The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, Manama

US President George W. Bush was warmly welcomed by leaders in Bahrain on Saturday during a tour of Gulf Arab allies to rally support against Iran and for the Middle East peace process, although about 250 demonstrators took to the streets.

Bush was greeted at the airport by King Hamad, who led a red-carpet welcome for the first US president to visit the small Gulf kingdom which serves as home to the US Navy's Fifth Fleet.

Bush, who flew in from Kuwait, was later honoured at an official greeting ceremony at one of the royal palaces, where King Hamad hailed the United States as "a friend, an ally and a partner."

The monarch expressed "pride" in Manama's longstanding links with the US Navy, which he said had "secured freedom of navigation" in the Gulf.

Tight security measures were evident in Manama as Bahraini police and special forces deployed along the main roads festooned with US and Bahraini flags.

Bahrain is a major non-NATO ally of Washington and has a free trade agreement with the United States.

Bush warned while in Israel on the first leg of a Middle East trip that Iran posed "a threat to world peace" and should not be allowed to develop the know-how to build a nuclear weapon. Iran denies seeking nuclear arms. He was expected to hold talks with King Hamad and visit the Fifth Fleet base in Manama, before travelling on to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. His week-long Middle East tour ends in Egypt on Wednesday.

But many members of the majority Shiite community in Bahrain have made clear they do not share the government's enthusiasm about Bush's visit to the Gulf archipelago, which is ruled by a Sunni dynasty.

About 250 people picketed near the US embassy in Manama after Bush's arrival to voice their opposition to his government's policies in the Middle East and support for Israel.

"Get out of Bahrain, criminal," read one of the banners raised by the protesters. "No to the US military presence in Bahrain," "America cares for oil, not democracy," said other banners.

Dozens of security men were deployed around the embassy as the sit-in took place some 500 metres (yards) away.

The protest was organised by several Sunni and Shiite political groupings, mainly from the opposition, but including some Sunni Islamist groups close to the government.

"We want to tell the US president that he is not welcome, and that he is not a friend of Arab and Bahraini peoples," said Ibrahim Sharif, secretary general of the leftist National Democratic Action Association.

"President Bush praises the Bahraini regime saying it is democratic and reformistt This is just politicians complimenting each other," Sharif told AFP.

Two other protests took place on the eve of Bush's arrival.

Bush's tour comes amid an escalation of tensions between the United States and Iran after Washington reported a weekend face-off in the Strait of Hormuz entrance to the Gulf.

Tehran accuses Washington of using the incident in the waterway -- a vital conduit for energy supplies -- as a propaganda stunt to paint Iran in a bad light during the Middle East trip.

AFP, Islamabad

Pakistani troops killed more than 50 Taliban militants after fighting off an attack on a military fort in a troubled tribal region bordering Afghanistan, security officials said Saturday.

The clash occurred on the night between Wednesday and Thursday near the town of Ladha in the rugged South Waziristan tribal district, where thousands of Pakistani troops are deployed to fight Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.

"More than 50 miscreants were killed in the attack and an unknown number were also injured," a senior security official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Chief military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad told AFP that militants suffered "heavy casualties in the encounter" but said he had no official figures yet.

The fighting erupted late Wednesday, just hours after thousands of armed tribesmen met at Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, to hunt down those involved in killing members of a tribal peace committee last week.

The tribesmen blame those killings on Baitullah Mehsud, a leading Taliban warlord, who has also been accused by the Pakistani government of masterminding the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto last month.

Military sources said those who mounted the attack on the fort were mainly followers of Mehsud.

There was no immediate comment from local Taliban sources.

Pakistan has pushed more than 90,000 troops into the tribal belt to combat Islamic militants who fled Afghanistan after US-led forces invaded the country in 2001 in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

AFP, Warren

Republican frontrunner John McCain took his plain-talk on US economic troubles to the hard-hit blue collar state of Michigan Saturday, as the specter of recession took center stage in the presidential race.

Buoyed by a national poll placing him ahead, McCain vied with his Republican rivals campaigning in Michigan, home to a troubled car industry and 7.4 percent unemployment, where the party holds its primary nominating contest on Tuesday.

At a rally in this Detroit suburb, McCain attacked claims by his rivals that they can bring back the jobs lost when US automakers shuttered plants in the face of a steady loss of market share to Asian competitors.

"I would be ashamed and embarrassed to say that some of those jobs are coming back," he said. "I'm proud to say that I can bring jobs, new jobs, good jobs, to the state of Michigan."

His flagging rival candidate Mitt Romney meanwhile waged a high-stakes fight for the survival of his campaign after defeats in the two opening nominating contests, vowing to fight for jobs in the state where he was born and his father used to be governor.

AFP, Washington

Threatening comments heard at the end of a Pentagon-released audio recording designed to prove harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a local heckler known as the "Filipino Monkey," The Navy Times reported.

The 36-minute video aired Friday included footage of Iranian boats following the US ships at some distance.

It includes a shot of a dark object floating in the water, but it could not be determined whether this was one of the box-like objects that the Pentagon claims were dumped in the path of a US warship by two speedboats. The videotape did not include a previously released audiotape of a threat to blow up the ships made in a radio transmission that the Pentagon says was received during the incident. A voice on the audiotape is heard to say in accented English: "I am coming to you t You will explode in a few minutes."

Pentagon officials now say they do not know the source of the radio transmission, backing off a previous claim that it came from one of the boats.

The Times said Friday the voice in the audio sounded different from the one belonging to an Iranian officer shown speaking to the cruiser Port Royal over a radio from a small boat in the video released by Iranian authorities.

