Tiger rebels were locked in intense battles in the island’s northeast on Saturday, for a second straight day, as both sides reported heavy casualties.
   The defence ministry placed its losses at nine soldiers killed and 45 hospitalised while military sources listed another 45 troopers as ‘walking wounded.’
   The ministry said the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and security forces were locked in combat near their de facto border in the Vavuniya district and that a total of 20 rebels were killed in the past two days.
   However, the pro-rebel Tamilnet.com website said the Tigers lost only six fighters and reported killing 60 Sri Lankan troopers and beating back a military advance.
   ‘The Sri Lanka army soldiers were forced to flee the battlefield with tractor loads of dead bodies,’ Tamilnet quoted an unnamed Tiger official as saying.
   Following the fall of the former Tiger bastion of Vakarai in January, the military has vowed to flush out the rebels from the east of the island.
   The guerrillas said about 2,000 families in the area were displaced by the latest heavy fighting.
   Defence ministry spokesman Prasad Samarasinghe said the military had moved to neutralise Tiger gun positions and that the offensive was not aimed at capturing rebel territory.
   The heavy fighting forced the closure of the de facto border crossing point at Omanthai, local officials said adding it remained shut on Saturday.
   Before the main thrust of the fighting erupted on Friday, the military had claimed killing 13 Tiger rebels in two locations of the island’s north the previous night.
   More than 4,000 people have been killed in a new wave of fighting in Sri Lanka since December 2005. The violence comes despite a truce in place since February 2002.
   The LTTE has been waging a 35-year-old campaign for an independent homeland for Sri Lanka’s 12.5 per cent Tamil minority in this majority Buddhist nation of 19.5 million people.
   The latest violence came as troops carried out clearing operations in the east of the island after simultaneous Tamil Tiger attacks left at least 20 people dead and dozens more wounded on Wednesday, officials said.
   Another six rebels were killed in a confrontation in the Batticaloa district on Friday night, military officials said.
   They said troops fired rockets at suspected Tiger positions in the jungles of Thoppigala in Batticaloa on Saturday, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.
   Security forces had also deployed small groups of soldiers to attack Tiger locations inside the vast jungle area from where the Tigers have been launching strikes against troops in Batticaloa, officials said.
   Official figures show nearly 150,000 people have been listed as ‘internally displaced’ in Batticaloa since the military captured a key Tiger base there in January.

A Hindu judge took over as new acting chief justice of Pakistan here Saturday in the shadow of a judicial crisis that has jolted the country’s military leader Pervez Musharraf.
   Rana Bhagwandas, the senior judge of the Supreme Court, along with four other senior judges, will deal with the fate of chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, who was suspended and charged with misconduct by the president on March 9.
   National and regional bar associations boycotted Bhagwandas’ oath-taking ceremony held at the branch office in Karachi of the Islamabad-based top court amid tight security.
   The 64-year-old judge from Sindh province replaced justice Javed Iqbal who was as acting chief judge for two weeks as Baghwandas was on leave to India.
   Lawyers have held daily countrywide protests since the suspension of Chaudhry. Eight judges and a deputy attorney general have already resigned in protest.

