Pakistani tribesmen traded heavy rocket and mortar fire with foreign al-Qaeda militants in a border region for a second day Friday, leaving 56 people dead, the interior minister said Friday.
   Explosions could be heard in Wana, the capital of the lawless South Waziristan tribal area bordering Afghanistan, a day after a ceasefire between the tribesmen and the mainly Uzbek and Chechen rebels broke down.
   Violence first erupted in the mountainous region on March 19 when a Taliban commander-turned-government supporter ordered foreign insurgents led by wanted rebel Tahir Yuldashev to disarm, leaving 160 people dead last week.
   ‘Fifty-four people were killed today, two were yesterday. They include 45 foreigners,’ the interior minister, Aftab Sherpao said.
   ‘The fighting is going on; it intensified today after peace talks failed. Tribes are insisting on their demand that these people either surrender or quit the area.’
   The government says the latest developments reflect the success of its policy to encourage local tribesmen to expel foreign Islamic extremists, instead of costly and politically damaging army operations.
   Local sources were not immediately able to confirm the death toll given by Sherpao, although communications in South Waziristan are poor because of the fighting. Last week they gave lower figures than Pakistani authorities.
   Earlier a security official said tribesmen overnight seized control of a school which the foreigners were using as their base in Ghawakha, a town near Wana, killing seven Uzbeks.
   Another official said three tribal fighters were also killed and six wounded in the fighting. Residents said the militants also shot dead a local man who was travelling in the area on his motorbike.

The United States pressed India on Thursday to honour its commitments to open a heralded new era of nuclear cooperation after talks this week again failed to resolve serious differences.
   US and Indian negotiators are trying to complete an agreement affirming landmark political commitments announced by the two governments in 2005 and 2006 that would let India buy US nuclear fuel and reactors for the first time in 30 years.
   But New Delhi has balked at provisions Washington considers essential, including a US requirement to halt nuclear cooperation if India tests another nuclear wea-pon, US government officials say.
   ‘We were hopeful that we would be able to make progress to close out all of the issues on the 123 (agreement) talks. Some progress was made but in our view, not enough,’ the undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns said.
   Burns, lead strategist on the deal and outspoken proponent of improving ties with the world’s largest democracy, acknowledged frustration over the stalemate.
   ‘The United States has done its part. We’ve met every commitment we said we would meet.–Right now I would say the ball is in India’s court,’ he said.
   Both sides have hailed nuclear cooperation as the centrepiece of a new US-India strategic relationship.
   India has been barred from nuclear cooperation because it refused to sign the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and produced nuclear arms in contravention of international law.
   In a first major step toward allowing New Delhi to buy US nuclear technology, Congress late last year made changes in the US Atomic Energy Act despite criticism it would undermine efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons.

At least five Sri Lankan soldiers were killed Friday in a powerful roadside explosion in the country’s north, while eight civilians died elsewhere in clashes, officials said.
   Suspected rebels detonated a Claymore mine as the soldiers were travelling along the main road near the de factor border with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at Parayanakulam, a military official said.
   The military also reported eight civilians were killed in shelling in the east of the island, where the two sides have been locked in long-range attacks.
   The defence ministry said the civilians were killed as a result of firing by Tamil Tiger rebels into populated areas of Batticaloa district. There was no immediate comment from the Tigers.
   There has been heavy fighting between the two sides in the coastal Batticaloa region, where the military captured a Tiger base on Wednesday.
   The Tiger rebels are leading a drawn out campaign for independence. More than 4,000 people have been killed in the latest wave of fighting since December 2005 despite a truce arranged by peace broker Norway in 2002.
   
