Poles stage rally against plans to deploy a US anti-missile defense system in Poland, Jan 7.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2--Poland said late Friday it has reached an agreement in principle with the United States on plans to install a missile defense system on Polish territory.
Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski says that after meetings with US officials, he is satisfied that the United States will deal with security problems that Poland wanted addressed as part of an eventual deal, AP said.
The announcement should add momentum to a project the Bush administration has said it hopes to start building this year.
The project, a major source of tension with Russia, had looked stalled since the Polish government of Donald Tusk sought new demands after taking office in November.
Sikorski did not outline the terms of the deal, but in a joint appearance with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after a working lunch, the two officials suggested that the US would help with Polish air defenses, as Poland had sought.
“We understand that there is a desire for defense modernization in Poland, and particularly for air defense modernization in Poland,“ Rice said. “This is something that we support because it will make our ally, Poland, more capable, it will make Poland, as the foreign minister has said, more able to operate with us.“
Sikorski said that negotiators would continue to work on the details of an agreement that would allow the US to install 10 interceptors as part of a long- range European missile defense system.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Feb. 2-- A police raid in Pakistan’s northwest Saturday triggered a shootout that killed three officers and a militant and led the insurgents to use women and children as human shields, officials said.
It was the latest clash between pro-Taliban militants and security forces in areas near the Afghan border. The fighting occurred in Mardan town, about 30 miles northeast of Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, when officers surrounded a house and asked the occupants to surrender, said Abdul Qayyum, a local police official, AP said.
He would not say what prompted the raid, but said the militants were using assault rifles and that the way they resisted showed they were well trained.
“They have killed three of our policemen, while we killed at least one militant,“ he said.
Abdullah Khan, another police official, said the militants were using some residents--including women and children--as human shields and fired without regard for civilians.
Neither official would identify the suspects.
About 380 people, mostly militants, died across Pakistan in January, according to figures provided by the government and military.
The fighting has not been limited to the Afghan border regions. In recent months, major urban centers such as the port city of Karachi have also been affected.
In 2005, police arrested Al-Qaeda’s No. 3 leader Abu Farraj Al-Libbi after a shootout in Mardan.
Al-Libbi, who allegedly orchestrated two assassination attempts against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, was later handed over to US authorities.
The latest fighting came just days after a US missile strike killed Abu Laith Al-Libi, a top Al-Qaida commander in the lawless border regions. US commanders in Afghanistan say the areas are being increasingly used as a safe haven by Taliban and Al-Qaeda guerrillas fighting the NATO-led international coalition there.

Unexploded cluster bombs in the southern Lebanese village of Yarun, Oct. 25.

In a rare internal critique of Israel’s use of cluster bombs, a government-appointed commission has found a lack of “operational discipline, control and oversight“ in the army’s deployment of the weapons in civilian areas.
The panel’s statement, buried in an exhaustive report on Israel’s conduct of the 2006 Lebanon war, did not directly challenge the army’s assertion that its use of cluster bombs in that conflict fell within the bounds of international humanitarian law, LATimes reported.
But the five-member panel raised questions about the army’s use of the ordnance against Hezbollah fighters in Lebanese villages from which civilians had fled but to which they would eventually return.
Cluster bombs spray deadly bomblets over a wide area. The United Nations and human rights organizations say that Israel unleashed about 4 million bomblets in southern Lebanon during the 34-day war against the militant Islamic group, and that up to 1 million of them failed to explode and now endanger civilians.
UN monitors in Lebanon say 26 civilians have been killed in explosions in southern Lebanon since the war ended in August 2006, most of them from leftover Israeli cluster bombs.
The Winograd Commission, named for the retired Israeli judge who has headed it, issued its long-awaited report Wednesday. The panel criticized Israeli leaders’ strategic and operational blunders in the inconclusive campaign, which Israelis widely view as a psychological defeat.
In Israel, attention focused on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s escape from personal rebuke by the panel. Olmert told confidants that he would resist calls by opposition leaders for his resignation and he was under little public pressure from partners in his governing coalition to step down.
Many abroad viewed the report’s focus on strategic mistakes as having glossed over the issue of responsibility for wartime civilian deaths.
Amnesty International criticized the report for ignoring what it called “grave violations of international law“ by Israel. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s office called the lingering presence of unexploded bomblets in southern Lebanon “a daily war crime.“
At least 1,035 Lebanese, most of them civilians, died in the conflict, along with 119 Israeli soldiers and 39 Israeli civilians.
The Winograd panel explained that it avoided an in-depth study of such allegations against Israel because it was “inappropriate to deal with issues that are part of a propaganda war.“
The panel nonetheless devoted a six-page appendix of the 629-page report to the issue of cluster bombs, which had also been the subject of a yearlong inquiry within the army.
The army inquiry concluded in December that the bombs were “a concrete military necessity“ in Lebanon and did not violate international laws that aim to protect civilians from deliberate wartime attack.
The Winograd panel did not dispute the army’s finding. But it asked the army to clarify how its practice of dropping cluster bombs on temporarily uninhabited villages squares with international law.
And it questioned the practice of giving field commanders discretion on when to use cluster bombs in such places.
It called for a reevaluation of cluster bomb use, with participation by nonmilitary specialists, and public disclosure of the results. New guidelines should be drafted and reviewed by Israel’s attorney general, the report said.
Meantime, it added, the army should develop less-dangerous bombs and better document the whereabouts of unexploded bombs.
A statement by the army said it was studying the report’s recommendations based on lessons of the war, with the aim of correcting failures. It declined to comment on specifics.

