LONDON, Jan. 20--A key official close to British Prime Minister Tony Blair was arrested in connection with a probe into alleged party political corruption that has engulfed party politics.
According to AFP, Ruth Turner, director of government relations at Downing Street, was arrested on suspicion of breaching the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 and perverting the course of justice, Blair’s official spokesman said.
Turner, 36, proclaimed her innocence after being arrested at her London home while Blair and others rushed to her defense.
“I absolutely refute any allegations of wrongdoing of any nature whatsoever,“ Turner said in a statement released through Blair’s Downing Street office.
Turner, whose job involves liaising between government and the ruling Labour Party, was taken to a police station for questioning before being released on police bail, the official spokesman said.
The “cash for honors“ probe, launched early last year, centers on whether Labour and other political parties offered seats in Britain’s unelected upper chamber of parliament, the House of Lords, in return for financial support.
It is also considering whether there was any breach of the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000, which requires donations and non-commercial loans to parties to be publicly declared.
As Blair’s political opponents seized on Friday’s news, the prime minister gave his full backing to Turner, who reports directly to his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, and controls access to Blair.
“Ruth is a person of the highest integrity for whom I have great regard and I continue to have complete confidence in her,“ Blair said in a statement.
Labour peer Lord Puttnam, a friend and Turner’s former boss, said she was “a woman of total, total probity“ and insisted the police had “fingered the wrong person“.
The probe, which has seen the entire cabinet including Blair questioned, has piled pressure on the government, which came to power in 1997 pledging to get rid of the “sleaze“ associated with the previous Conservative administration.

Khaddafy Janjalani

MANILA, Philippines, Jan. 20--The leader of the Philippines’ fiercest Muslim militant group and the country’s most wanted man is dead, military chief General Hermogenes Esperon said on Saturday.
He said US forensic tests on a body found last month on the island of Jolo confirmed it was Khaddafy Janjalani, chief of the Abu Sayyaf, who had a $5 million US bounty on his head.
Tissue from the decomposing body which could not initially be identified was taken to the United States for comparison with samples from Janjalani’s brother.
“We hit the jackpot, there was a match in the DNA,“ Esperon told Reuters.
“We are sure it is Janjalani.“
Esperon later told a news conference: “The armed forces of the Philippines is proud to announce we have neutralized the center of gravity of terrorism in the Philippines.“
Quoting from a copy of the forensic report, he said: “FBI laboratories positively matched DNA samples from the suspected remains of Abu Sayyaf group leader Khaddafy Janjalani with the leader’s brother, confirming Janjalani’s death.“
U.S. embassy spokesman Matthew Lussenhop said the forensic tests were authoritative. “It is confirmed the remains are of Khaddafy Janjalani, the tests show it was indeed him,“ he said.
Janjalani, 31, was on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s list of most wanted terrorists after being indicted by a US court for the kidnap and killing of American missionary Martin Burnham in 2002.
Captured militants who led troops to the buried body said Janjalani was mortally wounded in a gun battle in September.
The test results capped a week of resounding success for the military against the Abu Sayyaf. On Wednesday, the U.S. trained troops claimed they had killed Jainal Antel Sali, alias Abu Sulaiman, one of the top five leaders of the group, in a gun battle at a jungle camp on Jolo.
Ten militants were killed in another battle on Thursday, while several others have been killed in recent weeks.

SYDNEY, Australia, Jan. 20--China has come under growing pressure to explain the shooting-down of a satellite as condemnation continued to pour in from around the globe, AFP said.
The United States and Australia both said they were waiting to hear from Beijing after it reportedly blasted one of its own weather satellites on January 11.
“We’ve asked the Chinese to give us some greater details about what they did, why they did it, and explain it in greater detail to us simply because of the concerns that we have about this issue,“ said State Department spokesman Tom Casey on Saturday.
Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer, who summoned the Chinese ambassador in protest, said he was still also waiting on Saturday to hear an official explanation.
“The information we have is that a missile was fired at an old Chinese weather satellite and destroyed the weather satellite, and so we would like to hear what China has to say about it,“ Downer said.
“The Chinese have always opposed the militarization of outer space, so that’s why we look forward to hearing what they have to say about the issue,“ he added.
“They’re not saying very much about it, I must say, at the moment.“
The missile blast was reported by US officials but not confirmed by Beijing, which has played down fears of an extraterrestrial arms race.
“There’s no need to feel threatened about this,“ foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said on Friday. “We are not going to get into any arms race in space,“ he said.
If confirmed, it would be the first case since the 1980s when the Soviet Union and the United States both destroyed satellites in space.
The test would mean China could now theoretically shoot down spy satellites operated by other nations.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Jan. 20--The African Union’s top security body authorized the deployment of more than 7,600 peacekeepers to war-torn Somalia that officials said would begin immediately, AFP said.
The AU’s Peace and Security Commission decided to send nine battalions of 850 troops each to Somalia for an initial period of six months beginning Friday, a statement released after their meeting here said.
The initial deployment will be one-third that number, the AU said.
The aim of the mission, to be known as AMISOM (the African Mission to Somalia), would be to “facilitate humanitarian operations in Somalia and consolidate peace and stability in Somalia,“ it said.
The nearly 8,000-strong force should later assume a United Nations mandate aimed at long-term reconstruction in the country where the weak transitional federal government in December got Ethiopian military support to oust Islamists from Mogadishu and the south.
“We would like to see a strong commitment by the UN,“ the Commission statement said, urging that the UN Security Council “look at the way forward to take over the AMISOM“.
In the statement released late Friday, the AU appealed “to member states, to the EU, to all the partners to urgently provide the required financial and technical support“ for the deployment.
Only Uganda has thus far publicly offered troops for the force, with lawmakers from its ruling party endorsing the deployment of one battalion late Thursday, making mandatory parliamentary approval a certainty.
Angola will not contribute troops, the country’s foreign minister Joao Bernardo de Miranda told the Lusa news agency late Friday.
“Angola has come out of a long conflict. Our troops were involved in a draining war. It is not the time for us to be involved in a foreign military force,“ he said.
But Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin, just back from a African tour to lobby support for the mission, said he believed troop contributions or other assistance would likely be forthcoming from at least three other states.

