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The Libyan leader, Moamer Gaddafi, lambasted the International Criminal Court on Sunday as representing a ‘new form of world terrorism’ that wanted to recolonise developing countries.
   ‘It is a known fact that all Third World countries are opposing the so-called ICC,’ the recently elected chairman of the 53-nation African Union told a press conference at the AU headquarters here.
   ‘This is the case right now. This court is against the countries colonised in the past and they want to recolonise now. It is a practice of a new world terrorism that is not below the standard of the other terrorism.’
   Gaddafi’s condemnation followed a call by Arab foreign ministers on Saturday on the Hague-based ICC to annul its arrest warrant against Sudan’s president Omar al-Beshir.
   ‘It is not fair that a head of state should be arrested,’ he said. ‘If we allow such a thing... we should also try those who killed hundreds and millions of children in Iraq and in Gaza.’
   The ICC issued a warrant for Beshir arrest earlier this month, accusing him of crimes against humanity and war crimes in the western Sudanese region of Darfur.
   Many African and Arab states along with key ally China have condemned the ICC move and called for the warrant to be suspended.
   Beshir faces five counts of crimes against humanity and two of war crimes. He is the first sitting president to be issued with a warrant by the ICC.
   The AU has argued that the prosecution jeopardised peace efforts in Sudan and on March 18 chided the UN Security Council for ignoring its requests to defer the warrant.
   The bloc’s peace and security commissioner Ramtane Lamamra said they were awaiting a decision on the issue by Arab leaders due to their start their annual summit Sunday to make a united move.
   ‘We are about to set up a high-level delegation to go to New York to lobby the UN Security Council,’ Lamamra said.
   Beshir himself has made foreign trips to Eritrea, Egypt and Libya since the March 4 ICC arrest warrant.
   The ICC, the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, does not have a police force and calls on signatory states to implement warrants. None of the three countries Beshir visited are parties to the court’s statute.
   Gaddafi is to leave Addis Ababa later Sunday for the Arab summit in Doha. It is still unclear whether Beshir will attend the two-day meeting.
   Beshir is the first sitting president to be issued with a warrant by the ICC.
   The United Nations says 300,000 people have died in the six-year-long conflict between Darfur’s ethnic minority rebels and the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum, which puts the figure at only 10,000.
   An estimated 2.7 million people more have fled their homes.

South Korea warned Sunday that North Korea could face fresh UN sanctions if it goes ahead with a planned rocket launch, as spy satellites revealed part of a long-range rocket on the North’s launch pad.
   Global concern has been mounting over North Korea’s announcement that it will launch a communications satellite between April 4 and 8.
   The United States, Japan and South Korea believe Pyongyang is actually testing a long-range Taepodong-2 missile that could, in theory, reach Alaska.
   In Seoul, the foreign minister, Yu Myung-hwan, cautioned that should the rocket launch go ahead, the North — one of the world’s most impoverished countries — would face new UN sanctions.
   ‘It is common sense to go back into a sanctions mode after North Korea’s rocket launch,’ Yu said in an interview published Sunday in JoongAng, a newly-launched weekly newspaper in Seoul.
   ‘When there is a violation of the UN Security Council resolution, we just cannot go (on) as if nothing happened.’
   UN Security Council Resolution 1718 was passed in 2006 to press the North to halt nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches, but sanctions have been suspended or loosely applied since Pyongyang joined six-way disarmament talks.
   The North said last week that any United Nations discussion of its upcoming rocket launch would cause the breakdown of the denuclearisation talks between the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.
   Yu admitted the five states were yet to agree on ‘the degree of the penalty’ to be imposed on North Korea should it go ahead with a rocket launch, but he said he was confident a compromise would be reached at the UN.
   He said South Korea and Japan were demanding ‘strong’ measures, the United States is focused more on ‘dialogue’ while Russia and China remain ‘cool’ on the issue of implementing sanctions.
   South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported Sunday that spy satellites had photographed the nose cone of a long-range North Korean rocket on its launch pad.
   ‘But it is impossible to tell what object has been loaded onto the round-shaped (rocket) top — a satellite or a warhead,’ an unnamed government source told Yonhap.
   South Korea’s defence ministry declined to comment on the report.
   Seoul believes Pyongyang will choose its launch date based on weather considerations, Yonhap quoted South Korean officials as saying. The agency said meteorologists predict the weather over the launch site will be clear on the 6th, 7th or 8th of April.
   Japan’s Sankei Shimbun newspaper reported Sunday, quoting unnamed Japanese defence ministry sources, that North Korea could test a short- or medium-range ballistic missile after the initial rocket launch, from a different site.
   The paper also said a group of Iranian missile experts was staying in North Korea to help Pyongyang prepare for the launch.

