Egyptian and Hamas forces sealed off the border between Gaza and Egypt on Sunday after reportedly agreeing to control the frontier, blown open nearly two weeks ago amid an Israeli blockade.
   Metal barriers and barbed wire had been strung across all gaps in the breached border at the divided town of Rafah through which hundreds of thousands of people have swarmed since January 23.
   ‘Security forces have starting closing the border,’ an Egyptian security source said. ‘No more Palestinians are being allowed in.’
   One gate remained open to allow Palestinians and Egyptians to return home, but otherwise no pedestrians or vehicles were being allowed to cross, AFP correspondents witnessed.
   Dozens of armed and helmeted Hamas men wielded batons at a crowd of a few dozen people at the main Salaheddin crossing, yelling and pushing them back further into Gaza.
   A handful of angry Palestinians threw stones at Egyptian security forces after the border was closed, an AFP correspondent said. Hamas forces fired in the air but no injuries were reported.
   Up to half the Gaza population swarmed into Egypt through the breached border at Rafah, the only door to the outside world that bypasses Israel, after the Jewish state tightened its siege by halting fuel and aid supplies.
   ‘We have started to implement the measure to close the border between Egypt and Gaza,’ a spokesman for the Hamas-run interior ministry, Ihad Hussein, said in Gaza.
   The closure of ‘will last until we have a new agreement to open the Rafah crossing,’ he said.
   Zaki Abu Nasira, a 45-year-old, was despondent that he would be unable to get across to see a doctor in Egypt.
   ‘I am sick, I need to see a doctor in Egypt,’ said Abu Nasira, from the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunes. ‘There is no medicine here, we don’t have the medicine that I need here.’
   Nafisa Mahmud was in tears as she returned to Egypt from visiting friends in Gaza, which has become increasingly isolated from the world since Israel pulled out its troops and settlers in 2005 after 38 years of occupation.
   ‘It’s so sad that they closed the border, we are one people and should be able to visit each other without obstacles.’
   The move to reseal the border came after senior hardline Hamas leader Mahmud Zahar said the Islamists had agreed with Egypt on restoring order to the chaotic frontier.
   ‘We have concluded an agreement between us and our brothers in Egypt to operate channels at the local level at the crossing and along the border and we will implement it tomorrow after we meet with the (Hamas-run) government,’ Zahar told reporters on Saturday after talks in Egypt.
   It was unclear what kind of an agreement Egypt had reached with the Palestinians after talks last week with both Hamas and president Mahmud Abbas from the rival Fatah party.
   The two rival factions have not had any official contact since the Islamists violently ousted Fatah loyalists from Gaza in June last year after a week of deadly clashes.
   An official with the Palestinian Authority said on Saturday that Egypt had not struck a border deal with Hamas but had agreed that ‘it is the Authority that has to take control of the border’.
   Since Gaza militants blew down sections of the border barrier in the early morning hours of January 23, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have swarmed over the frontier, stocking up on fuel, medicines and other supplies.

Disparate militants bands in Pakistan are increasing coordination in their insurgency while the authorities who should be challe-nging their spread are demoralis-ed and fearful, security analysts say.
   Militants have battled security forces in several parts of the northwest in recent weeks and briefly seized a main road tunnel 50 km from Peshawar city in late January.
   Suicide bombers have killed hundreds of people over the past year, striking in all of the country’s main cities and killing opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on December 27.
   The attacks have raised fears about the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan. While there’s no chance of the insurgents defeating the army or holding territory outside remote enclaves on the Afghan border, the violence looks set to intensify.
   Retired Brigadier Mahmood Shah, a former chief of security in the ethnic Pashtun border lands, said peace deals with the militants in their border hub of Waziristan had backfired.

A stampede at Guangzhou railway station killed one person when frustrated passengers rushed to board trains after days of cancellations because of fierce cold and snow, the police confirmed on Sunday.
   Officials warned people to stay away from railway stations because service was recovering only slowly and was further strained as trains were commandeered to deliver emergency supplies to areas of the country battered by the worst winter weather in 50 years.
   The crush at Guangzhou station, which had been besieged by 260,000 people, killed a migrant worker hoping to get home to celebrate the most important holiday in the Chinese calendar, the Lunar New Year.
   Authorities said it was the first stampede death of the weather crisis that has killed more than 60, mainly in road accidents.
   ‘When the crowd surged in, people who dropped things didn’t dare to stop and pick them up,’ said Li Liujie, a factory worker who took a train Guangzhou on Friday, the day of the accident.
   ‘It was just too many people. There was nothing the police could do about it,’ Li said.
   Experts forecast the freak winter could continue past Chinese New Year, which will be celebrated mid-week, and said the cold and storms in areas unaccustomed to such weather was the country’s worst natural disaster in decades.