BRUSSELS, Belgium, Jan. 20--EU foreign ministers will agree next week to begin talks on strengthening ties with Ukraine but are divided over whether the country has a future in the European Union, AFP quoted EU officials as saying.
The bloc has intended for some months to start negotiating an “enhanced agreement“ on political and economic cooperation with Ukraine, which would include the creation of a free trade zone.
But the 27 EU countries must agree unanimously on the framework for the negotiations, which will be led by the European Commission.
Britain, Hungary, Poland and Sweden, which support Ukraine’s ambitions to join Europe’s rich club, have demanded that the EU recognize the former Soviet republic’s “European aspirations“, diplomats said.
However a number of countries--including France and Spain, with the “sympathy“ of Germany--are fiercely opposed.
They believe that ties with Ukraine should evolve under the framework of the EU’s so-called “neighborhood policy“, offering countries near the bloc a privileged relationship, rather than under its enlargement strategy. Those hostile to Ukraine’s future membership believe it is vital not to “create confusion between the EU’s neighborhood policy and its enlargement strategy,“ an EU diplomat said. But those in favor say there is no reason why Ukraine could not shift from one policy area to the other, he said.
Faced with the divisions, the ministers are likely to find a solution that exemplifies the complex nature of EU decision-making.

YEREVAN, Armenia, Jan. 20--Armenia’s defense minister joined calls on Friday for the border between his country and Turkey to be reopened as a step towards normalizing relations, AFP reported.
“I support this and I think that in the near future (the closure) will change. I think that relations need to be established with Turkey without any preconditions,“ Defense Minister Serzh Sargasian told journalists in the Armenian capital Yerevan.
The 355-kilometre (221-mile) border was closed in 1993 at the height of the Nagorno Karabakh war in which ethnic-Armenian separatists in Azerbaijan took over almost a fifth of Azeri territory.
Armenia fully backed the separatists, while Turkey gave diplomatic support to Azerbaijan.
Armenia and Turkey are also in a dispute over Turkey’s refusal to agree with Armenia that mass killings by Ottoman Turks of ethnic Armenians in 1915-1917 constituted genocide.
Sargasian, who is considered likely to run for president in 2008, echoed comments made Thursday by the deputy foreign minister, Gegam Garibdzhanian, that “Armenia is ready to open the border with Turkey.“
Last weekend, business and political delegates at a Turkish-Armenian conference in Yerevan said that opening the border would increase Turkey’s access to the Turkic-speaking countries of Central Asia, where Ankara has sought a greater role since the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse.
They said it would also increase trade and boost tourism.
Armenians visit Turkey on holiday in large numbers, despite the lack of diplomatic ties.
Ankara recognized Armenia’s independence in 1991 but the two sides did not establish diplomatic ties. Turkey’s drive to join the European Union has drawn greater attention to its relationship with its eastern neighbor in the strategic Caucasus region.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia,
Jan. 20--The decision by a leading pro-government newspaper to sue two prominent Malaysian bloggers for defamation was groundless and could stifle public expression, AP quoted two international media watchdogs as saying Saturday. The lawsuits by English-language New Straits Times marked the first time Malaysian bloggers have been taken to court for publishing comments on the Internet, in a country where much of the traditional media are controlled by political parties or the government.
“It looks to us as though legal proceedings are being used as a way of silencing two of your newspaper’s critics,“ Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said in open letter sent to New Straits Times CEO Syed Faisal Albar.
“We believe that this case is groundless.“ The first suit was filed on Jan. 11 against Jeff Ooi, whose “Screenshots“ blogs carries daily commentaries on the political situation in the country. The site is widely read by Malaysians.
The other suit is against a former editor at the New Straits Times Press, Ahirudin Attan, who operates “Rocky’s Bru.“ He is alleged to have posted nearly 50 defamatory reads on his web site.