People wear mock prison uniforms and hoods during the International Day to Shut Down Guantanamo protest, Jan. 11.

GUANTANAMO, Cuba, Jan. 12--Demonstrators in mock prison garb rallied here and around the globe Thursday calling for the US prison in Guantanamo, Cuba, to be closed, five years after its first “war on terror“ detainee arrived.
According to AFP, around 395 people are being held at the controversial US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, most without legal safeguards such as access to courts or legal counsel.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon joined in the world refrain, saying “like my predecessor (Kofi Annan), I believe the prison should be closed.“
His comments came as the London-based human rights group Amnesty International appealed to world powers to press the United States to shut down the prison at the US enclave at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“The US government must end this travesty of justice. Equally, it is not enough for world leaders to express concern about Guantanamo and carry on business as usual with the USA,“ said Amnesty’s secretary general, Irene Kahn.
Outside the base, a former inmate, relatives of detainees and other activists headed to its gates to demand the closure of the facility which received its first inmates on January 11, 2002.
The group staged a symbolic kilometer-long march to the barrier that separates the camp from the rest of Cuba.
In London, some 200 people demonstrated in front of the US embassy against the camp where a number of British nationals were held--some in solitary confinement--only to be released without charge after months of harsh treatment.
Amnesty organized a mock-up of life at Guantanamo with demonstrators playing the roles of guards and detainees wearing orange overalls and white masks over their mouths. “Scum, face down!“ the “guards“ shouted before an audience of protesters and journalists.
Some 300 people dressed in prisoners’ orange jumpsuits held a similar demonstration in the US capital.

Athens, Greece, Jan. 12--Unidentified attackers fired a rocket into the US embassy in Athens early Friday, damaging the building but causing no casualties, officials said. AFP quoted Public Order Minister Vyron Polydoras as saying police were investigating a claim that the attack was carried out by an extreme left wing group, Revolutionary Struggle, which has staged other operations in recent years.
“I’m treating (this) as a very serious attack,“ US ambassador Charles Ries told reporters outside the embassy, a modern glass-front building which is one of the best-guarded in the country.
“We did not expect anything, but the embassy is always guarded carefully,“ said Ries, who declined to label the attack as terrorism and added that he intended to reopen the embassy as soon as possible.
Both the US embassy in Athens and the consulate in the northern Greek city of Salonika were closed for security reasons on Friday.
US institutions, banks and companies have been frequently targeted by militant groups in Greece in recent decades. A CIA station chief was assassinated in Athens in 1975. Polydoras said Friday’s strike constituted “an attempt to revive terrorist (activity)“ which would fail.
“It is probably domestic activity ... as is seen from the apparent assumption of responsibility by Revolutionary Struggle,“ he said.
Police said the rocket penetrated the building near the front-entrance emblem and exploded inside, damaging a toilet on the third floor, which also houses the ambassador’s office.
The missile was fired at 5:58 am and caused minor damage to the front windows and the roof, the public order ministry said in a statement. There were no injuries.
“All evidence points to the rocket having been fired from an adjacent worksite lot, where a building was recently demolished,“ a senior police officer told AFP on condition of anonymity.

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 12--NATO says its forces have killed scores of insurgents who crossed from Pakistan in the biggest battle of the Afghan winter, while Pakistan’s army fired artillery at trucks supplying militants on the other side of the border, AP said.
NATO said it had tracked the suspected Taliban militants through air surveillance while the fighters were still in Pakistan. Once they crossed the frontier, NATO and Afghan soldiers attacked the two separate groups with ground fire and airstrikes during a nine-hour battle that began Wednesday evening.
Gen. Murad Ali, the Afghan army regional deputy corps commander, said the insurgents traveled into Afghanistan’s southern Paktika province with several trucks of ammunition. Lt. Col. Paul Fitzpatrick, a US military spokesman, said it was likely they were going to carry out an immediate attack, given the size of the groups.
Taliban militants last year launched a record number of attacks in Afghanistan, and an estimated 4,000 people died in insurgency-related violence, the bloodiest year since the US-led coalition ousted the Taliban regime in 2001.
Afghan and Western officials say the militants operate from sanctuaries in Pakistan, but Islamabad insists it does all it can to stop them.

CEBU, Philippines, Jan. 12--China, Japan and South Korea agreed Friday to send a “clear message“ to North Korea to scrap its nuclear program, AFP quoted South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-Soon as saying.
“We agreed to send a clear message to North Korea that the beginning of an immediate implementation of the September 2005 agreement is the most desirable of all options,“ Song said.
At six-party talks in September 2005, North Korea agreed in principle to scrap its nuclear programs in exchange for economic and energy benefits and security guarantees.
But it boycotted the forum two months later in protest at US financial sanctions imposed for alleged money-laundering and counterfeiting.
Song was speaking to reporters after meeting China’s Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing and Japan’s Vice Foreign Minister Katsuhito Asano during preparatory meetings for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit.
The ministers declined to say when the six-nation talks may resume. The last round was held in Beijing last month after a 13-month break but ended without apparent progress.
“The sooner the better,“ Song said in response to questions.
It is unclear whether the “clear message“ would be delivered at the six-nation forum.
Li reiterated that all parties--the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia--involved in the talks should stick firmly to the goal of the denuclearization of North Korea.
“We reaffirmed our common position on this,“ Li said.
The top diplomats were meeting to prepare for a meeting Sunday between Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun. This is expected cover a range of issues including how to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nuclear arms.
China, North Korea’s main economic lifeline, reacted angrily to its nuclear test on October 9 and backed a UN Security Council resolution that imposed sanctions.