The Thai prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, Sunday accused fugitive former leader Thaksin Shinawatra of stoking unrest for personal gain as protesters surrounded the seat of government for a fourth day.
   Thousands of demonstrators loyal to the exiled Thaksin have been camped out at Government House in Bangkok since Thursday, listening to fiery video addresses by their billionaire leader condemning the current administration.
   Thaksin urged his supporters late Saturday to ‘rise up’ against the government, while a day earlier he accused two of the revered king’s advisers of masterminding the 2006 military coup that toppled him.
   ‘He is trying to arouse people in an effort to gain benefit for himself,’ the British-born Abhisit told reporters.
   The prime minister said that while protests were allowed by law, the demonstrators ‘should not make more trouble for people who are already suffering from economic turmoil.’
   Some 1,500 people kept up the vigil at Government House for the fourth day Sunday.
   In his recent speeches, Thaksin has called for Abhisit, the leader of the ruling Democrat Party, to dissolve the government and call fresh elections.
   He further hit out at Abhisit’s policies for lifting Thailand out of the slump caused by the global financial crisis, which has hurt the kingdom’s export-dependent economy.
   Abhisit defended his government, saying it ‘is still focused on working, we are confident we can carry on working.’
   Thaksin loyalists have held several similar protests since Abhisit came to power in December, following a controversial court decision to dissolve the previous administration led by Thaksin’s brother-in-law.

Thousands of government and opposition supporters converged Sunday on a sleepy district in Malaysia’s north, for an electoral clash that will test the new leadership of Najib Razak.
   The semi-rural electorate of Bukit Gantang in Perak state is the headline contest in a series of three by-elections to be held on April 7, just days after Najib is likely to be sworn in as prime minister.
   The political temperature is already running high in Perak, where the royal ruler in January ordered the opposition to cede control of the state assembly to the coalition, after defections upset the delicate balance of power.
   Some 15,000 opposition supporters and 5,000 from the ruling coalition turned out Sunday at the nearby town of Taiping to nominate their candidates, putting on a rowdy display as they beat on drums, yelled chants and waved party banners.

Most Afghan Taliban are willing to lay down their arms, a former insurgent commander said, but are afraid they will be killed for defecting because the government cannot ensure their safety.
   The United States on Friday launched a new strategy in Afghanistan in response to the Taliban-led insurgency that is growing in strength and scope. More than 5,000 people, including 2,100 civilians, have been killed in the past year alone.
   With violence at its highest level since the Taliban was ousted in 2001, the United States is sending some 21,000 new troops to bolster about 70,000 foreign soldiers already in Afghanistan trying to crush the insurgency.
   Washington says the fight cannot be won by military means alone and its strategy review refers to the need to bring some of the insurgents in from the cold.
   ‘Ninety-five per cent of the Taliban want to reconcile with the government if they can be assured security,’ Mullah Abdul Salam, a former high-ranking Taliban commander and now governor of Musa Qala in southern Helmand province, said.
   ‘But the government of Afghanistan cannot ensure their safety. If they defect to the government, the other Taliban will kill them. They are fighting for their lives,’ said Salam.
   The government must promise to keep safe those insurgents who make peace, Salam said, but most of the militants are hedging their bets until it is strong enough to do so.
   The Taliban ‘are just observing the security situation. At the moment the government is not much stronger than them. When it gets stronger they will come to the government side,’ said Salam, once a friend of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
   Despite being ousted following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the Taliban were able to regroup in Musa Qala and Helmand because there were relatively few international troops and little influence from the central government.
   British troops entered Musa Qala in mid-2006 only to pull out later that year after daily Taliban attacks that at times reached their perimeter defences.

A senior European official said Saturday that aid groups want to help Sri Lanka meet the humanitarian needs of civilians in the country’s battle zone and are ‘not against’ the government.
   Colombo has drawn international criticism for not allowing safe passage for tens of thousands of non-combatants caught in a narrow strip of coastal jungle in the northeast where its military has cornered the Tamil Tiger rebels.
   But Sri Lanka hit back earlier this week against human rights and aid groups, accusing them of supporting the rebels and of trying to prolong the island’s civil war.
   Speaking here after he was given special government permission to visit Vavuniya in northern Sri Lankan earlier this week, aid official Esko Kentrschynskyj said: ‘We want to reassure the Sri Lankan government we are not against them.’