Tens of thousands of poor farmers and tribal people marched in Jharkhand on Friday in the latest protest against government plans to turn farmland into low-tax industrial parks to stimulate development.
   As they marched through the streets of Ranchi protesters promised further agitation unless the government scrapped its policy of setting up so-called special economic zones.
   But in a speech on Friday, the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said the government was not backing down, promising that the policy would ensure humane treatment to those forced from their land in exchange for cash compensation and, in some cases, employment.
   ‘In the process of implementation, we have been exposed to certain problems which cannot be dismissed. It is the strength of our democracy,’ the Press Trust of India quoted him as saying.
   ‘If we find there are some flaws in our policy, we can set in motion a mechanism to redress those gaps in our policy.’
   The protests in Ranchi come just over a week after police opened fire on villagers protesting against a planned SEZ in Nandigram, an area in the neighbouring state of West Bengal, killing at least 14 people.
   ‘The government should immediately form an alternative model of development based on self-reliance and free from imperialism,’ KN Pandit of the newly formed People’s Development Movement against Displacement said in a speech to the crowd.
   The protest was backed by the Maoist insurgency that has spread to about half of India’s 29 states and has been described by prime minister Singh as the country’s biggest internal security challenge since independence in 1947.
   ‘This is not just a Maoist movement, this is a war by poor farmers and they have all taken an oath to fight,’ Pandit added, as thousands of farmers applauded under the gaze of armed policemen.
   Villagers sang revolutionary songs and waved red flags and placards that said: ‘Say no to displacement, say no to deaths.’
   The killings at Nandigram were the worst violence yet over moves to acquire land for SEZs, and could undermine broader efforts to push farmers off their land to make way for factories in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, analysts say.
   Farmers have been pushed off their land to make way for factories for decades in India, but in recent months isolated protests have coalesced into a national movement against accelerating industrialisation.
   Facing huge criticism, the communist-ruled government in West Bengal permanently dropped its plans to build an industrial hub in Nandigram. In response to protests earlier in the year New Delhi had already put all proposed SEZs on hold.

The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, on Saturday dismissed US criticism of a forthcoming referendum on constitutional changes, ahead of a visit by the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.
   ‘We take the path towards reform with conviction and without looking back,’ Mubarak told a gathering in the southern city of Assiut.
   ‘I will not accept pressures or orders or conditions,’ he said. ‘I will not be swayed into gambling with the future of this nation and I will be relentless in defending the future of its people.’
   Rice said on Friday that the lack of democratic change in Egypt was disappointing and voiced her concern over Monday’s referendum. The Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, earlier on Saturday urged Washington not to interfere with domestic political issues.
   ‘The United States and Egypt have friendly and strategic relations but Egypt cannot allow its friends’ intervention in its internal affairs,’ Abul Gheit told reporters after a meeting between the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and Mubarak.
   In his speech Mubarak insisted that the amendments would mark a step forward in Egypt’s political life, without ignoring the threat of terrorism.
   ‘The dangers of terrorism will continue to increase in this region,’ he said. ‘The amendments will take into consideration the necessity to strike a balance between the need to move forward in our political life and the preservation of Egypt’s stability and security.’
   Egyptian opposition and human rights groups have described the constitutional changes, which have already been approved by parliament, as a major setback for pluralism and basic freedoms.

A Marine Corps special operations unit has been ordered out of Afghanistan amid an investigation into a March 4 incident in which the US soldiers allegedly fired on civilians, marine spokesmen said.
   At least eight civilians were killed and 35 wounded after a US military convoy was ambushed by a suicide bomber in Nangahar province, prompting the US forces to open fire.
   The Afghan government charged that the civilians were killed by US gunfire, prompting a US military investigation.
   Members of the unit who are still required for questioning in the ongoing investigation will remain in Afghanistan, said lieutenant colonel Lew Leto, a marine spokesman, on Friday.
   But the rest of their 120-member company is being redeployed out of Afghanistan and will rejoin the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit elsewhere in the region, he said.
   He said they were being pulled out because the commander of the marine corps special operations forces decided the unit could no longer be effective in conducting counterinsurgency operations after the March 4 incident.
   ‘That’s why they were moved out. Not because of the investigation,’ Leto said.
   The civilian deaths sparked angry protests that drew hundreds of people to the site of the attack, chanting ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Afghan president Hamid Karzai.’

