The US and Pakistani governments have reached a tacit agreement on Predator strikes on Pakistani territory, under which Islamabad allows them while continuing to complain about them and Washington never acknowledges them, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
   Citing unnamed senior officials in both countries, the newspaper said that under this don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, unmanned US drones have fired missiles at Pakistani soil at an average rate of once every four or five days recently.
   The deal coincided with a suspension of ground assaults into Pakistan by US special forces, the report said.
   The paper said the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, told it in an interview last week that he was aware of no ground attacks since one on September 3 that his government vigorously protested.
   A senior Pakistani official said the US-Pakistani understanding over the airstrikes was ‘the smart middle way for the moment,’ The Post reported.
   Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, the official said, ‘gave lip service but not effective support’ to the Americans.
   ‘This government is delivering but not taking the credit,’ the paper quoted the official as saying.
   From December to August, when Musharraf stepped down, there were six US Predator strikes in Pakistan, according to The Post. Since August, there have been at least 19.
   The most recent occurred Friday, when local officials and witnesses said at least 11 people, including six foreign fighters, were killed, the paper said.

Revolt-hit Indian Kashmir begins voting in state elections Monday amid appeals for a poll boycott by Muslim separatists who have spearheaded a wave of massive pro-freedom protests.
   Both rebels and separatist politicians argue elections only strengthen India’s sway over the disputed Muslim-majority region and have been urging voters not to turn out at the polls.
   ‘Elections can never be a substitute for our right to self-determination,’ says Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a leading separatist and Muslim cleric in Srinagar, summer capital of Indian Kashmir where the insurgency has raged since 1989, claiming 43,000 lives.
   Nearly 44 per cent of eligible voters — considered a healthy level — took part in the 2002 state elections despite militant violence that left 850 people dead, mostly pro-India political workers and leaders.
   This time around there has been no pre-poll violence with guerrillas for the first time in nearly 20 years vowing not to use guns to keep voters away.
   But anti-India anger is still bubbling in the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley since the eruption of vast demonstrations over a government decision to provide land to a Hindu shrine, a decision that was subsequently reversed.
   The protests — reminiscent of the early 1990s when the insurgency had just begun — have left nearly 50 Muslims dead since June.
   ‘I won’t vote as a mark of protest against the killing of my fellow Muslims,’ says mason Khurshid Ahmed, 43. ‘I’ll ensure no one in my family votes either.’

India needs a complete overhaul in the way it handles rape allegations, human rights campaigners say, after a German woman dropped a sex attack claim citing pressure and intimidation.
   The woman alleged that her 14-year-old daughter was raped by the son of a prominent minister in the resort state of Goa but withdrew the complaint on last Monday, saying she was made to feel like a criminal.
   Separately, a British woman who was raped in New Delhi said on Tuesday that Indian authorities do not take sexual assaults seriously as her attacker was freed on bail after serving just three months of a 21-year jail sentence.
   Meenakshi Ganguly, from Human Rights Watch in Mumbai, said legislation had changed since a high-profile case in the 1970s, when two police officers who raped a teenage girl were acquitted by a court, but attitudes lagged behind.
   As in the case of British girl Scarlett Keeling, 15, whose body was found on a Goa beach in February, revelations of drug taking and that she had an older boyfriend led to an attitude that ‘she asked for it’, Ganguly told AFP.
   ‘A rape victim therefore faces a double ordeal: on the one hand there is a social push back, especially if it’s an Indian woman as it affects her suitability for marriage and so on,’ she added.
   ‘Then at the police station there is an almost inevitable attitude of ‘she asked for it’. This has come up far too often.... There is a lot of debasement of rape victims. It’s part of the reason a lot of rapes go unreported.’
   The German woman said in a letter released to the media on Monday that since she filed the complaint in mid-October, she and her daughter had endured a ‘living hell’, as police tried to get her to drop the allegation.
   ‘We have learnt the bitter truth, that making genuine complaints against the rich and mighty is entirely counterproductive,’ the letter said.
   ‘We are constantly hounded, our names sullied, campaigns organised against us and all sorts of motives attributed to us.’
   The woman’s lawyer, Aires Rodrigues, added that she and her daughter were verbally abused by a doctor who was tasked to conduct a medical examination while immigration authorities opened an investigation against her.
   ‘She was made to look like the accused. Even the victim was treated like the accused by police,’ he added.
   According to the latest available statistics from India’s National Crime Records Bureau, there were 19,348 rape cases in 2006 — a 678 per cent increase since 1971 when records began.
   The increase far outstrips rises in other violent crimes such as murder, robbery and kidnapping. In January, India’s first female president Pratibha Patil called for stricter punishments and for women to learn self-defence.
   The British woman who was raped in New Delhi last year said she was dismayed when prosecutors failed to turn up at a court hearing this week to discuss whether it was right to free her attacker.
   ‘If the government fails to turn up at the Supreme Court, that’s not taking it seriously, that’s the complete opposite,’ said the woman, who cannot be named.
   ‘I’m not talking about just me, they need to take the level of sexual crime against women in India very seriously.’
   India’s culture and tourism minister Sujit Banerjee, in London to drum up foreign visitors, rejected the charge.
   But Ganguly said: ‘There has to be a complete reinvention of police attitudes to rape which means that they have to be sensitive to rape victims, have training to get victims to undergo medical tests, counselling and support.

