Hezbollah handed the bodies of two Israeli soldiers to the Red Cross on Wednesday to be exchanged for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel in a deal viewed as a triumph by the Lebanese Shia guerrilla group.
   Many Israelis see it as a painful necessity, two years after the soldiers’ capture sparked a 34-day war with Hezbollah that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 159 Israelis.
   Two black coffins were unloaded from a Hezbollah vehicle at a UN peacekeeping base on the Israel-Lebanon border after a Hezbollah official, Wafik Safa, disclosed for the first time that army reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were dead.
   The International Committee of the Red Cross took the coffins and drove them into Israel. Safa later said DNA tests conducted by the ICRC had verified the identity of the soldiers. The Israeli army said it had started its own checks.
   ‘We are now handing over the two imprisoned Israeli soldiers, who were captured by the Islamic resistance on July 12, 2006, to the ICRC,’ Safa said at the border. ‘The Israeli side will now hand over the great Arab mujahid (holy warrior) ... Samir Qantar and his companions to the ICRC.’
   In a deal mediated by a UN-appointed German intelligence officer, Israel was to free Qantar and four other prisoners. Qantar had been serving a life prison term for the deaths of four Israelis, including a four-year-old girl and her father, in a 1979 Palestinian guerrilla attack on an Israeli town.
   The fathers of the two Israelis soldiers spoke of their pain at watching the television pictures of their sons’ coffins. ‘It is not easy to see this, although there was not much surprise to it. But ... confronting this reality was difficult, yes,’ Shlomo Goldwasser told Israel radio.
   Hezbollah’s Safa said Israel had later handed over via the ICRC the bodies of eight Hezbollah fighters slain in the 2006 war, and those of four Palestinians, including Dalal Mughrabi, a woman guerrilla who led a bloody 1978 raid on Israel.
   The four were among the nearly 200 Arabs killed trying to attack Israel whose bodies are to be transferred to Lebanon as part of the exchange. Hezbollah will return the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon.
   The deal also calls for Israel to release scores of Palestinian prisoners at a later date as a gesture to the United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon.
   Hezbollah has dubbed the exchange ‘Operation Radwan’, in honour of ‘Hajj Radwan’, or Imad Moughniyah, the group’s military commander who was assassinated in Syria in February.
   Yellow Hezbollah flags and banners fluttered across south Lebanon and along the coastal highway from the border village of Naqoura to the capital, Beirut. ‘Liberation of the captives: a new dawn for Lebanon and Palestine,’ one banner read.
   Israel denounced the planned festivities. The Israeli president, Shimon Peres, set the prisoner swap in motion on Tuesday by pardoning Qantar, reviled in Israel for his role in the 1979 attack. Qantar, aged 17 at the time, has said the father was shot by Israeli soldiers who also wounded him, and that he doesn’t remember what happened to the girl.
   Peres said he felt ‘bitter and unbearable pain’ at the decision, but that Israel was obliged to retrieve its soldiers.
   Olmert had described Qantar as the last bargaining chip for word on Israeli airman Ron Arad, missing since he bailed out over Lebanon in 1986.Israel said a report supplied by Hezbollah on Arad as part of the swap had failed to clarify his fate.

The Pakistani prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, on Wednesday condemned Afghanistan’s president for alleging that Islamabad’s intelligence services were involved in a string of recent attacks.
   The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, on Monday directly accused Pakistani military intelligence of orchestrating a wave of bloody unrest by Islamic militants, including an attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, that has left scores dead.
   Gilani ‘has strongly condemned the Afghan president’s statement that Pakistan is involved in a series of terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan,’ a Pakistani government statement said.
   ‘Afghan leaders should not give such statements as it will hamper the development process in the region,’ it quoted Gilani as saying before a cabinet meeting in Islamabad.
   Violence has spiralled in Afghanistan in the past fortnight, including a militant assault on a NATO outpost Sunday that killed nine American soldiers and a suicide attack on the Indian embassy on July 7 that killed more than 40.
   Karzai has stepped up allegations against Pakistan in recent months, saying in June that Afghanistan would be justified in attacking militant sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of their porous border.
   Karzai said in a statement on Monday that ‘the murder, killing, destruction, dishonouring and insecurity in Afghanistan is carried out by the intelligence administration of Pakistan, its military intelligence institutions.’
   ‘We know who kills innocent people,’ the Afghan president said. ‘We have told the government of Pakistan and the world and from now on it will be pronounced by every member of the Afghan nation.’
   Gilani however said Islamabad had ‘time and again declared on all forums that a stable Afghanistan is in the interest of Pakistan and entire region.

