Fierce fighting erupted in northern Sri Lanka Monday as government forces mounted a fresh push into territory held by Tiger rebels and said 48 people were killed in new clashes.
   Security forces launched a pre-dawn assault against a defence line of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the Jaffna peninsula and smashed at least two dozen guerrilla bunkers, the defence ministry said.
   It said 15 rebels were killed and more than 30 wounded while the military suffered two soldiers dead and nine wounded.
   ‘Troops launched a multi-pronged surprise assault at LTTE positions ahead of Nagarkovil defences (in Jaffna peninsula)... forcing terrorists to flee with soaring casualties,’ the defence ministry statement said.
   However, the Tigers said they beat back the military offensive and pushed the security forces to their original positions.
   The Tigers, in a statement published in the pro-rebel Puthinam.com web site, said they killed three government soldiers and wounded more than a dozen during a 45-minute battle. The rebels said they did not suffer any losses. Elsewhere, the rebels lost 31 cadres in fighting across Vavuniya, Mannar and Weli Oya, all in the northern area of the mainland, on Sunday, the defence ministry said.
   The Tigers placed their losses in the Mannar area at three killed on Sunday and said they had inflicted heavy casualties on government forces. Since the start of this month, the Sri Lanka defence ministry has claimed it has killed 551 rebels against just 24 government soldiers dead.
   Army chief Sarath Fonseka said at the beginning of the year that the military planned to eliminate the estimated 3,000 cadres of the LTTE in the first six months of the year, or 500 rebels a month.
   The military’s claims cannot be independently checked as no journalists or rights groups have access to the embattled areas.
   The fighting came after the military accused the Tigers of killing at least 10 civilians late Thursday in the relatively calm south. A roadside bomb last Wednesday killed 27 bus passengers.
   At least 46 civilians have been killed in rebel attacks since the start of January, according to military statements.
   Sri Lanka formally ended a six-year peace truce with the Tamil Tiger rebels last week, accusing the guerrillas of using the Oslo-brokered pact to re-arm and strike military and civilian targets.
   Tens of thousands of people have been killed since the LTTE launched a separatist campaign in 1972 to carve out an independent homeland for minority Tamils in the island’s north and east.

The president, Pervez Musharraf, pledged that next month’s elections will be free and fair, but urged Western patience with the pace of democracy in Pakistan as he started a four-nation European tour Monday.
   ‘We must have fair and transparent elections,’ on February 18, he said in Brussels. ‘Whoever wins, obviously power will be handed over to them... There is no question at all that we will deny forming a government to whichever party forms a majority,’ he said.
   Pakistan is in a deep political crisis exacerbated by the assassination last month of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto which sparked violence and led to the general election being postponed.
   Musharraf urged the West to allow Pakistan more time to work toward democracy.
   ‘We are going to be returning to free, fair and transparent elections, and peaceful elections,’ he said, despite the slow progress made on the polls.

Five ethnic Indian leaders, detained by the Malaysian government under a draconian security law, Monday began a hunger strike to protest their incarceration and the alleged marginalisation of the community in the multi-racial country.
   The five men are leaders of the non-governmental Hindu Rights Action Front (Hindraf), which had organised a massive rally here on November 25 to voice to raise grievances of ethnic Indians over alleged discrimination in the Muslim-majority country. The government has denied the allegations.
   Several supporters of the five leaders held under the tough Internal Security Act that allows indefinite detention without trial, also joined the hunger strike at two different temples, a lawyer of one of the detainees said.
   The supporters said while the five – P Uthayakumar, V Ganabathirau, T Vasanthakumar, R Kenghadharan and M Manoharan – would go on hunger strike inside the detention centre, they would do it outside for five days, one for each of the detained.
   About 20,000 Indians took part in the November 25 rally.
   Yesterday, another 20,000 ethnic Indians assembled here but this time to support premier Abdullah Badawi who, addressing the rally, promised to wipe out poverty among all races and urged for their support.

Beijing plans to make an example of celebrities who flout China’s one-child policy by dramatically raising fines to prevent them buying their way past the rule, state media said Monday.
   ‘Celebrities and wealthy people will be more heavily fined for giving birth to more than one child,’ Xinhua news agency quoted city family planning chief Deng Xingzhou as saying.
   The government and its media outlets have recently played up reports of celebrities and other wealthy citizens skirting the policy, which limits urban families to one child.
   The rocketing incomes of the wealthy have allowed them to increasingly get past the rule by paying a fine officially set at around 100,000 yuan (13,800 dollars) for Beijing residents, but which is typically much lower, Xinhua said.
   It cited the case of Hao Haidong, a player in China’s domestic football league, who was fined just 50,000 yuan for having a second child despite an annual salary of five million yuan, one of China’s highest soccer salaries.
   Deng, who heads the Beijing Municipal Commission on Family Planning, said during a government meeting that the level of the new fines for celebrities was still being worked out.
   China’s family planning policy began in the late 1970s as a way to prevent the world’s largest population – now at 1.3 billion people – from exceeding the country’s capacity to feed it.
   Generally, urban families can have one child and rural families can have two if the first is a girl. The policy has averted about 400 million births, the government has said.