   Court blocks int’l rights probe
   A Sri Lanka court blocked access for an internationally supervised team probing grave human rights abuses as the island faced mounting criticism for extra-judicial killings, police said on Friday.
   Colombo’s chief magistrate refused permission on Thursday for the Special presidential Commission investigating high-profile assassinations and massacres to have access to court records, a police official said.
   ‘We made an application to court on behalf of the presidential commission, but the chief magistrate ordered that the records should not be made

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in interviews published on Friday that the Jewish state could clinch global peace with its enemies within five years, after Arab leaders revived a peace plan.
   ‘There is a real possibility that Israel can sign a global peace accord with its enemies within five years,’ Olmert said in an interview with the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot.
   Asked whether he meant ‘all of the Arab world,’ Olmert said ‘yes.’
   The interviews with several Israel’s leading dailies ahead
   of the Passover holiday were published after Arab leaders revived a five-year-old peace plan for comprehensive peace in the Middle East at a Riyadh summit.
   The blueprint offers Israel full normalisation of relations if it withdraws from all land occupied in the 1967 war and allows the creation of a Palestinian state and the return of Palestinian refugees.
   ‘A bloc of states is emerging that understands that they may have been wrong to think that Israel is the world’s greatest problem,’ he said in an interview with the liberal Haaretz. ‘That is a revolutionary change in outlook.’
   ‘There are things that are happening, which have not happened in the past, which are developing and ripening,’ he said, adding that Israel had to ‘know how to profit from this occasion.’
   Israel has not accepted the Arab blueprint as it stands, saying negotiations were needed, notably on the refugee issue.

For Sheela Devi, who fled her home town and a Maoist insurgency to live in a New Delhi slum, the peace process in her native Nepal has raised hopes she may soon be able to return home.
   Devi, who hails from the remote mountainous district of Rolpa which was a Maoist guerrilla stronghold, said leaving for India had been the only option when the insurgency became too violent.
   ‘People were suffering a lot because of continuous threats and intimidation. I was worried about my children’s future,’ said 42-year-old Devi, who came to India in 2001.
   But following the end of the decade-long civil war late last year, Devi and other Nepali migrants living in India’s capital are optimistic they can head home soon.
   A new government line-up due to be unveiled later Friday in Kathmandu will for the first time formally bring Maoists into mainstream politics.
   The former rebels struck a peace deal with other political parties last November, ending a war that claimed at least 13,000 lives. Under the accord, the Maoists received 80 seats in a new 330-seat interim parliament.
   Elections to an assembly, which will rewrite the constitution and decide on the fate of the 238-year-old monarchy, are to be held by June.
   So later this year, Devi will be returning to her home town with her four daughter, two sons and electrician husband after a gap of four years.
   ‘I miss my village so much. I’m planning to return to Nepal in April and I’m looking forward to voting in the elections,’ she said with a broad smile.
   Nepalis do not need a visa to enter India so there are no official records about how many are in the country, but the New Delhi-based South Asia Study Centre estimates the number at three million.
   ‘During the conflict there was a rise in Nepali migration, mostly women and children from Maoist strongholds,’ said Raju Bhattrai, convenor of the centre which has been focusing its activities on Nepali migrant’s workers.
   While Nepalis working in other parts of the globe are important sources of remittances for their homeland, where the war only deepened the economic woes of one of the world’s poorest countries, it is not the case in India.
   ‘Those who left during the conflict were very poor,’ said foreign ministry official Ghanashyam Thapa by telephone from Kathmandu.
   ‘Things were so ugly, I felt there was no hope,’ said Prem Mainali, 36, who now works as a clothing factory worker in New Delhi.
   ‘Now the future looks bright. I’m definitely going back to vote in the elections and if I find a good job I’ll stay there.’
   Co-worker Shankar Koirala, who moved to India to work 15 years ago because of the desperate poverty in Nepal, voiced similar sentiments.
   ‘I’ll go at any cost to vote in the election,’ he said.
   But not all are optimistic about the changes in Nepal amid fierce wrangling between the Maoists and political parties over ministerial posts.

Japan on Friday deployed its first missile defence system in the Tokyo area one year ahead of schedule as its relations remain tense with nuclear-armed North Korea.
   The United States last year installed Japan’s first anti-missile system on the southern island of Okinawa, but the interceptors deployed Friday were the first installed by Japan on its own.
   Two Patriot Advanced Capability-3 surface-to-air interceptors were installed early Friday at the Iruma Air Self-Defence Force base in suburban Tokyo, a defence ministry spokesman said.
   The ministry plans to deploy the US-developed PAC-3s, which can cover a 20-kilometre radius, at a total of 11 bases in eastern and western Japan by March 2011.
   ‘We would like to go fully ahead with our plan,’ the defence minister, Fumio Kyuma, told a news conference.
   Kyuma also said his ministry would speed up deployment of a missile defence system on its Aegis warships to give Japan a two-phased anti-missile shield.
   The ministry deployed the launchers, designed to protect the capital Tokyo, earlier than initially scheduled in response to North Korea’s launch of missiles in July and its nuclear test in October.
   ‘We had initially planned to complete the deployment by March next year, but we accelerated the plan following North Korea’s missile launch,’ the defence ministry spokesman said.