Top Indian officials met in New Delhi on Wednesday to address an increasing security threat from Maoist rebels operating in the mineral-rich but impoverished east of the country.
   The high-level security talks at the home ministry come weeks after an audacious rebel attack in Orissa state left dozens of members of an elite counter-insurgency force dead.
   The meeting also comes a day after Human Rights Watch accused India of backing a vigilante group which has forced at least 100,000 people from their homes in Chhattisgarh state, the hub of the Maoist movement.
   ‘The threat is a serious challenge facing internal security of our country today, so appropriate strategy has to be found,’ a government spokesman said.
   The Maoist insurgency, which grew out of a peasant uprising in 1967, has hit half of India’s 29 states.
   The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has described the rebels, known here as Naxalites, as the biggest threat to internal security.
   Earlier this month, the left-wing rebels opened fire on a boat carrying commandos of the Greyhound Force, based in southern Andhra Pradesh state, who were on a patrol in Orissa – sinking the vessel.

An angry South Korea Wednesday ruled out any diplomatic compromise with Japan in a worsening row over Tokyo’s claim to a group of disputed islands controlled by Seoul.
   ‘There is no room for concessions or compromise because Dokdo is a matter of our territorial sovereignty,’ the president, Lee Myung-Bak, told a cabinet meeting, calling for ‘strategic and non-partisan’ support.
   The rocky islands in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) – known as Takeshima in Japan and Dokdo in South Korea – have been in dispute for decades.
   The new row erupted Monday when Tokyo unveiled new educational guidelines calling for Japanese students to have a deeper understanding of their country’s claim over the islands.
   Japan called for calm over the dispute but the move sparked a furore in Seoul.
   South Korea recalled its ambassador to Japan, Kwon Chul-Hyun, in protest after he met Japanese officials to voice his government’s discontent.
   Kwon told the Munhwa Ilbo newspaper Wednesday that he warned Japan that it may lose support from Seoul in the international community.
   ‘I have conveyed our concerns to Japan that it may be hard to go ahead’ with a bilateral summit in Seoul and a trilateral summit involving the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea in Tokyo, he was quoted as saying.
   The Japanese prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, is scheduled to visit Seoul in September or in early October, while Lee is to visit Tokyo in September for a summit with Japanese and Chinese leaders, Kwon said.

Detained nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan Wednesday told a Pakistani high court that the media often misquoted him on proliferation issues and denied that he was harming the country’s interests.
   Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, has been effectively under house arrest in Islamabad since February 2004, when he confessed on television to transferring nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
   The scientist’s wife earlier this month lodged a court challenge against the restrictions on her husband, who had cancer surgery in 2006, encouraged by a brief relaxation in recent months which allowed him to meet family and friends.
   Khan has angered the authorities with a series of recent media interviews, including several in which he alleged that the president, Pervez Musharraf, knew he was taking centrifuges to North Korea in 2000.
   ‘I beg to submit that the media has misquoted me on several occasions and my rebuttals/disclaimers were published,’ Khan said in a letter addressed to Islamabad High Court chief justice Sardar Muhammad Aslam.
   ‘As I am confined to my house/subjail and have no direct interactional control or power to influence the media, the charade goes on.’
   Khan blamed ‘the vested interests’ that continue ‘disseminating disinformation as well as malicious propaganda’ against him and added that he would not countenance making comments that would hurt Pakistan.
   ‘I cannot ever imagine making a statement detrimental to the interests of my beloved country for which I and my family made so much sacrifice.’

