North Korea fired several short-range missiles off its west coast on Friday, a South Korean news agency reported, in what analysts saw as a show of anger at Washington and the new conservative government in Seoul.
   The launch comes a day after the North expelled South Korean officials from a joint industrial complex north of the border after Seoul told its prickly neighbour the clean up its human rights and stop dragging its feet in nuclear disarmament talks.
   ‘North Korea is understood to have shot several missiles, seen as short-range, in the West Sea (Yellow Sea),’ Yonhap news agency cited a government source as saying.
   South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff declined to comment.
   New South Korean president Lee Myung-bak has said he wanted to end the free ride given to North Korea under 10 years of left-leaning presidents who gave billions in aid while asking for little in return, seeing it as the price to pay for stability.
   Lee’s government has said it is ready to invest heavily in the impoverished state provided the North meets conditions such as taking apart its nuclear arms programme or returning the more than 1,000 South Koreans it kidnapped or kept in the country after the 1950-53 Korean War.
   Pyongyang was basically sending two messages, Keio University Korea expert Masao Okonogi said in Tokyo.
   One was aimed at the United States after talks in Geneva, showing the North’s dissatisfaction with Washington’s pressure to come clean on uranium enrichment and ties with Syria, he said. The other was a riposte to the Lee government’s shift in stance.
   ‘They are warning Seoul not to go back on things agreed between the North and the South,’ Okonogi said.
   North Korea has more than 1,000 missiles, at least 800 of them ballistic, that can hit all of South Korea and most parts of Japan, experts have said. Its launches are often timed to coincide with periods of political tension.
   At about the same time as the reported missile launch, North Korea’s official media launched a rhetorical volley at the United States, blaming it for pushing six-country talks aimed at scrapping the North’s nuclear arms plans into deadlock.
   ‘The more we talk, the deeper we are disappointed by the Bush administration’s behaviour,’ the North’s KCNA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.
   ‘If the United States continues to delay the resolution of the nuclear problem by insisting on something that doesn’t exist, it could have a grave impact on the disablement of the nuclear facility that has been sought
   so far.’
   It began disabling its Yongbyon Soviet-era nuclear plant at the end of last year, as its side of a deal with regional powers in return for aid and an end to international isolation.

Sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims intensified in a tribal region of northwest Pakistan on Friday, with at least 22 people reportedly killed in gunbattles, a senior official said.
   ‘Dead bodies are lying inside houses and in fields,’ said Qalb-e-Hassan, a newly elected provincial legislator from Kohat town.
   Fighting overnight was concentrated in three villages of Kohat district of North West Frontier Province.
   The tribesmen were armed with semi-automatic weapons, machine guns, mortars and rockets, and the civil authorities have asked for the army to help restore order.
   ‘I have reports that at least 22 people were killed in fighting overnight,’ said Kamran Zeb, a senior administrator in Kohat, though he added it was too unsafe to verify how many people have been killed.
   The latest clashes, between men from the Mishti and Kachai tribes, brought the toll to more than 50 in an outbreak of sectarian violence that began last week.
   Some media reports put the toll higher.
   At least six people were killed on Thursday in a suspected militant attack on an ambulance in Kohat’s neighbouring Kurram tribal region, which also has a long history of violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims.
   While Kohat is plagued with sectarian unrest, al-Qaeda-linked militants have unleashed a wave of violence on the rest of Pakistan. Nearly 600 people have been killed since the start of the year, many of them victims of suicide attacks.
   Pakistani security forces are battling militants in several parts of NWFP, including Kohat, and in seven semi-autonomous tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, on Wednesday threatened ‘painful’ measures against Hamas and ruled out talks with the Palestinian Islamist group on a possible truce.
   ‘We are not talking to Hamas and we are not going to compromise with someone that is consistently shooting rockets on the heads of Israelis,’ Olmert told foreign journalists at a news conference, speaking in English.
   ‘We will deal with Hamas in other ways and these ways will be very painful.’
   With US backing, Egypt has been trying to negotiate a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Gaza militants who fire rockets across the border into the Jewish state.
   Hamas has suspended rocket fire in recent weeks, following an Israeli offensive in northern Gaza that killed more than 120 Palestinians, many of them civilians.
   Israel has also refrained from carrying out attacks in Gaza against members of the group but it continues to target Islamic Jihad, which has kept up sporadic rocket attacks — strikes that rarely cause death or injury but have traumatised border towns.
   The talks could include the possibility of reopening the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, which was blasted open by militants in January in defiance of an Israeli-led siege on the territory. It has since been resealed.
   Olmert said on Wednesday Israel was willing to allow humanitarian goods through Rafah.
   ‘We will allow the transfer of all the humanitarian needs through all the crossings, including the Rafah crossing, as part of this effort. But this is as far as I’m prepared to go.’
   Olmert also reiterated that Hamas was an ‘obstacle’ to US-backed efforts to create a Palestinian state. But he added: ‘It is not an insurmountable obstacle. It can be overcome.’
   Israel tightened its cordon around Gaza after Hamas seized control in June following fighting with Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah forces. Israel is under international pressure to ease restrictions on Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.
   Hamas opposes peace talks with Israel.

