The Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, said on Sunday that his office has published an amended electoral law that could effectively exclude rival Hamas ruling Gaza from any future polls.
   ‘The new election law has been published,’ Abbas told reporters during a joint press conference with visiting EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
   Rafiq al-Husseini, chief of staff of Abbas’s office, said ‘the decree was already signed, but we are publishing it today.’
   No immediate reaction from Hamas was available.
   Since Hamas seized power in Gaza on June 15, Abbas has issued decrees that he says have the power of law, although this is disputed by the Islamists.
   On August 15, Abbas’s office said the president was mulling changing the law to require candidates in presidential and parliamentary elections ‘to respect the political programme of the PLO’ and to respect all previous agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority.
   Hamas is not part of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and refuses to be bound by its political programme, which recognises Israel.
   Hamas’s own charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state and the group has also refused to explicitly agree to abide by past peace deals.
   The amended text also said all parliamentary candidates will stand for election on party lists. Previously, half the members of parliament had been elected from constituencies.
   Such a requirement makes it easier for candidates from Abbas’s Fatah party to stand in the Gaza Strip, which has been under the control of the Islamists since Hamas fighters overran forces loyal to the moderate president on June 15.
   The Gaza rout has left Palestinians deeply divided, with the Western-backed Abbas controlling the West Bank and the Western-shunned Islamists ruling Gaza.
   Following the takeover, Abbas fired the Hamas-led unity cabinet and appointed one headed by Western-backed economist Salam Fayyad.
   He has since refused any talks with the Islamists and has also vowed to call early elections, although no date has been set.
   Hamas has refused to recognise the Fayyad government and insists that the coalition cabinet headed by the sacked Hamas premier Ismail Haniya is the Palestinians’ sole legitimate government.
   Hamas swept to victory in the last elections in January 2006 in a surprise rout of the long-dominant Fatah party.

Sri Lanka said Sunday that troops captured a Tamil Tiger naval base during a weekend advance into rebel-held territory that the guerrillas said killed nine civilians.
   Troops took the ‘Sea Tiger’ base at Silavattura on Sunday following intense fighting in the Mannar district on Saturday, the defence ministry said in a statement.
   ‘The army successfully captured an LTTE Sea Tiger base, including three boats and a large quantity of anti-personnel mines and detonators,’ the ministry said.
   It said an unspecified number of civilians had fled and sought shelter in schools and a church within the government-controlled area of Mannar.
   Security forces seized territory that had been held by the LTTE just south of Mannar on Saturday, military officials said.
   ‘The army is now engaged in consolidation operations to retain control of the area,’ the defence ministry said.
   The ministry said that another five guerrillas were killed in a separate confrontation with the security forces in the adjoining Vavuniya district on Saturday.
   In an earlier statement, the LTTE said nine people were killed and four injured in a landmine blast caused by Sri Lankan troops during the fighting in the coastal Mannar district.
   The defence ministry, however, accused the LTTE of attacking civilians for allegedly trying to enter government-held parts of the Mannar.
   The LTTE also said Sunday that they killed a government soldier and lost one of their men in Saturday’s fighting. The defence ministry said intercepts of rebel radio communications indicated that 11 guerrillas were killed.
   Both sides regularly make casualty claims that cannot be independently verified.
   Government forces have been trying to break into rebel-held territory in the Mannar district for weeks, but have faced stiff rebel resistance.
   The two sides have been locked in combat since 1972, with the Tigers fighting for a separate state for minority Tamils. The 35-year-old ethnic conflict has claimed more than 60,000 lives.

Pro-Taliban militants said Sunday they had abducted scores of Pakistani soldiers, demanding the withdrawal of troops from tribal areas near the Afghan border in exchange for their release.
   Military authorities have insisted that some 150 soldiers were stranded after straying into Ladha region in restive South Waziristan district in stormy weather on Thursday, amid tensions between militants and local tribesmen.
   ‘Our colleagues have captured them and put them in jails,’ Zulfiqar Mehsud, a spokesman for the militants, said by telephone from an undisclosed location.
   Mehsud said the fighters had ‘surrounded the soldiers and forced them to surrender’ their weapons.
   ‘We took them into custody because the soldiers were preparing to launch an operation in South Waziristan,’ he said, claiming responsibility for the kidnapping Saturday of 10 additional soldiers from the army’s Frontier Corps.