Muslim separatists shot dead five Hindu road workers and wounded three others in Jammu and Kashmir, police said on Friday.
    ‘Two militants in camouflage fatigue descended on the work site late last night near Rajouri district and opened indiscriminate fire on the labourers’ camp,’ said SP Vaid, a senior police officer.
   ‘All of them belonged to the minority community.’
   The mountainous Rajouri district is 170 km, northwest of Jammu, the winter capital of the scenic Himalayan region, which is claimed in full by both India and Pakistan, and the cause of two of their wars.
   The Rajouri killings late on Thursday came days ahead of a meeting in New Delhi next week of leaders of South Asian countries, including India and Pakistan, to discuss regional cooperation on issues such as terrorism.

A powerful spring storm unleashed dozens of tornadoes as it moved through the Midwest on Wednesday and Thursday, including a twister in Oklahoma City that injured at least five people — two of them critically.
   Joyce Eels said she can live with the fact that a tornado took off most of the roof of her home — she’s just thankful to be alive.
   ‘All the important things are OK,’ she said Thursday. ‘My husband and family are OK. That’s the important stuff.’
   Tornadoes or high winds are believed to have killed at least four people in three states, including a woman who was flung into a tree by a twister that witnesses said was as wide as two football fields.
   At least 65 tornadoes were reported in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska by late Wednesday, the National Weather Service said.

Japan will extend sanctions against North Korea when they expire in mid-April to keep the pressure on Pyongyang over its abductions of Japanese nationals, a report said Friday.
   The continued tough line would come despite an increasingly conciliatory approach by the United States, which has agreed to a six-way deal providing fuel aid in return for North Korea freezing its nuclear programme.
   Japan has taken the hardest line at the six-way talks and has refused to fund the deal, saying it will not help North Korea until the kidnapping dispute is resolved.
   In October last year, the Japanese government barred all imports from North Korea–including money-makers such as clams, crabs and high-end mats take mushrooms–for six months.

India successfully tested on Friday a nuclear-capable ballistic missile from a naval ship near its east coast, the defence ministry said.
   The domestically developed Dhanus (Bow) missile, with a strike-range of 250 kilometres, was fired from the Indian Naval Ship Subhadra in the Bay of Bengal off the coast of Orissa, a defence spokesman said.
   The Dhanus is a naval variant of India’s surface-to-surface Prithvi missile.
   The missile, 8.56 meters long and one metre wide, can carry a 500 kilogram conventional or nuclear warhead. It uses liquid propellants and has a launch weight of 4,600 kilograms.
   On Thursday, India successfully tested an air-to-air missile for the third time in four days, defence officials said.
   India’s nuclear rival, Pakistan, tested its own nuclear-capable radar-dodging cruise missile Hatf VII Babur with a range of 700 kilometres on March 22.
   Dhanus is part of India’s Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) begun in 1983 to develop and produce a wide range of missiles for surface-to-surface and surface-to-air roles.
   The Prithvi was the first missile developed as part of programme.

