Three Israeli soldiers and 17 Palestinians, one a cameraman for an international news agency, were killed on Wednesday as troops backed by helicopters stormed into the Gaza Strip.
   Fadel Shana, 23, a Reuters cameraman, was critically wounded when a missile hit his vehicle in the central Gaza Strip. He died after being taken to hospital, Dr Muawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza emergency services, said.
   An AFP photographer driving behind the Reuters jeep, which had TV and press stickers plastered across its doors and roof, said the vehicle burst into flames after a missile slammed into it.
   When a group of photographers rushed to try to rescue their colleague a second missile struck the area, he said.
   Two more people were killed in the air strike, medics said. Their identities were not immediately known.
   An Israeli military spokesman expressed regret after the incident.
   ‘We regret the death of a photographer, but it must be pointed out that there’s a war going on against armed terrorists who are extremists and dangerous,’ he said.
   ‘Members of the media or civilians put themselves in danger’ by entering a combat zone,’ the spokesman said.
   Shana was driving near the Al-Bureij refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, where at least nine Palestinians were killed in an earlier air strike, all of them civilians, according to Hassanein.
   The Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, strongly condemned the Israeli military assault and called on all sides to respect a ceasefire.
   ‘President Abbas strongly condemned Israel’s escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip,’ said spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina, who is travelling with Abbas on a three-day visit to Moscow.
   Abbas, whose forces were driven from Gaza in June when Hamas seized power there, has been holding US-sponsored peace talks with Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert since November.
   Israel has meanwhile launched near-daily military operations in the Gaza Strip aimed at halting rocket fire on southern Israel.
   The rockets, most of them home-made, have killed 14 people since 2000.
   The Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, said on Wednesday: ‘We are aware of the suffering of the people of Gaza, but in our eyes, the suffering of the residents of communities that border on that area, and those of the Israeli army count more.’
   Earlier in the day clashes erupted after Palestinian gunmen approached the security fence separating Gaza from Israel near the Nahal Oz fuel terminal which supplies most of Gaza’s fuel and which was attacked last week.
   ‘Three soldiers were killed and three were wounded in an exchange of fire,’ an army spokeswoman said.
   Hamas claimed it killed the soldiers in a ‘sophisticated ambush.’
   ‘This ambush is a message to let the Zionist enemy know that Gaza will remain a cauldron that will break its will and criminal plans,’ said Abu Obeida, spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades.
   Four brigades members were killed earlier by an Israeli unit backed by helicopters, and six others were captured and taken to Israel at dawn, medics said.
   Another Palestinian militant was killed in an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip that also wounded three people.
   Palestinian militants meanwhile fired at least 11 homemade rockets and 26 mortar shells at southern Israel without causing casualties, the army said.
   The latest casualties bring to 409 the number of people killed, mostly Gaza militants, since Israel and the Palestinians relaunched formal peace talks at a US conference in November, according to an AFP count.
   Wednesday’s toll was the highest in Gaza since March 1, when Israeli forces killed more than 60 Palestinians in a single day during a land and air blitz.

A stunning showing by Nepal’s Maoists in landmark polls is a wake-up call for giant southern neighbour India as it battles its own left-wing rebellion, analysts say.
   India, they say, needs to do far more to bring its own ultra-left insurgents into the mainstream and end crushing poverty that drives rebels into their arms.
   ‘New Delhi will have to get used to this completely unexpected choice of the people,’ said security analyst Uday Bhaskar, adding that Nepal’s surprise early results from last week’s elections held lessons for India.
   ‘There is definitely a need for India to be alert – in terms of the linkages that may develop between the Indian left-wing rebels and their compatriots across the border,’ he said.
   Their pro-poor platform is the reason Delhi is so worried about the group known in India as the Naxalites, after the town Naxalbari where the movement was born in 1967.
   The Indian Maoist rebels, who say they are fighting for the rights of neglected tribal people and landless farmers, are now active in 15 states and have been described by the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, as the ‘single biggest threat’ to India’s internal security.
   Some 834 people died in Maoist-related violence last year, including one attack in which the rebels slaughtered 55 policemen.
   India, which shares a porous border with Nepal, had been ‘expecting the Nepalese people to vote for the centrist parties rather than the political left or the right,’ said Krishna V Rajan, a former Indian ambassador to Kathmandu.
   Instead, results show the staunchly republican Maoists on track to become the single largest party in a new assembly whose first task will be to abolish the monarchy and rewrite the Himalayan nation’s constitution.
   The Nepal rebels ended their decade-long bloody insurgency and joined mainstream politics after signing a 2006 peace pact that led to the elections.
   ‘A positive lesson for India would be to see how we can bring our own Maoists into the political mainstream,’ Bhaskar said.
   Rajan said doing this requires, among other things, improving the quality of governance and delivery of services in the country of 1.2 billion.
   ‘There is an estimated 836 million people living on less than 20 rupees a day, which is 50 cents,’ said Ajai Sahni, research scholar at New Delhi’s Institute for Conflict Management think-tank.

