Thailand’s prime minister Somchai Wongsawat rejected pressure to resign Friday, as thousands of anti-government demonstrators marched in protest at last week’s deadly street clashes.
   The police hung back by the roadside as some 5,000 supporters of the People’s Alliance for Democracy marched down a busy Bangkok street carrying pictures of Somchai emblazoned with the word ‘murderer’.
   Two people were killed and nearly 500 injured on October 7 when police fired tear gas to prevent thousands of PAD supporters from blocking parliament, prompting some protesters to fight back.
   Thailand’s powerful army chief on Thursday had hinted that the premier should resign over the clashes, prompting rumours that Somchai may heed his advice and dissolve parliament.
   But despite calling an urgent meeting of his coalition partners, Somchai insisted he would stay on for the sake of the country.
   ‘The government cannot abandon its duty as we still have three key functions coming up,’ he said in a televised statement, referring to two royal events and a regional summit to be held before the end of the year.
   ‘Whether I resign or do not resign will depend on national interest.’
   At the downtown rally, PAD supporters handed out books and CDs with photos and accounts of last week’s violence.
   ‘The truth will show why the government has no legitimacy to run the country,’ Somsak Kosaisuk, a PAD leader, told the crowd, many wearing black to mourn the dead supporters or yellow out of allegiance to the king.
   ‘The government thinks that people are their enemy and used the police to kill people on October 7.’
   The colour booklets showed graphic images of protesters whose limbs were blown off in the clashes — injuries blamed by a forensic expert on dangerous Chinese-made tear gas canisters.
   The front page of the PAD leaflet showed a man clutching the bloodied stump of his leg, allegedly after it was blown off in the police crackdown.
   ‘We have brought pieces of cloth, water bottles and masks in case the police use tear gas again,’ said PAD supporter Dusadee Siriwanlop, 42.
   The PAD launched its campaign in May, claiming that the ruling People Power Party elected in December was a puppet of ousted and exiled premier Thaksin Shinawatra, whom it accuses of corruption and nepotism.
   The crowd — which police estimated at 5,000 — seemed largely cheerful Friday, sheltering from the sun under a sea of umbrellas.
   The rally ended without incident at about 1:00pm (0600 GMT) after the protesters marched to the main shopping district and dispersed.
   Friday’s protests came a day after army chief General Anupong Paojinda appeared on television flanked by the heads of the air force, navy and the police saying that if he were Somchai, he would resign.

Cambodia’s premier vowed Friday to improve the country’s defence capabilities, but insisted there would be no war with Thailand after a deadly firefight erupted on their disputed border.
   The two sides have agreed to a joint border patrol aimed at preventing a repeat of Wednesday’s clashes which killed two Cambodian soldiers near the ancient Preah Vihear temple, but there was no word on when they would start.
   The prime minister, Hun Sen, said that talks remained the best solution to the dispute over land around Preah Vihear, a UN World Heritage site on Cambodian territory and the focus of months of tensions.
   ‘There will be no large-scale armed conflict because the two countries can still be patient,’ Hun Sen told reporters after meeting his cabinet.
   At the weekly meeting, ministers held a moment of silence for the Cambodian soldiers who died. Seven Thais were also wounded in the clashes.
   ‘Today our cabinet, with the pride we received from protecting our territory, will discuss draft laws (to put the) national defence sector on top (of the agenda),’ Hun Sen said, without elaborating on specific steps.
   While Thailand has a 300,000-strong armed forces and a well-equipped air force, Cambodia’s much smaller military is badly equipped, badly trained and disorganised, according to a Western military official in Bangkok.
   Many of their Cold War-era weapons mis-fired during this week’s shooting, soldiers along the border said.
   Hun Sen also rejected the help of mediators — a U-turn from Cambodia’s position earlier this year when officials spoke about bringing the land dispute to the United Nations Security Council.
   ‘I think that it is not time yet (for mediated talks) because Cambodia and Thailand agreed to resume negotiations within existing mechanisms,’ Hun Sen told reporters.
   Thai and Cambodian military officials met Thursday to try to calm the situation after the clashes, but there were few results from the meeting apart from an agreement in principle to jointly patrol the disputed areas.
   But Keo Kim Yean, head of the Cambodian army, questioned how the patrols would work.
   ‘Where can we do a joint patrol? The border is not yet agreed by the two countries, so there is no area to do joint patrols... We’re just making sure the troops stay far away from each other,’ he told reporters.
   Soldiers on both sides appeared more relaxed Friday, with some even stashing away their rifles and rocket launchers.
   ‘The situation is less tense,’ Thai border task force commander Major General Kanok Netrakavaesana said.