An Israeli air strike killed four armed Palestinians after two rockets fired from Gaza hit Israel on Sunday as its leaders prepared to review its crippling blockade of the aid-dependent strip.
   ‘There was an aerial attack against a (rocket) launching squad in the northern Gaza Strip a few minutes ago,’ an Israeli army spokesman said. ‘The force identified hitting them.’
   The head of the emergency services in Gaza, Moawiya Hassanein, said: ‘Four resistance fighters were killed in an Israeli raid in an eastern neighbourhood of Gaza City and were taken to Gaza hospital.’ The raid came shortly after two rockets hit uninhabited areas of Israel without causing any casualties or damage, the army spokesman said.

Sri Lanka stepped up air strikes against suspected rebel targets in the island’s north Sunday, a day after ground troops seized control of a highly strategic town, the defence ministry said.
   Mi-24 helicopter gunships and fighter jets were deployed to pound defence lines of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam on the Jaffna peninsula and on the mainland, the defence ministry said.
   ‘Sri Lanka air force has lunched a series of air strikes in support of ground troops in the Muhamalai area,’ the ministry said in a statement.

As civilians flee the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an increase in attacks on aid workers has left humanitarian organisations struggling to help them.
   An estimated 250,000 people have been displaced since the start of hostilities between the Congolese army and the Laurent Nkunda’s National Congress for the Defence of the People at the end of August.
   One top UN official described large parts of the war-ravaged Nord-Kivu region as ‘black holes’ where violence rages and masses of displaced people are on the move.
   ‘We’ve got enough aid, but now the problem is access,’ said Christophe Illemassene, head spokesman for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Kinshasa.
   The UN agency said there have been 21 attacks on aid workers in Nord-Kivu since the fighting resumed and now they are hesitating to go into some of the most affected areas.
   ‘There are a lot of NGO’s in Goma, but aid is not getting through to the worst affected zones, where they need it most,’ said Francois Dumont, an official with Medecins sans Frontieres.
   ‘Many people are sleeping rough with their children. It’s cold at night and we’re in the rainy season,’ said Olga Miltcheva from the International Red Cross, adding that most lack the basic essentials to survive such as drinking water or cooking utensils.
   Kanyabayonga, 100 kilometres to the north of Goma, is one of the most dangerous areas of Nord-Kivu. Government soldiers have run amok there in recent days, looting properties and attacking local people.
   Most aid workers have withdrawn from the area, Illemassene said. As a result, a feeding centre ten kilometres further north had completely run out of food, according to the UN’s OCHA.
   At Bambu, some 80 kilometres north of Goma, some 25,000 people who have taken refuge at a small base for the UN mission in DR Congo (MONUC), aren’t receiving any assistance.
   ‘Three children have already died’ at the improvised camp, said MONUC spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich, spokesman for the UN mission in DR Congo.
   Medical supplies had been pillaged from health centres in the surrounding area while others weren’t receiving new supplies, just as cholera is spreading through the area, with some 1,000 cases recorded in Nord-Kivu in October.
   But further south in the rebel-controlled territory between Goma and Ruthsuru, aid agencies are slowly restarting their work.
   But it is around Goma, where there are tens of thousands of refugees, that most aid workers are operating, although a lack of security remains a problem.
   Insecurity is also a problem for civilians, with 65,000 people taking refuge in the Kibati camps ‘located in a no man’s land’ near the frontline of the fighting, according to Illemassene.
   The UN announced Friday they would start transferring people from the Kibati camps to Muganga, west of Goma.
   But many living at the camps are worried about such a move.

