Security was tightened Sunday in Myanmar’s largest city as rumours spread that pro-democracy activists would launch protests against an upcoming referendum on a draft constitution backed by the ruling military.
   Riot police and junta supporters carrying batons were deployed at major road junctions and Buddhist monuments including Yangon’s famous Shwedagon Pagoda, the site of many earlier demonstrations in the staunchly Buddhist country.
   Dissidents in Myanmar and exile groups elsewhere have urged voters to vote against the constitution, saying it is merely a ploy to perpetuate more than four decades of military rule.
   Voting ahead of the May 10 referendum by Myanmar citizens has already begun in some countries including Japan and Singapore, where about a thousand people lined up outside their country’s embassy Sunday.
   At least 230 Myanmar citizens held their own mock ‘referendum’ outside the Myanmar Embassy in Tokyo, where official polls were also held for expatriates with the required official documents such as exit permits. The requirement effectively excludes most exiles and dissidents from the vote. The same rules applied to expatriate voters elsewhere.
   A Myanmar man was arrested and 12 demonstrators were injured Saturday in a scuffle with Japanese police in Tokyo as about 150 Myanmar citizens and Japanese supporters demanded all expatriates be allowed to vote.
   Another protest in Tokyo ended peacefully Sunday.
   About 100 Myanmar activists also staged a peaceful demonstration in Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, shouting slogans against the draft constitution.
   University student Myo Myint Maung, 23, a spokesman for the Overseas Burmese Patriots — a loose network of Myanmar activists based in Singapore — said many were wearing caps printed with the word ‘no’ on them.
   He urged everyone to vote ‘no’ ‘because the draft constitution is for a sham democracy,’ the student said. ‘It’s not for a true and real democracy as all the terms in the constitution are biased toward the military regime.’
   The new constitution is supposed to be followed in 2010 by a general election, and both votes are elements of a ‘roadmap to democracy’ drawn up by the junta.

Tamil Tiger light aircraft bombed a Sri Lankan military position in the north of the island early on Sunday in the rebels’ first air raid in nearly six months.
   The Sri Lankan military and the Tamil Tigers are locked in a new chapter of a bloody civil war that has killed thousands in recent months.
   ‘At about 1:35am they came and dropped three bombs on the Welioya Forward Defence line. Nobody was hurt, and no damage to any property,’ said military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, referring to the rebel air raid on the northern district of Pollonnaruwa.
   The rebels conducted their last air strike in October 2007 on an air force base in Anuradhapura.
   Fighting between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam has intensified since the government formally pulled out of a 6-year-old ceasefire pact in January, though a renewed civil war has been in progress since 2006.
   The Tigers, fighting for an independent state in the north and east, were not immediately available for comment.
   Pro Tamil Tiger rebel web site www.tamilnet.com said heavy fighting erupted in the Welioya area, pitting the Tigers against a ‘large scale offensive’ by the army.

US Marines are crossing the sands of southern Afghanistan for the first time in years, providing a boost to a NATO coalition that is growing but still short on manpower.
   Some of the 2,300 Marines that make up the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit helped to tame a thriving insurgency in western Iraq.
   The Marines are working alongside British forces in Helmand province — the world’s largest opium-poppy region and site of the fiercest Taliban resistance over the last two years. The director of US intelligence has said the Taliban controls 10 per cent of Afghanistan — much of that in Helmand.
   ‘Our mission is to come here and essentially set the conditions, make Afghanistan a better place, provide some security, allow for the expansion of governance in those same areas,’ said Col Peter Petronzio, the unit’s commander.
   Thirteen of the 19 Marines in the platoon of 1st Lt Adam Lynch, 27, served in 2006 and 2007 in Ramadi, the capital of the Anbar province in western Iraq. The vast region was once al-Qaeda in Iraq’s stronghold before the militants were pushed out in early 2007.
   Lynch expects the Marines, who arrived last month on a seven-month deployment, will help calm Helmand as well.
   ‘If you flood a city with Marines, it’s going to quiet down,’ Lynch said in between sets of push-ups on Helmand province’s sandy ground. ‘We know for seven months we’re not here to occupy, we’re just here to set conditions for whoever comes in after us.’
   Taliban fighters have largely shunned head-on battles since losing hundreds of fighters in the Panjwayi region of Kandahar province in fall 2006, and it’s not clear that Taliban fighters will stay to face the Marines in regions they operate.
   Lynch, a mobile assault commander, said he doesn’t care if the militants flee: ‘Just get the Taliban out of here, that’s the biggest thing.’ Western countries, including the US and other NATO nations, have been sending more troops to Afghanistan as violence has escalated.
   More than 8,000 people, mainly militants, were killed in insurgency-related violence in 2007, the UN says.
   Some 3,500 Marines arrived in Afghanistan last month; the 2,300 members of the 24th MEU are concentrating on counterinsurgency, while 1,200 Marines are helping to train the Afghan police force.

