Sri Lankan troops advanced Saturday on the military headquarters of the Tamil Tigers and engaged the rebels in fresh gunbattles, a day after capturing their de facto political capital.
   The defence ministry said ground forces, backed by helicopter gunships and war planes, were moving towards Mullaittivu, the jungle district along the northeastern seaboard, where the Tigers have their main military facilities.
   ‘The battle for Mullaitivu has already begun,’ the ministry said in a statement.
   The air force used Mi-24 helicopter gunships to carry out four bombing raids Saturday in support of the advancing troops while jet aircraft were also deployed to hit Tiger positions, a military spokesman said.
   He added that 10 such missions were carried out on Friday.
   In the capital Colombo, a bomb went off at a commercial area of the city on Saturday, wounding three civilians and damaging several vehicles, the police said. A suicide bombing in Colombo on Friday killed two people and wounded 36.
   Troops, who took the Tigers’ northern stronghold of Kilinochchi on Friday, were fanning out to neighbouring areas and confronted small pockets of rebel resistance, a military official said.
   ‘Several Tigers were killed and security forces also suffered injuries,’ the official said.
   The pro-rebel Tamilnet web site reported that a petrol station and a bus station were bombed by the air force on Friday morning, killing four civilians and wounding another eight.
   The defence ministry said government troops were moving further north of their positions in Kilinochchi in a bid to retake the strategically vital Elephant Pass which was lost to the Tigers in April 2000.
   Elephant Pass lies at the entrance to the Jaffna peninsula which security forces wrested from rebel control in 1995.
   Military officials said the fall of Kilinochchi had cleared the way for security forces to re-establish control over a vital highway linking the northern Jaffna peninsula with the rest of the country.
   Jaffna, which has a population of nearly half a million people and a considerable military presence, used to be supplied by air and sea because the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam controlled the land route.

Israel maintained its ban on foreign journalists entering the Gaza Strip Friday despite a recent Supreme Court order to allow a limited number of reporters to enter the territory.
   The ban has been in place since a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas began to fray on November 5. Israel eased the ban last month but tightened it again after launching its air offensive against Gaza’s Hamas rulers a week ago.
   A legal challenge by the Foreign Press Association, which represents foreign media in Israel, prompted the court ruling this week to allow groups of up to 12 foreign journalists to cross the border whenever the Erez crossing between Israel and Gaza is open for humanitarian cases.
   That was the case on Friday, when Israel opened the crossing to allow nearly 300 Palestinians with foreign passports to leave Gaza. But authorities defied the court order and kept reporters out.
   ‘We call on the Israeli government to immediately honour the will of the court and allow foreign journalists access to Gaza,’ the Foreign Press Association said in a statement. ‘The authorities’ position that there was not enough time to coordinate and allow the journalists to enter does not seem reasonable.’
   A military spokesman said Israel kept the journalists out because authorities at the crossing point were focused on processing the hundreds of Palestinians exiting Gaza.
   ‘The crossing today was overwhelmed dealing with the emergency evacuation of people,’ said army spokesman Peter Lerner. He said journalists might be allowed to cross on Sunday, when Israel plans to open the crossing for injured Palestinians to enter Israel for medical treatment.
   The ban on foreign journalists has made it more difficult for news organisations to verify the extent of damage from the offensive, the number of civilian casualties or the seriousness of humanitarian problems such as shortages of food and medicine.
   Some organisations, such as The Associated Press, are relying on journalists who live in Gaza and cover the conflict full-time but would normally have sent in reinforcements to cover the story more extensively.

Forensics experts in Thailand struggled to identify charred corpses while 26 victims were still receiving emergency medical care Saturday following a New Year’s Eve fire in a packed Bangkok nightclub.
   The death toll stood at 61 on Saturday although a final list of casualties, which include a number of foreigners, has yet to be issued, the Narenthorn Emergency Centre coordinating the medical aid operation said.
   Dr. Chatree Charoencheewakul at the centre said two more deaths were reported Friday night, while 26 people still in intensive care units at several Bangkok hospitals. The police were still trying to identify 15 bodies.
   A Singaporean was among the dead, while injured foreigners were from Australia, Belgium, Britain, France, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and the United States, according to officials and reporters.
   The interior minister, Chavarat Charnvirakul, said Friday that the fire could further damage the country’s image, already battered by widespread political protests and a recent weeklong closure of the capital’s two airports. The unrest has crippled the country’s essential tourism industry at a time when the economy was already sagging amid the global financial meltdown.
   The statement came as the police investigated the cause of the fire. Police Major General Jongrak Jutanont said authorities were focusing on whether the blaze was sparked by a countdown fireworks display organised by the club owners or by firecrackers brought in by guests.
   More than 200 were injured from smoke inhalation, burns and injuries sustained during a stampede out the one main door of the club, which catered to young well-to-do Thais, tourists and expatriates.
   ‘It’s about the lax law enforcement which we need to strengthen,’ Charnvirakul told reporters while visiting victims at Chulalongkorn Hospital. ‘But an accident like this can happen everywhere and in every country.
   But I really don’t want this to happen because it came from carelessness.’