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, on Wednesday dismissed his tough attorney
   general the day after he announced his intention to stand in presidential polls due next year.
   Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabet, 62, criticised Karzai’s decision, telling reporters it was unconstitutional.
   In a statement, Karzai said Sabet’s announcement Tuesday that he would stand for election was considered his resignation because the attorney general should be neutral and free of ‘political influences.’

More than 200 Thai troops have assembled on the Cambodian border amid escalating tensions over an ancient temple at the centre of a territorial dispute, a Cambodian official said Wednesday.
   The soldiers began crossing the border on Tuesday, he said, after three Thai protesters were arrested for jumping an immigration checkpoint to reach the Preah Vihear temple.
   Thailand denies the trespass and insists the soldiers are patrolling on its side of the border. Cambodia also has hundreds of troops in the area.
   ‘More than 200 Thai troops have arrived,’ Hang Soth, head of the government agency running Preah Vihear temple, said by telephone.
   ‘They have refused to go back. The confrontations could be serious,’ he said, adding that officials are discussing ways to end the stand-off.
   Thai authorities on the border made a complete denial.
   ‘It’s totally untrue. There is no trespassing,’ said Seni Chittakasem, governor of the province that borders the temple.
   ‘We have deployed rangers to patrol the border and some civilian volunteers,’ he said.
   ‘But we have withdrawn soldiers from the disputed area and are monitoring from a distance,’ he added.

Afghan authorities said Wednesday air strikes against extremist rebels in southwestern Afghanistan had killed four women and five children as well as several insurgents.
   A ‘big number’ of rebels were killed in other operations while three more civilians died in militant bombings, they said, with violence linked to an insurgency led by the hardline Taliban surging in recent weeks.
   International troops said they were looking into allegations that civilians were killed in the volatile Bakwa district of southwestern Farah province.
   ‘The bombing started Tuesday morning,’ deputy provincial governor Mohammad Younus Rasouli said. ‘One bomb struck a civilian home which killed four women, four young girls and a boy.’
   Provincial police chief Khalilullah Rahmani gave the same information citing people from the area, which has seen a build-up of Taliban in recent years and is involved in opium production. US Lieutenant Nathan Perry confirmed to AFP that air strikes were used against rebels in the area overnight.
   The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and US-led coalition are also investigating official reports that 64 civilians were killed in strikes in northeastern Afghanistan early this month.

American voters remain divided by race before a presidential election that will have the first black nominee from a major party on the ballot, a new poll showed on Wednesday.
   Blacks and whites hold much different views of Democrat Barack Obama, who is vying to be the first African-American commander-in-chief, as well as the state of US race relations, according to the New York Times/CBS poll.
   Black and white voters do agree that the country is ready to elect a black president, but disagree on other questions about race, said the survey published Wednesday.
   More than 80 per cent of black voters said they had a favourable opinion of the Illinois senator while 31 per cent of whites said they had a favourable opinion of him, the poll said.
   Black voters were more likely than whites to say that Obama cares about the needs and problems of people like them, and more likely to describe him as patriotic.
   Whites were more likely than blacks to say that Obama says what he thinks people want to hear rather than what he truly believes.
   Obama’s wife, Michelle, enjoyed more support among black voters than whites. She was viewed favourably by 58 per cent of blacks, compared with 24 per cent of white voters, the survey said.
   The poll also showed Obama with a strong lead over McCain among Hispanic voters, a crucial voting bloc that Obama failed to win over during his Democratic party nomination battle with senator Hillary Clinton.
   Obama leads McCain among Hispanics by 62 to 23 per cent. He is viewed favourably by more than half of Hispanics, while McCain’s rating is below one-quarter.
   Three national polls published Tuesday showed Obama with a lead over McCain but voters still trust McCain more to lead the country in the face of a major crisis.
   Less than four months before the November 4 presidential election, Democrat Obama held a lead of six to eight points among registered voters in the three surveys, including the New York Times/CBS survey.
   In results similar to a previous poll carried out for the New York Times eight years ago, few Americans say they have regular contact with people of other races and their workplaces and neighbourhoods tend not to be integrated.
   Fifty-nine per cent of blacks said race relations were generally bad, with only 34 per cent of whites supporting that view.
   Four in 10 blacks said there has been no progress in recent years in eliminating racial discrimination, compared to fewer than two in 10 whites.
   About one-quarter of whites said they thought that too much had been made of racial obstacles confronting black people. Half of black respondents said not enough had been made of racial barriers.