A candidate backed by the main opposition party looks set to win a key Japanese by-election Sunday in a blow to the already struggling government of the prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, reports said.
   The by-election in a constituency in the western prefecture of Yamaguchi was the first vote for a parliament seat since Fukuda took power in September and is seen as a referendum on his cabinet amid tumbling support ratings.
   Hideo Hiraoka, a 54-year-old former lawmaker backed by the Democratic Party, looks certain to beat Shigetaro Yamamoto, a 59-year-old former bureaucrat fielded by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, private Fuji network and other media said.
   The predictions, based on separate exit polls, came just a few minutes after voting stations closed. The final official vote count will not be available until shortly past midnight early Monday (after 1500 GMT Sunday).
   The predicted victory for the Democratic Party is expected to raise fresh doubts about Fukuda’s leadership, while enabling the opposition to step up its attack against the government, Kyodo News agency said.

Even by the standards of Thailand’s untouchable elite, it was considered bad form.
   A decorated policeman was shot dead in a Bangkok bar in 2001 after a fracas with the son of a top politician. The next day, the son, a military officer, went AWOL before surrendering six months later to the Thai embassy in Malaysia on a murder charge.
   Then, two years later, he was acquitted due to a lack of evidence since nobody in the bar at the time will testify.
   Four years on, and Duangchalerm Yubamrung is back in the headlines in the Southeast Asian nation having been reinstated this week as an army sub-lieutenant. The fact his father, Chalerm Yubamrung, is interior minister has nothing to do with it, he insists.
   Whatever the reason, the episode is causing uproar because it is seen as a return of the arrogance that typified the government of Thaksin Shinawatra, the telecoms billionaire ousted in a 2006 coup after months of protests by Bangkok’s middle classes.
   Although the coup ultimately failed in its mission — the administration that came to power after a December election is stuffed with Thaksin acolytes — many Thais hoped it might have curbed some of the more outrageous excesses of his ruling inner circle.
   The Duangchalerm saga suggests otherwise.
   Analysts say that if it carries on in this vein, especially with regard to a quest to rewrite the army-drafted constitution, it risks inflaming public anger to point of rekindling the protests that preceded the coup.
   ‘If the government arrogantly thinks it can do whatever it wants to benefit its cronies just because it has a majority in parliament, people will be agitated and start hitting the street again,’ political analyst Prayad Hongtongkhum said.
   Even though the chances of another coup are remote given the mess the army made of running the country after 2006, the struggle for control of Thailand rages on between the royalist establishment and the brash, modernising forces of Thaksinism.
   The constitution is now the main battleground.
   The sole opposition party and allies of the ex-coup leaders accuse the six-party coalition government of trying to whitewash itself by changing the charter, which is threatening three parties with possible dissolution for poll fraud.
   The Election Commission accuses senior members of the People Power Party, led by fiery TV chef Samak Sundaravej, and two of its junior partners of vote buying in the December election — charges that could see the entire parties disbanded.