Threatened by the Taliban and corrupt police, regarded with suspicion and in danger of capture, Afghan journalists say they risk their lives working in the lawless south.
   In the city of Kandahar, reporters installed in a ‘press centre’ in a local hotel spend much of their time rushing to the scenes of bombings and counting the dead and wounded in front of the ripped-up body of a suicide attacker.
   This small group of men, many of them freelancers for foreign media, say security has deteriorated over the past year, pointing to an ambush that included rocket-propelled grenade fire in the city and several assassinations.
   Now, they say, the risks are even higher, with the freeing March 19 of an Italian journalist in exchange for five Taliban prisoners–a deal widely condemned as setting a dangerous precedent.
   ‘The freeing on Monday of the Italian journalist was a victory for the Taliban,’ says Fazal Rahman, president of a journalists’ union in Kandahar.
   ‘They (the Taliban) know now that they can get what they want by kidnapping a journalist. It is difficult to feel secure in that context.’
   Militants seized Italian Daniele Mastrogiacomo in Helmand, a flashpoint of the Taliban insurgency, neighbouring Kandahar. They beheaded his Afghan driver and have not yet released his Afghan translator.
   Moving outside of Kandahar city has long been difficult because of Taliban, corrupt police and bandits operating on some roads, says journalist Salih Mohammad Salih. But now it ‘must be 10 times more dangerous.’
   The arrival of an Afghan ‘asking strange questions’ and in a tribal area that is not under government control can arouse suspicion, says the young man, one of a few journalists who regularly visit Helmand.
   ‘I originally come from that province. They know my tribe, my family, but despite that, I do not say I am a journalist,’ says the reporter for Azadi radio, the Pashtun service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
   ‘It is sometimes difficult to know who you are dealing with,’ he says.
   ‘I know if the Taliban arrest me, it is the end for me. I work for ‘infidel’ media. And my government will never help me,’ he says.
   In parts of the south like Helmand, where military officials acknowledge that remote areas are in militant control, even those representing the government can encounter problems.
   ‘On one side is the Taliban who threaten us because we report on what NATO is doing and on the other the local authorities who don’t want us to talk to the Taliban,’ Salih says.
   ‘It is an area without law where the Taliban, like the security forces, are a threat.’

Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan has denied reports that his family performed Hindu religious ceremonies to lift a curse from Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai who is engaged to marry his son.
   ‘Nothing like this ever took place,’ the actor told this week’s edition of the Indian magazine ‘The Week,’ calling the widespread media accounts of the ceremonies ‘intrusive and insensitive.’
   The marriage of 33-year-old former Miss World Rai and 31-year-old heart-throb Abhishek Bachchan is expected to be Bollywood’s biggest wedding in years, but no official date has been announced.
   Last November the family travelled with Rai to a temple on the banks of the sacred river Ganges in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi for what the Indian media reported were prayers to clear up mismatches in their stars.
   According to media reports, the Bachchans–known as the first family of Bollywood for their dominance of the entertainment industry–carried out the ceremonies to offset the curse of being a ‘manglik’ hanging over the green-eyed Rai.
   Anyone who marries a ‘manglik,’ which is determined by the position of Mars in a person’s horoscope, could fall ill and suffer a premature death, according to astrologers who play a huge role in the everyday lives of Indians.

The Indian government is considering some steps towards reducing the army’s presence in Kashmir, after a fall in violence and as a gesture towards the region’s people and politicians, officials said on Friday.
   The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has been under pressure from the leader of a Kashmir coalition ally who threatened to bring down the state government if some of the roughly 500,000 troops were not withdrawn.
   Mufti Mohammad Syed, leader of the People’s Democratic Party, which is part of the ruling coalition in Kashmir, met Singh on Thursday and said discussions would continue on his demands.
   Syed said the level of violence in Kashmir had fallen since India and Pakistan launched a peace process over the disputed region in 2004, and therefore some troops should go back.
   An official involved in the high-level talks said a package of measures was on the table and said an agreement was likely.

The US State Department is dispatching an official to the Philippines to look into charges that security forces are behind a spate of extrajudicial killings, the foreign department said Saturday.
   US deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs Eric John will arrive sometime in April, the foreign affairs secretary, Alberto Romulo, was quoted as saying.
   The move comes after both a US Senate panel and a UN rapporteur in recent months linked Philippine security forces to many of the killings of leftists.
   The Inter-Parliamentary Union is also sending a three-member fact-finding team to the Philippines in April to look into the murders.
   ‘He (John) has requested to visit the Philippines so he would know more about what were doing and he wants to look at our side because of what was projected there is the propaganda so he wants get at the facts and figures,’ said Romulo.
   ‘We’ll be happy to talk to him and we really welcome him because we want to tell him what’s happening, including the evidence and witnesses that we have,’ he added.

