Roadside bombs kill 6 in NW Pakistan

PARACHINAR, Pakistan – Roadside bombs struck two vehicles in Pakistan's volatile northwest Sunday, killing a former irrigation minister and three others in one attack and two anti-Taliban tribal elders in the other.

Public officials and private citizens combatting the growing Taliban-led insurgency in Pakistan have been frequent targets in a wave of violence that has killed more than 600 people in the past two-and-a-half months.

A single attack two days ago killed nearly 100 people when a suicide car bomber struck a sports event near a meeting of tribesmen who supervise an anti-Taliban militia near Pakistan's South Waziristan tribal area.

The Pakistani army invaded South Waziristan in mid-October in an attempt to neutralize the Pakistani Taliban's main stronghold in the country, but many militants fled the offensive and have been launching attacks elsewhere in the northwest.

A roadside bomb struck a vehicle in the Hangu district of North West Frontier Province on Sunday, killing former Irrigation Minister Ghaniur Rehman, his two guards and his driver, said district police chief Abdur Rasheed. Two police officers accompanying the former minister were wounded in the attack, he said.

Rehman was affiliated with the Pakistan People's Party (Sherpao group) headed by former Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao, who has survived two suicide bomb attacks.

Several hours earlier, another roadside bomb struck a vehicle carrying anti-Taliban elders in the Bajur tribal area, killing two and critically wounding four others, said local official Naseeb Shah. The six men were working to set up an anti-Taliban militia in Bajur, a militant stronghold near the Afghan border, said Shah.

The men were on their way to meet local officials in the main town of Khar when the remote-controlled device detonated, Shah said. The blast occurred near Kassai, about 17 miles (28 kilometers) northeast of Khar, he said.

The Pakistani military carried out an anti-Taliban offensive in Bajur in 2008 and 2009 that it declared a success. But the militants have maintained their presence, and violence has flared in the region since then.

The bullet-riddled bodies of a man and a woman were found in the Mamund area of Bajur on Sunday with a note saying they were guilty of violating Islamic law, local official Faromosh Khan said.

Militants have stepped up attacks in other parts of the northwest as well in apparent retaliation for the recent South Waziristan offensive.

The suicide car bombing in the northwest village of Shah Hasan Khel near South Waziristan that killed 96 people on New Year's Day was one of the deadliest attacks since the army launched the operation.

Police believe the attacker meant to detonate his 550 pounds (250 kilograms) of explosives at the meeting of anti-Taliban tribesman. Instead, the blast went off at a nearby outdoor volleyball court, leveling some three dozen mud-brick homes and covering the village in Lakki Marwat district with dust, smoke and the smell of burning flesh.

Ameer Haider Khan Hoti, the chief minister of Northwest Frontier Province, where Lakki Marwat is located, said recent military operations had put militants on the defensive and they were lashing out.

"They are running and they are targeting citizens," Hoti told reporters after visiting victims of the bombing being treated at a hospital in the provincial capital of Peshawar.

"Militants and militancy is a cancer, and our struggle against it will continue until it vanishes completely," he said.

None of the elders meeting at the time of Friday's attack were killed, and they insisted residents will keep defying the Taliban.

Across Pakistan's northwest, where the police force is thin, underpaid and under-equipped, various villages and tribes have taken security into their own hands over the past two years by setting up citizen militias to fend off the Taliban.

The government has encouraged such "lashkars," and in some areas they have proven key to reducing militant activity. The militias helped turn the tide against militants when the army conducted its offensive in Bajur.

Pakistani tribal leaders who face off with the militants do so at grave personal risk. Several suicide attacks have targeted meetings of anti-Taliban elders, and militants often go after individuals.

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Associated Press writers Anwarullah Khan in Khar, Riaz Khan in Peshawar and Zarar Khan contributed to this report from Islamabad.

Reports: Cartoonist attacker earlier held in Kenya

STOCKHOLM – The Somali man who attacked an artist who depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a controversial cartoon has previously been arrested in Kenya, Danish media reported Sunday.

The Danish intelligence agency PET knew that the 28-year-old Somali man was held in Kenya in September for allegedly participating in plotting an attack against U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Politiken newspaper reported Sunday.

Citing unnamed sources, it said he was later released due to lack of evidence.

Clinton visited Kenya as part of an 11-day-tour of Africa in August.

