The leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, vowed on Saturday to carry on fighting NATO and US-led forces in Afghanistan regardless of negotiations for a peace deal with the government of Pakistan.
   The Taliban leader told a group of journalists, invited to his stronghold in the tribal lands of South Waziristan, that he wanted to stop fighting the Pakistan army.
   ‘Fighting between the Taliban and Pakistan is harming Islam and Pakistan. This fighting should come to an end immediately,’ the black-bearded, short, muscular Mehsud said.
   But he made no commitment about halting attacks in Afghanistan, and said the jihad, or holy war, would carry on.
   ‘Islam does not recognise frontiers and boundaries. Jihad in Afghanistan will continue,’ Mehsud said, as guards carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles looked on.
   Mehsud emerged as a notorious militant commander over the past year, having been linked to a string of suicide attacks, including one that killed former prime minister Benazir Bhutto last December.
   After an offensive in January, the army succeeded in bottling up Mehsud’s forces in the mountainous tribal lands of Waziristan, giving the government a stronger position to negotiate from.
   Though led by Benazir’s party, the new government, after taking office in March, opened talks with tribal elders to persuade Mehsud to desist from launching attacks from their territory.
   Pakistani authorities say tribal elders were close to finalising the peace pact with Mehsud.
   Pakistan’s western allies, notably the United States, harbour grave reservations about any peace deal, as such pacts in the past have resulted in the militants regrouping in the safe sanctuary of the tribal lands.
   The proposed 15-point agreement, a draft of which was seen by Reuters, called for an end to militant activity, an exchange of prisoners and gradual withdrawal of troops from Waziristan.
   However, it made no explicit reference to militants stopping attacks in Afghanistan. The Pakistan army says it controls all roads out of Mehsud’s tribal lands, which do not border Afghanistan, so the scope for cross-border movements is limited.
   Mehsud has broke a peace deal signed with the government in 2005, and last year humiliated the army by capturing some 250 soldiers, and freeing them in exchange for the release of his own men.
   The deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, voiced his government’s misgivings about Pakistani peace talks with the militants during a congressional hearing on Tuesday.
   Mehsud said he was proud to be an enemy of the United States. He said Afghans were leading the fight against US-led forces in Afghanistan, while Pakistanis and other foreigners made up only five per cent of the insurgents.

A Pentagon report has said that the growth of al-Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas is ‘troubling’ and warned it may take Pakistan several years to turn around the situation.
   The report to Congress by the US Department of Defence said Pakistan increased its troop levels in the border areas by 30,000 last year, and made ‘significant and costly’ efforts to eliminate safe havens.
   ‘It is troubling that despite these efforts, safe havens in the FATA have grown in recent years,’ the report said Friday.
   The report made no reference to an apparent change in strategy by the new Pakistani government favouring negotiations with militants in the federally administered tribal areas.
   Under a peace agreement reached this week with pro-Taliban militants in the Swat Valley, the government agreed to gradually pull out its troops in return for a halt in attacks.
   The Pentagon report noted that 700 Pakistanis have been killed in suicide attacks since July 2007. It said ‘al-Qaeda and other violent extremists continue to hide out in the FATA, where they are able to recruit, train, and target US and western interests, including plots against Europe and the US homeland.’
   Madrassahs, or Islamic religious schools, ‘continue to promote jihad and martyrdom, and provide potential operatives for acts of violence in Afghanistan,’ it said.
   ‘Despite successful attacks against some terrorist training facilities in the tribal areas, it is believed other camps remain active and safe havens have grown in recent years,’ it said.
   The report described a six-year US programme to help strengthen the Pakistani military and security forces’ ability to secure the border with Pakistan, but cautioned that it will take time to implement.
   ‘It may be several years before Pakistan’s comprehensive strategy to render the remote tribal areas permanently inhospitable to terrorists, insurgents and other violent extremists can be measured for success,’ the report said.
   The United States is helping Pakistan build new training facilities for the Frontier Corps, a poorly equipped tribal force responsible for guarding the border, and is also supporting special forces elements of the Pakistani army, the report said.
   Frontier Corps instructors are supposed to be trained this fiscal year, to be followed next year by the training and equipping of a 700-member ‘wing’ of the border force, according to the report.