Iran can deter any threats against it, the head of the Revolutionary Guards said in comments published on Wednesday, after the country’s air force announced plans for a military exercise to help deter its foes.
   Iran is embroiled in a deepening international standoff over its nuclear programme, which the United States and Israel suspect is aimed at making bombs, a charge Tehran denies.
   In a shift in policy the United States will send a senior envoy, Under the secretary of state, William Burns, to talks between Iran and major powers this weekend to discuss Tehran’s response to an offer of incentives if it suspends enriching uranium.
   Washington had said previously it would not be involved in pre-negotiations with Tehran unless it gave up enrichment.
   ‘The enemies of Iran would not dare to undertake any direct threat or any other action against Iran,’ Iran’s Revolutionary Guards commander-in-chief Mohammad Ali Jafari was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.
   US leaders have not ruled out military options if diplomacy fails to assuage fears about Iran’s nuclear activities, which the world’s fourth-largest oil producer says is only to produce electricity.
   Israel, long assumed to have its own atomic arsenal, has vowed to prevent Iran from emerging as a nuclear-armed power. I
   t staged an air force exercise in June that stoked speculation about a possible assault on Iranian nuclear sites.
   But Iran has refused to halt sensitive nuclear work, as demanded by the powers before formal negotiations can begin on a package of trade and other benefits they have offered to Tehran.

The Arab League said on Wednesday a decision by the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor to charge Sudan’s president with genocide may not have been well thought out, and it was concerned about repercussions.
   ‘The situation is very serious and very dangerous,’ the Arab League secretary general, Amr Moussa, told reporters.
   ‘At the same time, we are not convinced that the steps taken by the criminal court were well considered,’ he said.
   Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo on Monday asked the ICC for an arrest warrant for the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
   He accused Bashir of running a campaign of genocide that has killed 35,000 people in Sudan’s western Darfur region.
   Arab foreign ministers are to hold emergency talks in Cairo on Saturday to discuss the situation.
   Meanwhile, the United Nations was airlifting staff out of Darfur for a second day on Wednesday with peacekeepers on alert following a deadly attack and moves to charge Sudan’s president with war crimes, reports AFP.
   The ‘relocation’ operation hit a snag on Tuesday when about 50 people bussed to the airport in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur where the UN-led peacekeeping mission is based, were unable to fly out for technical reasons.
   ‘One flight left this morning with the people from last night. Two more flights scheduled for today,’ said Josephine Guerrero, spokeswoman for the joint African Union-United Nations mission called UNAMID.
   At least one flight was bound for Entebbe, Uganda and another for Al-Obeid, the capital of Northern Kordofan in central Sudan.

