British soldiers in Kabul, Jan. 2.

LONDON, Jan. 28--The pressure on Britain’s military to meet its commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq has battered morale and spurred experienced officers to leave, a high-profile group of lawmakers warned on Monday.
The House of Commons Defense Select Committee said the armed services’ performance was “deteriorating“ after several years of involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and added it was “unacceptable“ that troops were still not getting enough rest after their deployments, reported AFP.
“The continuing pressure on our armed forces personnel is likely to have an impact on retention, and there are some disturbing signs of an increase in early departure in the Army,“ committee chairman James Arbuthnot said.
In its annual report on the Ministry of Defense, the parliamentary committee warned: “We are deeply concerned that the armed forces have been operating at or above the level of concurrent operations they are resourced and structured to deliver for seven of the last eight years, and for every year since 2002.“
According to the committee, neither the Army nor the Royal Air Force was likely to meet their target strength figures this year, and both services were also breaking “harmony“ guidelines on how long troops should be on active duty in any given year.
The latter was “another clear indicator of the pressure on our Armed Forces from the continuing high level of operations.“
There are currently about 7,700 British troops in Afghanistan, and 4,500 in Iraq, according to the defense ministry.
The lawmakers continued in their report: “We are concerned that there are signs that voluntary departure in the armed forces, in particular the Army, is increasing and that in the RAF personnel are not extending for a further engagement to the extent that had happened in the past.“
The committee also criticized the rising costs of major planned equipment projects, which were putting more strain on budgets, while the dates the equipment in question were due to be deployed were simultaneously being pushed further back.

BEIT-UL-MOQADDAS, Jan. 28--Ehud Olmert’s tumultuous premiership faces a new test this week with the release of the final report into Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon which is expected to blast the conduct of the nation’s military and political leaders.
The government-appointed commission headed by former judge Eliyahu Winograd will deliver the report to Olmert on Wednesday, eight months after an interim inquiry found the premier and other leaders responsible for “severe failures.“
Although the report is not expected to contain a direct call for Olmert to resign, an official closely involved in the commission’s work told AFP that “the report will be as harsh as the previous one.“
As the key day nears, bereaved families, reservists and politicians have renewed calls for Olmert to step down over the war, sparked by the Shiite Hezbollah members capturing two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.
Last week, 50 reserve infantry company commanders sent Olmert a letter calling on him to assume responsibility for the failures of the 33-day war.
“It is not just our right but our duty to demand you retract this and you declare that you will accept the conclusions of the final Winograd Committee report,“ the reservists wrote in the petition.
Olmert, who has also been embroiled in allegations of corruption, has already been quoted as saying that he had “absolutely no intention“ to step down after the release of the final report.
But his future depends on his key coalition partner, the centre-left Labour party, whose chairman, Defence Minister Ehud Barak, has said he would decide on whether to quit only after the report is released.

BRUSSELS, Belgium,
Jan. 28--EU foreign ministers perform a delicate diplomatic balancing act on Monday when they seek to boost Serbia’s pro-Europe presidential candidate Boris Tadic while readying to back a declaration of independence by Kosovo.
According to AFP, the ministerial meeting in Brussels falls ahead of the second round of Serbia’s presidential election this Sunday.
Hardline nationalist Tomislav Nikolic topped incumbent Tadic by five percentage points in the first round.
Nikolic is close to Moscow, which like Belgrade strongly opposes the independence bid by the majority-Albanian Serbian province of Kosovo.
In order not to inflame nationalist passions Kosovo isn’t formally on Monday’s agenda. “We would like to help him (Tadic) as much as possible,“ one EU diplomat admitted.
The EU is keen to keep a lid on the independence declaration until after the run-off vote on February 3, fearful it would propel Nikolic into office.
The EU’s Slovenian presidency has instead been pushing for the foreign ministers to sign a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with Serbia, the first formal step to European Union membership, to mollify Belgrade.
However the Netherlands is proving difficult to convince, insisting that Serbia must first cooperate fully with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
In particular the Dutch have insisted that before the SAA is signed the Serbs must help bring former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic--accused of genocide at the 1995 Srebrenica massacre--to the UN court, as demanded by its chief prosecutor.
Only Belgium has shown some of the same insistence, with the other EU member states prepared to be more flexible in a bid to sugar the pill over Serbia’s impending loss of Kosovo.
The United Nations has run Kosovo since 1999, when a NATO bombing campaign drove out Belgrade’s forces waging a crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians who make up 90 percent of the population.

