MIRANSHAH, Pakistan, July 22--Pakistani troops killed 19 militants in clashes near the Afghan border, officials said Sunday, a day after the US president fully backed Islamabad’s efforts to combat extremism.
Six rebels died in a gunbattle Sunday after they ambushed a troop convoy with a roadside bomb in the tribal agency of North Waziristan, where fighting continued with helicopter gunships, the army said.
Troops also killed 13 pro-Taliban fighters in overnight clashes after the rebels attacked several military checkpoints in the lawless region, where authorities were simultaneously trying to revive a 10-month-old peace deal, AFP said.
Fighting in the rugged border lands has intensified amid a wave of Islamist bloodshed that has killed more than 200 people nationwide, sparked by the army’s storming of the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad earlier this month.
US President George W. Bush in his weekly radio address Saturday linked the US global campaign against Al-Qaeda to Pakistan’s efforts to quell Islamist violence, including the deadly storming of the pro-Taliban mosque.
Bush expressed full US support for embattled Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf’s efforts “to rid all of Pakistan of extremism“ including an Al-Qaeda “safe haven“ in western tribal areas.
In the first attack on Saturday night in North Waziristan, chief military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad said four “miscreants“ were killed when they attacked a checkpoint and security forces returned fire.
“After some time they attacked five other security posts in the area and nine other militants were killed,“ Arshad told AFP. “The miscreants have fled with the bodies, but security forces have arrested seven people.“

SEOUL, South Korea, July 22--President Roh Moo-Hyun on Saturday urged the immediate release of South Koreans kidnapped by armed insurgents in Afghanistan as Seoul said it would withdraw troops from the war-torn country by the end of 2007.
The appeal was made a few hours before a Taliban spokesman said the insurgent group had killed two German hostages because the Afghanistan or German governments had failed to contact them for negotiations, AFP wrote.
“The kidnappers must return the South Koreans unharmed at the earliest possible date,“ Roh said in a speech on national television.
The Taliban kidnapped 18 South Korean Christians, along with the two German nationals, this week in the insurgency-hit south of Afghanistan.
Reports said the Taliban had also threatened to kill the 18 South Koreans unless Seoul immediately pulls out its 200-strong peace-keeping troops from Afghanistan. But the fate of South Koreans was not known immediately.
Roh stressed that the abducted South Koreans had been engaged in aid activity for Afghan people.
“Innocent civilians must not be held as hostages,“ he said.
Roh also said all South Korean troops stationed in Afghanistan were either army engineers or medics helping to reconstruct the war-ravaged nation rather than engaged in combat.

NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon, July 22--The Lebanese army took advantage of a lull in fighting on Sunday to continuing clearing a path towards positions manned by militants holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp.
“Since Saturday evening, there have not been very intense military operations as specialist units continue to demine and clear the way,“ an army spokesman told AFP.
“The rest of the time, the army is responding to shooting and continues to tighten its grip on the remaining terrorists,“ he added.
Nahr Al-Bared camp has been relatively calm since Saturday night, apart from the occasional explosions of artillery shells fired at the Fatah Al-Islam militants, according to an AFP correspondent.
Members of Fatah Al-Islam, an Al-Qaeda-inspired group of Arab Islamists, are currently cornered in a tiny southern part of the seaside settlement after more than two months of fierce combat.
So far more than 200 people have been killed since the conflict with the militants erupted at Nahr Al-Bared on May 20 in the worst internal clashes in Lebanon since the 1975-1990 civil war.
More than half of the dead were members of the Lebanese armed forces engaged in the standoff. The army said the most recent fatality of a soldier was on Friday, taking its overall death toll to 113.

Gordon Brown

LONDON, July 22--Prime Minister Gordon Brown has led his Labour party to its best opinion poll ratings in two years, figures showed Sunday--fueling speculation the new leader could call a national election in 2008.
Brown, who replaced Tony Blair as head of the government on June 27, has until mid-2010 to call the next national election, where he will face the main opposition Conservatives and their youthful leader David Cameron, AFP said.
In a poll for Britain’s The Observer, Ipsos-Mori put Brown’s Labour on 41 percent, with Cameron’s Conservatives on 35 percent and the third party, the Liberal Democrats, on 15 percent.
It was the first time Labour had polled over 40 percent in an Ipsos-Mori poll since 2005.
Ipsos-Mori interviewed 1,068 adults between July 12 and 17. No margin of error was given, but in a similar samples the margin is typically plus or minus 3 percent.
Brown last week won two special elections, one called after Blair quit as a lawmaker and the other following the death of a legislator, and has ordered a key minister to begin drafting his national election manifesto.
Deborah Mattinson, Brown’s polling adviser, told the Sunday Times newspaper the party’s performance in the special elections “beats even the heady days“ of Blair and showed it could win a national poll in the near future.
“Labour now enjoys a clear opinion poll lead on all substantive policy areas and, interestingly, we find this advantage grows significantly across the board when the party leaders’ names are mentioned,“ Mattinson was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
Cameron will likely come under more pressure following the election defeats.
At least two Conservative lawmakers, and possibly as many as six, have backed a letter calling for a vote of no confidence in Cameron’s leadership, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported.