Pakistan has arrested a former senior Taliban figure who was released by Afghanistan in 2007 in exchange for a kidnapped Italian journalist, a senior security official said Saturday.
   Ustad Mohammad Yasir was detained on Thursday in the northwestern city of Peshawar, on the edge of Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, the official told AFP.
   Yasir once served as a spokesman for fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar after his hardline regime was ousted from power in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001.
   In August 2005, Pakistan had arrested Yasir and transferred him to Afghan custody, but he was released along with four other Taliban in exchange for the freedom of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo in March 2007.
   The United States and other countries criticised both the Afghan and Italian governments for agreeing to the prisoner exchange, with some saying such agreements could prompt extremists to carry out more kidnappings.
   Yasir was the former political assistant to Abdur Rab Rasool Sayyaf, chief of the Ittehad-i-Islami rebel group that battled the decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
   But he switched sides to join the Taliban when Sayyaf formed an alliance with the US-backed government of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

Mexico’s Zapatista rebel leader ‘Subcomandante’ Marcos slammed US president-elect Barack Obama for failing to speak out on Israel’s bombing of Gaza, in a speech on Friday marking the 15th anniversary of his rebellion.
   The masked leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation — which rose up in arms in Chiapas, southeast Mexico, on January 1, 1994 — also criticised a government clampdown on spiralling drug violence, in his first public appearance in more than a year.
   Obama ‘supports the use of force’ against Palestinian people, Marcos said in a speech to some 2,500 leftist politicians and activists from 25 countries.
   Obama has kept a low profile on the Gaza conflict, stressing that there is only one president at a time ahead of his inauguration on January 20.
   Marcos also criticised the Mexican president, Calderon, for his clampdown on drug violence, with the deployment of more than 36,000 soldiers countrywide so far failing to stop more than 5,300 deaths in drug-related attacks last year.
   ‘Calderon promised he’d use all the force of the state against organized crime, but it’s evident that organized crime directs the force of the state,’ Marcos said.
   The rebel leader’s Zapatista insurrection left 150 people dead before a ceasefire was declared 12 days later.
   The small guerrilla army has now essentially become a political movement that groups several indigenous and peasant organisations as well radical leftist militants.

About 5,000 families in the southern Philippines have been displaced by flash floods and large waves spawned by heavy rains, officials said Saturday.
   Over a hundred houses have been destroyed and many people are fleeing their homes in the face of rising waters in the northern part of the southern island of Mindanao, civil defence officials said.
   Regional civil defence director Carmelito Lupo said that most of those whose homes were destroyed were from Cagayan de Oro city but officials were still trying to get information on the situation in the surrounding areas.

Communist Cuba’s president Raul Castro has offered to talk directly ‘without intermediaries’ and on equal terms with incoming US president Barack Obama, who has said he would consider direct dialogue.
   ‘A gesture for a gesture. We are ready to do it whenever it may be, whenever they may decide, without intermediaries, directly, but we are in no rush, we are not desperate,’ Castro said on state television late Friday, a day after Cuba marked the 50th anniversary of its revolution.
   After years of economic embargo and hardline US efforts to isolate the island, Havana now faces rare potential for change with Obama, who has voiced willingness to engage world leaders the administration of the president, George W Bush, has sought to sideline.
   Obama, who takes office January 20, could ‘do a great deal, could take positive steps,’ said Castro, 77, adding he did not expect him to change overall hostile US policy. ‘But I hope I am wrong about that,’ the Cuban president said.
   ‘A president is coming in who has raised a lot of expectations in many parts of the world, hopes that are too high, I think.’
   But Castro allowed that a new US president ‘may be able to make more just ideas move forward, and may be able to stop the almost uninterrupted rule since the United States was created that almost every president has had his war or wars.’
   The Cuban president repeated his argument that US ‘carrot and stick diplomacy’ was a dead end.
   ‘That is over now, that was another era,’ said Raul Castro, who took over in July 2006 from his brother, iconic Cuban leader Fidel Castro, now ailing and 82. Raul Castro officially took over the presidency in February.
   ‘We will continue to wait patiently,’ Castro said. ‘That is incredible if with our Cuban temperament we learn to be patient. Well we’ve got it, and at least on this front, we have shown it to be true.’
   In his anniversary address Thursday, Castro said future leaders of the revolution must not be duped by the ‘siren songs of the enemy,’ as the Cuban government refers to the United States, which he said ‘will never cease to be aggressive, imposing and treacherous.’
   Communist Cuba marked the 50th anniversary of its Revolution Thursday with traditional fanfare. But the country faced an uncertain future, with its iconic, ailing leader Fidel Castro withdrawn from power and the economy in dire straits.