Reuters, Almaty

The death toll in a Kazakh coal mine explosion rose to 30 on Sunday when authorities gave up hope of rescuing 23 trapped miners and said they could not have survived.

"The high temperatures and the high concentration of carbon oxide t have made their survival impossible," the Emergencies Ministry said in statement following Friday's explosion at the Abaiskaya mine in central Kazakhstan.

Rescuers have been unable to put out an underground fire at the mine, owned by the world's largest steel maker, Arcelor Mittal. Seven miners had initially been reported killed in the blast. The ministry said the search for survivors had been abandoned and certain areas of the mine were being filled with water to prevent the flames from spreading. An explosion at another mine owned by Arcelor Mittal in the same region, the Lenin mine, killed 43 workers in 2006. Two earlier blasts, in 2002 and 2004, killed more than 30 miners.

Coal mining accidents occur frequently in the former Soviet Union, where safety practices are often less strictly observed than in Western mines.

AFP, Gaza City

Two members of the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas were killed in an Israeli air raid on the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday, medics said.

They said the two Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades militants were killed by the explosion of a missile, apparently fired from a drone, and four other people wounded. The attack took place east of the city of Khan Yunis, near the Israeli border.

An Israeli military spokesman confirmed the air strike without specifying how it was carried out.

He said the raid was part of a campaign targeting armed groups which have "fired some 215 rockets or mortar rounds" at Israel or Israeli forces carrying out operations in the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces did not launch any operations in Gaza during the visit of US President George W. Bush, who toured Israel and the West Bank over three days. The last attack carried out by Israel occurred on Wednesday morning when two civilians and a Palestinian activist were killed and 10 other people wounded.

Almost 30 Palestinians -- the majority of them fighters -- have been killed in Gaza since the start of the year following Israeli land or air strikes.

Saturday's deaths brought to 6,046 the number of people killed since the start of the Palestinian uprising in 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinian, according to an AFP tally.

Reuters, Islamabad

Nearly half of Pakistanis believe government agencies or government-allied politicians were involved in opposition leader Benazir Bhutto's assassination, a poll found, as President Pervez Musharraf again dismissed such suspicion. Bhutto was killed in a gun-and-bomb attack on December 27 as she was leaving an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi. The government has blamed al Qaeda-linked militants for her death and for a string of other bomb attacks in recent months, many on the security forces, which have killed hundreds of people. Bhutto, who was seen as close to the United States and was a staunch opponent of militancy, had said al Qaeda had tried to kill her in the past. She would have been an obvious target of the militants, who were reported to have issued suicide-bomb threats against her before she returned from exile in October.

AFP, Amman

Jordan's King Abdullah II told President George W. Bush on Saturday that there needs to be a clearer timetable for renewed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians if they are to bear fruit. The king told Bush in a telephone call that there is a "need for the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations to proceed within clear mechanisms and a timeframe that would lead to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state," the palace said. He added that it was "important to sustain the present American and international momentum to advance peace." Bush, who is currently in the Gulf on the latest leg of a Middle East tour, had rung the king to brief him on his talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders earlier in the week, the palace said. "The US president stressed his administration's commitment to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the basis of a two-state solution," it added.

AFP, Heart

At least 43 people have been killed in a remote western Afghanistan village after days of heavy snowfalls across the country, authorities said. "I can confirm that 43 people have been killed in Ghoryan alone," Agha Mohammad Sidiqi, the head of the government's emergency response committee, told AFP, referring to a district in western Herat province. "Their bodies have been recovered and most of them are shepherds. They died mostly in avalanches," Sidiqi said. Seventeen other people are missing in the same area, he added. The deaths brought to more than 70 the number of people killed by the freezing weather in several western provinces over the past week. Thousands of head of livestock have also died. Constant snowfalls, the heaviest in years, have blocked roads linking major cities to isolated villages, Sidiqi said. "Most roads leading to districts and remote communities have been blocked and this has made it even more difficult to reach those communities to help them," he added.

AFP, London

Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour party lagged well behind the main opposition Conservatives in two opinion polls published Sunday. David Cameron's Conservatives were on 43 percent and Labour on 33 percent in a YouGov/Sunday Times poll, which put the opposition's lead back to previous highs after a lull when it fell to five percent at the end of last year. Labour were also behind in an ICM/Sunday Telegraph study which put the Conservatives on 40 percent and Labour on 33 percent. The Sunday Times reported that many voters cited pessimism over the state of the economy in explaining their position, adding that 22 percent believe there will be a recession in Britain this year. As former finance minister, Brown has faced rising political heat over fears about the state of the economy and particularly over the plight of troubled bank Northern Rock. There is increasing speculation among commentators that the government is about to announce the nationalisation of Northern Rock, which applied to the Bank of England for emergency funding in September last year.

AFP, Riyadh

French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed holding talks between Iraqi factions in France similar to those it hosted in July for Lebanon, in an interview published Sunday in the Al-Hayat daily. Sarkozy, who begins a three-nation Gulf tour Sunday in Saudi Arabia, proposed "hosting in France, far from the heat of passions and on neutral territory, inter-Iraqi roundtable talks that are as large as possible." "It is up to the parties involved to decide what steps to take next," he was quoted as saying in the London-based Saudi daily. It is not the first time France has offered to hold such talks for Iraq. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner proposed holding such talks last August during a visit to Baghdad, according to French diplomats, and Sarkozy said the offer was made again in November in Istanbul at a ministerial meeting of countries neighboring Iraq. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani declined the August offer.