The New Nation - Internet Edition

More than 100 Taliban killed as attack on key Afghan town foiled

AP, Kandahar

Taliban militants launched a surprise attack on a key southern Afghan town, sparking a battle that killed some 60 insurgents, an Afghan official said Sunday. A second clash in the same region killed another 40 militants.

Taliban fighters used rockets and other heavy weapons to attack Afghan forces on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province, said Daud Ahmadi, the spokesman for Helmand's governor. Militants attacked the city from three sides starting just after midnight and were pushed back only after a battle that involved airstrikes, Ahmadi said. Rockets landed in different parts of the city but there were no civilian casualties, he said. NATO said its aircraft bombed insurgents after they observed them gathering for a major attack, killing "multiple enemy forces," the military alliance said in a statement.

"If the insurgents planned a spectacular attack prior to the winter, this was a spectacular failure," said Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette, the spokesman for the NATO-led force.

Authorities recovered the bodies of 41 Taliban fighters on the city's outskirts, from where the attack was launched, he said. He estimated the bodies of another 20 fighters were taken from the battle site by the militants, citing intelligence reports. British forces are responsible for protecting the area around Lashkar Gah. In a second battle in Helmand province, Afghan and international troops retook the Nad Ali district center - which had been held by militants - during a three-day fight, Ahmadi said. That battle, which also involved airstrikes, ended Saturday, Ahmadi said.

Afghan police and soldiers were now in control of the district center. There were no casualties among Afghan or NATO troops, Ahmadi said.

Ahmadi's death tolls could not be verified independently. Journalists are not able to travel to remote and dangerous battle sites.

Afghan officials have been known to exaggerate death tolls in the past. The NATO-led force said it was aware of fighting in Helmand but could not provide any information. Helmand province is the largest drug producing area in the world and the region alone accounts for more than half of Afghanistan's production of opium poppies. More than 90 percent of the world's opium is produced in Afghanistan and up to $100 million of the trade's profits are used to finance the Taliban insurgency. Insurgency related violence has killed more than 4,700 people - mostly militants - this year, according to an Associated Press count of figures from Western and Afghan officials.

A roadside bomb, meanwhile, struck a civilian vehicle traveling in the Shamulzai district of Zabul province on Sunday, killing five people, said Ghulab Shah Alikheil, a provincial official. Alikheil blamed Taliban militants for planting the bomb.

Kashmir shuts down in protest as Indian PM visits

AP, Srinagar

Shops, businesses and schools were shut in the Indian portion of Kashmir on Saturday to protest a visit by the Indian prime minister who inaugurated the first train line in the disputed Himalayan region.

The visit by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to meet with pro-Indian political parties comes amid a wave of unrest that has included some of the largest protests against Indian rule in two decades.

On Friday, police fatally shot two people as thousands of Muslims protested Singh's arrival. At least 75 others, including 34 security personnel, were injured in the clashes. The Jammu-Kashmir Coordination Committee, a coalition of Muslim separatists and local business leaders, called for a strike Saturday in the region's main city, Srinagar, to protest Singh's visit.

The new train line is aimed at helping to forge stronger ties between the Kashmir region and the rest of India. The line links the northern town of Rajwansher to Anantnag, 40 miles to the south. It is expected to be extended next year, officials said.

The city's streets were deserted and government forces erected steel barricades and laid razor wire on the streets in anticipation of protests. Thousands of additional soldiers in riot gear patrolled the city.

"We're taking no chance and are strictly enforcing restrictions to maintain law and order," senior police official B. Srinivas said.

Anti-India sentiment runs deep in Kashmir, where most people favor independence from mainly Hindu India or a merger with predominantly Muslim Pakistan.

At least 45 people have died in the unrest in recent months, most of them killed when Indian soldiers opened fire on Muslim demonstrators.

Speaking to reporters late Friday, Singh expressed sadness over the deaths and reiterated India's commitment to peacefully solving the Kashmir crisis. "It has always been our belief that even the most difficult issues can be resolved through dialogue," Singh said.

A key separatist leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, rejected Singh's call for talks.