Denmark's ambassador to Kenya, Bo Jensen, told the news agency Ritzau that the Somali man was arrested in Kenya at the time for having incomplete travel documents. However, he said Kenyan authorities never told the embassy he was suspected in any terror plot and that the newspaper misunderstood the situation.

PET would not comment Sunday on the reports or the Somali suspect.

The suspect was charged with two counts of attempted murder Saturday after breaking into artist Kurt Westergaard's home armed with an ax and a knife on Friday night. He denied the charges at the court hearing.

Westergaard — one of 12 Danish artists whose cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad outraged the Muslim world in 2006 — escaped the attack by fleeing to a specially made safe room and alerting police. Police shot the Somali man in the hand and knee.

On Saturday, the head of the Danish intelligence agency, Jakob Scharf, said the man was suspected of having been involved in terror-related activities in east Africa with the terror group al-Shabab and had been under PET's surveillance. However, he did not specifically mention Kenya or any attack against Clinton.

Westergaard's cartoon of Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban was viewed as the most provocative of the 12, and he has been the target of several death threats since then. He has been under round-the-clock police protection since February 2008.

Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.

US, UK close Yemen embassies over al-Qaida threats

SAN'A, Yemen – The U.S. and Britain closed their embassies in Yemen on Sunday in the face of al-Qaida threats, after both countries announced an increase in aid to the government to fight the terror group linked to the failed attempt to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas.

The confrontation with al-Qaida's offshoot in Yemen has gained new urgency since the 23-year-old Nigerian accused in the attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, told American investigators he received training and instructions from the group's operatives in Yemen. President Barack Obama said Saturday that the al-Qaida offshoot was behind the attempt.

The White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan said the American Embassy, which was attacked twice in 2008, was shut Sunday because of an "active" al-Qaida threat. A statement on the embassy's Web site announcing the closure cited "ongoing threats" from the terror group and did not say how long it would remain closed.

In London, Britain's Foreign Office said its embassy was closed for security reasons. It said officials would decide later whether to reopen it on Monday.

The closure comes as Washington is dramatically stepping up aid to Yemen to fight al-Qaida, which has built up strongholds in remote parts of the impoverished, mountainous nation where government control outside the capital is weak.

Over the weekend, Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. general who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, announced that Washington this year will more than double the $67 million in counterterrorism aid that it provided Yemen in 2009. On Saturday, Petraeus met with Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to discuss coordination in the fight against al-Qaida.

Britain announced Sunday that Washington and London will back the creation of a new counterterrorism police unit in Yemen. Britain will also host a high-level international conference Jan. 28 to hammer out an international strategy to counter radicalization in Yemen.

The U.S. also provided intelligence and other help to back two Yemeni air and ground assaults on al-Qaida hideouts last month, reported to have killed more than 60 people. Yemeni authorities said more than 30 suspected militants were among the dead.

The U.S. has increasingly provided intelligence, surveillance and training to Yemeni forces during the past year, and has provided some firepower, a senior U.S. defense official has said. Some of that assistance may be through the expanded use of unmanned drones, and the U.S. is providing funding to Yemen for helicopters and other equipment. Officials, however, say there are no U.S. ground forces or fighter aircraft in Yemen.

On Thursday, the embassy sent a notice to Americans in Yemen urging them to be vigilant about security. and announced the increased counterterrorism aid.

Yemeni security officials said over the weekend that the country had deployed several hundred extra troops to Marib and Jouf, two mountainous eastern provinces that are al-Qaida's main strongholds in the country and where Abdulmutallab may have visited. U.S. and Yemeni investigators have been trying to track Abdulmutallab's steps in Yemen, which he visited from August until Dec. 7. He was there ostensibly to study Arabic in San'a, but he disappeared for much of that time.

Al-Qaida has killed a number of top security officials in outlying provinces in recent months, underscoring Yemeni government's lack of control over the country. Tribes hold sway in the region, and many of them are discontented with the central government and have given refuge to al-Qaida fighters, both Yemenis and other Arabs coming from Saudi Arabia or war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden and the site of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, has a weak central government whose authority does not extend far beyond the capital San'a. In addition to battling al-Qaida fighters, it also faces two separate internal rebellions in the north and south.

Located at the tip of the Arabian peninsula, Yemen straddles a strategic maritime crossroads at the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, the access point to the Suez Canal. Across the Gulf is Somalia, an even more tumultuous nation where the U.S. has said al-Qaida militants have been increasing their activity. Yemen also borders Saudi Arabia, the world's leading oil producer.