The 250 detainees at the US Guantanamo war-on-terror prison could see their living conditions improve under Barack Obama, but he has yet to say how he might change the controversial military tribunals created to try them.
   David Cynamon, who represents four of the detainees at Guantanamo, says he is not sure they will be overly excited by the election of Obama, who pledged to shut down the navy-run prison in a US enclave in Cuba, set up in the wake of the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks.
   ‘I will tell them that this is a very hopeful development,’ he said as he planned to visit his clients next week.
   ‘But they have been so beaten down during the past seven years that I don’t know whether they will allow themselves to agree.
   ‘They will be surprised, because they were convinced that a black man could never become president in the US,’ Cynamon added.
   Civil liberties activists who have strongly denounced the Guantanamo prison all applauded the election of the progressive Democrat to replace President George W. Bush, whose administration set up the prison in 2002.
   Guantanamo’s population reached some 800 prisoners at one point, and most of those who have passed through its doors never been charged.
   Critics say the detainees are denied basic rights, and they have cheered Obama’s pledge to abide by constitutional principles with regard to the detainees.

Hundreds of homes were destroyed and thousands of residents forced to flee as a series of ferocious wind-driven wildfires raged across Southern California Sunday, virtually circling the city of Los Angeles.
   More than 500 mobile homes were gutted and 10,000 people were evacuated by a blaze that ripped through a Los Angeles suburb in what officials said was one of the worst fires to ravage the city in nearly half a century.
   The fire, which erupted late Friday in the densely populated district of Sylmar, came as firefighters continued to battle a blaze in the celebrity enclave of Montecito, 100 miles to the north.
   Fires also broke out in the cities of Yorba Linda and Corona, southeast of Los Angeles, reportedly destroying at least 20 homes and forcing the closure of several important transport routes.
   More than 20,000 people were ordered to evacuate the Orange County burn area, The Los Angeles Times reported.
   The Los Angeles fire — fuelled by seasonal winds of up to 80 miles per hour — erupted late Friday and has scorched some 7,900 acres. Ground zero of the firestorm was a mobile home park near Sylmar where more than 500 residences were reduced to a smouldering wasteland.
   Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, blaming the spread of the fire on ‘absolutely atrocious’ winds, said the blaze was one of the worst in the city’s history.

Iraq’s cabinet defied fiery opposition from Shia hardliners on Sunday to approve a wide-ranging military pact that includes a timetable for the withdrawal of all US troops by the end of 2011.
   Within hours of the cabinet decision, a suicide car bomb exploded at a police checkpoint in Iraq’s volatile Diyala province, killing at least 15 people and underscoring the violence that still plagues the country.
   Baghdad and Washington have been scrambling for months to reach an agreement that will govern the status of more than 150,000 US soldiers stationed in some 400 bases across the country after their UN mandate expires on December 31.