Palestinians carry the body of Mohammed Ashour, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike, during his funeral in northern Gaza Strip, Nov. 6. (Reuters Photo)

BEIT LAHIYA, Occupied Palestine, Nov. 6--A 17-year-old student was killed in a Gaza air strike on Monday, as Israel pressed an assault against militants that has left 50 Palestinians and one soldier dead in six days, AFP said.
The offensive, the latest in four months of Israeli operations in the territory where more than 300 Palestinians have been killed since a soldier was captured in late June, has been condemned by the international community.
Student Mahmud Ashrafi was killed and nine other Palestinians, two of them five-year-olds, wounded when an Israeli aircraft fired a missile on the town of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, a medical source said.
Witnesses said the militants who were the presumed target of the air strike escaped unscathed but that the missile exploded near a bus carrying children to school.
Israel said it had targeted militants who came to collect a rocket launcher used to fire two rockets into the Jewish state on Sunday.
“There was an attack on a Qassam launching cell in the area of Beit Lahiya. They came to pick up their launchers that were used yesterday to fire at Israel, two Qassams. We identified hitting them,“ a military spokesman said.
“The target of this operation is against the terrorist infrastructure and in particular the rocket launching infrastructure.“
The six-day blitz has failed to halt the rockets, however, with 34 striking Israel since Wednesday.
Following Palestinian reports that the aircraft had struck near a school, an Israeli military source accused the militants of having used a “school and college in that area as a cover for launching rockets at Israel“ on Sunday.
Two members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an armed offshoot of president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah faction, were later wounded in a second air strike north of Gaza City, witnesses said.

BAGHDAD, Iraq,
Nov. 6--Iraq’s shellshocked population awoke on Monday one day after Saddam Hussein’s death sentence to find a country still more deeply and dangerously divided into rival armed camps.
Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and US President George W. Bush may well have hailed the verdict as a victory over the demons of Iraq’s dark past, but the reaction on the streets showed a battle far from over, AFP wrote.
Joyful Shiite crowds celebrated the judgment like a release, a weight that had been lifted from their once persecuted community, but also as their latest bitter triumph over the former Sunni elite.
“Executing Saddam means the end of a bitter chapter in the lives of Iraqis and the start of a new one,“ said Khilud Mohammed, a resident of the restive town of Diwaniyah, as Shiite militia fighters fired gleefully in the air.
Sunni towns also erupted, but in anger and a kind of desperation at their plight. Their demonstrations showed how tenacious Saddam’s cult has remained, three-and-a-half years after his humiliating capture by US forces.
“We will continue demonstrating, not because we are Sunnis but because we are Iraqis. We loved the period when the Mujahid leader Saddam Hussein ruled,“ said Abdullah Zamar Hassan, a 49-year-old shopkeeper in Hawija.
Opinion was divided as to whether the verdict would increase violence in a country already wracked by inter-communal strife.
“The execution will certainly decrease terrorism in Iraq,“ the deputy speaker of Kurdistan parliament, Kamal Kerkukli, told AFP confidently. “The execution will put an end to the illusion that he could come to office again.“
Sunni parties warned that the opposite would happen and other commentators were more cautious.
“Iraqis have suffered from big problems and we hope this sentence will not add any others,“ said prominent Kurdish lawmaker Mahmud Othman.

TOKYO, Nov. 6--Japan said Monday it will take part in the next round of six-nation talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear program, rejecting Pyongyang’s call for Tokyo to stay away, AFP reported.
“There is absolutely no change to Japan’s stance,“ Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters.
North Korea on Saturday urged Japan to leave the six-way talks, saying that Tokyo amounted to nothing more than a state of the United States, which is part of the negotiations.
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman called Japanese leaders “political imbeciles“ for saying they would not regard Pyongyang as a nuclear power despite its October 9 nuclear test.
But government spokesman Yasuhisa Shiozaki said Japan still refused to see North Korea’s nuclear weapons as a fait accompli.
“There is no way we will let them return to the process as a nuclear power,“ the chief cabinet secretary told a news conference.
“Japan is in total agreement with others to continue to take part in six-party talks to discuss North Korea’s nuclear problem.
There is no change to that,“ he said.
The negotiations, which began in 2003 in Beijing, are aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for economic incentives and security guarantees.
Japan would likely be asked to help bankroll any potential deal reached during the six-nation talks.
But Japan has used the negotiations to press North Korea over its past abductions of Japanese nationals, infuriating Pyongyang and causing unease for other countries at the table.
The talks bring together North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
Japan is particularly sensitive about North Korea as the communist state fired a missile over Japan’s main island in 1998.

Thaksin Shinawatra

BANGKOK, Thailand, Nov. 6--Deposed Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra is ready to stand trial and defend himself against any criminal charges, his lawyer in Thailand said Monday.
Coup leaders who ousted Thaksin on September 19 have justified the bloodless putsch by saying widespread corruption during Thaksin’s five years in office had undermined democracy, AFP said.
Noppadol said that Thaksin, who left his self-imposed exile in London and flew to China last week, might consider returning to Thailand once martial law is lifted.
“Thaksin has the right to defend himself in the court. He has prepared and is ready for that, even though no direct accusation has yet to be made against him. The matters are just allegations,“ Noppadol Pattama told AFP.
The billionaire businessman’s trip to Beijing last week came amid swirling rumors that negotiations were underway to secure permission for his return to Thailand.
Local media reported Monday that security had been stepped up along the Thailand-Laos border amid further rumors that Thaksin may try and slip back into Thailand via the Golden Triangle.
However Noppadol dismissed such reports and said that Thaksin had no plans to return to the kingdom in the near future.
“He has no immediate plan or has even approached anyone here to come back to Thailand. He will consider returning when the situation has returned to normality,“ Noppadol said.
Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont, who was installed following the putsch, has said that martial law will be lifted as soon as security commanders are confident that no political movement against the new government remains.