The external affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, on Saturday concluded his visit to Japan during which he sought Tokyo’s support for the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal and initiated steps to add depth to India-Japan strategic and global partnership, including in the areas of defence and security cooperation.
   During his first official visit to Japan as the external affairs minister, Mukherjee called on the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and held talks with his counterpart Taro Aso, launching the first Ministerial-level Strategic Dialogue between the two nations.
   Mukherjee and Aso exchanged views on ways to enhance cooperation on regional, multilateral and global issues. They reached a common understanding that India and Japan have a responsibility to respond to regional and global challenges and they must play an active role in the promotion of peace and stability in Asia and the world as a whole.

Taliban fighters attacked police posts in southern and southeastern Afghanistan overnight, sparking battles that left 16 rebels and five policemen dead, the police said Saturday.
   The attacks occurred late Friday, the same day a commander announced Taliban fighters had ambushed a convoy ferrying supplies to foreign troops, killing at least 14 guards and drivers in one of the biggest incidents of its kind.
   Insurgents stormed a police post near the Uruzgan capital Tirin Kot, touching off a battle that lasted hours, provincial police chief general Mohammad Qasim said. ‘Five Taliban and two police were killed and another 10 Taliban and four police were wounded,’ he said.
   Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said the movement was responsible.
   In a separate incident, the Islamist militants attacked a police post on the Kabul-Kandahar highway in Qalat, capital of Zabul province, the police detection commander Mohammad Asif said.

Two suicide bombings and other attacks killed 47 people in Iraq on Saturday, underscoring the apparent powerlessness of officials to contain the raging insurgency in the war-torn country.
   In the most lethal attack, a suicide bomber killed 20 Iraqis by driving a lorry packed with explosives and bricks into a police compound in Baghdad’s militant stronghold of Dura.
   The bomber penetrated the tightly guarded compound by seemingly posing as a driver bringing building materials for construction work being carried on at the site, a security official said.
   He steered the truck past the first police checkpoint before blowing up both body and vehicle, damaging the front of the main police station and gouging a giant crater out of the ground, splattering body parts and debris.
   Sixteen policemen, two detainees in police custody and two civilians were killed, while another 26 people were taken to hospital with injuries, the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
   ‘There were many corpses lying in the compound of the police station. Some of the bodies were burnt, while some had shrapnel wounds... and many cars destroyed,’ said one US soldier who quickly rushed to the scene.
   Dura, a known haunt of al-Qaeda in Iraq fundamentalists, is one of the most volatile districts of Baghdad where Iraqi and US forces have concentrated raids in a huge security operation launched last month to try to quell unrest.
   The efforts of around 90,000 Iraqi and US troops have seen a reduction in execution-style killings, considered the hallmark of Shiite militias, but spectacular bombings, long favoured by Sunni insurgents, have continued.
   In another deadly bombing, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a sweet shop in the northern town of Tal Afar killing 10 people and wounding three, the town’s mayor Najim Abdallah al-Juburi said.
   Another 17 Iraqis were killed in other violence on Saturday, as authorities opened an investigation into a twin-bomb assassination attempt against the government’s top Sunni Arab official, the deputy prime minister, Salam Zubayi.
   Ten of the 17 were killed by another truck bomb that heavily damaged a small Shiite religious site just as worshippers finished prayers in the mixed sectarian town of Al-Haswa, south of Baghdad, police Haider al-Shammari said.
   The US army also announced the deaths of two more soldiers, bringing the latest American military casualties to 3,229, according to the Pentagon.
   In their investigation into Iraq’s latest high-profile assassination attempt, the authorities were interrogating detained bodyguards of Zubayi over the bomb attack on Friday that kept him in hospital for a second day.
   The brazen attack inside Zubayi’s heavily guarded personal compound while he was praying on the Muslim day of rest exposed the perilous security of even top-ranking officials and underscored tensions within the Sunni community.
   The prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, said he had ordered a full inquiry into the suicide and car bombing that killed nine people, including Zubayi’s brother. The minister is understood to be stable after surgery at a US army hospital.