A recount of disputed parliamentary seats has confirmed opposition control of parliament and should be complete Monday, allowing the release of results of the presidential election, state media reported Sunday.
   The Sunday Mail said the recount of 18 of 23 contested seats confirmed the initial results. Even if the opposition lost the last five districts, it would still hold the majority in parliament for the first time since independence from Britain in 1980.
   Original results of the March 29 elections showed that opposition groups won 110 seats to president Robert Mugabe party’s 97. Three
   seats are vacant, awaiting by-elections after the deaths of candidates. The Sunday Mail newspaper, a government mouthpiece, said the state Electoral Commission planned to invite Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai or their polling agents to a final ‘verification and collation exercise’ on their presidential tallies on Monday.
   ‘The process of feeding recounted statistics into our systems has already begun. We trust by Monday April 28 this process will have been concluded,’ said Judge George Chiweshe, head of the electoral commission, the paper reported.
   After that, tallies from the presidential race would be scrutinised by the candidates or their representatives before results are given, he said.
   Leaving room for a further delay, Chiweshe said election authorities agreed each party would collate its own figures during the final verification stage.
   The electoral commission on Saturday confirmed the results in 10 disputed parliamentary votes: six seats were taken by the opposition and four by Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party in the March 29 election.
   Tallies from the additional eight recounted seats have not been released but Chiweshe told reporters Saturday there were no significant differences between the two counts, effectively confirming the opposition’s control of the main 210-seat House of Assembly.
   Mugabe, believed to have lost the presidential race, has been accused of using delays, fraud and violence to hold onto power. Even if he retains the presidency, he will have to deal with a defiant parliament.
   The opposition and an independent Zimbabwean observer group say the opposition also won the presidential race, basing their conclusions on their own surveys of results posted at individual polling stations. But electoral laws require a presidential run-off if neither main candidate won more than 50 per cent of the vote.
   On Friday, security forces raided the offices of the opposition and the independent observers, seizing materials related to the count.
   The police confirmed Saturday that they arrested 215 people in a raid on opposition headquarters in Harare. They also said they searched the offices of the observer group, the independent Zimbabwe Election Support Network, looking for evidence that the Western-funded organisation bribed state election officials to rig polling results.
   The oppositions said those arrested were seeking refuge in the capital Harare after being attacked by ruling party loyalists in the countryside.
   Human rights lawyer Alec Muchadehama said 24 children, ‘some still suckling,’ were among the detained and that there were reports of widespread beatings in the police stations.
   Hundreds of opposition supporters have been abducted, tortured and assaulted in recent weeks in what independent religious and human rights groups call a violent crackdown on dissent.
   The clampdown and delay in announcing the presidential results has prompted international condemnation.
   America’s top envoy on Africa, Jendayi Frazer, was Sunday in Zambia, whose president has been unusually critical of his Zimbabwean counterpart. Frazer has called for regional leaders to demand an end to intimidation by security forces and to work with the United States to find a peaceful solution to the crisis.

Russia’s warning that it could use military force in Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is a breach of international law, Georgia said on Saturday.
   A Russian Foreign Ministry envoy said on Friday that Russia might have to use military means to protect ‘compatriots’ in the regions if they were attacked.
   ‘The statement about the possible use of force against Georgia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia on the part of Russia is a violation of all international legal acts and agreements,’ Georgia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
   ‘The Russian side is taking aggressive actions,’ it said.
   Russia’s ties with Georgia have been strained for more than a decade by Moscow’s support of the two separatist regions, which threw off Georgian rule after wars in the 1990s. The Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, says he wants to bring the regions back under Tbilisi’s control.
   Moscow said this month it was deepening ties with the two regions, where most of the population have been issued with Russian passports. ‘Russia is trying to justify their criminal activities in relation to the Georgian separatist regions by saying they protect Russian citizens there,’ the Georgian ministry said.
   ‘However the actions of Russia contradict the fundamental obligations which derive from the European Convention of Human Rights,’ it said.
   Russia and Georgia are engaged in a war of words over the downing of a Georgian spy drone over Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia, a stretch of land run by pro-Moscow separatists on the Black Sea coast.

Recent letters from the US Justice Department to Congress state that intelligence agents working on counter-terrorism can legally use interrogation techniques that might otherwise be banned by international law, The New York
   Times reported in its Sunday editions.
   The Justice Department’s interpretation shows the Bush administration is contending that the boundaries should have a degree of latitude, the Times said, despite the
   president’s order last summer which he said meant the CIA would hew to international norms on the treatment of detainees.
   The United States has faced heavy criticism from rights groups and some allies for its use of a simulated form of drowning known as ‘waterboarding’ during interrogations and for holding hundreds of suspected militants in a prison camp at a US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
   A March 5 letter from the Justice Department to Congress makes clear the Bush administration has not set boundaries for which interrogation methods might violate the ban in the Geneva Conventions on ‘outrages upon personal dignity,’ the Times reported.
   ‘The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,’ Brian Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in one letter.
   The Times said the letters were provided by the staff of senate Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
   The committee had received classified briefings on the matter and Wyden had requested further information, which yielded the letters, the paper said.
   A senior Justice Department official, speaking to the Times on condition of anonymity, said of the classified information: ‘I certainly don’t want to suggest that if there’s a good purpose you can head off and humiliate someone.’
   But he said ‘the fact that you are doing something for a legitimate security purpose would be relevant.’
   ‘There are certainly things that can be insulting that would not raise to the level of an outrage on personal dignity,’ the official said.

