A statement carried by the ISNA agency said that two commanders of the Guards’ ground force and 12 other military personnel were killed in Friday’s accident. Kurdish rebels had claimed they shot down the aircraft.
   ‘Commanders Ghahari Said and Dorosti of the Guards’ Hamzeh Army 3, along with 12 other members of the Islamic republic’s army and the Guards, were martyred in the helicopter accident,’ the army statement said.
   It said the operation against the ‘mercenary elements opposing the Islamic republic were carried out in the valleys close to the town of Khoy’ 50 kilometres from the Turkish border.
   Iranian state media had earlier reported that the crash was ‘an accident due to bad weather.’ The Revolutionary Guards had said on Saturday they killed 17 rebels in the operation after besieging them.

Methods used by private western security companies to recruit mercenaries in poor countries and send them into dangerous areas like Iraq are deeply worrying, according to a UN report to be presented next month.
   Private security guards employed by western companies make up the second highest number of armed forces currently posted in Iraq, after the US military but ahead of the British troops, according to Jose Luis Gomez del Prado, the head of a United Nations workgroup on the use of mercenaries.
   ‘At least 160 companies are operating in Iraq. They probably employ 35,000 to 40,000 people,’ Gomez del Prado said on the sidelines of a second workgroup session in Geneva last week.
   More than 400 of these private employees have died in Iraq since 2003, putting their casualties below the number suffered by US armed forces but ahead of British military deaths, he said. ‘And a lot more have been injured.’
   The workgroup is scheduled to deliver a report to the UN Commission for Human Rights next month emphasising concerns over mercenary recruitment methods used by US companies like Triple Canopy and Blackwater.
   Many of the recruits stem from former police and military forces in the Philippines, Peru and Equador, according to the workgroup, which recently conducted missions to the latter two countries.
   ‘They are trained quickly but not prepared for armed conflict situations,’ Gomez del Prado said.
   ‘They are sent there, they receive M16 (assault riffles) and are placed in very dangerous areas like the Green Zone (in Baghdad), convoys and embassies,’ he added.

Islam is growing fast among African Americans, who are undeterred by increased scrutiny of Muslims in the United States since the September 11 attacks, according to imams and experts.
   Converts within the black community say they are attracted to the disciplines of prayer, the emphasis within Islam on submission to God and the religion’s affinity with people who are oppressed.
   Some blacks are also suspicious of US government warnings about the emergence of new enemies since the 2001 attacks because of memories of how the establishment demonised civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
   As a result, they are willing to view Islam as a legitimate alternative to Christianity, the majority religion among US blacks.
   ‘It is one of the fastest-growing religions in America,’ said Lawrence Mamiya, professor of religion at Vassar College, speaking of Islam among black Americans.
   He said there were up to 2 million black US Muslims but acknowledged there are no precise figures.
   ‘It’s not viewed (by authorities) as a threat because the numbers are small and once we get past the war on terror and all the negative images then it will continue to spread.’
   Black Americans typically attend mosques separate from Muslims from immigrant backgrounds despite sharing common beliefs, according to Aminah McCloud, religious studies professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
   But imams in Atlanta, a US centre for black Muslims, said they were subjected to less scrutiny than Muslims from the Middle East and Indian sub-continent.
   Many blacks converted during the civil rights era, when Malcolm X helped popularise the Nation of Islam, attracting boxer Muhammad Ali among others. Islam still attracts prominent blacks such as rapper Scarface, a recent convert.
   But the Nation of Islam has declined as a force at the expense of an association of mosques led by Warith Deen Muhammad, the son of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, who died in 1975.
   At a street-corner mosque in one of Atlanta’s oldest and poorest neighborhoods, a recent Friday sermon illustrated the power of the history of Islam in the United States for blacks.
   Men and women sat separately on the mosque floor, heads covered, as cleric Nadim Ali recounted stories from history of Muslim slaves brought from Africa who struggled to uphold their faith in the face of slaveholders’ opposition.
   If Muslims could remain true to Islam under slavery, the audience should follow their example, Ali said at the Community Masjid of Atlanta in the city’s West End district.
   ‘You are talking about a people who were cut off from their roots– Islam reconnects you with Africa and with other parts of the world so your people hood transcends race,’ Ali said later in an interview.
   The mosque has a direct link to a slice of black history. It was founded by H. Rap Brown, a one-time member of the 1960s Black Panthers group. Brown became a Muslim in prison in the 1970s and changed his name to Jamil al-Amin.
   He was convicted for killing a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia in March 2000 and is serving a sentence of life without parole, but in his absence the mosque has continued what Ali said was the low-profile work of building a local Muslim community.

Romano Prodi, given a second chance to prove that he can govern Italy, scrambled for support on Sunday ahead of a vote of confidence this week that he must win to stay on as prime minister.
   Prodi resigned last week after suffering an embarrassing defeat over foreign policy in the upper house. But Italy’s president asked him on Saturday to stay on as premier and put his majority to the test in parliament.
   Prodi needs to prove he has enough support in both chambers of parliament to keep his government afloat. The votes are expected to take place on Thursday and Friday.
   While his fractious Catholics-to-communists coalition has a comfortable majority in the lower house, in the 315-seat Senate the bloc is effectively level with the opposition, forcing him to court outside senators for support. Prodi appeared to have won the backing of two extra senators, an independent and a Christian Democrat who served as deputy prime minister in Silvio Berlusconi’s previous, centre-right government.