The US military has suspended a Florida company’s contract to provide ammunition to Afghan security forces because of concerns about the packaging, age and origin of the gun cartridges, US defence officials said on Thursday.
   The military has started an investigation into the contract and the contractor, privately held AEY Inc. of Miami Beach, which sent millions of questionable rifle and machine-gun cartridges to the Afghan forces NATO hopes will lead the fight against the Taliban.
   ‘This is an army contract that has currently been suspended as they look at the performance of that contract or contractor,’ said Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman. ‘There is some concern with the packaging of the ammunition that’s not in accordance with the type of standards we would like to see and what we would expect in the performance of this contract,’ he said.

An Arab summit will discuss divisions worsened by the crisis in Lebanon, foreign ministers said on Thursday, but
   the absence of the Saudi, Egyptian and Jordanian leaders will make bridging differences difficult.
   The ministers, meeting to prepare for the March 29-30 summit in Damascus, held a rare session on ways to heal the rift among Arab countries and agreed to ask their leaders to discuss the issue, they said.
   ‘The brainstorming session was important because we discussed our joint experiences in Arab division and the harm it does,’ said Arab League chief Amr Moussa, who was charged with preparing proposals for ways to heal the rifts.

The Taliban announced the start of a spring offensive in Afghanistan, promising ‘painful strikes’ to force all enemy soldiers to leave, according to a web message seen by a US-based monitoring service on Thursday.
   NATO-led forces have conducted wide-ranging offensives in southern Afghanistan to disrupt the insurgents ahead of spring, which each year heralds a surge in violence as the snows melt and fighters emerge from their mountain hideouts.
   The web message entitled ‘Taliban declares beginning
   of spring offensive in Afghanistan’ was from Mullah Bradar Akhund, who styles
   himself deputy emir of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, according to a translation by the SITE Institute terrorism monitoring service seen in London.
   ‘The winter season is about to end, and here spring looms on the horizon, and in order for the continuity of doing the holy jihad, with the coming spring season, the Islamic Emirate begins a new series of operations under the name ‘Admonition’,’ it said.
   ‘Our aim in these operations is to give the enemy an admonishing lesson through conclusive and painful strikes that he does not anticipate, until he knows and is compelled to end the occupation of Afghanistan and withdraw until the last soldier leaves.’
   The insurgents have already vowed to intensify attacks on Afghan and foreign troops countrywide, launch a wave of suicide bombings and attack supply lines from Pakistan this year in their campaign to overthrow the pro-Western government.
   The Web statement said the Taliban would employ ‘new types of operations’ across the country, according to the SITE Institute.
   Last year saw a record level of violence in Afghanistan that killed nearly 6,000 people, about a third of them civilians. More than 200 foreign troops were killed in Afghanistan in 2007.

US and Russian officials ended two days of meetings Thursday without bridging the gap on Washington’s plans to deploy parts of a missile shield in eastern Europe, US officials said.
   The two sides are intensifying efforts to end a row with echoes of the Cold War by planning more talks on missile defence at a summit in early April in Russia between the US president, George W Bush, and his counterpart Vladimir Putin.
   The talks in Washington followed high-level meetings in Moscow last week.
   ‘There are differences on missile defence. The two secretaries set the stage for progress, but there are differences that remain,’ acting secretary for political affairs Daniel Fried said after two days of talks.
   The secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the defence secretary, Robert Gates, met in Moscow last week with their Russian counterparts Sergei Lavrov and Anatoly Serdyukov in a bid to ease Russian concerns about the project.
   ‘This is pretty much what we expected,’ Fried said of the remaining differences during a telephone conference call with reporters.
   But he said the two sides made progress on a strategic framework that Bush raised earlier this month in a letter to Putin aimed at mapping out future US-Russian ties on more than a dozen security, economic and other areas. These issues range from missile defence to fighting terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation.
   ‘And this strategic framework has sections on security that go beyond missile defence. It is a very substantive document. And so we made progress in all these areas, including this security area,’ Fried said.
   The two days of talks here were led by US arms control expert John Rood and the Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Kislyak, as a follow up to Rice’s and Gates’ meetings in Moscow.
   ‘We were prepared for lengthy and extensive negotiations over the last two days and we’re going to stay at this at a pretty intense pace with the hope of reaching agreement soon,’ Rood said.
   But Rood said he could not guarantee that there would be agreement on the strategic framework document by the time Putin leaves office in May and hands over to president-elect Dmitry Medvedev.
   Putin is widely expected to stay on as a powerful prime minister, however.
   Russia opposes US plans to install 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a tracking radar in the Czech Republic as part of an anti-missile system which Washington says is aimed at protecting against ‘rogue’ states such as Iran and North Korea.
   The Russian side has seen the shield as a direct threat to its security, especially with a radar installation that could survey parts of Russia’s territory.