Malaysia’s main opposition party has offered to endorse as election candidates two ethnic Indians who have been detained under internal security laws after they helped organise a mass Indian street protest.
   The Democratic Action Party, gearing up for snap polls expected in the next few weeks, said on Sunday the pair were existing party members who had the right to stand for election, despite their indefinite detention as threats to state security.
   ‘It’s basically up to them. If they agree, we will nominate them,’ party secretary-general Lim Guan Eng said, adding that he had yet to hear back from the pair via their lawyers.
   Racial tensions are expected to cost the ruling coalition votes at the next election, after more than 10,000 minority ethnic Indians took to the streets in November, accusing the government of starving them of jobs and university places.
   Anti-government protests are generally outlawed in Malaysia, and police used water cannon and tear gas to break up the rally in the capital.

Fierce fighting with tanks and helicopter strikes rocked the Chad capital for a second day Sunday as rebels surrounded the president, Idriss Deby, in his palace and hundreds of foreigners fled the country.
   With international aid organisations reporting bodies in the streets and hundreds of people wounded, anti-tank and automatic weapons fire was heard around the presidential palace, where Deby has been holed up since Friday.
   The French defence minister, Herve Morin, said the new fighting could be ‘crucial’ in the battle for control of the former French colony in West Africa.
   The campaign by three rebel commanders has opened up a new conflict next to Sudan’s strife torn Darfur region and the deployment of a European peacekeeping mission in Chad and neighbouring Central African Republic has been suspended, Morin said in Paris.
   Chadian authorities accused Sudan of giving military backing to rebels who launched a new attack on Sunday on an eastern town near the border.
   Chadian army helicopters attacked a rebel column in the south of the capital near the national radio station. They also fired at other rebel vehicles in the city. An army tank defended the entrance to the national radio and was firing at anyone who showed themselves on the street, a witness said.
   ‘We did not take the airport so as not to hinder the evacuation of foreign nationals and now the French army is letting these helicopters take off and attack us,’ a rebel spokesman, Abderaman Khoulamallah, said.
   The fighting closed in on the airport and forced a temporary halt to the airlift of foreigners. But the French military said a Hercules plane carrying 104 people left Sunday morning in a calm in the unrest.
   A French foreign ministry statement said 217 French nationals and 297 foreigners had been flown out of Ndjamena.
   The United Nations said it would evacuate all UN personnel and US embassy staff were taken to the French military base on Sunday to be flown out, military sources said. China, a major investor in Chad’s growing oil industry, was organising an airlift for 210 Chinese and two Taiwan nationals to Cameroon, China’s official Xinhua news agency reported.
   The foreigners also included Germans, Belgians, Spanish, Portuguese, Egyptian and Armenian nationals.
   The French ministry said about 400 foreigners were still grouped at two hotels, the French international school and other two other emergency assembly points. But Deby, who seized at the head of a similar rebel force in 1990, refused a French offer to help him leave the country.
   France sent an extra 150 troops to help with the evacuations and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, broke off from celebrating his wedding on Saturday to twice telephone Deby.

Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls on Sunday continue their intense campaign schedule ahead of the key ‘Super Tuesday’ vote, even as millions in the United States turn their attention to the American football national championship game.
   With 24 states voting Tuesday in a showdown that amounts to a national primary, none of the leading candidates are resting on a day most Americans will be glued to the nation’s biggest sporting event.
   Republican front runner John McCain will campaign in Connecticut along with Democrat-cum-independent Joseph Lieberman, while his rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is scheduled to campaign in Missouri.
   The New York senator, Hillary Clinton, has scheduled events in the midwestern states of Missouri and Minnesota, while the Illinois senator, Barack Obama, travels to the eastern state of Delaware.
   Obama then flies home to Chicago to watch the New England Patriots face off against the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, the television event with the highest ratings in the United States.
   Top Hillary and Obama surrogates will also be busy campaigning in voter-rich California.
   Talk show queen Oprah Winfrey and Caroline Kennedy, daughter of slain president John F Kennedy, will join Obama’s wife Michelle – like her husband, a gifted orator – for a rally in Los Angeles, while former president Bill Clinton will visit churches and headline events for his wife.
   A Washington Post-ABC News poll Sunday had Hillary and Obama virtually tied in the Democratic race – 47 per cent against 43 per cent, within the poll’s margin of error.
   The poll also gave McCain, senator from Arizona, a commanding lead among Republicans – 48 per cent against 24 per cent for Romney, with rivals Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul trailing far behind.
   A confident McCain, 71, predicted he would have the nomination after Super Tuesday as he campaigned Saturday in traditionally conservative southern states.

At least 13 people were killed in tribal fighting and a police crackdown in western Kenya, the police said Sunday, in a further blow to hopes raised by a peace deal between political leaders.
   The new deaths increased the toll to 70 since Friday in the area where clashes flared after the killing of a local opposition lawmaker last week.
   ‘A total of 13 people were killed overnight,’ a local police commander said, declining to be named. He said the fatalities occurred along the Kisii-Kalenjin tribal border and nearby areas in Nyamira district in western Kenya.
   ‘Fighting is going on along the border, people are fleeing homes,’ he added.
   The police reported at least 47 new deaths Saturday, adding to 10 on Friday, as the president, Mwai Kibaki, and opposition leader Raila Odinga traded further barbs, despite a tentative first peace deal since the start of the crisis.
   The document – overseen by former UN chief Kofi Annan – aimed to end weeks of unrest that has claimed around 1,000 lives, within two weeks.
   Odinga claimed Kibaki robbed him of the presidency in closely-fought December 27 elections, amid widespread concerns from local and international observers over the vote counting process.
   The new deal called for illegal militias to be disbanded and for the investigation of all related crimes, including those allegedly committed by the police, who have killed scores of people.

Residents of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul are hastily stocking up with supplies ahead of what the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, says will be a ‘decisive battle’ against al-Qaeda, traders said on Sunday.
   Maliki warned on Saturday after an emergency meeting of his war council in Mosul, the last urban stronghold of al-Qaeda in Iraq, that a major assault on the jihadists in northern Nineveh province was imminent.
   Nineveh governor Duraid Kashmoula told reporters in the provincial capital of Mosul on Saturday that the assault would start ‘in a few days’.
   The warnings come after blasts and attacks in Mosul which have killed dozens of people, including a police chief, and bombings of Baghdad markets on Friday by two mentally impaired women which killed almost 100 people.
   ‘It is time to launch a decisive battle against terrorism,’ Maliki said after Saturday’s meeting attended by US commander in the Iraqi General, David Petraeus, and Iraq’s national security advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie.
   ‘The battle that our armed forces will launch will destroy terrorism and the criminal gangs and outlaws in Nineveh,’ he said.
   On January 25, Maliki promised a ‘decisive battle’ against al-Qaeda after dozens of people including a police chief were killed in bomb attacks in Mosul.
   Since that warning and the arrival a few days later of military reinforcements in Mosul, residents have made a rush on foodstuffs and fuel, traders said.
   ‘I sold in one week what I usually sell in a month,’ said grocer Abu Karim, 49. ‘The rush is continuing.’ ‘Many people have been stocking up on different kinds of foods since the announcement of the operation.’
   Um Mohammed, 52, a housewife, said she was worried that the whole of Mosul may be brought to a standstill by the assault.

Serbia voted Sunday in a watershed presidential election runoff that pits a pro-European against an extremist bolstered by anti-Western feelings over Kosovo’s looming independence.
   Voters took advantage of mild winter conditions including intermittent sunshine for a strong early turnout at the 8,500 polling stations across the country, reports said.
   They face a stark choice between incumbent reformist Boris Tadic, who campaigned on EU-backed prosperity, and ultra-nationalist Tomislav Nikolic, who wants stronger ties with Russia.
   Central to a fiercely fought campaign was the delicate issue of Kosovo, a southern Serbian province whose majority ethnic Albanians are threatening to make a unilateral declaration of independence within days.