Three months after a peace accord in east Congo, armed groups are still killing and raping civilians, and fighting between the army and Rwandan rebels who did not sign the ceasefire has displaced thousands more refugees.
   Humanitarian organisations are calling on the international community which backed the Jan. 23 Goma peace agreement to take urgent action to ensure it is translated into real security for civilians in Democratic Republic of Congo’s turbulent east.
   They say that since president Joseph Kabila’s government and rebel and militia factions signed the accord, which introduced a ceasefire in North and South Kivu provinces, civilians there are still enduring horrific suffering. Scores have been killed, hundreds of women and girls raped and children recruited as fighters. Malnutrition, cholera and malaria are rife.
   ‘Nothing has changed ... We’re seeing that, three months on, there has been no progress on human rights and the humanitarian situation. This needs to be more than words on paper,’ Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.

Iraqi security forces have found more than 100 bodies in two mass graves, military officials said on Sunday.
   Fifty bodies were found
   in a mass grave in central
   Iraq on Sunday, a military source in the area said,
   and another team said it had discovered more than 50 bodies in a grave south of Baghdad on April 17.
   The grave found on Sunday was in the village of al-Guba, 80 km north of Baghdad, in the troubled Diyala province, where al Qaeda Sunni Arab militants have regrouped after being driven out of other parts of the country.
   Most of the bodies had their hands bound and gunshot wounds in the head. Some were decomposed, according to the military source, who declined to be named.

Transit workers in Toronto went on strike at midnight on Friday after rejecting a tentative contract deal, shutting down bus, street car and subway service in Canada’s most populous city.
   Local 113 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents 9,000 operating and maintenance workers, rejected the proposed three-year pact by a vote of 65 per cent and walked off the job.
   The Toronto Transit Commission said that because of the legal strike, there would be no service as of Saturday.
   The TTC carries more than 1.5 million passengers every weekday. A strike will cause serious problems for many workers who rely on the service, which covers a wide metropolitan area where some 5 million people live.
   The union said on Saturday it had agreed to a request from the Ontario Ministry of Labour for both sides to return to the bargaining table on Saturday afternoon.
   ‘We are doing everything we can to resolve this dispute in line with our members’ decision to reject the settlement,’ said Bob Kinnear, president of Local 113. ‘We will continue to attempt to reach a negotiated agreement.’
   Union officials said the strike was called immediately rather than allowing 48 hours’ notice because they feared a public backlash against transit workers.
   ‘We have assessed the situation and decided that we will not expose our members to the dangers of assaults from angry and irrational members of the public,’ Kinnear said in a statement issued late on Friday night.
   The rejection of the tentative deal has been blamed on members’ dissatisfaction with plans to contract out maintenance work as well as its wage and benefits provisions.
   The Ontario premier, Dalton McGuinty, recalled the provincial legislature for an emergency session on Sunday to pass back-to-work legislation to try and avoid chaos when the work week begins.
   The City of Toronto said it would implement measures aimed at aiding the flow of traffic during the transit strike, such as restricting parking on major arteries and designating certain lanes reserved for buses as car pool lanes. The city’s bicycle path and lane network would also be broadened.
   Union and transit commission officials had reached a tentative deal last Sunday, averting a strike that was to begin the next day. The TTC had offered 3 per cent wage increases in each of the three years of the contract.

Massive gun battles broke out between suspected drug traffickers who fired at each other while speeding down heavily populated streets of this violent border city early Saturday, killing 13 people and wounding nine.
   All of the dead were believed to be drug traffickers, possibly rival members of the same cartel who were trying to settle scores, said Rommel Moreno, the attorney general of Baja California state, where Tijuana is located.
   ‘Evidently this is a confrontation between gangs,’ Moreno told reporters.
   Eight suspects and one federal police officer were injured in the pre-dawn shootings, none gravely, said Agustin Perez Aguilar, a spokesman for the state public safety department. The suspects are being held on suspicion of weapons possession among other possible charges.