SAN JOSE,USA, Feb. 2--White House hopefuls launched a frantic blitz with the stakes enormous heading into “Super Tuesday“ and the home stretch of the costliest and longest US election campaign in history.
Democratic rivals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were criss-crossing the country over the weekend, touring places from California to New York and points in between ahead of Tuesday’s primaries in nearly two dozen states, AFP reported.
“No matter what happens, I want everyone of you with a child or a grandchild to look into the eyes of that precious child and say yes, you can be whatever you want to be in America,“ Clinton told exuberant supporters here late Friday.
A new national poll out Friday showed Obama gaining on the New York senator in the historic 2008 White House race as he bids to be the country’s first black president.
According to the Gallup poll, the Illinois senator was trailing by just three percentage points with 41 percent of the vote to 44 percent for Clinton, who is also on a historic quest to be the first woman president.
But other polls by Fox News and Rasmussen showed Clinton holding a six-point national margin over Obama.
Hot on the Democrats’ heels were Republican hopefuls John McCain and Mitt Romney. Arizona senator McCain was to address rallies in Illinois, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia before arriving back in Washington late Saturday.
The same Gallup poll gave McCain a 15-point lead with 39 percent to 24 percent for Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. Mike Huckabee was trailing third on 17 percent.
All the campaigns took note of economic trouble on Friday after 17,000 job losses were announced in January, the first monthly drop in US job creation since 2003.
“We will make this economy work again for hard-working middle-class families,“ Clinton said, warning that the United States was sliding into its second recession under Republican President George W. Bush.
Obama assailed two rounds of hefty tax cuts pushed through by Bush that were initially opposed by McCain, who now wants to make them permanent.
“Well I haven’t changed my mind. They have been an economic disaster for America, and I will end them when I am president,“ the Illinois senator said at his own economy-themed rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The Bush administration has “landed us in record debt that is controlled by foreign countries and will have to be paid off by our children for generations to come.“

NAIROBI, Feb. 2--At least 34 people have been killed in fresh ethnic clashes and a police crackdown in western Kenya, bringing the toll in the past 24 hours to 44, police said Saturday.
The upsurge in violence in western regions follows the death Thursday of a local opposition MP, David Kimutai Too, from the village of Ainamoi, where clashes broke out Friday, AFP reported.
Local police commander Japheth Daido said that two people had died overnight in Ainamoi, where a crowd of thousands went on the rampage Friday, killing a policeman. He said eight others had also died there Friday.
Angry protesters set fire to dozens of houses in western Kenya Friday after Too was shot dead by a policeman on Thursday in Eldoret. It was the second killing of an opposition MP in two days and yet another upsurge in violence first sparked by disputed December 27 presidential elections.
A police commander said, “Many more were killed in the nearby tea plantations“ in clashes with police.
Amid the turmoil, the parties of Kenya’s feuding leaders agreed a joint roadmap Friday to try to stem the unrest that has claimed nearly 1,000 lives since last month’s disputed presidential elections, former UN chief Kofi Annan said.
Meanwhile, African Union leaders condemned the latest unrest in Kenya Saturday at the close of a summit overshadowed by new crises on the continent and which saw little headway achieved on older ones.

DUREIJ, Sudan,
Feb. 2--Their clocks are set on Beijing time, they use state-of-the-art equipment and--most of all--they are welcome by the Sudanese government.
In just about everything, the Chinese peacekeeping contingent in Darfur is strikingly different from the rest of the UN mission here.
The 140 Chinese engineers and troops deployed in Darfur were among the first reinforcements sent by the United Nations, which took over peacekeeping in the western Sudanese region in January.
The Sudanese government quickly approved the Chinese contingent, even as it vetoed contributions from other countries because they were not African--including a Scandinavian engineering corps, AP said.
The Chinese deployment comes amid accusations by human rights activists that China is partly responsible for Darfur’s chaos because of its staunch diplomatic backing of the Sudanese government.
Five years of fighting between the Sudan’s Arab-dominated government and Darfur’s ethnic African rebels has killed over 200,000 people and chased 2.5 million to refugee camps, largely black African civilians.
Arab militias allied with the government have been blamed for many of the atrocities; the government denies backing them.
Energy-hungry China is Sudan’s key political and economic ally, investing in the country and importing over two-thirds of its oil output, estimated at about 500,000 barrels daily.