The Malaysian government has shut down a newspaper catering to ethnic minority Indians – a move the daily’s news editor slammed Thursday as punishment for its critical coverage of social and political issues.
   The Tamil-language Makkal Osai, or People’s Voice, received a letter from the home ministry on Wednesday saying its operating license would not be renewed, news editor BR Rajan said.
   The letter gave no reason, Rajan said. No edition of Makkal Osai was published Thursday.
   ‘It’s mostly because of the issues we covered. We go more on social issues ... That has caused some kind of anger to the ministry,’ he said.
   The home minister, Syed Hamid Albar, said the newspaper broke the ministry’s guidelines but did not elaborate, according to an aide who declined to be named, citing protocol.
   Rajan said the daily gave ‘wide coverage’ to opposition rallies and to activists who marshaled some 20,000 ethnic Indians to protest last November against racial discrimination in this Muslim Malay-majority country.
   The paper has had repeated run-ins with authorities. Earlier this year, Makkal Osai received a ‘small reminder’ to tone down its coverage of the Indian protest movement, Rajan said.

Thailand’s prime minister Samak Sundaravej said Thursday that martial law, imposed after the 2006 coup, would be lifted in most of the kingdom after his party swept to victory in last year’s polls.
   Samak, whose People Power Party is closely allied with ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinaw-atra, said the restrictions were no longer needed. ‘At today’s (Thurs-day’s) meeting of the National Security Council, we agreed to lift martial law in 179 districts of 31 provinces,’ he told reporters.
   Martial law will remain throughout the three southern provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat, which are in the grip of a separatist insurgency, and in parts of southern Songkhla province, he said.

East Timor’s president, Jose Ramos-Horta, arrived home on Thursday to a cheering crowd of thousands after more than two months of treatment in Australia for injuries sustained in an assassination attempt in February.
   A military parade welcomed Ramos-Horta as he stepped out of the plane at Dili’s airport where people waved national flags and carried photographs of the president as they shouted ‘Viva president Ramos-Horta.’
   The 58-year-old Nobel laureate, who was shot and critically wounded in an attack by rebel soldiers at his home in Dili on February 11, thanked parliament, government officials, the church, the people of East Timor and the international community for their support.
   ‘I’m happy to be back in Timor-Leste,’ Ramos-Horta told a news conference at the airport, where he was received by the prime minister, Xanana Gusmao, opposition leader Mari Alkatiri and other government ministers and diplomats.
   He drove to his beachside house to the beating of drums played by students and a traditional welcome dance while soldiers stood guard.
   ‘I’m happy that he is back. He will bring unity to the country,’ said Joao Freitas, a local resident who sat near Ramos-Horta’s thatched-roof house, watching people dance.
   Ramos-Horta nearly lost his life when he was shot twice after gunmen loyal to rebel leader Alfredo Reinado launched early-morning attacks on the president and Gusmao in Dili in February.

The Kenyan prime minister, Raila Odinga, took oath Thursday at the head of a new coalition government after a political crisis that unleashed violence in which more than 1,500 people died.
   Odinga was sworn in as prime minister before his rival president Mwai Kibaki and former UN chief Kofi Annan, who mediated the power-sharing accord aiming to curb months of violence after contested December 27 presidential polls. Also present were presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi and former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi.
   The new government is made up of 93 ministers and assistant ministers, sparking complaints that it is too big for a nation where 60 per cent of the people earn less than a dollar a day.
   Former UN secretary general Annan on Wednesday urged Kenyans to support the new government, saying the deeply divided country had a long way to go after the crisis that ruined its reputation as a bastion of stability in a region beset by conflict.
   Annan brokered a 50-50 power-sharing deal between Kibaki and opposition leader Odinga on February 28, paving the way for the cabinet.
   Odinga’s claim that Kibaki rigged the December 27 presidential ballot touched off tribal fighting, revenge killings and police crackdowns that choked the country’s mainstay tourism and agricultural sectors.
   Kenyan civil society groups have lamented that that several ministries in the new cabinet overlap, chiefly citing the ministry of public health and sanitation with that of medical services. Others include lifestock, fisheries and agriculture which had been under the same docket, but are now separate. Roads was separated from public works, and industrialisation created from trade. Environment and mineral resources was separated from forestry and wildlife.
   Gender and children’s affairs was split from youth and sports while Nairobi metropolitan was under local government, according to lists compiled by civil groups. But Annan said size does not matter in a country struggling to regain stability.
   ‘I know that some would have liked a smaller cabinet which would have been easier to manage, but what is important is that the two parties have agreed, that is why I am stressing that somebody has mould this 40-man cabinet to be effective, cohesive and productive,’ Annan told reporters late Wednesday.