Sri Lanka’s government said Friday it would send a delegation to India to defuse mounting tensions over the escalating war against Tamil Tiger rebels.
   Sri Lanka’s minority Tamils share close cultural and religious links with the 55 million Tamils in the nearby South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Colombo’s military drive has prompted New Delhi to voice ‘grave concern’ over the conflict.
   ‘We are hoping to send a team of MPs to India to educate them on the latest situation,’ the media minister, Yapa Abeywardena, said in a statement over national radio, signalling that Sri Lanka was attempting to defuse pressure from India.
   He also insisted the government was trying to avoid civilian casualties in its all-out assault in the north of the island, where the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam maintain a mini-state.
   ‘We know the difference between the Tamil civilians and the Tiger terrorists,’ he said, rejecting complaints from politicians in Tamil Nadu that Tamil civilians were being targeted.
   The Sri Lankan conflict has emerged as a political issue in India, with MPs from Tamil Nadu threatening to resign — a move that could destabilise the federal government — unless New Delhi puts pressure on Colombo.
   An estimated 230,000 Sri Lankan Tamil civilians have been displaced by the latest fighting.
   Late on Thursday, the Indian foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, expressed ‘grave concern’ over the humanitarian situation, and urged Colombo to find ‘a peacefully negotiated political settlement... within the framework of a united Sri Lanka.’
   New Delhi would ‘do all in its power to achieve this goal, to ameliorate the humanitarian conditions,’ he said, repeating the Indian view that the long-running dispute cannot be resolved by yet more fighting.
   Sri Lanka’s hawkish government, however, says peace will only come once the Tigers have been defeated.

China was silent on media freedom on Friday, the expiry date of special Olympic regulations that had officially allowed foreign journalists to report freely in most of the country for nearly two years. Local governments across China, which once had to approve any visit by overseas correspondents to their regions, said they would still follow the temporary rules in the short term.
   As part of Beijing’s bid to host the August Games, it promised to allow complete media freedom and although the state’s grip over domestic media did not ease it did relax controls on foreign correspondents.
   There were problems with access to restive Tibet and some controversial sites were blocked at the start of the Games, but the regulations made it easier to report on many things, from windfarms to dissidents.
   Rights groups and the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, while welcoming the greater openness, have repeatedly expressed concern about ongoing harassment of reporters and those they interview, especially on sensitive topics like protests.
   The special regulations were due to expire on Friday, technically thrusting China back to the pre-Olympic days of greater bureaucracy, and control and Beijing has been coy about what, if anything, will replace them.
   ‘I understand everyone’s eager desire,’ foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference on Thursday. ‘We will tell you very soon what the related arrangements are.’
   In China’s vast hinterland, however, it appeared to be business as usual for now at least.
   ‘There has been no change, the rules are still the same as for the Olympics,’ said Zhou, a media official in Hebei province which has been in the spotlight for weeks because of a tainted milk scandal.