"Economic packages or railway lines cannot be alternates to the right of self-determination," he said Friday. "We believe a dialogue process is futile unless it is for discussing this fundamental right."

Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, which both claim the region and have fought two wars over it.

Militant separatist groups have been fighting since 1989 to end Indian rule. The uprising and subsequent Indian crackdown have killed some 68,000 people, most of them civilians.

NKorea off US blacklist after nuke inspection deal

AP, Washington

After North Korea relented on nuclear inspection demands, the U.S. on Saturday erased from a terrorism blacklist the communist country President Bush once branded part of an "axis of evil."

The U.S. step, assailed by some conservatives who say it is sketchy and rewards North Korea's bad behavior, is aimed at salvaging a faltering disarmament accord before President Bush leaves office in January.

State Department officials said the inspection agreement and the decision to take North Korea off the state sponsors of terrorism list were in the interests of national security and consistent with the "action for action" principle of the negotiations. Bush approved the action on Friday and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice followed suit Saturday. "Every single element of verification that we sought going in is part of this package," her spokesman, Sean McCormack, told reporters at a rare weekend briefing. The North's removal from the list was effective immediately.

The terrorism designation - now shared only by Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan - carries severe penalties. But U.S. officials said North Korea would not see any immediate benefit because it is punished under other programs and could return to the list if it does not comply with the inspections.

The U.S. previously had demanded the six-nation group negotiating with North Korea - China, Japan, North and South Korea, Russia and the U.S. - approved the agreement before the administration would drop the North from the terrorism list.

North Korea will allow atomic experts to take samples and conduct forensic tests at all of its declared nuclear facilities and undeclared sites on mutual consent, according to the accord those countries soon are to formalize. It was not immediately clear if the site of a 2006 nuclear test is a declared site.

The North will permit experts to verify that it has told the truth about transfers of nuclear technology and an alleged uranium program. Officials said North Korea has agreed to immediately resume disabling its main plutonium facility. Since August, the North had reversed that process, heightening tensions.

Officials acknowledged the difficulty in checking North Korea's accounting of its nuclear activities.

"Verifying North Korea's nuclear proliferation will be a serious challenge. This is the most secret and opaque regime in the entire world," said Patricia McNerney, assistant secretary for international security and nonprofileration.

Paula DeSutter, assistant secretary for verification, compliance and implementation, said the North could block access to some undeclared sites under the "mutual consent" clause, but that the agreement was no different from any other inspection deal the U.S. has negotiated.

"The idea of mutual consent is not a show-stopper for us," she said. "There should be no anticipation by anybody that there are not going to be bumps in the road. This is going to be a bumpy road. However, we are building a road."

The move followed days of intense internal debate in Washington and consultations with U.S. negotiating partners China, South Korea, Russia and Japan.

Tokyo had balked at removing North Korea from the terrorism list because North Korea has not resolved issues related to its abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s.

Bush told Japan's prime minister, Taro Aso, that the U.S. supports Japan's position and will press the North to honor commitments it made to Tokyo this summer about abductees, said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council.

The blacklist decision had been in the works since chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill returned from a trip to North Korea late last week. On his visit, he proposed a face-saving compromise under which the North would accept the verification plan after the delisting was announced.

Removing North Korea from the list was immediately criticized by some conservatives who said it goes too far and sends a bad signal to other U.S. adversaries, notably Iran. Hill, a lightning rod for conservative criticism on the issue, was noticeably absent at the State Department announcement.

Critics pilloried the development because they said it is not adequate to address its involvement in spreading nuclear weapons technology or its alleged uranium enrichment activities.

"By rewarding North Korea before the regime has carried out its commitments, we are encouraging this regime to continue its illicit nuclear program and violate its pledge to no longer provide nuclear assistance to extremist regimes," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said he would not support the step unless it is clear North Korea will accept intrusive inspections of its nuclear sites. In addition, he said he was worried that U.S. allies in Asia, particularly Japan, had not been properly consulted.

Democratic rival Barack Obama expressed similar concerns but called the removal of North Korea from the terrorism list "an appropriate response, as long as there is a clear understanding that if North Korea fails to follow through there will be immediate consequences."