There have been a spate of assaults on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen and it has closed several times over past threats.

In April, embassy personnel were put on a one-week lockdown, barred from leaving their homes or the embassy after al-Qaida suicide bombings that targeted South Korean visitors.

In an attack in September 2008, gunmen and two vehicles packed with explosives attacked the U.S. Embassy, killing 19 people including an 18-year-old American woman and six militants. None of those killed or wounded were U.S. diplomats or embassy employees. Al-Qaida in Yemen claimed responsibility.

In March 2003, two people were shot dead and dozens more are wounded as police clash with demonstrators trying to storm the embassy. In March 2008, three mortars missed the U.S. Embassy and crashed into a high school for girls nearby, killing a security guard

Last January, gunmen in a car exchanged fire with police at a checkpoint near the embassy, hours after the embassy received threats of a possible attack by al-Qaida. Nobody was injured.

As recently as July, security was upgraded in San'a after intelligence reports warned of attacks planned against the U.S. Embassy.

Searchers hunt for more victims of Brazil mudslide

ANGRA DOS REIS, Brazil – A small army of searchers clambered across a mountain of red earth and crushed homes on Saturday, hoping to find survivors of a massive mudslide that killed at least 26 people at an upscale island resort.

It was the worst of scores of slides and flooding incidents that have killed at least 64 people across southeastern Brazil.

A separate mudslide in the nearby coastal city of Angra dos Reis, 95 miles (150 kilometers) west of Rio de Janeiro, hit a slum, killing at least 13 people and reducing rickety shacks to rubble.

The dual mudslides early on New Year's Day were triggered by 10 inches (27 centimeters) of rain that fell on the area since Wednesday.

Hundreds of Brazilians die in mudslides each year, most of them slum dwellers living on precarious hillsides. But Friday's slide on Ilha Grande also struck affluent tourists who were vacationing in houses and a hotel at the foot of a jungle-shrouded cliff.

"We came to celebrate the New Year and then all this sadness happened," Fernanda de Oliveira, a witness to the mudslide on Ilha Grande, told the O Globo newspaper.

Oliveira was staying next to the Pousada Sankay resort, which was destroyed by the mudslide, along with three private homes. She said she heard a rumble in the middle of the night.

"We couldn't see what was happening. It was raining hard and the water was leaking into our house," she told O Globo. "Suddenly, we saw people in the sea and we went down to rescue them. They were people staying in the pousada."

The collapse of the hillside largely pushed the Sankay Pousada and homes into the sea and cut a 1,000-foot (300-meter) scar of slicked auburn mud across the rain forest.

In Angra dos Reis, a similar scene unfolded in an urban landscape, with reddish mud cascading into the Carioca slum.

Nearly 80 other mudslides have been reported throughout the region in recent days. Together with flooding, they have killed at least 64 people — 61 of those in Rio state.

Another six people — all from the same family — are missing after a mudslide hit their house in the town of Cunha in Sao Paulo state, the Civil Defense there said. In Minas Gerais state, firefighters said three elderly people died when a mudslide hit their home, the state-run Agencia Estado reported.

Morgue authorities in Rio de Janeiro — where many bodies are being flown for identification — and Civil Defense authorities in Angra dos Reis have said all the identified victims are Brazilian. But they also say the death toll might double because many people remain missing.

In Angra dos Reis, 12 bodies from the two deadly mudslides were laid out in coffins in a school gymnasium for visitation by family and friends.

The rains halted Saturday morning, allowing searchers to intensify their efforts. But the muddy conditions and the hopes that survivors may still be buried under the mud meant efforts had to be carried out mostly by hand.

Somali charged in attack on Danish cartoonist

COPENHAGEN – A Somali man was charged Saturday with two counts of attempted murder for an attack on a Danish artist whose 2005 cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad ignited riots and outrage across the Muslim world, authorities said.

The artist — 74-year-old Kurt Westergaard — was moved to an undisclosed location for his own protection.

The 28-year-old Somali man with ties to al-Qaida broke into Westergaard's home in Aarhus on Friday night armed with an ax and a knife, said Jakob Scharf, head of Denmark's PET intelligence agency.

Westergaard, who has been the target of several death threats since depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban, pressed an alarm and fled with his 5-year-old granddaughter to a specially made safe room. He had been under round-the-clock protection by Danish security agents.