Afghan and international soldiers destroyed a Taliban headquarters in an operation just outside Kandahar city Sunday that killed an estimated 25 rebels, the US-led coalition said.
   The overnight swoop on the complex about 17 kilometres southwest of Kandahar was based on intelligence that insurgents were attempting to re-establish control after being defeated there last year, it said.
   Soldiers moved through the compounds, coming under heavy fire. One man blew himself up in an apparent suicide attack that did not cause casualties to the security forces, it said in a statement.
   Coalition war planes struck the area, causing many of the deaths, it said.
   The complex of seven buildings was believed to be the base for several attacks on the nearby Highway One, an often-targeted road linking Kandahar and the western city of Herat, the statement said.
   The Taliban first took Kandahar in their sweep to power in 1996 with the help of elements in Pakistan who are said to be aiding the insurgency against the new administration.
   They were driven from government in late 2001 by the coalition, which is still tracking Taliban fighters and their allies in al-Qaeda.

Lebanese troops took control on Sunday of a Palestinian refugee camp where they had been battling militants for more than three months, killing at least 31 fighters who tried to flee, security sources said.
   Twenty-three more fighters from the Fatah al-Islam group were captured, 12 of them wounded militants detained after the army took over the Nahr al-Bared camp in north Lebanon, a security source said.
   ‘The battle is over. The Lebanese army has seized the last positions of Fatah al-Islam in the camp,’ a senior security source said.
   ‘Most of the terrorists were killed today. The others have been captured. A few might have escaped but the army is hunting them down,’ the source added.
   The fate of Shaker al-Abssi, the Palestinian leader of the group which says it shares al-Qaeda’s ideology but has no organizational ties to the network, was unclear.
   The fighting has been Lebanon’s worst internal violence since the 1975-1990 civil war, killing more than 300 people.
   Five soldiers were also killed on Sunday, raising the army death toll to 157. At least 131 militants and 42 civilians have been killed.
   The army had initially estimated that only 35 active fighters remained in the camp before Sunday.
   An army statement said the militants had tried to escape from the camp in the early hours of the morning.
   They ‘attacked army positions in a desperate attempt to flee’, the statement said, urging citizens to contact the army if they encountered suspect individuals.
   At least three gunmen from outside the camp had also attacked an army position in order to help the fighters escape, security sources said.
   Security forces patrolled the area, searching orchards and fields, while helicopters hovered overhead in a hunt for any militants who had managed to escape from the camp on the Mediterranean coast. Naval boats patrolled the sea.
   Soldiers fired celebratory gunfire from inside the camp and locals threw rice at the troops to applaud their efforts.
   Most of the camp’s 40,000 residents fled to a nearby Palestinian refugee camp in the early days of the fighting, which erupted on May 20 when the army says Fatah al-Islam attacked its positions near the camp and the northern city of Tripoli.
   Fatah al-Islam split from a Syrian-backed Palestinian faction last year. The hardline Sunni Islamist group includes Lebanese, Saudi and Syrian fighters.

Nineteen South Koreans held captive by Afghanistan’s Taliban for six weeks under threat of death arrived home on Sunday, saying they felt as if they had died and then got their lives back.
   The former hostages had tearful reunions with their families at a hospital outside Seoul before undergoing medical checks.
   ‘We apologise to the people for causing trouble and thank everyone who helped us return home safely,’ the spokesman for the Christian aid workers told reporters at Incheon airport after a drama which gripped the country.
   ‘We owe the country and the people a great debt,’ said Yu Kyeong-Sik.
   ‘We had basically died and have got our lives back. We plan to live in a way that will make you proud, and we promise that to you and we will repay our debt.’
   Guerrillas posing as passengers abducted 16 women and seven men on July 19 from their bus in insurgency-plagued southern Afghanistan.
   The extremists murdered two men last month to press their demands to exchange the Koreans for Taliban prisoners, a condition firmly rejected by the Kabul government.
   After starting talks in Afghanistan with South Korean officials, the Taliban on August 13 released two women in what they called a ‘goodwill gesture’ and finally freed the remainder of the group last Wednesday and Thursday.
   It was only then that the 19 learnt that two of their colleagues had been killed.
   ‘When we heard about that, all of us were unable to recover from that,’ said Yu, 55. ‘We ask that you give us a little bit of time and space and once we are able to rest we will explain everything in detail.’
   Some of the women in the group sobbed as he spoke to journalists.
   ‘Having my two children back today, I cannot but thank the people,’ Suh Jeong-Bae, whose son and daughter were held by the Taliban, said in a big smile during the family reunion.
   The South Korean government, powerless to meet demands for a prisoner release, finally reached a deal with the help of an Indonesian diplomat.
   Seoul agreed to go ahead with a previously scheduled withdrawal of its 210 non-combat troops from Afghanistan by year-end, and to ban its missionaries from visiting the Islamic nation.
   Despite several media reports that a ransom was paid, the head of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service – who was in Afghanistan personally overseeing the discussions – denied making payments to the Taliban.
   ‘There was no such deal,’ Kim Man-Bok told reporters upon his return home with the group.
   Presidential spokesman Cheon Ho-Seon on Sunday also repeatedly denied that South Korea bought the release of the hostages, telling journalists: ‘We have never paid any ransom.’
   ‘I thank the public for their support. I am sorry for having failed to rescue all 23 kidnapped people,’ Kim said.
   ‘I hope that the government and the public make efforts so that this kind of incident will not happen again.’