The European Union led mounting calls on Monday for Israel to end its crippling four-day-old blockade of Gaza as Egypt came under pressure to open the territory’s only access to the outside world that bypasses the Jewish state.
   Radical and pro-Western Arab governments alike called for urgent international intervention to secure an end to the closure which plunged much of Gaza City into darkness on Sunday night and has left hospitals with dwindling fuel stocks.
   The EU external relations commissioner, Benita Ferrero Waldner, accused Israel of the ‘collective punishment’ of Gaza’s aid-dependent population of 1.5 million people as the UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned it would be forced to stop food distribution within days if the lockdown continued.
   The EU commissioner warned that neither the blockade nor the deadly air and ground strikes of the past week would bring Israel security from militant rocket fire.
   ‘Only a credible political agreement this year ... can turn Palestinians away from violence,’ she said.
   Israel relaunched peace negotiations with the moderate Palestinian president, Mahmud Abbas, at a conference in the United States last November and during a visit to the Holy Land less than two weeks ago the US president, George W Bush, said he hoped to see a final agreement before he leaves office next January.
   The Gaza Strip has been outside Abbas’s control since the Islamist Hamas movement seized power there last June, but the Palestinian leader warned late on Sunday that he would raise the blockade with the UN Security Council if it was not lifted within hours.
   The leading radical Arab state, Syria, said the Israeli actions against Gaza made a mockery of the relaunched peace talks and called for urgent international intervention.
   ‘Talk of a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians flies in the face of the green light being given to the attacks and blockade,’ a foreign ministry statement said.
   Neighbouring Lebanon, which has a Western-backed government strongly opposed to Syria, called on the Western powers to end their silence over Israel’s military action against Gaza which has killed 37 people, most of them militants, in a week.
   ‘It is the duty of the Security Council, the United States, the European Union and the Arab League to act immediately to stop the Israeli offensive, and to denounce Israel,’ the prime minister, Fuad Siniora, said.
   ‘Israel is profiting from the international silence... to unleash its rage against the inhabitants of Gaza.’ Egypt, one of just two Arab countries with Jordan to have signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state, made frantic calls to Israeli leaders appealing for an end to the military action and a lifting of the blockade.
   The president, Hosni Mubarak, rang both the prime minister, Ehud Olmert and defence minister Ehud Barak, the official MENA news agency said.
   But his appeals drew short shrift from the Israeli premier who promised no let-up in the lockdown as long as Hams remained in power.
   ‘The population has to understand that as long as Hamas rules there, we will provide them only with the bare minimum,’ he said.
   Hamas responded by calling for Arab pressure on Egypt, the only Arab state that borders Gaza, to open up its Rafah crossing to desperately needed supplies.
   ‘We have one demand and that is the opening of the Rafah crossing and the breaking of the siege,’ said Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister dismissed after the Islamist takeover of Gaza, calling on the Arab League to take ‘concrete steps’ to break the blockade.
   The Rafah crossing has remained largely closed since last June although Egypt has occasionally opened it in defiance of Israel, most recently for returning Muslim pilgrims last month.

Five people were hacked to death in ethnic clashes in Nairobi slums, the police said Monday, as mediators prepared a fresh bid to break the deadlock that followed president Mwai Kibaki’s re-election.
   The five died in the capital’s Huruma, Babadogo and Mathare slums where feuding tribes clashed late into the night, bringing to 50 the number of deaths over the past six days, the police and witnesses said.
   The police said the fighting and revenge killings raged between members of pro-Kibaki tribes and those supporting opposition chief Raila Odinga, who claims he was robbed of victory in the December 27 presidential polls.
   Several houses were razed as hundreds stampeded out of shantytowns that have been divided into tribal blocs.
   Three days of opposition protests that began Wednesday provoked a fierce crackdown by anti-riot and paramilitary police, and some unarmed civilians were shot down in the capital and the western city of Kisumu.
   The political rioting morphed into tribal killings and looting, mainly in the capital’s crowded slums and areas in the country’s western region where the political crisis has exacerbated long-running tribal feuds. Overnight clashes left two dead in Huruma, one in Babadogo and two in Mathare, where police commander Paul Ruto said 12 people had been arrested following the violence.
   Riot police continued to patrol major towns as well as the volatile rural areas across the country, as opposition supporters remained in defiant mood. ‘The struggle is still on until justice prevails,’ Odinga said in the town of Kakamega, on his first visit to western opposition strongholds since the elections.
   ‘I won the election, but I was rigged out,’ Odinga said, during the brief visit, which took him to see victims of the violence at local hospitals and displaced people sheltered in a Methodist church. Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement party over the weekend called for a fresh round of demonstrations on Thursday, but police have vowed to block them.
   Alarmed by the stalemate, the Roman Catholic Church appealed to the feuding leaders to start talks and avert plunging the country, once seen as a haven of stability in a restive region, further into chaos.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has backed parliament in a dispute with hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had objected to several measures adopted by MPs, the ISNA news agency said on Monday.
   Ahmadinejad had criticised parliament, which is dominated by fellow conservatives, for overturning his decision to dissolve several institutions – including the Monetary and Credit Council, a key financial policy maker – as well as his abolition of summer time in Iran.
   ‘Laws adopted through the process defined by the constitution must be respected by all organs,’ Khamenei said in a letter to parliament speaker Gholam Ali Hadad Adel.
   Hadad Adel had sought the opinion of the supreme leader, who has the final say on all key policy issues, after receiving Ahmadinejad’s complaint.
   ‘I was surprised by the president writing to parliament to say a bill was against the constitution.