North Korea's state news agency was silent on the U.S. announcement. The country often waits days before releasing official statements.

Kim Sook, South Korea's chief envoy to international nuclear talks with North Korea, said he expects the North to immediately resume work to disable its nuclear reactor. He said Seoul believes the developments would put multilateral talks back on a normal track and ultimately lead to the North giving up its nuclear weapons programs.

Earlier Saturday, North Korea released pictures of its leader, Kim Jong Il, for the first time in nearly two months. They showed him looking generally well; reports have said he recently had brain surgery. The photos were taken during a visit to a military unit and shown on Pyongyang's Korean Central Television. It was unclear when they were taken.

North Korea, along with Iran and Iraq, was branded as part of an "axis of evil" by Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Journalist among 5 killed in spate of Iraq attacks

AFP, Baghdad

At least five people were killed on Sunday in a spate of attacks in Baghdad that targeted Iraq's national security forces, security officials said.

Two policemen were killed by sniper fire in the western neighbourhood of Mansour, police told AFP, while two men manning a checkpoint in Baghdad's mainly Sunni quarter of Dora were killed in a drive-by shooting attack.

The guards killed when unidentified attackers in car fired on them as they sped past were both members of the Awakening movement, former Sunni rebels recruited by the US military to fight against Al-Qaeda. The attack was the second in Dora in two days. On Friday, a car bomb blast at a crowded market killed 13 people and wounded 27, sparking clashes between insurgents and police.

In central Baghad's Palestine street, a major commercial thoroughfare, meanwhile, a roadside bomb wounded at least seven people, including two police, officials said.

Meanwhile, a Kurdish journalist was gunned down in the northern city of Kirkuk, Iraqi police said. A New York-based journalists' group said Saturday it was the 136th killing of a reporter since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq five years ago.

Col. Taha al-Din of Kirkuk police said Diyar Abbas Ahmed, a journalist with Iraq Eye media, was assassinated Friday in the city center.

Ethnic and religious tensions have risen in the city, which has been the site of a tense standoff between Arabs and Kurds. Kurds want to incorporate Kirkuk into their semiautonomous region in the north and Iraq's government has been stalled for months over the future status of the oil-rich city.

The Committee to Protect Journalists called on Iraqi authorities to track down Ahmed's killers and bring them to justice. It said four journalists have been killed in the Kirkuk area since 2003.

Iraq Eye says on its Web site that it provides news, market research, public relations and other services.

Lateef Fatih Faraj, head of Kirkuk's journalist union, said Ahmed was 28 and unmarried. He said Ahmed worked with several media stations including Iraqiya TV and a television station sponsored by a Kurdish political party.

Ahmed was leaving an art center in Kirkuk with a friend when three gunmen stopped them, Faraj said. The friend was not harmed.

Faraj said the killers were targeting Ahmed because of his writing. More assassinations of journalists will occur, he added, "if no protection is given to them."

32 killed in fresh Sri Lankan fighting

AP, Colombo

Separate battles between government forces and Tamil separatists across Sri Lanka's volatile northern region killed 30 rebels and two soldiers, the military said Sunday.

The new fighting came as soldiers closed in on the rebels' administrative capital of Kilinochchi in a campaign aimed at routing the guerrillas and ending the 25-year-old war that has killed more than 70,000 people. The worst fighting took place Saturday around Kilinochchi where two separate clashes killed 26 rebels and two soldiers, said military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara. The same fighting wounded 16 rebels and seven soldiers.

The army has said its forces are about 1 mile from the outskirts of Kilinochchi.

Other battles in Welioya and Vavuniya killed four rebels on Saturday, said Nanayakkara.

With nearly all communications to the north severed, a rebel spokesman could not be contacted for comment.

Independent verification of the military's claims is nearly impossible because most journalists are banned from the war zone. Both sides routinely exaggerate enemy losses and underreport their own.

Fighting has escalated in recent months, with the military capturing a series of rebel bases and large chunks of territory. Officials have pledged to crush the guerrillas by the end of the year.