Britain’s Defence Ministry is to admit that its troops tortured and breached the human rights of nine Iraqi men they detained in southern Iraq in 2003, opening the way to potentially large compensation claims.
   The decision follows years of legal wrangling in which the family of Baha Musa, an Iraqi hotel worker who was beaten and died in British custody, and eight other Iraqis who survived the beatings, have sought justice.
   The ministry, which will make the admission in the High Court on Friday, said on Thursday it was doing so to try to smooth the process of paying compensation to Musa’s family and the eight other Iraqis and end lengthy court proceedings.
   The case was one of the British military’s darkest episodes in Iraq. All nine detainees suffered 36 hours of violent interrogation before Musa died with 93 injuries to his body, including a broken nose and ribs.
   ‘I deeply regret the actions of a very small number of troops and I offer my sincere apologies and sympathy to the family of Baha Musa and the eight others,’ armed forces minister Bob Ainsworth said in a statement issued along with the ministry’s admission of its breach of human rights.
   ‘During 2003 and 2004, a very small minority committed acts of abuse and we condemn their actions.’
   Lawyers for Musa’s family and the eight others welcomed the decision but said it was still not clear what compensation would be paid and whether the ministry would issue a formal apology.
   ‘It’s definitely a very welcome step,’ said Sapna Malik, a lawyer with Leigh Day, which represents the claimants. ‘We spoke with Baha Musa’s father and he definitely felt that this was an admission of guilt and in some senses a victory for them. It’s an acknowledgment that Iraqi lives are not cheap, that they do count,’ she said.
   Claims for compensation have already been lodged with the British courts, but the size of any payment will probably not be decided before June, when lawyers begin talks with the ministry.
   The ministry confirmed it expected to pay compensation, but would not say how much. ‘Obviously it will be larger in the case of Baha Musa because he died,’ a spokesman said.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, agreed on Thursday to cooperate on civil nuclear technology, improving French companies’ chances of leading the UK’s nuclear power push.
   France already gets 78 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power and the deal will give French companies favoured access to Britain where the government says it urgently needs a new fleet of nuclear reactors.
   After their meeting at a soccer stadium in north London, the two leaders said in a statement they had agreed to streamline the development of projects by getting French and British nuclear regulators to work more closely on nuclear safety, security, waste management and reactor licensing.
   They also agreed to increase the exchange of nuclear technicians and expertise, which France’s thriving nuclear industry can offer more of after decades of decline in the sector in Britain.
   The two leaders said the deal might at some stage be extended to include other European Union countries.
   EDF Energy, the British subsidiary of major French power utility EDF, has said it wants to build four new nuclear power plants in Britain and has opted for the new European EPR reactor design.
   It is one of four designs being vetted by the British government for pre-construction approval.
   The British business minister, John Hutton, said on Wednesday he hoped the Anglo-French civil nuclear cooperation would help make Britain a springboard for the global rebirth of the nuclear power industry in the face of global warming.

Iran and Indonesia on Friday condemned a film by a Dutch lawmaker that accuses the Qur’an of inciting violence, while Dutch Muslim leaders urged restraint.
   Islam critic Geert Wilders launched his movie on Thursday evening. Titled ‘Fitna’, an Arabic term sometimes translated as ‘strife’, it intersperses images of the September 11, 2001 attacks and other Islamist bombings with quotations from the Qur’an.
   The film urges Muslims to tear out ‘hate-filled’ verses from the Koran and starts and finishes with a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb under his turban, originally published in Danish newspapers, accompanied by the sound of ticking.
   The image ignited violent protests around the world and a boycott of Danish products in 2006. Many Muslims consider any depiction of the Prophet as offensive.
   Iran called the film heinous, blasphemous and anti-Islamic and called on European governments to block any further showing.
   Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation and a former Dutch colony, also condemned the film.
   ‘We are of the view that the film has a racist flavour and is an insult to Islam, hidden under the cover of freedom of expression,’ a foreign ministry spokesman said. ‘We call on Indonesian people not to be incited.’
   Dutch Muslim leaders appealed for calm and called on Muslims worldwide not to target Dutch interests. The Netherlands is home to around 1 million Muslims out of a population of 16 million.

One of the Army’s most Iraq-savvy generals is taking charge, at least temporarily, of arguably the most important command in the US military, with responsibility for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   In a ceremony Friday at MacDill Air Force Base, flit, lieutenant general, Martin Dempsey is to assume command of US Central Command from Navy admin William J. Fallon, who announced unexpectedly on March 11 that he was quitting. Fallon cited press reports that he was at odds with president Bush over Iran policy.
   The defence secretary, Robert Gates, who has denied that Fallon was out of step on Iran, and Navy admin Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are scheduled to attend the ceremony.