Israeli border guards stand at the entrance of a Beit-ul-Moqaddas market, Feb. 5.

BEIT-UL-Moqaddas, Feb. 6--Israel mulled ways of keeping up the pressure on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip on Wednesday a day after the Islamists claimed their first suicide attack inside Israel in three and a half years.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was meeting with his foreign and defense ministers and other security officials at his office in Beit-Ul-Moqaddas, a senior government official told AFP.
“They will discuss the situation in Gaza, the suicide bombing and the defense minister (Ehud Barak) will present plans to construct a barrier along the border with Egypt,“ he said on condition of anonymity.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was also to recommend that Egypt double its forces along its border with Gaza from the current 750 to 1,500, another senior official told AFP on Tuesday.
The meeting came a day after Israel pounded Hamas positions in its Gaza Strip bastion, killing nine Palestinian militants.
It was the first time since August 2004 that Hamas, which seized control of the territory sandwiched between Israel and Egypt last June, claimed responsibility for a suicide attack.
Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon, a close Olmert ally, said that Israel had to maintain its punishing economic sanctions against Gaza “as there is a war currently going on against Hamas.“
“As long as the economic pressure is applied the rocket fire decreases,“ he told public radio.
Israel has increasingly tightened restrictions on movement around Gaza since the second Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, notably in June 2006 after militants seized an Israeli soldier in a deadly cross-border raid and a year later when Hamas seized power in the territory from forces loyal to Abbas.

Michael Hayden

WASHINGTON,
Feb. 6--CIA director Michael Hayden for the first time admitted publicly late Tuesday that the agency had used “waterboarding,“ or simulated drowning, in interrogations of three top Al-Qaeda detainees nearly five years ago.
The technique, which critics say is tantamount to torture, was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri at a time when further catastrophic attacks on the United States were believed to be imminent, AP quoted Hayden as saying.
“Let me make it very clear and to state so officially in front of this committee that waterboarding has been used on only three detainees,“ he told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“It was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was used on Abu Zubaydah. And it was used on Nashiri.“
Mohammed has claimed to be the operational mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Abu Zubaydah is alleged to have been an aide to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. And Al-Nashiri is alleged to have been the operational commander of the suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
All three were initially held and interrogated at secret CIA-run detention centers overseas before being transferred in 2006 to a military-run detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Hayden’s remarks were the first direct official admission that agency interrogators had used “waterboarding“ in questioning “war on terror“ detainees.
The admission came amid a long-running battle between the administration and members of Congress over so-called “enhanced“ or coercive interrogation techniques used by the CIA.

ROME, Feb. 6--Italian President Giorgio Napolitano dissolved parliament on Wednesday, paving the way for early elections and a probable return to power by conservative media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi.
Napolitano met Tuesday evening with both speakers of parliament, the prelude to dissolving parliament, reported AFP.
Neither Senate Speaker Franco Marini nor his lower house counterpart Fausto Bertinotti spoke to the media afterward.
But the ANSA news agency reported that centre-left leader Romano Prodi, who resigned as prime minister two weeks ago, co-signed a decree dissolving parliament on Wednesday.
Elections are expected on April 13-14 in the wake of Prodi’s resignation and the failure of attempts to form an interim government to reform Italy’s unpopular election law.
Berlusconi and his allies on the right have been clamoring for snap elections since voter surveys began favoring them by double-digit margins.
The vote now visible on the horizon, campaign fever is already in the air, with Berlusconi facing a new rival in the form of popular 52-year-old Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, the new flagbearer of the left.
“The Giants won in the end, so can we,“ Veltroni said, referring to the upset win by the New York Giants in Sunday’s American football Super Bowl.
The new face-off makes a change from the three previous duels between the flamboyant Berlusconi and his professorial arch-rival Prodi, both of them now former prime ministers twice over.
With 68-year-old Prodi’s political star on the wane, the centre-left has been grooming Veltroni, who served as his culture minister in the 1990s, to succeed him.