Women must be more involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS, a disease increasingly being spread through sex, and men must also be encouraged to respect women more, a senior UN official said Friday.
   Nafis Sadik, UN special envoy for HIV/AIDS in the Asia-Pacific region, told a poverty alleviation conference in Beijing that lack of respect for women was helping drive the spread of the virus.
   ‘Gender-based violence and discrimination on grounds of gender drive the HIV and AIDS epidemic among women. Empowerment of women — equipping them with self-esteem, the knowledge, the ability to protect themselves — will be of critical importance in winning the battle,’ Sadik said.
   ‘Women suffer doubly.
   First, from HIV and AIDS itself, and secondly from the stigma associated with the disease. Women are routinely blamed for infecting their husbands, though it is almost always the men who infect their wives,’ she said.
   In Asia, at least 75 million men regularly buy sex from about 10 million female sex workers, she said.
   ‘The results of male behaviour can be seen in changing patterns of infection. Today, about one-third of all people living with HIV in China are women, compared with one in 10 in 1995,’ Sadik said.

Pakistani helicopter gunships and fighter jets on Friday pounded militant hideouts in a Pakistani tribal region bordering Afghanistan, killing 10 rebels, an official said.
   The bombardment took place in Bajaur where Pakistani troops and Islamic extremists have been locked in fierce fighting since August.
   ‘Pakistani helicopter gunships and fighter jets bombarded militant hideouts, killing 10 rebels and wounding 13 others,’ a senior security official said.
   Khar, the main town in Bajaur, remained under strict curfew as leaflets asking people to flush out militants were dropped from a helicopter on Friday, locals said.
   The United Nations refugee agency recently said almost 190,000 people had been displaced from the Bajaur region since fighting began.
   ‘This number includes over 168,000 Pakistanis now sheltering in their country’s North West Frontier Province and another 20,000 Pakistanis and Afghans who fled into eastern Afghanistan,’ it added.

South Korea is willing to give the North unconditional food aid but the communist state must fundamentally change its system to end massive long-term malnutrition, a senior official said Friday.
   Chief nuclear negotiator Kim Sook also said a decade of engagement under previous liberal Seoul governments had largely been a failure.
   Kim was speaking a day after the North threatened to cut all ties with the South in protest at what it termed a hostile policy by the new conservative government.
   ‘The real solution to the chronic food shortage is North Korea’s commitment to fundamental change. However, there is little sign the North is moving toward the right direction,’ Kim told a seminar in the southern island of Jeju.
   He said ‘structural inefficiencies’ had contributed to ‘massive malnutrition’ which left children almost 14 centimetres shorter than their South Korean counterparts.

Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain shared the same stage and microphone again on Thursday, but this time they traded wisecracks instead of campaign attacks.
   One night after battling in their final debate, the rivals in the White House race donned white ties for a more genial political tradition — a New York dinner that has attracted presidential candidates in every election but two since 1945.
   McCain told the glittering Manhattan crowd at the annual Al Smith dinner, a fundraiser for area Catholic charities named after the four-term former New York governor, that he had an announcement — he had dismissed all of his campaign advisers.
   ‘All of their positions will now be held by a man named Joe the plumber,’ McCain said, citing the Ohio small business owner who McCain made an overnight sensation in Wednesday’s debate.
   The Arizona senator also poked fun at his reference to Obama as ‘that one’ in an earlier debate.
   ‘He doesn’t mind at all. In fact he even has a pet name for me: George Bush,’ McCain said.
   McCain saluted senator Hillary Clinton of New York, Obama’s bitter rival in the Democratic primary whose level of enthusiasm for Obama’s campaign for the November 4 election has been a subject of great media fascination.
   ‘I can’t shake the feeling that some people here are pulling for me,’ McCain said. ‘I’m delighted to see you here tonight Hillary.’
   When Obama took the microphone, he said he needed to correct some misconceptions since McCain had been asking ‘Who is Barack Obama?’
   ‘I was not born in a manger,’ he said, adding the name Barack, given by his Kenyan father, was Swahili for ‘that one.’ He also had an explanation for his middle name, Hussein. ‘I got my middle name from somebody who didn’t think I would ever run for president,’ he said.
   Obama listed his greatest strength as humility and his greatest weakness: ‘I’m a little too awesome.’
   Without naming her, he also made reference to Alaska governor Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate. She has been touted by Republicans for her foreign policy expertise because of Alaska’s proximity to Russia.
   Obama noted the dinner was held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
   ‘I’m told from the doorstep you can see all the way to The Russian Tea Room,’ he said.
   The only times presidential candidates did not speak at the Al Smith dinner were 1996, when president Bill Clinton was not invited after he vetoed a late-term abortion ban, and 2004, when sponsors cited the divisive nature of the campaign and skipped the invitations.
   Both candidates closed with warm words for each other, with Obama praising McCain’s service to country in the Navy and as a Vietnam prisoner of war.
   McCain noted Obama’s history-making bid to be the first black US president.
   ‘I won’t wish my opponent luck but I do wish him well,’ McCain said.