Officers arrived two minutes later and tried to arrest the assailant, but then shot him in the hand and knee when he threatened them with the ax, said Preben Nielsen of the Aarhus police.

Nielsen said the man's wounds were serious but not life-threatening, and Westergaard was "quite shocked" by the attack but was not injured.

The Somali man denied the charges at a court hearing Saturday in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city, 125 miles (200 kilometers) northwest of Copenhagen. Accompanied by a lawyer, he was wheeled into the court on a stretcher from the hospital where he was being treated.

Chief Superintendent Ole Madsen in Aarhus said the man was charged with two counts of attempted murder: one on Westergaard and one on a police officer. The court also banned publication of the man's name.

"He will be in custody for four weeks, and in isolation for two," Madsen said, adding that the Somali would be moved to the Vestre Faengsel prison in Aarhus, which has medical facilities.

His defense lawyer, Niels Christian Strauss, told reporters outside the court he had urged his client to remain silent during the hearing to give him more time to examine the evidence.

Westergaard remains a potential target for extremists nearly five years after he drew a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad along with 11 other Danish cartoonists that were printed in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. Since Westergaard's cartoon is viewed the most provocative, he is the only of the twelve to live under round-the-clock protection.

The Jyllands-Posten had asked Danish cartoonists to draw Muhammad as a challenge to a perceived self-censorship, not to insult Muslims. Still, Danish and other Western embassies in several Muslim countries were torched a few months later in 2006 by angry protesters who felt the cartoons had profoundly insulted Islam.

Islamic law generally opposes any depiction of the prophet, even favorable, for fear it could lead to idolatry.

The Somali man had won an asylum case and received a residency permit to stay in Denmark, Scharf said, declaring the Friday attack "terror related."

"The arrested man has, according to PET's information, close relations to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab and al-Qaida leaders in eastern Africa," Scharf said. "(The attack) again confirms the terror threat that is directed at Denmark and against the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in particular."

Scharf said the man is suspected of having been involved in terror-related activities in east Africa and had been under PET's surveillance but not in connection with Westergaard.

Westergaard could not be reached for comment. However, he told his employer, the Jyllands-Posten, that the assailant shouted "Revenge!" and "Blood!" as he tried to enter the bathroom where Westergaard and the child had sought shelter.

"My grandchild did fine," Westergaard said, according to the newspaper's Web site. "It was scary. It was close. Really close. But we did it."

Westergaard has received previous death threats and was the subject of an alleged assassination plot.

In October, terror charges were brought against two Chicago men who planned to kill Westergaard and newspaper's former cultural editor. That trial has not yet begun.

In 2008, Danish police arrested two Tunisian men suspected of plotting to kill Westergaard. Neither suspect was prosecuted. One was deported and the other was released Monday after an immigration board rejected PET's efforts to expel him from Denmark.

Throughout the crisis, then-Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen distanced himself from the cartoons but resisted calls to apologize for them, citing freedom of speech and saying his government could not be held responsible for the actions of Denmark's press.

An umbrella organization for moderate Muslims in Denmark condemned the Friday attack.

"The Danish Muslim Union strongly distances itself from the attack and any kind of extremism that leads to such acts," the group said in a statement.

Afghan parliament rejects most Cabinet nominees

KABUL – Afghanistan's parliament dealt a stinging rebuke to President Hamid Karzai on Saturday by rejecting 70 percent of his nominees for a new cabinet, including a regionally powerful warlord and the country's only female minister.

The laborious voting that took much of Saturday ended with the rejection of 17 of 24 nominees. The nominations, announced in mid-December, aimed to keep 12 current ministers in their posts for a second term. In part, that appeared aimed at satisfying U.S. and Western desires to keep trusted hands in place.

Among those Karzai wanted to keep was Water and Power Minister Ismail Khan. But that raised many hackles because Khan was a warlord in Herat province during the civil war of the 1990s and retains considerable local power; critics said keeping Khan indicated the extent to which Karzai appears to be beholden to regional power-brokers at the expense of the whole country's interests.

Many of his new nominees were also criticized as having been picked for reasons other than their competency.

"I think, unfortunately, that the criteria were either ethnicity or bribery or money," lawmaker Fawzia Kufi said before the voting.