India’s Supreme Court froze Thursday a controversial affirmative action plan to more than double places in elite medical, engineering and management colleges for ‘backward castes.’
   The ruling was a stunning blow to the ruling Congress coalition, which pushed the measure to help fulfil an election pledge to help the disadvantaged. The government had based its scheme to more than double ‘reservation quotas’ in the prestigious state-run schools to nearly 50 per cent on figures from a 1931 census — taken when India and Pakistan were still one country and the last to still divide people according to India’s ancient caste system.
   The apex court ruled the outdated data meant that the legislation passed by parliament last year was fundamentally flawed.
   ‘The government has failed to provide any authentic or reliable data to justify its policy of reservation,’ justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice LS Panta said in their ruling.
   The judges said it was ‘desirable to put on hold’ the quota plan which was slated to take effect with this year’s applications to the colleges, for which competition is cut-throat.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon called on Friday on leaders on both sides of Lebanon’s political divide to pursue dialogue to end the country’s most damaging crisis since the civil war.
   After talks with parliament speaker Nabih Berri, an influential leader of the Syrian-backed opposition, Ban urged ‘the leaders of Lebanon’ to engage in ‘dialogue’ in order to reach ‘national reconciliation.’
   Ban’s talks in Beirut covered the months-old political crisis in Lebanon and plans for the creation of an international court over the 2005 murder of former premier Rafiq Hariri and the status of the UN probe into the killing.
   He noted the ‘importance of the full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, including the establishment of the tribunal’ due to try suspects in the Hariri murder.
   Later Friday, Ban was also due to meet with Western-backed The prime minister, Fuad Siniora, and parliamentary majority leader Saad Hariri as well as pro-Syrian Hesbollah official Mohamad Fneish, who was among six Shia ministers who quit the cabinet in November.
   On Saturday, he is expected to travel to southern Lebanon to visit the UN peacekeeping force monitoring a ceasefire that ended last year’s war between Israel and the Lebanese Shia Muslim movement Hesbollah.

Suicide bombers killed nearly 130 people in a crowded market in a Shia district of Baghdad and a mainly Shia town on Thursday, one of the bloodiest days in Iraq in months.
   The upsurge in sectarian violence threatens all-out civil war and the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia, called for restraint and urged Iraqis to work with security forces to prevent the violence spiraling out of control. Bombs earlier this week in northern Iraq sparked mass reprisal killings.
   Two suicide bombers wearing vests packed with explosives killed 76 people in a market in the Shaab district of northern Baghdad, police and medical sources said, in what appeared to be the latest of a string of attacks on Shia districts and towns blamed on al Qaeda. More than 100 were wounded.
    ‘It is impossible to tell the exact number of dead because we are basically counting body parts,’ said a Health Ministry official in Baghdad, who asked not to be named.
   Most of the victims were women and children, who had been out shopping in the crowded market before the start of the nightly curfew, he said.
   At about the same time, three suicide car bombs exploded within minutes of each other in Khalis, 80 km north of Baghdad, killing 53 people and wounding 103, police said.
   There has been a spike in bloodshed, particularly outside the Iraqi capital, in recent days. Violence between majority Shias and minority Sunnis has killed tens of thousands in the past year.
   On Tuesday two truck bombs killed 85 people in a Shia area of Tal Afar in northern Iraq. In the hours after those blasts Shia gunmen, including police, shot dead up to 70 Sunni Arab men in reprisal.
   The top US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, confirmed on Thursday police appeared to have carried out ‘retribution killings’ after the bombings, which he blamed on al-Qaeda. Iraq’s Sunni vice-president urged the Shia-led government to do more to purge the security forces of militias.
   In Khalis, one car bomb exploded in a commercial area and a second at a police checkpoint leading to the police headquarters and court building, police said. A third bomber attacked police patrols rushing to the scene.
   ‘It was a scene of horror. There were charred bodies and human remains scattered about,’ said one policeman
   who spoke on condition of anonymity.
   A survivor of the Shaab market blast in Baghdad, Wissam Hashim Ali, 27, told Reuters the market had been ‘very, very crowded’ at the time of the blasts.
   ‘I saw heads separated from the bodies and legs blown off,’ he said in hospital, where he was receiving treatment for his wounds.

The International Atomic Energy Agency is pushing Iran to agree to cameras in its underground nuclear plant within days and Western states are mulling whether to seek a crisis IAEA meeting if Tehran refuses, diplomats said.
   The UN Security Council widened sanctions against Iran last week after it defied a second deadline for it to stop enriching uranium, which Iran says will yield solely electricity but world powers fear is a disguised atomic bomb programme.
   Tehran, disputing any obligation to do so, has refused to let the UN watchdog set up cameras in the Natans plant where it has installed about a third of 3,000 centrifuges it plans to have running by May to launch ‘industrial scale’ enrichment.
   The row over Iran’s nuclear ambitions has been overshadowed this week by Tehran’s capture of 15 British naval personnel. Some analysts have suggested Iran seized the sailors to distract world attention from the nuclear issue.
   Diplomats familiar with IAEA operations said the agency’s director for nuclear safeguards, Olli Heinonen, had written to Tehran pressing it to relent on cameras within days, with the end of March in mind as the target for a positive answer.