SAO PAULO, Brazil, July 22--The Brazilian government faced rising pressure over the safety of its aviation industry Sunday amid public outcry over the country’s deadliest air disaster that killed around 200 people this week.
Just a day after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva insisted the country’s airways met international safety standards, a power failure in air traffic control forced five US-bound flights to turn back temporarily Saturday, highlighting the frequent problems experienced by Brazil’s aviation industry, reported AFP.
The flights had to return to Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport while the northern Amazon region’s Manaus center went down for several hours, according to aviation officials.
Meanwhile, recovery teams--including around 60 firefighters and a squadron of sniffer dogs--continued to work at the site of the wreckage where the black box containing the pilot voice recorder was found.
The cockpit voice recorder was expected to help the investigation, after an earlier find that was believed to be the two voice recorders turned out to be one flight recorder and one heavily damaged regular tape recorder.
Grieving family members of the 187 people who died aboard the TAM Airlines flight continued to demand justice as critics pointed to a possible technical fault in the aircraft as well as an unsafe runway at Sao Paulo’s Congonhas airport.
Waving black flags and banners criticizing the government, some of them let loose their emotions Saturday.
During a televised address Friday night, Lula announced measures to reduce air traffic and congestion at the airport where the crash occurred. Local media said the plan would cut down on air traffic by 30 percent.
The plan would also make sure that within 60 days, Congonhas was no longer the main hub of Brazilian air traffic, by hosting only direct flights and no stopovers and limiting the number of flights arriving and departing to 33 per hour instead of 44.
Within three months, the location of a third Sao Paoulo airport would be chosen, though that project would likely take around six years to complete.

BRUSSELS, Belgium, July 22--The European Union will seek Monday to set aside divisions and examine ways to end the impasse over Kosovo’s future status after Russia blocked attempts to put the province on the road to independence.
EU foreign ministers will meet in Brussels in the first high-level talks since the United States and its European allies postponed Friday UN Security Council efforts to secure “supervised independence“ for the Serbian province, AFP reported.
It comes at the start of a week expected to see the international Contact Group--Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States--take over diplomatic efforts and organize new talks between Belgrade and Pristina.
But EU officials acknowledge that the 27-country bloc is divided over whether to recognize the UN-administered province should it unilaterally declare independence out of frustration with the delays.
“We are already faced with a difficult situation“ which could be complicated if “the EU is unable to maintain a position of coherence and cohesion,“ warned Portuguese Foreign Minister Luis Amado, whose country holds the EU presidency.
Russia complains that recognizing an independent Kosovo would send the wrong signal to other breakaway regions.
That argument has resonance with Spain--facing problems with Basque separatists-- while Greece, Cyprus and Slovakia are known to be reluctant to recognize any unilateral move by the province.
Yet the Balkans has been a well-spring of instability and no one can forget the images of Serbia troops cleansing Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian majority, a crackdown stopped in 1999 when NATO bombed Belgrade.

Benazir Bhutto

LONDON, July 22--Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto could return to the country as early as September amid speculation that she may do a deal with President Pervez Musharraf, she said.
Bhutto, in exile because of corruption claims against her, told The Sunday Times she would only consider an agreement with Musharraf if she felt it necessary to guarantee fair and timely parliamentary elections, AFP said.
“I said I would return by December, but now my people tell me we should go to court in regard to my return, and that I should come back as soon as possible, maybe in September,“ the Pakistan People’s Party chairman said.
“We will decide at a party meeting at the end of August.“
But she added that she felt “safer about returning“ after Pakistan’s Supreme Court overturned the suspension of the country’s top judge, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, by Musharraf.
In an interview from London, Bhutto, who was twice premier in the 1990s, told the paper that a deal with Musharraf would be “very unpopular“ and could lose votes for her party.

NAWALAPITIYA, Sri Lanka, July 22--Sri Lanka’s president has ruled out a snap parliamentary election to increase his slender majority, after battlefield success against the Tamil Tiger rebels boosted his government.
President Mahinda Rajapakse said he was keen that the current parliament serve its full six-year term. It was elected in April 2004, while the president came to power in November 2005.
“I am not interested in calling a snap election,“ the president told AFP late Saturday on the sidelines of his first public rally, in Nawalapitiya, central Sri Lanka, after troops captured the rebels’ final bastion in the east.
“This is a very favourable time for our party, but I don’t want to go for another general election and spend two billion rupees (18 million dollars) to conduct that election.
“I can build a few more roads with that money. We have a stable government and I want other parties too to unite and move forward.“
Blue flags signifying his party and banners welcoming him as a hero were raised across Nawalapitiya.
Maithripala Sirisena, the secretary of Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), said Saturday’s public rally represented the first in a series due across the country.