Greece’s huge forest fires have been blamed by some on global warming, but satellite images of smoke plumes drifting as far as Africa prompt the question: are forests a major source of greenhouse gas?
   Usually it is cars, factories and power stations that are most often mentioned as sources of carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas which traps heat in the atmosphere. Trees, considered the ‘lungs of the planet,’ soak the gas up. But what if they burn?
   ‘Global emissions from deforestation and the degradation of forests are the second single source after coal,’ said Stefan Singer of WWF (the World Wildlife Fund).
   Every year 13 million hectares of the world’s forests disappear – an area the size of Greece – according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization which says deforestation accounts for 18 per cent of CO2 emissions.
   Although paling in significance next to deforestation in the Amazon, Congo and Indonesia, forest fires in the Mediterranean might also be a net source of emissions, experts said.
   Trees absorb carbon dioxide as they grow and climatologists see forests as carbon ‘sinks’ – places where large amounts of that element are stored. When they burn, whether in forest fires or as logs in a stove, it is released.
   In the atmosphere, CO2 is the main gas which contributes to the greenhouse effect – trapping the earth’s heat which would otherwise be radiated into space.
   The latest UN report on global warming says temperatures will rise by a best estimate of 1.8 to 4.0 Celsius this century and sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres.
   The resulting hotter, drier summers in countries like Greece could mean forests are more frequently brought to the tinder-box conditions which allowed fires to spread so devastatingly.
   The Greek foreign minister, Dora Bakoyanni, said the summer’s devastating floods in Britain and the worst fires in Greek memory demonstrated climate change was already happening.
   ‘From that moment everyone understood that the phenomena caused by climatic change need to be confronted with much more coordination and speed from the EU,’ she told a news conference.
   Scientists said it was too early to judge how much C02 was released by the Greek fires which are the most intense in Europe in at least a decade and have killed 63 people.
   If the trees grow back, they will eventually reabsorb the CO2. ‘If not, the fires will have contributed to greenhouse gas emissions,’ said Earl Saxon of the Geneva-based World Conservation Union.
   Bakoyanni tried to allay fears that the scorched land would be used for building. ‘We are determined that not the smallest piece of land will not be reforested. Nobody will build on burnt land,’ she said.
   Any net loss of CO2 would not count against Greece’s legal obligation to control greenhouse gas emissions.

Myanmar’s junta has stepped up a manhunt for pro-democracy activists after a rare string of protests, raiding homes and subjecting citizens to arbitrary searches, campaigners and residents say.
   More than 10 plainclothes policemen have surrounded the home of 34-year-old labour rights campaigner Su Su Nway, who went into hiding after leading a brief demonstration last week in Yangon over soaring fuel costs.
   Dozens of protesters were detained after that march, one of a series of anti-junta rallies that began here two weeks ago after the generals doubled key fuel prices, and later spread to other parts of the country.
   The price hike has left many workers unable to even afford bus fare in the impoverished nation formerly known as Burma, which has been under military rule since 1962.
   Su Su Nway, who managed to evade arrest by jumping into a taxi, said by telephone on Sunday that she was ready to stand up to the generals, who tolerate little public dissent.
   ‘I will not hide forever. I have to stand up for our people,’ said the activist, who is a member of Myanmar’s opposition party.
   Amnesty International said Friday that more than 150 people have been detained since the protests broke out on August 19.
   Apart from Su Su Nway, the regime has targeted key activists including Htay Kywe, who also went into hiding after the first rally in Yangon which drew about 500 people – the biggest anti-junta march here in at least nine years.
   Authorities have sent Htay Kywe’s picture to every police station in the country and raided his home in Yangon, along with the homes of other protest leaders, confiscating computers, mobile phones and documents, activists say.

