Palestinian reconciliation talks due to be held in Cairo were called off on Saturday after Hamas announced a boycott in protest at the detention of hundreds of its members by president Mahmud Abbas’s security forces.
   ‘They’ve been cancelled,’ Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki said. Another Egyptian official, said the talks ‘have been delayed to an undetermined date... at the request of Hamas.’
   Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said that ‘Hamas decided not to attend the dialogue talks in Egypt. We have informed the Egyptian authorities of our decision.’
   ‘Our decision was made because president Mahmud Abbas is continuing to weaken the Hamas movement and he has not released any Hamas detainees in the West Bank,’ he said.
   Hamas and Abbas’s secular Fatah movement have been bitterly divided since Hamas violently seized power in Gaza in June 2007, confining Abbas’s rule to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and cleaving Palestinians into two hostile camps.
   Egyptian intelligence, which had been mediating talks between individual rival Palestinian groups, said in a statement that round-table talks set for Monday were cancelled after Hamas announced its withdrawal.
   ‘Hamas told us it would not participate in the dialogue and therefore Egypt delayed talks until an opportunity presents itself,’ the statement said.
   A leading member of the Islamic Jihad delegation in Cairo for the talks said his delegation was returning to Gaza.
   ‘The Islamic Jihad delegation in Cairo is leaving to Gaza because there is no meaning to dialogue without Hamas and Fatah,’ said Mohamad al-Hindi.
   ‘We expended great efforts in the last moments... Egypt told us that it will continue efforts to remove obstacles and come up with a new date,’ he added.
   Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina slammed Hamas’s decision and blamed the rival movement for being responsible for the talks’ failure.
   ‘Hamas carries the responsibility for the failure of the Cairo dialogue and the responsibility for losing the opportunity to regain Palestinian unity and stop the division between Palestinians,’ he said.
   Abu Rudeina also denied Abbas has arrested Hamas members.
   Hamas had already expressed reservations about the plan, which calls for a politically independent transitional government to pave the way for new elections, saying Abbas would get an automatic extension of a term the Islamists insist ends in January.
   Abbas insisted his law enforcement forces arrested people who posed a security risk, irrespective of political affiliation. ‘They are arrested and brought to justice,’ he said at a joint news conference on Friday with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

New Zealand’s main opposition National Party and its support parties were on track to sweep the ruling Labour government from power in Saturday’s general election, the latest count showed.
   With 50 per cent of the vote counted, the centre-right National Party led by former foreign exchange dealer John Key had 47 per cent of the vote, which would translate to 60 seats in the 122-seat parliament.
   The centre-left Labour Party, which is seeking a fourth three-year term, had 33 per cent of the vote, translating to 42 seats.
   The Green Party is on 6 per cent, which would give it eight seats, with National’s committed ally, the right-wing ACT Party, on 3.7 per cent for five seats.

Afghan government and international military officials said Saturday that Taliban insurgents had gunned down a district governor overnight and about 30 militants had been killed in various clashes.
   Two men delivering voter registration materials for presidential elections due next year were meanwhile missing for a second day and believed kidnapped, the Independent Election Commission said.
   Militants ambushed the governor of Taywara district in the remote central province of Ghor late Friday as he was driving to the provincial capital, police said.
   ‘The district governor was killed and his driver was wounded,’ Ghor police chief Shah Jahan Noori said.
   He blamed the attack on Taliban militants who have increased their attacks against Afghan government and non-governmental organisations to a new high since they were ousted from power in late 2001.
   Separately, the government of Ghazni province said that 20 militants were killed on Friday in an operation involving Afghan and international troops.
   The bodies of the dead had been left at the scene of the fighting in Ab Band district, provincial government spokesman Ismail Jahangir said.
   The US-led coalition helping the government to put down a Taliban-led insurgency also announced that its forces had killed 10 militants and detained 13 in operations Friday against ‘terrorist networks’ in eastern Afghanistan.

Iraqi and US officials are concerned about an apparent surge in ‘sticky bombs,’ explosives fixed to vehicles with magnets or glue, as a tactic for assassinating Iraqi officials.
   The use of such small explosives by Sunni insurgents and Shia militiamen is not a new phenomenon in more than five years of war in Iraq.
   But US and Iraqi security officials are paying renewed attention on the bombs in the last two months, especially in the capital Baghdad.
   ‘It seems we have had an uptick, 21 sticky bombs in the last month of October (in Iraq),’ US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Steven Stover said.
   Personnel were being told to check their vehicles before driving and to be alert while they travelled, he said.
   Bombs are usually stuck to the target’s car while it is parked then is triggered by remote control.
   It is not clear whether the ‘sticky’ bombs mark a shift in tactics for militants as violence drops to sharply in Iraq.
   They may be an efficient way to target politicians or low-level officials for assassination but they are too small to be used for mass killings that have been a favourite tactic of Sunni Islamist al-Qaeda.

A crisis summit on eastern DR Congo called for an immediate ceasefire and the creation of humanitarian corridors amid fresh fighting on the ground and a warning by the UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, that the conflict could spread.
   But rebels at the centre of the conflict who did not attend rubbished Friday’s one-day summit held in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, saying the Congolese people’s problems would only be settled by direct talks with the Kinshasa government.
   Diplomacy was ‘without hope after this summit,’ rebel spokesman Bertrand Bisimwa said, adding that the participants were just going ‘round and round.’
   ‘There should be an immediate ceasefire by all the armed groups and militias in Nord-Kivu,’ said the emergency meeting’s final declaration.
   It urged the implementation of the disarmament of rebel groups in the region and the beefing-up of the UN peacekeeping force’s mandate.
   The main protagonists, feuding presidents Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo, turned up but held no direct talks.
   The United Nations said late Friday that troops loyal to Laurent Nkunda’s rebels and pro-government Mai-Mai militia fighters had been fingered over the murder of civilians in the DRC this week.
   Following an inspection team’s visit, the UN Mission in DR Congo, MONUC, said that ‘serious violations of human rights’ had been confirmed in Kiwanja, 80 kilometres north of the eastern city of Goma.
   ‘Witnesses have described incidents during which civilians lost their lives’ on Tuesday, as pro-government Mai-Mai militia fighters attempted to seize the town from renegade general Nkunda’s rebel National Congress for the Defence of the People forces.
   The UN statement said it had also received ‘credible reports’ of civilian deaths in reprisal attacks ‘just after’ the Mai-Mai left Kiwanja.
   The investigators ‘visited 11 communal grave sites, containing at least 26 bodies, fighters and civilians,’ it said, adding that reports of further loss of life were still being checked out.
   Immediately prior to the statement’s release, Nkunda had issued a ‘categorical denial’ that his men were behind civilian killings in Kiwanja this week.
   Renewed clashes broke out between Congolese troops and Nkunda’s CNDP around 15 kilometres from the regional capital Goma, scattering thousands of displaced people from a nearby camp.

Alaska governor Sarah Palin fired back on Friday against post-election claims by aides to Republican presidential candidate John McCain that she thought Africa was a country, not a continent, calling the anonymous sources ‘jerks.’
   Palin, McCain’s running mate in their unsuccessful White House campaign, told CNN the allegation ‘is not true.’ She said the leaks could have come from people who helped her with preparation for her debate against Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden.
   She said she remembered having conversations during debate preparation about Africa and the North American Free Trade Agreement.
   A Fox News report cited unidentified campaign sources who said Palin did not know Africa was a continent and could not name the three countries in NAFTA — the United States, Canada and Mexico.