Some 9,000 school children and teachers are among the dead, buried or missing in China’s major earthquake, state press said Saturday.
   The students account for about 12 per cent of the overall number of victims, which stood Friday at more than 80,000 dead or missing.
   According to the Sichuan province education department, 6,581 school children and teachers were killed in the massive quake and 1,274 were missing as of noon on Wednesday, the Beijing News reported.
   Another 1,107 students and teachers are known to be buried under the rubble and will not be classified as dead until their bodies are recovered, according to the newspaper.
   Many people in China horrified by the devastation of the quake became angry after learning that thousands of schools collapsed, even though some neighbouring structures remained standing.
   Some of the most horrifying scenes from the disaster zone were at kindergartens and elementary schools flattened by the quake which measured 8.0 on the Richter scale.
   Many stories of teachers losing their lives as they attempted to save children have been reported.
   Amid the outrage, the government has vowed to investigate and punish anyone responsible for substandard construction standards at schools.
   ‘We will investigate the construction quality of the schools and if we find that there are problems, we will severely deal with them,’ the paper quoted Han Jin, a top official with China’s Education Ministry, as saying.
   More than 12,300 schools in Sichuan were damaged, making up nearly 41 per cent of all schools in the province, one of China’s most populous, the paper said.
   According to the local education department, another 8,810 schoolchildren and teachers were injured in the quake.
   The earthquake, China’s deadliest in three decades, has also left more than 5.4 million people homeless.

Islamic separatists staged a general strike in Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar on Saturday to protest a visit by India’s president to the revolt-hit region.
   Businesses closed and schools and colleges declared the day a holiday in line with the strike call by the hardline wing of the separatist Hurriyat Conference alliance.
   The strike to protest the visit by the president, Pratibha Patil, was also backed by the powerful Islamic rebel group Hizbul Mujahedin, which is fighting New Delhi’s rule in India’s only Muslim-majority state.
   Traffic was also thin in Srinagar, the urban hub of the secessionist drive in Indian-administered Kashmir.
   Indian soldiers backed by police declared several areas of the city ‘out of bounds’ for civilians to ensure Patil’s security during her visit.
   Patil, elected India’s first woman president last year, arrived here on Friday on a four-day official trip to the region, which borders Pakistan.
   On Friday she warned that India would retaliate ‘resolutely and firmly’ against any violations of the heavily militarised border.
   ‘I’m confident that any violation of our borders will be dealt with resolutely and firmly,’ Patil said in a speech to soldiers at a camp in Baramulla town, 55 kilometres north of summer capital Srinagar.
   The warning by Patil, who is also supreme commander of India’s armed forces, came after forward Indian posts came under fire from across the Line of Control three times this month. In one incident, an Indian soldier was killed.
   The LoC or ceasefire line splits Kashmir between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan.
   The two nations each hold part of the region but claim it in full and have fought two of their three wars for control of Kashmir.
   The insurgency has left more than 43,000 people dead by official count.
   Earlier this week, India’s foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee held talks with the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, in Islamabad, with the neighbours expressing optimism about their slow-moving four-year-old peace process.

Russia’s new president Dmitry Medvedev said Saturday that the world could not ignore the joint voice of his country and China, even if their alliance was facing criticism.
   Medvedev was in Beijing as part of his first foreign trip since taking office. The two countries have increasingly coordinated positions at the United Nations on a range of international issues.
   ‘Russian-Chinese cooperation has today emerged as a key factor in international security, without which it is impossible for the international community to take major decisions,’ Medvedev told students at Peking University.
   ‘Maybe not everybody likes the strategic cooperation between our two countries, but we understand that this cooperation is in the interest of our people and we will boost it whether or not it pleases some people,’ he said.
   A day earlier, Medvedev and the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, in a joint statement denounced US plans to build a global missile defence shield.
   Russia has been outraged by US plans to build the shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, former Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe. Russia and China have also been uneasy about US-Japanese cooperation on a missile shield.
   Medvedev was winding up his first trip as president after stopping in energy-rich Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic.
   Since taking office, Medvedev has refrained from openly assailing the West in the style of his mentor and predecessor Putin, who remains highly influential in the prime minister’s post.
   China and Russia are veto-wielding permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, where they have been coordinating their positions on controversial issues such as the Iranian nuclear issue and Kosovan independence, which they both oppose.