Pope Benedict said on Saturday that even the late Mother Teresa of Kolkata ‘suffered from the silence of God’ despite her immense charity and faith.
   The Pope, addressing a youth rally in central Italy, referred to a new book that reveals that the Roman Catholic nun was deeply tormented about her faith and suffered periods of doubt about God.
   It is significant that the Pope mentioned Mother Teresa’s torment about God’s silence as not being unusual because there was some speculation that the letters could hurt the procedure to make her a saint.
   ‘All believers know about the silence of God,’ he said in unprepared remarks. ‘Even Mother Teresa, with all her charity and force of faith, suffered from the silence of God,’ he said.
   He said believers sometimes had to withstand the silence of God in order to understand the situation of people who do not believe.
   Due out on September 4, the book, ‘Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light’ is a collection of letters written to colleagues and superiors over 66 years.
   The ethnic Albanian nun, who dedicated her life to poor, sick and dying in India, died in 1997 aged 87.
   Mother Teresa had wanted all her letters destroyed, but the Vatican ordered they be preserved as potential relics of a saint, according to a spokeswoman for Doubleday, the US publisher of the book. Mother Teresa has been beatified but has not yet been made a saint.
   Time magazine, which has first serial rights, published excerpts on its Web site last month. When the German-born pontiff visited the former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz last year, he publicly asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, mostly Jews, died there.

The British backlash over the United States’ handling of post-invasion Iraq grew Sunday as another military commander blasted Washington’s ‘fatally flawed’ policy.
   Major general Tim Cross, the top British officer involved in planning post-war Iraq, said he raised serious concerns with then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the possibility of the country descending into chaos.
   But Rumsfeld ‘ignored’ or ‘dismissed’ his warnings, the general told the Sunday Mirror newspaper.
   On Saturday, the head of the British Army during the 2003 invasion launched a fierce attack on the United States over its handling of troubled Iraq since.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday Iran had put into operation over 3,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges at a nuclear plant, reaching a key goal of its atomic drive, state broadcasting reported.
   ‘They (world powers) thought that by issuing any resolution Iran would back down,’ Ahmadinejad told Islamist students, referring to the two sanctions resolutions imposed against Tehran by the UN Security Council.
   ‘But after each resolution the Iranian nation took another step along the path of nuclear development,’ he said.
   ‘Now it has put into operation more than 3,000 centrifuges and every week we install a new series.’
   The installation of 3,000 centrifuges has always been earmarked by Iran as the key medium-term goal of its nuclear programme which it had originally hoped to reach by March.

US Republican senator Larry Craig announced his resignation Saturday after being caught in an undercover sting allegedly soliciting sex with a man in an airport bathroom.
   The resignation brought a quick end to the newest sex scandal undermining the conservative Republican Party’s moral stance and threatening to damage its performance in next year’s national elections.
   ‘It is with sadness and deep regret that I announce that it is my intent to resign from the Senate effective September 30,’ Craig said at a news conference in Boise, Idaho, the state he represents.
   Craig, 62, was arrested June 11 in a men’s bathroom at Minneapolis-St Paul airport by an undercover police officer investigating complaints of homosexual activity. The officer said Craig solicited him for sex.
   The veteran lawmaker pleaded guilty on August 8 to a misdemeanour misconduct charge, paid more than 500 dollars in fines and fees and received a 10-day suspended sentence.
   The incident only surfaced in a Washington newspaper report on August 27, leading to a firestorm over morality and hypocrisy in the conservative party and putting pressure on Craig to step down.

President George W Bush and his Democratic foes in Congress this week fire the opening shots in a long-brewing clash likely to seal the fate of US war strategy in Iraq.
   Lawmakers return from their summer break for a week of hearings and political theatre to set the stage for Bush’s critical progress report on the war, due by September 15.
   Then, in the week of September 9, war commander general David Petraeus, and US ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker will make one of the most significant appearances in Congress for years, to deliver their verdicts on the war.
   At stake is the fate of Bush’s last-ditch strategy to ‘surge’ 28,500 extra troops into Iraq, after a highly unpopular four year-war which has killed more than 3,700 US troops and tens of thousands of civilians.
   The president wants to push the surge into early next year, but Democrats are set to try again to force him to bring home most combat forces by May.

Hurricane Felix gained intensity as it tore across the warm waters of the Caribbean early Sunday, the Florida-based National Hurricane Centre said.
   In the pre-dawn hours the Hurricane Centre upgraded Felix to a Category Two hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale on a scale of five, with winds of 160 kilometres per hour and even higher gusts.
   At 0900 GMT the storm’s centre was located about 135 kilometres east-northeast of the island of Aruba, travelling towards the west at about 30 kilometres per hour, the Hurricane Centre said in its latest advisory.
   ‘On this track the centre of Felix will pass very near the north of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao during the next few hours, and into the open waters of the Central Caribbean sea later (Sunday),’ the advisory read.
   ‘Some strengthening is forecast ... and Felix could
   become a major hurricane in the next 24 hours,’ the advisory added.