Myanmar is going ‘downhill on all fronts,’ a senior US diplomat said during a visit to Vietnam Monday, urging regional neighbours to pressure the junta running the country formerly called Burma.
   ‘The regime in Burma is absolutely refusing to take any positive steps at all, either in response to its own people or to the international community,’ said the US deputy assistant secretary of state, Scot Marciel.
   ‘It should be a cause of concern for everybody because the way Burma is going under this regime and its policies is sort of downhill on all fronts,’ he told a media briefing during a Hanoi stop on a regional tour.
   ‘We talk about it mostly in terms of human rights and democracy and that’s critically important to us, but it’s beyond that,’ he said. ‘The economy is going downhill, the education system is getting ruined.
   ‘The health care system isn’t functioning, ... you’re getting more and more cases of resistant strains of tuberculosis and malaria out of Burma. You’ve got refugee flows out of Burma. It’s just a whole series of problems.’
   Myanmar faces mounting pressure for democratic reform after its crackdown on peaceful protests led by Buddhist monks last September triggered widespread international outrage and tighter Western sanctions.
   The United Nations says at least 31 people were killed during the suppression of the protests, and 74 remain missing.
   Marciel said he had spoken about Myanmar with officials in Tokyo, Phnom Penh and Hanoi and would also raise the topic in Bangkok and Vientiane soon, urging all governments to push for change.
   ‘Our sense is that there is no easy solution, but for Burma to begin to turn around in a very general sense, it’s not really going to happen and can’t really happen under this regime,’ he said.

Russia wants a legal settlement of the dispute with Britain that has caused the closing of two branches of the British Council, the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Sunday.
   ‘The British side is trying to keep everything on a political level, but we do not want to politicise,’ Russian news agency ITAR-TASS reported Lavrov as saying.
   ‘Russia is for a legal resolution of the problem related to the British Council,’ he said, adding: ‘We will present the legal arguments showing that the British Council in Russia has no legal basis.’ A diplomatic spat ignited between the two countries following the November 2006 murder in London of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko. Moscow refused to extradite Britain’s chief suspect in the murder, former KGB member Andrei Lugovoi.
   The escalating dispute resulted in the expulsion of diplomats from both sides last year and recently – on January 1 – in Russia ordering the British Council to close two of its three offices for tax irregularities.
   With a mandate to promote cultural and educational links, the British Council in Russia now says local authorities have made it impossible for the organisation to operate in the country.

This year, for the first time, expatriate Democrats can cast their ballots on the internet in a presidential primary for people living outside the United States.
   Democrats Abroad, an official branch of the party representing overseas voters, will hold its first global presidential preference primary from February 5 to 12, with ex-pats selecting the candidate of their choice by Internet as well as fax, mail and in-person at polling places in more than 100 countries.
   Democrats Abroad is particularly proud of the online voting option – which provides a new alternative to the usual process of voting from overseas, a system made difficult by complicated voter registration paperwork, early deadlines and unreliable foreign mail service.
   ‘The online system is incredibly secure: That was one of our biggest goals,’ said Lindsey Reynolds, executive director of Democrats Abroad. ‘And it does allow access to folks who ordinarily wouldn’t get to participate.’
   US citizens wanting to vote online must join Democrats Abroad before February 1 and indicate their preference to vote by Internet instead of in the local primaries wherever they last lived in the United States. They must promise not to vote twice for president, but can still participate in non-presidential local elections.
   Members get a personal identification number from Everyone Counts Inc, the San Diego-based company running the online election. They can then use the number to log in and cast their ballots.
   Their votes will be represented at the August Democratic National Convention by 22 delegates, who according to party rules get half a vote each for a total of 11. That’s more than US territories get, but fewer than the least populous states, Wyoming and Alaska, which get 18 delegate votes each.