Ethiopia and Uganda denied on Saturday accusations by a UN weapons sanctions committee that their soldiers broke the world body’s arms embargo on Somalia.
   The United Nations says the Horn of Africa nation is awash with weapons despite a 1992 weapon ban that followed the collapse of the central government a year before. Somalia has been engulfed in civil conflict ever since.
   Dumisani Kumalo, chairman of the UN Security Council’s Somalia sanctions committee and the South African envoy to the body, accuses ‘elements’ of an AU peacekeeping force in Somalia and Ethiopian and Somali government troops of arms trafficking.
   ‘We want to assure the world community that this accusation does not have an iota of truth,’ Wahade Belay, spokesman for the Ethiopian ministry of foreign affairs, said.
   ‘In fact our troops were and still are playing an exemplary role in mitigating the arms trade inside Somalia,’ he said.
   Boats, planes and donkeys mainly transport weapons and military hardware to Somalia’s numerous arms markets.
   The South African envoy said 80 per cent of ammunition on sale in Somali markets come from Ethiopian and Somali troops.
   Ethiopia sent thousands of soldiers into Somalia in late 2006 to help the Somali government oust an Islamic Courts movement from the south. Since then, the two allies have battled an insurgency led by members of the Islamists.
   Kumalo said the presence of Ethiopian troops inside Somalia was itself a violation of the 16-year-old arms ban. Addis Ababa rejected this claim.
   The sanction committee’s report comes as the world body unanimously adopted a measure for a stronger UN presence in Somalia and opened the door for a possible UN force.
   A 2,200-strong African Union peacekeeping contingent, known as AMISOM, has been unable to stem the mounting violence.
   Uganda – which has 1,600 troops in Mogadishu – joined Ethiopia in condemning the sanctions committee’s accusations.
   ‘I can assert that none of the AMISOM commanders is involved in any form of arms trafficking in contravention of the UN arms embargo,’ said Captain Barigye Bahouku, spokesman for the mission.
   Both Ethiopia and Uganda said they would investigate the claims if supplied with evidence.
   Last week, the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, said his troops would remain in Somalia until the ‘jihadists’ were defeated.
   The United States, whose main ally in the region is Addis Ababa, says some of the Islamist-led insurgents have links to terrorist organisations.
   Rebels hit Ethiopian and Somali government troops with near-daily attacks. Thousands of Somalis have been killed and some 1 million displaced by fighting.

Sri Lanka warplanes bombed a suspected rebel boat yard and provided cover for ground troops pushing into rebel territory, the defence ministry said Saturday.
   However, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam accused the airforce of dropping bombs over a group of civilians fleeing fighting in the restive north, killing an infant and a 17-year-old girl.
   The conflicting accounts came a day after the LTTE said government commandos set off a fragmentation mine against a minibus packed with civilians near the rebels’ main base of Kilinochchi, killing 16 people.
   The pro-rebel Tamilnet website said government commandos had also bombed an ambulance inside the guerrilla-held north, killing two civilians on Friday.
   The military denied both charges and accused the rebels of trying to ‘tarnish’ the army’s image to win sympathy from the international community.
   On Saturday, the proxy Tamil National Alliance also accused the government of carrying out attacks against civilians.

The police shot dead 14 protesters during clashes with an ethnic group in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, the police officials said Saturday.
   Two police officers also died in the overnight disturbances in Bharatpur district, where activists of the group are demanding more government aid, local law enforcement officials said.
   ‘The army has now been deployed in Bharatpur to bring the situation under control,’ the Rajasthan home minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, said by telephone from provincial capital Jaipur.
   Another dozen people were injured in the protests by thousands of people from the local Gujjar community, who want the government to classify them ‘Scheduled Tribes’ entitled to government jobs and education benefits.
   The Gujjars, traditionally shepherds who make up about five per cent of Rajasthan’s population, called off massive protests last year after the government promised to form a panel to study their case.
   The panel rejected their demand to be included in the category but recommended the formation of another board to provide them special assistance. The 2007 unrest claimed 28 lives.

China on Saturday voiced strong opposition to a meeting between the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, and the Tibetan exiled leader the Dalai Lama, calling it interference in its internal affairs.
   ‘The British side has refused to acknowledge our serious concerns and ... arranged a meeting with Brown and other politicians,’ the foreign ministry said in a statement.
   ‘This interferes in China’s internal affairs,’ it said. ‘The Chinese side expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to this.’
   During the Friday meeting, Brown pledged Britain’s support for rapprochement between Tibet and China after Beijing held talks with envoys of the Dalai Lama.
   Brown’s office said he held ‘warm and constructive’ discussions with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader in a 30-minute meeting at Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official residence in London.
   The talks were the most contentious engagement of the Dalai Lama’s 11-day visit to Britain. Brown, who is keen to boost trade and other links with China, faced domestic criticism for not receiving him in the prime minister’s Downing Street office, as his predecessors Tony Blair and John Major did.
   Protests against China’s 57-year rule over Tibet broke out in March, a sensitive time in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. Exiled Tibetan leaders say 203 people died in the Chinese crackdown on the demonstrations.