The rebels have been fighting since 1983 to create an independent homeland for the country's ethnic minority Tamils, who have faced marginalization by successive governments controlled by ethnic Sinhalese.

More than 70,000 people have been killed in the violence.

Bush approach to war on terror under pressure as term ends

AFP, Washington

The Bush administration has come under renewed pressure over its anything-goes approach to the "war on terror" that could leave tough problems behind for a new president, analysts say.

A federal judge's order this week that 17 Chinese Muslim Uighurs be released from Guantanamo into the United States renewed questions about White House policy of holding people without charges in the US prison in Cuba for years after their capture.

Meanwhile, allegations by two linguists that the National Security Agency listened in on conversations of Americans overseas, including pillow talk, aroused protests over infringements on civil liberties.

"If it proves to be true, I think you'll see further demand for oversight and further demand for control," said James Lewis, a national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Only two years ago, the Bush administration could count on public fear of terrorism and a Republican-controlled Congress to support an array of anti-terrorism tactics and programs that tested or exceeded the limits of US law.

Coercive interrogations, indefinite detentions, secret overseas prisons, and warrantless surveillance of phone calls and emails were among the tools used in its no-holds-barred response to the September 11 attacks on the United States.

But with the administration near the end of its term, said Lewis, "things are starting to come a little unglued.

"The approach this administration took is breaking down. Some of it is, as it loses its political steam and its credibility, people are willing to speak out."

Greater oversight and political resistance in Congress has forced some compromise but not radical changes in approach, however.

The administration succeeded in amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last year to permit the government to monitor communications that begin or end overseas.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey this month signed new guidelines on Federal Bureau of Investigation operations that critics say will give it broad new powers to conduct surveillance and use other intrusive investigative techniques on Americans.

And the administration won a stay of the court order releasing the Uighurs, and have plodded on with trials by military commission of some detainees at Guantanamo Bay despite repeated legal setbacks.

"The sense that what they are doing is right and necessary is very strong still in the Bush administration," said Lewis.

Any major adjustment in the US approach to the "global war on terror" awaits a new administration, which must still weigh the risk of catastrophic attack against the need to preserve civil liberties.

"Every democratic nation that has had to grapple with a terrorist threat has been obliged to alter some of the rules-the rules of intelligence collection, police powers and so on," said Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation.

"And that's okay so long as you modify the rules and work within the rules. Where things begin to go wrong is where people assert that the rules don't matter," he said.

Fierce new row rocks White House race

AFP, Chicago

A war of words with racial undertones marked the White House race Sunday after civil rights icon John Lewis accused Republican John McCain of sowing "hatred" against Barack Obama.

McCain, who has been trying to tamp down abuse of the Democratic nominee at his campaign events, reacted furiously, lashing out against Lewis, who only a few weeks ago he described as one of the Americans he most admired.

The latest political turbulence came just over three weeks before the November 4 election, with Obama building a steady lead over McCain on the national level, and on the state-by-state electoral map. It also overshadowed another controversy, the legislative probe finding in Alaska that state governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin had abused her power in a feud with her ex-brother-in-law.

Congressman Lewis, revered as one of the key figures in the 20th century US civil rights movement, ignited a political firestorm by issuing a statement about McCain's recent searing character attacks on Obama.

"As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Senator McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all," Lewis said.

Republicans "are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse."

He also appeared to suggest attacks on Obama were reminiscent of late segregationist Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace, whose rhetoric in 1963 was blamed for a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four little girls.'

McCain said in his own statement that Lewis had launched a "character attack against Governor Sarah Palin and me that is shocking and beyond the pale."

He said Lewis' apparent reference to Wallace was "unacceptable and has no place in this campaign."

McCain called on Obama "to immediately and personally repudiate these outrageous and divisive comments."

Later, Lewis issued a second statement in an apparent attempt to defuse the row, saying he had not meant to draw a link between Wallace and McCain.

"My statement was a reminder to all Americans that toxic language can lead to destructive behavior, I am glad that Senator McCain has taken some steps to correct divisive speech at his rallies," he said.