Israel used unmanned drones to attack clandestine Iranian convoys in Sudan that were attempting to smuggle rockets into Gaza, Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper reported.
   The paper said that western diplomats confirmed that Israel attacked the Iranian truck convoys in late January and the first week of February in the remote Sudan desert, just outside the Red Sea town of Port Sudan.
   The convoys had been tracked by agents from Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence agency, the report added. The Sudanese government said this week it was investigating the possibility that Israel was behind the deadly air strikes, but so far had found no proof.
   Foreign ministry spokesman Ali Sadiq said there were two separate bombing raids against smugglers, killing about 40 people.
   The Sunday Times said that had the rockets been delivered to Hamas, the militant Islamic group that controls Gaza, they would have raised the stakes in the conflict with Israel.
   It quoted defence sources as saying the convoys were carrying Fajr-3 rockets, which have a range of more than 40 miles, and were split into sections to be smuggled through tunnels into Gaza from Egypt.

India’s military on Sunday successfully tested a surface-to-surface version of the BrahMos cruise missile which it has developed jointly with Russia, a defence ministry spokesman said.
   The missile was fired from the Pokhran range in the western desert state of Rajasthan, bordering Pakistan, that was also the site of India’s nuclear tests in 1998.
   The BrahMos has a range of 290 kilometres and can carry a 300-kilogramme conventional warhead. A version of the BrahMos is already used by the Indian navy and, following Sunday’s test, the missile was now also ready for the army, the Press Trust of India news agency said.

Tens of thousands of anti-abortion demonstrators took to the streets of the Spanish capital on Sunday to protest government plans to liberalise the abortion laws.
   The protesters massed outside the Equality ministry, which is behind the draft law, and marched through central Madrid behind signs proclaiming: ‘There is no right to kill, there is the right to live’ and ‘Women yes, abortion no’.
   Elderly people marched alongside young families with toddlers in pushchairs as the protest wound its way through the centre of Madrid.
   Many wore red baseball caps distributed by pro-life groups as a symbol ‘of strength and the celebration of life.’
   The protest is the first in a series of demonstrations called to resist the plans by socialist prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s government.

Snow storms closing in on North Dakota Sunday threatened more misery for residents sheltered behind miles of dikes, as teams shored up strained levees holding back record flood waters.
   One floodwall protecting a Fargo school cracked early Sunday, flooding the campus, and sending teams of police and firefighters to the scene to repair the breach.
   But officials warned blizzards and strong winds forecast for later Sunday could whip up waves as high as two feet which may wash over the city’s defences, holding back walls of water from the swollen Red River.
   Authorities fear as many as 30,000 people could be left homeless in the northern plains if the river breaks through levees protecting North Dakota’s largest city, Fargo, as well as Moorhead lying on the opposite bank in Minnesota.
   The weary region had been granted a few hours relief Saturday as the water levels sank due to the extreme cold halting the snow melt, and the level was holding steady Sunday at 40.3 feet. But city officials warned the raging river was not done with them yet.
   ‘With water this high we absolutely are in the watch and respond and plug mode,’ Fargo mayor Dennis Walaker said.
   The Red River is putting enormous amounts of pressure on the city’s 48 miles of protective dikes and levees and crews are struggling to reinforce weak spots and contain minor leaks, he told reporters.
   Warnings posted on the state’s emergency website said a blizzard watch had been issued from Sunday afternoon until Monday night for southwest and central Dakota, bringing strong winds of 25 to 45 miles an hour.
   ‘Easterly winds associated with this storm may cause waves of up to two feet on top of the crest which will impact the western dikes along the Red River. There is still a possibility the river could rise again,’ the web site said.

For environmental activists, the message was clear: Earth Hour was a huge success. Now they say nations have a mandate to tackle climate change. ‘The world said yes to climate action, now governments must follow,’ the World Wildlife Fund said a day after hundreds of millions of people worldwide followed its call to turn off lights for a full hour.
   From an Antarctic research base and the Great Pyramids of Egypt, from the Colosseum in Rome to the Empire State building in New York, illuminated patches of the globe went dark Saturday night to highlight the threat of climate change. Time zone by time zone, nearly 4,000 cities and towns in 88 countries dimmed nonessential lights from 8:30pm to 9:30pm.
   WWF called the event, which began in Australia in 2007 and grew last year to 400 cities worldwide, ‘the world’s first-ever global vote about the future of our planet.’
   ‘Last night’s message from the masses was loud and clear: Delay no more, real action now!’ Kim Carstensen, the leader of WWF’s Global Climate Initiative, said in a statement.
   Negotiators from 175 countries gathered Sunday in Bonn for the latest round in an effort to craft a deal to control emissions of the heat-trapping gases responsible for global warming.