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia, Jan. 12--Protesters seeking the ouster of a Bolivian state governor for his opposition to President Evo Morales battled with the governor’s supporters Thursday in clashes that left two dead and dozens injured, AP quoted authorities as saying.
Bolivian military officials estimated some 30,000 demonstrators armed with sticks and rocks overran police in the streets of Cochabamba during the fourth day of protests, clashing at various spots throughout the valley city.
A military force of 1,500 soldiers has been dispatched to the city to restore order, authorities said.
Bolivian media reported one of the dead men was a coca farmer, among the thousands who had gathered in the state capital to demand the resignation of governor Manfred Reyes Villa for his opposition to Morales.
The president was in Nicaragua Thursday attending the inauguration of fellow leftist President Daniel Ortega, but administration officials said Morales was speeding up his return in response to the violence.
Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera confirmed two deaths in the unrest.
Mario Cossio, an ally of Reyes and governor of the southern state of Tarija, called on the Morales administration to restore order, at a meeting of opposition governors in La Paz attended by Reyes.
“I want us all to return to peace and to respect,“ Reyes told reporters at the La Paz meeting, but said it was up to Morales’ government to restore order. “I regret the violence that is now happening in Cochabamba, and put the responsibility on the government to solve this soon.“
Leaders of Bolivia’s largest coca growers’ union--of which Morales still serves as president--claimed that a second of their ranks had also been killed.
“We are totally mobilized. The people are coming in from the provinces, and I don’t know what will happen,“ said Julio Salazar, director of the Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba. “The author of this is Manfred Reyes, and he must resign if he wants peace.“

A Bangladeshi soldier mans a machine gun mounted on top of an army van as he, along with others, patrols along a street in Dhaka, Jan. 12.

DHAKA, Bangladesh, Jan. 12--Bangladesh scrambled to form a new government Friday after its president postponed general elections and declared a state of emergency, bowing to opposition demands following months of street protests, AP reported.
President Iajuddin Ahmed stepped aside as head of the interim government to clear the way for a new caretaker administration with the difficult task of steering the country towards free and fair polls.
His announcements Thursday night brought an end to a string of violent and crippling nationwide strikes and blockades by the main opposition Awami League and its allies which had said they would boycott the January 22 polls.
Speaking in a televised address to the nation a day after deploying 60,000 troops nationwide, Ahmed said the opposition’s threat to resume its protests from Sunday had left Bangladesh facing a “grave situation.“
Citing a danger of the situation spiraling out of control, he declared a state of emergency that also includes a ban on all political gatherings and a night-time curfew.
The new caretaker chief was tipped to be former central bank governor Fakhruddin Ahmed, seen as politically independent, after micro-credit pioneer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus turned down the job.
A swearing-in ceremony was expected to be held at 7:00 pm.
Ahmed said in his address that the new caretaker government would “hold dialogue with all the parties, and prepare for new elections within the shortest possible time“. He did not specify when they would be held.
The last state of emergency in Bangladesh was in October 1990, before the ousting of military dictator Hossain Muhammad Ershad.
But despite the reintroduction of democracy 16 years ago, both main parties of the Awami League and Bangladesh National Party (BNP) have regularly boycotted parliament and staged national strikes as negotiating tactics when in opposition.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Jan. 12--A Bosnian court on Friday ordered a retrial after revoking a five-year sentence against a former Serb policeman for crimes against humanity committed during the country’s 1992-1995 war, AFP said.
The special war crimes court’s appellate panel said it had decided to retry Boban Simsic “on the basis of essential violations of criminal procedure,“ it said in a statement without elaborating.
In July last year, the court found the 38-year-old guilty of torturing and killing Muslim civilians in the eastern town of Visegrad in 1992, when he was a guardsman at a detention camp that had been set up in a school.
Simsic was found guilty of “aiding in the enforced disappearance and rape of Bosnian Muslim civilians... which occurred as part of a widespread and systematic attack by the Serb army, police and paramilitary“ forces. The court said Simsic’s custody would be extended until January 2008.
Bosnia is allowed to try low-profile war crimes cases, while The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is tasked with those involving top wartime officials.
Bosnia’s inter-ethnic war claimed some 200,000 lives while some 2.2 million people--or around half of the Balkan country’s population--were forced to flee their homes.

WASHINGTON,
Jan. 12--Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saudi Arabia should do more to help the Iraqi government, AP said.
Testifing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rice said the “single best thing“ Saudi Arabia could do would be to provide debt relief for Iraq.
Rice was responding to a question from committee chairman Tom Lantos, a Democrat, who said the Saudis should use revenues from high oil prices to ease the US financial burden in Iraq.
Rice said she does not envision a Saudi offer to send forces to Iraq because Baghdad is reluctant to have neighbors or near neighbors play such a role.
To the extent that the kingdom has been active in Iraq, she said, it has been to encourage Sunnis to join the political process in the country. The Saudis also have made clear that they favor more equitable treatment for the Sunni minority in Iraq, she said.
The administration, Rice said, has been urging the Saudis to do more to help the Iraqi government.
According to AFP, Rice also will visit the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Germany and Britain, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Tuesday.