Chants of "terrorist" and "kill him" were reportedly heard at recent McCain Republican events and some commentators blamed hard-hitting negative advertisements which claimed Obama consorted with a domestic "terrorist" -- 1960s radical William Ayers.

On Friday, McCain was forced to intervene twice at a town hall meeting in Minnesota after one voter described Obama as an Arab and another said he was "scared" of the Democratic nominee.

American space tourist blasts off in Soyuz rocket

AP, Baikonur

A Soyuz spacecraft with two Americans and a Russian on board lifted off from Kazakhstan on Sunday for the international space station.

The Soyuz TMA-13 capsule carrying American computer game millionaire Richard Garriott soared into a clear sky atop a Russian rocket as the latest paying space traveler's family watched from a viewing platform. Also aboard were U.S. astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov.

The rocket lifted off on schedule at 1:01 p.m. (3:01 a.m. EDT), sending an orange flare behind it as it streaked upward. The craft entered orbit about 10 minutes later. "I'm elated, elated," said Richard Garriott's father, Owen, a former U.S. astronaut who is the first American to see his child follow in his footsteps and reach space. "They're in orbit, that's good."

Garriott's mother Eve and his girlfriend, Kelly Miller, shed tears of joy and relief at the successful launch.

"This is cool, this is cool," Miller said.

The Soyuz is to dock Tuesday with the international space station, where Garriott will spend about 10 days conducting experiments - including some whose sponsors helped fund his trip - and photographing Earth to measure changes since his father snapped pictures from the U.S. station Skylab in 1973.

He is to return to Earth in a Soyuz capsule with cosmonaut Yuri Volkov, whose father also traveled to space - making him the first second-generation space traveler.

Garriott, a Texan who made his fortune designing computer fantasy games, dreamed of space as a child but learned as a youth that he could not become a NASA astronaut because of his poor eyesight. He paid a reported US$30 million for his voyage.

"I'm really happy for him. It's one of the things he's wanted to do most in his life. I spent a lot of time listening to him about when he goes up in space," Miller said.

"He's like a kid in a candy shop," she said. "And I already want him to come back."

Garriott, 47, is a board member and investor in Space Adventures Ltd., a U.S.-based company that has organized flights aboard Russian craft for five other millionaires including the first paying space tourist, California businessman Dennis Tito, in 2001.

Zimbabwe talks deadlocked: Opposition

AFP, Harare

Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change said on Friday that talks to allocate key cabinet positions have reached deadlock, leaving a power-sharing accord in jeopardy.

"The three principals met and there is now a shared consensus among them that there is a deadlock," MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa told AFP. "The intervention of the mediator therefore becomes imperative," said Chamisa.

President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF was not available to comment. In September Zimbabwe's political rivals signed a landmark power-sharing deal aimed at ending the country's ruinous political crisis. Under the deal, 84-year-old Mugabe would retain his position as head of state, after nearly three decades in power, while Tsvangirai took up the new post of prime minister. Tsvangirai's MDC claims that Mugabe's ruling party wants to retain key posts-believed to be the defence, home affairs, state security and finance ministries-in violation of the pact.

India’s unmanned lunar mission ready for launch

AFP, Sriharikota

India is making final preparations for its first mission to the moon, officials said over the weekend. Lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 will be launched on October 22 by a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from the Sriharikota space centre in the country's south.

"All checks on the vehicle have been completed. The vehicle is now ready to receive the satellite," T. Subba Reddy, manager of the second launch pad, told reporters in Sriharikota. The mission will involve three stages-the lift-off from the space centre, raising the spacecraft into the lunar orbit and a series of experiments in the next two years. A team of meteorologists will start monitoring the weather six days ahead of the launch.

"The launch vehicle is rain-proof. Only a cyclone can pose problems," range safety officer V. Krishnamurthy said. India will share the data collected during the mission with other countries.

"This is an exploratory mission in search of the mineral, geological and chemical characteristics of the lunar surface," M.Y.S Prasad, associate director of the launch centre said.

The space craft will conduct a lunar orbit at a distance of 385,000 kilometres (240,000 miles) from Earth.