DHAKA, Bangladesh, Feb. 6--Detained former Bangladeshi premier Sheikh Hasina Wajed scored a victory against the army-backed government Wednesday with a court ruling that she could not be tried for corruption under emergency laws.
The former premier, who led the country from 1996 to 2001, is one of around 150 high-profile figures arrested as part of an anti-graft drive by the emergency government, which took office in January 2007, AFP reported.
She is being tried by a special fast-track court, but the High Court in Dhaka said this was illegal--effectively throwing into doubt all other completed or pending corruption cases pushed by the authorities.
Sheikh Hasina’s lawyer said, however, that this victory would be short-lived, with the government set to take the matter to the Supreme Court--a body that has in the past sided with the authorities.
“It’s a major victory for us. The High Court... gave the verdict in favor of the former prime minister,“ Kamrul Islam said.
“We will fight in the supreme court, although we have very dim hope for a positive verdict. In the past, the Supreme Court’s appellate division has overturned all the High Court verdicts in favor of the government,“ he added.
Sheikh Hasina, the leader of the Awami league party, went on trial for corruption last month, facing accusations that she extorted 435,000 dollars from a power company owner.

Iraqi nationals leaving for Syria, Feb. 5.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 6--Iraqis are once again leaving Iraq for Syria in greater numbers than they are returning, despite the decreasing levels of bloodshed in their homeland, the UN refugee agency said on Wednesday.
A report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, citing Syrian immigration officials, said that in late January an average of 1,200 Iraqis came to Syria every day compared with around 700 who returned, reported AFP.
Most of those Iraqis who are returning say they are doing so more because their Syrian visas have expired or because they have run out of money, rather than because of an improvement in conditions in Iraq, the report explained.
“The UNHCR has observed that the return movement to Iraq that increased immediately after the imposition of new visa regulations appears to have subsided,“ the report, which was sent to AFP in Baghdad, concluded.
The figures will disappoint Iraqi officials, who have pointed to a number of high-profile convoys of returning refugees as evidence that safety is returning to their war-torn cities after a year of battles with insurgents.
The United Nations estimates there are around 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria, including 153,516 who are formally registered as refugees from the conflict that has wracked their homeland since the US-led invasion of March 2003.
Most fled after the bombing of the Al-Askari shrine in Samarra in February 2006, which touched off a bitter civil conflict between Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite sects and sent between 30,000 and 60,000 fleeing across the border every month.

TOKYO, Feb. 6--Opium cultivation in rebel-controlled areas in southern and southwestern Afghanistan is expected to grow this year, fueling the Taliban insurgency with more drug money, a UN report said Wednesday.
The report, by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said that Afghanistan, in turmoil since a US-led military operation toppled the repressive Taliban regime in 2001, is also steadily increasing its production of marijuana, AP said.
Afghanistan supplies some 90 percent of the world’s illicit opium, the main ingredient in heroin, and the Taliban rebels fighting the US-led forces receive up to $100 million from the drug trade, the UN estimates.
“Indeed, it is the insurgents, the Taliban, that are deriving an enormous funding for their war by imposing ... a 10 percent tax on production,“ said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN agency.
Afghanistan cultivated a record 477,000 acres of opium in 2007, a 14 percent increase over the previous year. Total production, spurred by unusually high rainfall, increased even further, by 34 percent.
The one bright spot in the report, which was released on the sidelines of an international meeting on Afghanistan in Tokyo, was that the area under cultivation outside of the rebel strongholds was expected to fall.
That meant overall cultivation area would stay even or fall slightly in 2008, the report said, though wet weather could boost the productivity of each poppy plant.
Costa and Gen. Khodaidad, Afghanistan’s acting counter-narcotics minister, attributed the stall in overall growth of cultivation to eradication efforts and programs aimed at convincing farmers to switch to legal crops.
“The pre-planting campaign is the best way to fight drugs in Afghanistan because we involved the local people ... and we’re encouraging people not to grow poppy,“ said Khodaidad, who, like many Afghans, uses one name.