NUSA DUA, Indonesia, Jan. 28--More than 100 countries met in Bali on Monday for a UN anti-corruption conference to find ways of clawing back some of the billions of dollars in assets stolen by corrupt leaders.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who won Indonesia’s first direct presidential vote in 2004 on a pledge to end corruption, can expect his own track record to come under scrutiny, particularly his handling of the late former strongman Suharto, Reuters reported.
In the decade since Suharto stepped down, the former president fended off all attempts to seize his family’s fortune, which Transparency International put at $15-$35 billion.
“Corruption is a communicable disease, within and across countries. In some places, like a pandemic it is out of control,“ said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which oversees a convention on corruption.
The United Nations Convention against Corruption, ratified by 107 nations, came into force three years ago and requires members to make corruption a criminal offence.
Along with Suharto, a list of former leaders accused of robbing their own people, compiled by Transparency International, also includes Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, who amassed up to $10 billion, Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Zaire, and Sani Abacha of Nigeria, who each took up to $5 billion.

Lebanese soldiers guard a street leading to the Beirut Christian neighborhood of Ain Al-Remaneh, Jan. 28.

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Jan. 28--The Lebanese army was on high alert in the capital Beirut on Monday following weekend riots that left at least seven people dead and stoked fears of civil unrest.
Troops were out in force, setting up sandbags and checkpoints along many roads leading from the mainly Shiite neighborhoods of southern Beirut to Christian areas of the capital, reported AFP.
The scene was a stark reminder of the beginning of the 1975-1990 civil war as the first line of demarcation at the time was in the same area.
“Black Sunday“ said the headline in the Arabic daily Al-Mustaqbal.
Seven people were killed in Sunday’s riots and at least 40 were injured, including activists from the Syrian-backed opposition parties Amal and Hezbollah, a security official told AFP.
Local newspapers and television reported that the violence broke out after youths protesting power cuts in the Shiite district of Shiyah entered the nearby Christian area of Ein el-Rommaneh and began throwing stones and setting cars on fire.
A grenade was also thrown injuring seven people.
The situation quickly escalated with youths moving in several neighborhoods, setting tyres ablaze and briefly shutting down the main road leading to the airport. Protests alo broke out in the southern coastal cities of Sidon and Tyre and in the eastern Bekaa region.

Samak Sundaravej

BANGKOK, Thailand, Jan. 28--Samak Sundaravej, an ally of deposed Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra, was Monday elected prime minister after winning a majority of votes in parliament, according to an AFP tally of televised proceedings.
Samak, a right-winger and staunch royalist, won more than the 241 votes needed to become premier, defeating opposition leader Abhisit Vejjajiva of the Democrat Party, the AFP tally showed.
Samak’s People Power Party leads a six-party coalition that controls two thirds of the seats in parliament, after winning the first elections since the September 2006 military-backed coup that ousted Thaksin.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia,
Jan. 28--African Union chief Alpha Oumar Konare called for a political solution in Kenya, expressing concern about post-election violence that has killed more than 900 people to date, AP said.
Referring to a message citing human rights violations sent by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general currently in Kenya to mediate a solution to the crisis, Konare said: “We are concerned about this situation.“
“One talks of genocide... what role did Rwanda serve?“ he asked, referring to another East African country split by ethnic warfare in which Hutu extremists slaughtered roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.
Konare was speaking to African foreign ministers gathered ahead of an AU summit that begins Thursday in the Ethiopian capital.
While calling on the AU to support Kenya in finding a political solution, Konare added: “(The answer) cannot just be a power sharing one. If the democratic process is only about sharing the cake, we will never have peace because there will always be those who are discontented.“
Rather, he said, it was necessary to “reaffirm the principles of good governance and not of indifference, to fight against violence.
We cannot close our eyes and ears“.
Once one of Africa’s most stable nations, Kenya has witnessed nationwide fighting since the disputed re-election of President Mwai Kibaki last month.
Latent ethnic and land disputes have fuelled revenge killings in western Kenya between Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe and members of the Luo and Kalenjin ethnic groups, who support his election rival Raila Odinga.