Bay Us Naval Base Australian David Hicks must explain under oath exactly what he did in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda before he learns his sentence from the Guantanamo war crimes tribunal, the chief prosecutor said.
   Hicks, a 31-year-old former farmhand from Adelaide, pleaded guilty on Monday to providing material support for terrorism. His hearing was scheduled to resume at 8:00am on Friday at the US naval base in southeast Cuba, with Hicks due to explain what he is guilty of under oath.
   The US military accused Hicks of training with al-Qaeda, taking up arms to join the Taliban and fighting US forces and their allies in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks.
   Hicks are not accused of actually shooting anyone and were trying to flee to Pakistan by taxi when he was captured in December 2001.
   ‘I’m not going to stand here and tell you that David Hicks is on par with Osama bin Laden,’ said the chief prosecutor, Air Force colonel Moe Davis.
   But Davis bristled at suggestions that Hicks was merely an al Qaeda bit player and said it was not ‘the grand strategic thinkers’ who killed thousands of people in terrorist attacks around the world.

Former US presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton said on Thursday media coverage of politicians had grown harsher and warned that this could have a detrimental effect on future leaders as the 2008 election draws near.
   Bush, the 41st US president and father of the current president, described what he called an increasingly adversarial relationship between the press and politicians that is ‘even tougher, uglier’ than he remembered.
   ‘I’m afraid it will turn off a lot of good people from politics,’ he said in his speech at the CTIA wireless industry conference in Orlando, Florida.
   ‘I’ve never seen it quite as harsh as mean as it is right now for the president and for a lot of other people in public life,’ said Bush during questions from Pricewaterhouse Coopers managing partner Juan Pujadas after the speech.
   Clinton’s wife, former first lady and New York Democratic senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is a contender for the White House in 2008.
   Clinton said he and Bush had received their share of tough questions when they were in office, but cited a blurring of the lines between sensationalism and mainstream journalism.
   Clinton had to deal with rumours of marital infidelity, and a scandal involving a White House intern during his presidency and the accompanying press coverage.
   As the current race takes shape, deeply personal issues of candidates are regularly making headlines, from the multiple marriages of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani to the battle with cancer being fought by former senator John Edwards’s wife, Elisabeth.

Russian efforts to obtain secrets on US political and military decision-making have reached levels not seen since the Cold War, the top US counterintelligence official said on Thursday.
   Joel Brenner, the Bush administration’s National Counterinte-lligence Executive, said a new intensive assault by Moscow is intent on gaining insights into ‘the upper echelon of US decision-making’ rather than stealing secrets about sensitive US technology.
   ‘The Russians are back to Cold War levels in their efforts against the United States,’ he said in a speech to the American Bar Association.
   Brenner, whose job is to oversee counterintelligence strategy and policy for US intelligence csar Mike McConnell, did not provide details about suspected Russian intelligence operations in the United States. Sensitive counterintelligence activities are classified.
   But he said Moscow appears less interested in US commercial and military technology than other countries including China, which US officials have described as the greatest counterintelligence threat facing the United States.
   Brenner’s remarks come at a time when Russian officials including the president, Vladimir Putin, have become more openly confrontational about US policy such as Washington’s plan to deploy a missile defence system in Eastern Europe.
   Putin, himself a former KGB official, accused the United States of trying to dominate the world in a February speech.
   US officials and independent analysts view Russia as a country determined to return to great power status it enjoyed during the Cold War, largely through its oil wealth and the reconstitution of its military and intelligence capabilities.
   McConnell also warned the Senate last month that Russia was taking a step backward in its democratic progress and could be heading for a controlled succession to Putin. Moscow responded by describing his remarks as ‘outdated assumptions.’