A Muslim family that was ordered off an AirTran Airways flight on New Year’s Day received an apology and refund on Friday from the airline, which said its decision to bar the passengers was necessary.
   Atif Irfan said in an interview with CNN that federal authorities removed him, seven family members and a friend from the flight after passengers overheard members of the group talking about the safest place to sit on the plane.
   He said they were being careful to avoid any ‘buzzwords’ like ‘bomb’ that would trigger a security alert.
   The group was flying out of Reagan Washington National Airport and was headed for a religious retreat in Florida when other passengers apparently overheard the conversation and reported it to authorities.
   AirTran, a subsidiary of AirTran Holdings Inc., issued a statement apologising to the nine and the other passengers who were inconvenienced by the incident. It said the airfare of the nine was refunded and other passengers would be reimbursed for expenses incurred by taking other flights.
   ‘We apologise to all of the passengers — to the nine who had to undergo extensive interviews from the authorities, and to the 95 who ultimately made the flight,’ the discount airline said in a statement.
   ‘While ultimately this issue proved to be a misunderstanding, the steps taken were necessary,’ it said.
   An earlier AirTran statement said the airline complied with all Transportation Security Administration and Homeland Security directives and had no discretion in the case.
   All 104 passengers aboard the flight were taken off and rescreened and their baggage was checked again, AirTran said. Of the nine passengers in the group, six asked to be rebooked to Florida, AirTran said.
   The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations said it filed a complaint on Friday with the US Department of Transportation. The Islamic civil rights group said in a statement it was working with the Muslim passengers and the airline to address the civil liberties issues related to the incident.

Australia has rejected all US requests so far to resettle detainees from Guantanamo Bay, the most recent being on Friday night, the deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, said on Saturday.
   A request to resettle a group of prisoners from the military prison camp in Cuba was made last month by the outgoing administration of the president, George W Bush, Gillard told reporters in Melbourne.
   It was the second such request and was rejected on Friday night Australian time, Gillard said.
   ‘Those resettlement requests have been considered on a case-by-case basis, against our stringent national security and immigration criteria,’ said Gillard, who temporarily heads the government while the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, is on leave.
   ‘Assessing those requests from a case-by-case basis, they had not met our stringent national security and immigration criteria and have been rejected.’
   About 255 men are still held at Guantanamo, including 60 the United States has cleared for release but cannot repatriate for fear they will be tortured or persecuted in their home countries.
   The prison has come to symbolise aggressive interrogation practices that opened the United States up to allegations of torture.

US troops shot and critically wounded a newly-wed Iraqi woman working for a television news station after she failed to heed warnings from American soldiers in Baghdad, the US military and her station said on Saturday.
   A US military statement said that a combined team of the Iraqi police and US soldiers had observed the woman, who had had failed to listen to warnings, behaving ‘erratically’ before US soldiers shot her.
   ‘Concerned by the danger she might present to the security forces and civilians, given her repeated failure to respond to warnings, multi-national division Baghdad soldiers fired two rounds, wounding the woman.’
   Mohsen al-Darraji, a spokesman for Beladi TV, said that 25-year-old Hadeel Emad, a producer with Beladi, had failed to heed warning shots because she had impaired hearing.

Tenacity has paid off for John Atta-Mills, whose third bid to become Ghana’s elected president proved successful on Saturday.
   The former vice-president to the mercurial and charismatic ex-leader Jerry Rawlings grew up with a ‘desire to serve others, especially the underprivileged,’ according to family members.
   The soft-spoken 64-year-old politician and law professor — who ran under the slogan ‘A Better Man for a Better Ghana’ — had previously lost twice to the outgoing head of state John Kufuor, in 2000 and again in 2004.
   ‘The one negative thing one can raise about Mills is the perception that he is under the control of Rawlings, and that perception cost him two elections,’ said a senior Ghanaian journalist.