A looming split between the two Shia parties that dominate Iraq’s government threatens efforts to win parliamentary approval for a security pact with the US and could set the stage for a major struggle for power in the oil-rich Shia southern heartland.
   Prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council led by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim have been allies since the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led regime.
   Now they are rapidly turning into bitter rivals, raising the spectre of a weakened Shia front ahead of two key elections next year.
   The security agreement, reached after months of tortuous negotiations, would allow US troops to remain here after their UN mandate expires December 31. It is critical to ensuring Iraq’s security until government forces are capable of taking charge of the fight against insurgents.
   A draft has been completed and the government is preparing to submit it to parliament for final approval — which US officials believe is by no means certain.
   Although passage would require only a majority of the 275-member parliament, al-Maliki will submit the draft only if he is convinced it will receive two-thirds support — which would allow him to fend off critics both here and in neighbouring countries such as Iran and Syria, according to al-Maliki’s aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss strategy.
   To reach two-thirds, the draft would need the 30 votes from the Supreme Council.
   The secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, discussed the pact over the telephone late Wednesday with the vice president, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, a top member of the Supreme Council. (In Washington, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, was calling US congressional leaders in support of the agreement.)
   But the Supreme Council has said little in public about the negotiations, a stand that a senior aide to party leader al-Hakim said was designed to distance the party from the agreement if it meets significant opposition.
   ‘The Supreme Council did not want to be associated with the agreement,’ said the aide. ‘If it founders, then al-Maliki alone must deal with the consequences.’
   The first hint of opposition by the Supreme Council to the agreement emerged Thursday.
   Senior lawmaker Jalal Eddin al-Sagheer said the party will seek ‘clarification’ from al-Maliki when he meets with parliament leaders over the weekend.
   Another Supreme Council legislator, Diaa Eddin al-Fayadh, said the party planned to vote on the agreement at a later unspecified date.

A surge of fighting in Sudan’s isolated north Darfur region has displaced 24,000 people, who face shortages of food and water, a senior UN official said on Friday, urging a rapid humanitarian response.
   ‘The numbers being thrown out now are somewhere in the neighbourhood of about 24,000 people that have not gone back to Birmaza or Disa,’ said Gregory Alex, the head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.
   A first wave of people abandoned their homes five or six weeks ago when the fighting began and a second group towards the end of September.
   But Alex said humanitarian access to the area has been extremely limited, owing to insecurity and banditry.
   ‘I would guess that their access to basic necessities are extremely limited. Water, I think, has been identified as the most important need, but then you have shelter. The colder season is approaching... these places don’t have firewood,’ he said.
   ‘The problem with the food is that they’re distant from any place that they could actually have a distribution... that puts them in, I’d say, a fairly difficult situation.’
   Few of them have gone to camps for the estimated 2.5 million people made homeless by nearly six years of war in Darfur.
   Alex said some are stranded in the barren hills, rocks and valleys with little protection.
   Last month, the UN head of humanitarian affairs for Sudan said only that thousands of vulnerable civilians were feared displaced.
   ‘Whatever they had is now running low, they haven’t gone back yet to home and it’s time that somebody does something about it,’ said Alex. ‘How long can we just allow them to remain displaced and not have any assistance?’
   Rebel fighters reported heavy battles with government and Arab militia forces, backed by aircraft, in remote parts of north Darfur in September.
   The Sudanese military said its troops were operating to ‘clear roads’ to provide humanitarian access.