TUNIS, Tunisia, Nov. 6--Tunisia has freed 29 Islamist prisoners as part of an annual amnesty marking the anniversary of President Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali’s taking power, human rights activists said on Monday.
The 29 include Mohamed Akrout and Habib Ellouz, two former presidents of the banned Islamist Nahda party, one of the north African country’s main opposition movements, Reuters quoted the activists as saying.
The two have served 15 years of a life sentence imposed in 1992 for participation in an attempted military coup.
“It (the pardon) is a positive step. We hope that it will be followed by others in the ramework of the legislative amnesty“, Nahda spokesman Ali Laraydh, told Reuters.
Human right groups said about 300 people are still in jail for their religious or political opinions, most of them are members of Nahda.
The government, which says it is committed to democracy and respect of human rights, insists it has no political prisoners and that no one has been jailed for expressing an opinion. Tuesday Nov 7 marks the 19th anniversary of Ben Ali’s assumption of power in the country of 10 million.
The government usually frees a number of prisoners on the anniversary without disclosing how many. The government has confirmed that several people have been freed this year but has declined to give details.

Bulent Ecevit

ANKARA, Turkey, Dec. 6--Five-time Turkish prime minister Bulent Ecevit, 81, died at the military medical academy here where he had been hospitalized since May with a stroke from which he never fully recovered, AFP quoted doctors az saying.
Dr. Mucahit Pehlivan of the GATA academy, where Ecevit was hospitalized on May 18, made the announcement to state television and the semi-official Anatolia news agency.
Zeki Sezer, chairman of the Democratic Left Party, which Ecevit’s wife Rahsan founded in 1985 and which Ecevit led until retiring from politics in 2002, said the former leader of the Turkish left died at 10:40 pm.
He quoted doctors as saying Ecevit had died at the hospital’s intensive care unit from a collapse of his “respiratory and circulatory functions, which had been deteriorating over the past week.“
Ecevit, the father of social-democracy in Turkey and a former leader of the Republican People’s Party, already frail and ailing, was hospitalized on May 18 with a brain hemorrhage he suffered after attending the funeral of a high magistrate assassinated by a religious fanatic.
He underwent four and a half hours of brain surgery after he was hospitalized but never fully recovered, although doctors said there was some hope for recovery when they took him off an artificial respirator on August 16.

LONDON, Nov. 6--Poland would like to see the creation of a 100,000-strong army of European Union troops tied to NATO for use both in European and global flashpoints, the country’s President Lech Kaczynski said in an interview published in the Financial Times on Monday.
Kaczynski said he hoped to raise the issue when he meets with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on a visit to Britain starting on Monday, reported AFP.
He added that he had discussed the idea with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso twice, and that his twin brother, Jaroslaw, the Polish prime minister, had raised the issue with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week.
“At the moment we have the situation where the EU needs about 8,000 troops in Lebanon and there is a problem where to find them,“ Kaczynski told the newspaper.
“Forces are needed which would not replace the armies of individual states, but which could be gathered without a problem when not just 8,000 but as many as 25,000 to 30,000 are needed.“
The proposals have reportedly met with concern within the EU, where officials have questioned whether, if the army were tied to NATO, the troops would be under European or American command.
Kaczynski also said that Poland would table its own proposals for a pact between the soon-to-be 27-member EU, after a proposed constitutional treaty was voted down in the Netherlands and France last year, which would be ready next year.
He gave hints as to the tone of Poland’s proposals, saying that he thought “the nation state has still not ended its mission,“ signaling he does not support increased federalism in Europe.
The president also said that his country’s proposals “would be much more compact than the current constitutional treaty“.

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan,
Nov. 6--About 3,000 opposition protesters rallied outside the main Kyrgyz presidential building on Monday calling on President Kurmanbek Bakiyev to come out and meet them and explain his proposed changes to the constitution.
According to Reuters, the protesters, chanting “Leave (power)!“, marched to the so-called White House after Bakiyev put forward changes, that one of his opponents said only made the crisis worse, and failed to show up in person to explain them.
State secretary Adakhan Madumarov told reporters that Bakiyev had presented proposals for a presidential-parliamentary model of government under which parliament would be able to appoint the prime minister.
But the opposition said the proposals had been presented in such a way that parliament could not amend them. “Bakiyev is deliberately pulling the knot tighter,“ said Edil Baisalov, one of the leaders of the opposition For Reform movement.
The protesters, who have said they do not intend to storm the White House but have acknowledged “radical elements“ in their midst, rallied noisily outside the White House which was ringed by riot police, armed with truncheons, shields and helmets.
Inside the gates of the building, which houses the offices of both the president and the government, stood armed regular troops and behind them armed special forces in black balaclavas.
Bakiyev, who has barely spoken in public during days of protests against his 16-month rule of the Central Asian state, had been widely expected to appear before parliament to present the proposals in person and his no-show inflamed the opposition.