Contrary to his earlier assertions, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales took part in a confidential meeting on firing seven out of eight US attorneys now at the centre of a political controversy, documents released late Friday show.
   The e-mails and other papers sent by the Justice Department to Congress indicate that on November 27, Gonzales attended an hour-long meeting on the firings with his then-chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, the man in charge of putting together a list of those to be dismissed.
   According to the documents, in late November, Sampson was still struggling with the task as he tried to determine which prosecutors would lose their jobs.
   The list was finalised days after his meeting with Gonzales in the attorney general’s conference room, and the seven attorneys were formally notified of their dismissals on December 7. The eighth attorney was fired earlier.
   A calendar entry showed that the subject of the meeting was the future of US attorneys.
   The documents contradict Gonzales’s earlier assurances that he played no active role in the firings that have since mushroomed into a heated political dispute between Democratic-controlled Congress and the White House.
   The attorney general told reporters two weeks ago that the dismissals were an ‘effort that was led by Sampson’ and that they ‘never had a discussion about where things stood.’
   The unexpected release of the latest documents came after Sampson earlier Friday informed the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the controversy that he will testify under oath about the matter.
   But while admitting that the meeting between Gonzales and Sampson took place, Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse insisted there was still no proof the two discussed the upcoming firings.
   ‘The information available to us does not indicate that there was discussion at this meeting about which US attorneys should or should not be on the list,’ Roehrkasse said.

All 11 people on board a cargo plane shot down over Mogadishu on Friday killed, a Red Cross-Red Crescent official said.
   ‘All the 11 are dead. Ten died on the spot and one died in hospital,’ the official, who asked not to be named, told AFP on Saturday.
   The Belarussian plane was hit by a rocket shortly after takeoff from Mogadishu airport and crashed in the capital’s northern Karan neigbourhood, according to Somali government spokesman Hussein Mohamed Muhamoud.
   The Red Cross-Red Crescent, which operates at the hospital where the victims of the crash had been brought, did not specify their nationalities.
   Airport officials said the plane had brought engineers and equipment to Mogadishu to repair another, an Ilyushin-76 chartered by the African Union, which was hit by a rocket and seriously damaged when landing two weeks ago.
   Friday’s rocket attack came as fighting erupted for a third straight day in Mogadishu, breaking a ceasefire agreement between Somalia’s powerful Hawiye clan and the Ethiopian army made only hours earlier.

Accompanied by a soundtrack ranging from Beethoven to the Beatbox Battle Allstars, Europe’s leaders celebrate half-a-century of peace, democracy and unity this weekend, but finding harmony on the EU’s future direction is proving tough.
   Leaders from the EU — which turns 50 on Sunday — are gathering for two days of revelry in the German capital featuring classical concerts, fine art and all-night techno music. There is also serious work for presidents and prime ministers from the 27 nations who must agree on a ‘Berlin Declaration’ which their German hosts hope will point the way for a fundamental overhaul of the EU by 2009.
   Leaked drafts show the birthday declaration to be heavy on lofty ideals recalling how the EU has helped establish peace, prosperity and democracy on a continent that spent much of the previous half-century mired in war, depression and dictatorship.
   ‘European unification has made peace and prosperity possible. It has brought about a sense of community and overcome differences,’ the draft states. ‘Each Member State has helped to unite Europe and to strengthen democracy and the rule of law.’
   The declaration is not expected to contain any explicit reference to its troubled constitution nor to any plans to bring in members beyond its current borders.
   The omissions reflect widespread public disillusionment with an organization seen by many as a distant and overbearing influence on the lives of citizens, particularly in countries of Western Europe where the EU’s proud record in overcoming wartime rivalries and developing post-war economies no longer resonates with a younger generation.