The world needs tougher action to combat global warming than a plan by the president, George W Bush, to halt a rise in US greenhouse gas emissions only by 2025, delegates at a climate conference in Paris said on Thursday.
   South Africa, one of 17 nations at the two-day global warming talks that started on Thursday, called Bush’s proposals ‘disappointing’ and unambitious when many other industrialised economies are already cutting emissions.
   ‘There is no way whatever that we can agree to what the US is proposing,’ the South African environmental affairs minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, said in a statement.
   Developing nations such as China and India also want the rich, led by the United States, to cut now.
   The United Nations and France noted that studies by the UN Climate Panel say that world emissions will have to peak within 10 to 15 years and then fall sharply to avert the worst of floods, droughts, and rising seas.
   Bush unveiled a plan on Wednesday to cap US emissions by 2025, toughening an existing target of slowing the growth of emissions by 2012. The United States and China are the top greenhouse gas emitters.

Pope Benedict XVI chided Americans for a moral breakdown he said had fueled the church’s child sex abuse scandal, ahead of an open-air mass before tens of thousands here Thursday.
   Gates opened at Washington’s new sports stadium before dawn so that an expected 48,000 people could trickle through stringent security measures to attend the mass at 10:00am (1400 GMT).
   Benedict received a rapturous White House welcome Wednesday and met privately with the president, George W Bush, in the Oval Office, before addressing the paedophile priest scandal that has rocked the US church in a speech to US Catholic bishops.
   Thousands of people gathered at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception late Wednesday whooped, cheered and whistled when the Popemobile pulled up outside.
   The basilica’s bells pealed, and inside the largest Catholic church in North America, people had no qualms about climbing onto pews to catch a glimpse as Benedict entered.
   In a speech delivered after evening prayer, the pontiff berated the bishops for their poor handling of a scandal surrounding sexual abuse of children in the church.
   But he urged efforts ‘to address the sin of abuse within the wider context of sexual mores’ as well as a reassessment of ‘the values underpinning society.’
   ‘What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?’ the pontiff said on the first full day of his US visit.
   ‘Children deserve to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships. They should be spared the degrading manifestations and the crude manipulation of sexuality so prevalent today.’
   Describing clerics who sexually abuse children as ‘gravely immoral,’ the octogenarian pope warned that the scourge of paedophilia ‘is found not only in your dioceses but in every sector of society.’
   ‘It calls for a determined, collective response,’ he said, but did not outline any firm action that the Vatican intended to take to purge the church of paedophile priests.

Western states joined the United Nations in urging action to ensure a fair outcome from Zimbabwe’s elections but most African countries avoided the issue at a summit of the Security Council and the African Union on Wednesday.
   No results have been announced from the March 29 presidential vote in Zimbabwe, but the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, said, ‘No one thinks, having seen the results of polling stations, that the president, Robert Mugabe, has won.’
   ‘A stolen election would not be a democratic election at all,’ Brown told the summit. ‘Let a single clear message go out from here in New York that we ... stand solidly behind democracy and human rights for Zimbabwe.’
   South Africa, current president of the Security Council, scheduled the summit to discuss cooperation between the United Nations and the African Union. It did not include Zimbabwe on the agenda but Western countries were determined to raise it.
   The South African president, Thabo Mbeki, who chaired the summit, has insisted the situation in Zimbabwe can be resolved through the Southern Africa Development Community, which has avoided a tough stand.
   Trying to counter accusations at home that he is taking too soft a line on Zimbabwe, Mbeki told reporters after the summit the only way for mediators to resolve the impasse was to keep talking with both Mugabe’s government and the opposition.
   The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, indicated to the gathering he was not satisfied with a soft approach.
   ‘The Zimbabwean authorities and the countries of the region have insisted that these matters are for the region to resolve but the international community continues to watch and wait for decisive action,’ Ban said.
   Zimbabwe’s economy is in ruins, with 80 per cent unemployment, chronic food shortages and the world’s worst inflation rate of almost 165,000 per cent. Mugabe is widely blamed for the turmoil and critics say the country’s misery will only end when he is replaced.
   One of two African speakers who did mention Zimbabwe was Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete, whose country chairs the AU.