Five-and-a-half years after the September 11 attacks, the president, George W Bush’s war on terrorism has emerged as a wasteful, misguided exercise that poses its own threat to US national security, experts say.
   A growing number of analysts and former US officials say the global war on terrorism has undermined US influence abroad, forced onerous costs in American lives and money in Iraq, and unleashed a huge government spending spree that has often funded projects unrelated to national security.
   It has also produced a climate of fear in the United States that helped justify the war in Iraq and the curtailment of civil liberties at home, they said.
   ‘The atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty, and the vagueness of the definition of the enemy, makes the country more fearful and more susceptible to being steered in irrational directions,’ said Sbigniew Brsesinski, who was US national security adviser to president Jimmy Carter in the 1970s.
   Unlike the muted response to attacks by Britain and Spain, experts say the US has overreacted to the September 11 attacks that killed 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania in 2001.
   Congress has spent nearly $271.5 billion on homeland security since September 11, with money often going to projects that have nothing to do with security but that are important to politicians and their constituents, according to a survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
   At the same time, the number of potential terrorism targets identified by Congress has exploded from 160 in 2003 to 80,000, allowing such unlikely sites as a Midwestern apple festival and a roadside theme park in Florida to bid for funds.
   Meanwhile, the private sector–lobbyists, interest groups, industries, the media and even universities–has also used the national security label aggressively to sell its own agendas, experts say.
   ‘What’s clear is that there is no focus whatsoever in the way we are fighting terrorism,’ said Veronique de Rugy, author of the AEI study.
   Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke dismissed the criticism as old and inaccurate, saying the Bush administration had never viewed sites such as small theme parks to be critical national assets deserving of funds. ‘This has no basis in fact,’ he said.
   Knocke’s boss, homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, has also taken issue with the assertion that the US response to September 11 is exaggerated.
   ‘If we begin to heed arguments that somehow our concern about security is overblown–then I feel we’re going to feel consequences in the loss of lives,’ Chertoff said in a speech outlining his priorities for 2007.

Insurgents shot down an Ethiopian military helicopter Friday as unrest in the Somali capital which claimed dozens of lives in a few hours escalated.
   Clashes between Somali government forces with their Ethiopian allies and Somali insurgents erupted across the city before the MI24 helicopter was hit by a missile and came down in Mogadishu airport.
   ‘The plane has crashed and nobody came out,’ a Somali security officer at Mogadishu airport said.
   Black smoke poured from the wreckage of the Ethiopian helicopter which came down near the base at the airport used by Ugandan troops in an African Union peacekeeping force. It was not known how many troops were on the helicopter.
   There was heavy fighting across the city and the death toll from 24 hours of clashes sparked by an Ethiopian offensive on insurgents rose to 38.

A Sudanese man tried to hijack a plane flying between Tripoli and Khartoum on Friday and was arrested after the plane landed in the Sudanese capital.
    ‘The hijacker gave himself up after negotiations with the authorities,’ an official said on condition of anonymity.
   ‘The hijacker wanted to refuel in Khartoum to travel on to another country,’ the official said, without specifying which country.
   A source at Khartoum airport said the hijacker gave himself up three hours after the plane landed. There was no immediate information about whether the hijacker had demands or how many people were on board the hijacked plane.

Troubled pop star Britney Spears reached a divorce settlement Thursday with Kevin Federline less than three years after the pair married, celebrity news media reported.
   People magazine said on its website that the deal was reached in a five-hour meeting attended by the former couple and their lawyers at the Los Angeles office of Spears’ attorney.
   ‘The parties signed a global settlement on all issues of their marriage and the custody of the children,’ Michael Sands, a spokesman for Federline’s attorney Mark Vincent Kaplan, told People.
   The magazine had no details of the deal.
   But celebrity news website TMS.com, citing unidentified sources, reported that Federline, a former backup dancer, would get one million dollars while the former couple would share custody of their two sons, aged 18 months and six months, 50-50.
   Spears, 25, and Federline, 29, got married in a surprise ceremony in September 2004. The singer filed for divorce in November, citing irreconcilable differences.
   News of the settlement emerged days after Spears left a rehabilitation centre on March 20.
   Spears ‘successfully’ completed the programme at the Promises Malibu Treatment Centre in California, her manager, Larry Rudolph, was quoted as saying by People last week.
   She had first checked herself in on February 20, after she shaved her head at a hair salon within view of paparazzi, and then briefly checked out again the next day.
   But she returned to the centre in Malibu reportedly after Federline, a former back-up dancer, threatened a custody battle over their two children.