Over 50 countries have alerted the IAEA that they are considering utilising nuclear power with Turkey and Vietnam actively preparing their atomic programmes, the head of the United Nations’ atomic watchdog has said on Friday.
   Addressing the 50th anniversary meeting of the Nuclear Energy Agency of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, Mohamed ElBaradei said that a decade ago, nuclear power’s popularity was in question.
   ‘When we talked about transferring nuclear technology to developing countries, we generally meant applications in medicine and industry, not nuclear power,’ the IAEA Director General said.
   But the tides have turned and ‘change is in the air,’ he said, with many of the agency’s Member States mostly from the developing world expressing interest in nuclear power. He put the number of such countries to over 50.
   One dozen countries, including Turkey and Vietnam, are actively preparing nuclear programmes, while China is constructing six power reactors and Russia intends to build dozens of both large and small reactors by 2020.
   Greater efforts are essential to ensure that nuclear power’s future is ‘safe, proliferation-resistant and cost-effective,’ ElBaradei said.
   ‘Every country has the right to develop nuclear power, but also a responsibility to do it properly,’ he noted.
   But, the IAEA chief cautioned that it is crucial to have realistic expectations of how quickly countries can have nuclear reactors online. ‘It can take a minimum of 10 years just to put the basic infrastructure in place. This is not an area where you can cut corners.’

Democrat Barack Obama won the endorsement of The Washington Post in an editorial saying the Illinois senator ‘has the potential to become a great president.’
   The newspaper said its choice was made easy in part by the ‘disappointing campaign’ of Republican candidate John McCain and his decision to pick Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, as his vice presidential running mate for the November 4 election.
   ‘It is made easy in larger part, though, because of our admiration for Obama and the impressive qualities he has shown during this long race,’ the Post said in the editorial for its Friday editions published on its web site on Thursday night.
   The paper, which endorsed Democrats in the two previous presidential elections, praised Obama as a ‘man of supple intelligence, with a nuanced grasp of complex issues and evident skill at conciliation and consensus-building.’
   It said Obama also has a sophisticated understanding of the world and America’s place in it and that he was committed to maintaining US leadership.
   Meanwhile, Obama holds a five-point lead over McCain, with little immediate indication their final public debate did much to sway the presidential race, a Reuters/C-SPAN/ZOGBY poll showed on Friday.
   Obama’s edge over McCain held steady at 49 per cent to 44 per cent among likely U.S. voters in the four-day tracking poll, unchanged from results before the two men met on Wednesday for their third and last debate before the November 4 election.

Zimbabwe’s opposition MDC said on Friday the United Nations and African Union should step in to mediate between the country’s rivals if talks aimed at rescuing a power-sharing deal stay deadlocked over cabinet posts.
   ‘They (the UN and AU) are the guarantors of the (power-sharing) agreement. If ZANU-PF continues to be intransigent, then those institutions should step in,’ MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa said.
   The president, Robert Mugabe, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara of a splinter MDC faction have failed to reach a deal on forming a cabinet in three days of talks and were due to start another round of negotiations on Friday.
   Supporters of Mugabe earlier accused the MDC of ‘bad faith’ and of stalling on a deal to try to bring about UN mediation.
   Chamisa said the MDC was ready to compromise, but ‘not to the point of betrayal,’ and would not settle for being the junior partner in a Mugabe-led government.

The Turkish army said Friday that up to 35 Kurdish rebels may have died in a military offensive near the Iraqi border earlier this week.
   General Metin Gurak, the head of the general staff’s press department, said that intercepted wireless communication between Kurdistan Workers’ Party rebels during Tuesday’s operation in Sirnak province spoke of up to 35 casualties.
   ‘As you can see the organisation has suffered heavily. We are still sweeping the area. We do not have an official statement yet’ on the PKK’s losses, he told a press conference.
   The communication was intercepted after Turkish artillery and gunship fire targeted two groups of PKK militants when they were moving towards a military outpost in the mountainous region, he said.