Hillary Clinton mentioned the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy in explaining on Friday why she had resisted calls to end her White House bid, drawing a rebuke from Democratic front-runner Barack Obama’s campaign.
   Hillary, who later expressed regret over the remark, made it to the editorial board of a South Dakota newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, when explaining that other races for the Democratic presidential nomination had lasted into June.
   ‘My husband (Bill Clinton) did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,’ she said.
   ‘I don’t understand it,’ Hillary said, referring to calls for her to pull out of the Democratic race in which the final nominating primaries are held on June 3 in South Dakota and Montana. The Democratic nominee will face Republican John McCain in the November election.
   Kennedy, brother of slain US president John F Kennedy and Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, was assassinated during his 1968 race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
   Hillary’s comments drew a sharp response from the Obama campaign.
   ‘Senator Hillary’s statement before the Argus Leader editorial board was unfortunate and has no place in this campaign,’ said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.
   Hillary told reporters later: ‘I regret if my referencing of that moment of trauma for our entire country and particularly the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I had no intention of that whatsoever.’
   ‘I’m honoured to hold senator Kennedy’s seat in the United States Senate from the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family,’ Hillary added.
   A spokesman said Hillary had simply been pointing out that Democratic campaigns in the past had continued into June and therefore people should not be pressuring her to withdraw.
   ‘She was simply referencing her husband in 1992 and Robert Kennedy in 1968 as historical examples of the nominating process going well into the summer. Any other reading is inaccurate,’ Hillary spokesman Mo Elleithee said.
   Robert Kennedy Jr., son of the slain senator, said in a statement, ‘It is clear from the context that Hillary was invoking a familiar political circumstance in order to support her decision to stay in the race through June.’
   ‘I understand how highly charged the atmosphere is, but I think it is a mistake for people to take offense,’ said Kennedy, a Hillary supporter unlike some other members of his family, including senator Edward Kennedy, who back Obama.

The Zimbabwe opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, arrived home Saturday after more than six weeks abroad, saying it was good to be back despite fears of an assassination plot.
   Relaxed and smiling, Tsvangirai said he had no concern for his safety ahead of a presidential run-off election next month, although his party has warned of an army plot to kill him and the threat of a treason charge.
   ‘It’s good to be back,’ he told reporters as he walked through Harare airport.
   ‘Why would I go home if I fear for my safety?’ he said as he left Johannesburg earlier.
   Tsvangirai had been abroad since shortly after a first round of elections on March 29 in a bid to lobby regional leaders to pressure veteran president Robert Mugabe.
   He had twice announced his intention to return only to delay the move and his long absence from Zimbabwe ahead of the June 27 run-off had begun to raise questions about his leadership qualities.
   He was scheduled to give his first press briefing back on Zimbabwean soil later in the day.
   The aftermath of the elections has been marked by delays and political violence, with followers of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party accused of conducting a campaign of terror against supporters of the opposition.
   Tsvangirai had announced his return for last Saturday before pulling out at the last minute, citing an assassination plot.
   His party’s number two, Tendai Biti, has since claimed that the former trade union leader was one of dozens of top opposition figures on an army hitlist. The government denies the allegations.
   Tsvangirai beat Mugabe in the first round of presidential elections in March but without an absolute majority.
   Mugabe, now fighting for his political life after nearly three decades in power, has acknowledged a ‘disastrous’ first-round campaign and has since accused the MDC of embarking on ‘an evil crusade.’

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, faced a grim holiday weekend as speculation mounted Saturday over whether he might face a leadership challenge.
   Only one Labour deputy broke ranks and publicly called for Brown to go after Friday’s devastating by-election defeat. But according to newspaper reports, even senior figures in Brown’s Labour Party were wondering how much more they could tolerate.
   The Conservatives won the previously safe Labour seat of Crewe and Nantwich in north-west England with a mammoth swing of nearly 18 per cent, stunning commentators and politicians alike. Britain is supposed to be enjoying a long weekend off given Monday’s spring public holiday.
   But that will not stop fevered gossip in political circles as Labour lawmakers – many now fearing for their seats – consider their next moves, eyeing the general election which must come within two years.
   Labour deputy Graham Stringer told the BBC it was time for a senior figure in the party to challenge Brown. ‘Is it more damaging for the party to change the leader or cross our fingers and hope that things get better?’ he asked.
   One unnamed senior Labour figure told The Guardian: ‘People are not far away from thinking that we cannot win under Gordon Brown.
   ‘We wish it was different from what it is. But it is hard to avoid looking at the facts.’
   The Times quoted cabinet sources as saying that most ministers now doubted whether Labour could turn around its poll deficit with Brown in charge.

South African soldiers shot and killed a man in a slum area east of Johannesburg during operations to support police to quell anti-immigrant violence, an army spokesman said Saturday.
   ‘We unfortunately had an incident where a member of the public was shot when he pointed a firearm at a soldier. He was shot dead,’ army spokesman General Kwena Mangope said.
   The incident happened Friday at about 6:00pm (1600 GMT) in the East Rand area.
   ‘A male was allegedly assaulting a woman. Our men confronted him and then he pointed a firearm at them,’ Mangope added.