The scandal over child sex abuse by Catholic priests flared again Wednesday as Pope Benedict XVI prepared to take centre stage at the world’s biggest Christian festival in Sydney.
   While more than 200,000 young pilgrims attended beach concerts, barbecues and religious classes, the head of the church in Australia Cardinal George Pell faced a threat of confrontation by the parents of two victims of abuse.
   The pilgrims are in Sydney for World Youth Day celebrations, which will be led by the pope from Thursday at the end of his four-day holiday at a retreat on Sydney’s outskirts.
   But the scandal over sex abuse by corrupt clergymen has partly overshadowed the festival, despite the pope’s pledge to apologise to victims as he did in the United States in April.
   The father of two girls abused by a Melbourne priest, one of whom committed suicide, has said he and his wife would travel back to Australia from Europe within the next few days for a confrontation.
   Anthony Foster told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. he would not accept an apology unless the pontiff also changed the way the church and its lawyers dealt with victims of sex abuse.
   ‘I want them to set up a system which provides lifetime help to victims, a system where they beg forgiveness of the victims,’ he said.
   Foster said he planned to make a public statement when he arrived and would demand a response from the pope and the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Australia, Cardinal George Pell.
   He said he hoped the pope would meet him to hear his demands for the church to adopt a new approach to the victims of abuse.
   ‘I should not have to try to see them. They should be coming to us to beg our forgiveness,’ he said.
   Foster’s daughter Emma committed suicide this year aged 26, after struggling to deal with abuse by a priest while she was at primary school.
   Her sister Katie was also abused and turned to alcohol in her teens before being left brain-damaged after being hit by a car while drunk, the broadcaster reported.
   The priest involved, Father Kevin O’Donnell, died in 1997 after serving time in jail for multiple sex offences but the Fosters had to fight an eight-year legal battle for compensation from the church for the abuse, ABC said.

Zimbabwe’s Christian community has rejected president Robert Mugabe’s re-election last month as marred by violence and intimidation and expressed support for efforts to form a government of national unity. In a statement obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, the heads of all the churches in the predominantly Christian country said the race between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was marked by the worst violence since independence in 1980.
   Mugabe won a landslide victory last month in a vote that was ultimately boycotted by Tsvangirai and denounced by Western nations. Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change says pro-Mugabe militia have killed at least 113 of its supporters.
   ‘We, the churches of Zimbabwe, stand ready and committed to partner with all efforts that will result in a transitional authority and subsequently a government of national unity, to bring peace stability and reconciliation within the nation,’ the church statement said.
   The 84-year-old Zimbabwean leader, in power since the end of British rule, blames the opposition for the bloodshed.
   ‘People were subjected to the most traumatic forms of violence that included torture, murder, abductions, displacement and psychological trauma,’ the Heads of Christian Denominations said in the statement.
   ‘Based on the reality of the conditions prevailing on the ground, our conclusion is that the will of the people of Zimbabwe was not given authentic expression during these elections,’ they said, adding that the violence was continuing.
   Tsvangirai, who cited the violence for his withdrawal from the June vote, has demanded that the government halt all attacks on his supporters as one of several pre-conditions to negotiating with Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF.

Osama bin Laden’s former driver took the stand on Tuesday at the US military war court where he faces trial next week and described isolation, sleep deprivation and sexual impropriety during nearly seven years of captivity.
   It was the first time prisoner Salim Hamdan, who challenged the president, George W Bush, and won, testified before the war court at the remote US Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Hamdan’s lawsuit led the US Supreme Court in 2006 to strike down the original military tribunal system created by Bush.
   In Washington on Tuesday, the Justice Department urged a federal judge to allow the trial of Hamdan, a Yemeni in his late 30s, to go forward, opposing a request by Hamdan’s lawyers to halt it based on last month’s landmark Supreme Court ruling which extended some constitutional rights to the detainees.

Tropical Storm Bertha headed back out over open ocean and away from the US mainland Tuesday after it battered Bermuda, knocking out electricity to thousands on the Atlantic tourist island.
   It is the longest-lived July tropical storm in history, according to the US National Hurricane Centre. Bertha became the Atlantic season’s first hurricane, before weakening into a tropical storm. It is expected to strengthen over the next 24 hours, forecasters said.
   The previous longest-lived storm, known as Storm No 2, occurred in 1960 and lasted just over 12 days, according to forecaster Daniel Brown. Bertha is entering its 13th day.
   The storm was centred 360 miles northeast of Bermuda Tuesday night, with sustained winds near 65 mph, the centre said. It was moving northeast at 6 mph.
   In Bermuda, the government dispatched cleanup crews and expected to restore power to 200 remaining customers by the end of the day.