Malnutrition among Central American children is ‘a massive emergency’ killing thousands every day and compromising the region’s economic future, a United Nations World Food Programme official said.
   Pedro Medrano, the Food Programme’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, said that countries in the region need only ‘political will’ to deal with the chronic problem, which he said is costing their economies some six billion dollars per year.
   ‘Child malnutrition is a massive emergency, because it is jeopardising the future of Central American countries and of the Dominican Republic,’ said Medrano, speaking on the sidelines of the Inter-American Development Bank’s annual meeting here.
   ‘We believe that when a country has a 50 per cent level of chronic malnutrition, we are talking about a national emergency, one that does not appear in the news media, but which means that ever day thousands of children are dying of malnutrition.
   At the meeting, senior finance ministry officials for Central American nations and the Dominican Republic signed a document on Monday committing to eradicating chronic child malnutrition in their respective countries.
   According to the IADB, it is the first time the nations commit to prioritise fighting chronic child malnutrition, and the first time the region’s finance ministry officials agree on joint measures for nutrition.
   ‘We are talking about a million and a half children in Central America. This region has the resources. It is only a matter of political will to prevent hunger among children,’ Medrano said.
   Medrano cited a recent study by the WPF and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean showing the grave impact how grave the situation is for Central American economies.
   ‘Our estimates are that the economic cost of malnutrition is between two per cent and 12 per cent of gross domestic product,’ depending on which country, or an average of six per cent for the Central American region, he said.
   ‘This is approximately an average of six billion dollars lost annually by Central American countries due to malnutrition.’
   Proper care and nutrition of children at their earliest ages ‘are fundamental to overcome poverty and assure economic growth and the stability of the countries,’ he said.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has abandoned plans to address the UN Security Council ahead of a vote on fresh sanctions against Tehran, with Washington angrily accused of scuppering them.
   Ahmadinejad had asked to address the council to defend his country’s position on its controversial nuclear programme, but an official in Tehran said he will not travel to New York because his visa would not arrive in time.
   ‘President Ahmadinejad’s trip has been made impossible because of the lateness in supplying a visa by the United States,’ the official said late on Friday.
   ‘Because of this, it is not possible to get the visa to Tehran on time, and the president’s trip has therefore become virtually impossible.
   ‘The United States deliberately issued the visas late to prevent the president from going, and they are responsible. Also the visas for the team members who would have accompanied him were not issued, which makes the trip impossible,’ the official said.
   Foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini accused Washington of ‘deliberate and conscious negligence.’
   ‘The delays in granting the visas were planned in such a way that the trip, given the particularly long distance involved, could not take place,’ he said.
   The foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, who is already in New York, will speak in the president’s place, a ministry spokesman said. But Washington denied any visa delays.
   ‘We provided visas to president Ahmadinejad’s delegation, including his security and aircrew, in time for him to come to New York and speak at the Security Council on Saturday,’ said State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey.
   ‘Any suggestion that visa issues are the cause of President Ahmadinejad’s decision not to travel to New York is false.’
   Casey also said Washington’s UN mission ‘has been informed that President Ahmadinejad has now decided not to come to New York.’

Mozambique on Saturday began three days of national mourning after an explosion at an arms depot in the capital left at least 96 people dead and more than 400 injured, many of them children.
   Officials said the death toll could rise as they combed through the rubble.
   ‘There are still some bodies in the rubble. Once we have recovered all the bodies, the number of deaths could pass 100,’ the head of the Maputo municipal council, Enneas Comiche, said.
    Comiche said 81 people were killed instantly when a series of bombs, mines and rounds of ammunition in the country’s largest arms depot exploded late Thursday and descended on nearby poor neighbourhoods, triggering fires and causing residents to flee in panic.