The rejection of the women's affairs minister was an awkward blow to Karzai, who has pledged to place more women in high government posts in the traditionally male-dominated society.

Karzai has said he will make new nominations for the unfilled posts, but it is unclear when those names will be announced or a parliamentary vote held.

Karzai did not propose a nominee for foreign minister. He has asked incumbent Rangin Dadfar Spanta to stay in the post until after the Jan. 28 international conference in London that is to discuss the way forward for Afghanistan.

In another high-stakes political issue, the chief of Afghanistan's elections commission said Saturday that a parliamentary vote will be held in May despite widespread international concern that the country's electoral system needs serious reform.

Elections commission chief Ali Najafi told a news conference the national vote will be held May 22.

However, he said Afghanistan needs about $50 million from the international community to meet the election's estimated budget of $120 million. It was not clear whether the vote would or could be held if donor countries don't provide the money.

In the wake of last August's heavily disputed presidential election, many critics have pushed Karzai and his government to delay the parliamentary vote. Karzai has insisted the constitution, which specifies the elections be held by May, must be observed.

A U.S. Congressional delegation that met with Karzai in Kabul last week said it had warned the president that holding the election without first enacting substantive electoral reform could undermine support for U.S. aid to the country.

Iran's opposition leader defiant after new threats

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's opposition leader on Friday pledged to remain defiant in the face of new threats — including calls by hard-liners for his execution — and said he was ready to sacrifice his life in defense of the people's right to protest peacefully against the government.

Mir Hossein Mousavi's remarks come after the worst unrest since the immediate aftermath of the disputed June presidential election. At least eight people died during anti-government protests on Sunday, including Mousavi's nephew.

In one of his strongest statements to date, Mousavi said he was "ready for martyrdom" — the sacrifice of one's life for a higher cause — and lashed out at the bloody crackdown the authorities are waging against the opposition.

He said the government was making more mistakes by resorting to violence and killings, and that it must accept the people's rights to hold peaceful demonstrations.

Iranian hard-liners have called for the execution of Mousavi and other opposition figures, while a previously unknown group claimed in an online posting that suicide squads were ready to assassinate opposition leaders should the judiciary fail to punish them within a week.

Iran's state prosecutor on Thursday warned opposition leaders could be put on trial if they don't denounce this week's anti-government protests.

"I explicitly and clearly state that an order to execute, murder and imprison (opposition leaders) ... won't resolve the problem," Mousavi said in a statement on his Web site, Kaleme. "I'm not afraid to be one of the martyrs people have offered in the struggle for their just demands."

The confrontation between clerical rulers and their opponents returned to the streets in recent weeks, after a harsh crackdown immediately following the June 12 balloting all but crushed the opposition movement.

One of those killed in clashes Sunday between security forces and opposition protesters was Mousavi's nephew, Ali Mousavi. He was gunned down but authorities claimed police didn't use firearms and said the nephew was "assassinated" by unknown assailants.

The nephew was buried Wednesday in a hastily organized ceremony that was attended by the opposition leader and other family members. Authorities had taken the body from the hospital earlier in the week in what was seen as an attempt to prevent the funeral from turning into another pro-opposition protest.

Hard-liners have become especially furious after some pro-opposition protesters chanted slogans against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — a taboo in Iran, where the supreme leader is considered answerable only to god.

Sunday's unrest was followed by two days of pro-government protests Wednesday and Thursday in which crowds called for Mousavi's execution and that of another opposition figure, Mahdi Karroubi.

A once-in-a-blue-moon New Year's Eve

PARIS (AFP) – For only the second time in nearly two decades, December will end with Earth illuminated by a "Blue Moon," the name given to the second full moon appearing in a single month.

For New Year's revellers in the Western hemisphere, the calendar will not quite have turned into the new decade when the perfectly round orb lights up the night sky.

Not since 1990 has the world had the opportunity to observe on a mass scale the compounded impact of a Blue Moon and bubbly.

The double full moon phenomenon happens on average every 2.7 years, with the most recent in May 2007, and the next set for August 2012.

This month, the moon was also at its maximum on December 2.

Why Blue? For no particular reason, according to Space.com, a popular science website based in the United States.

"If there's been a recent volcanic eruption that poured significant ash into the upper atmosphere, it is possible for the moon to take on a blue tint," noted the site's editorial director Robert Roy Britt.

"That's not expected tonight," he added, as if by way of apology.

It also turns out that the term "blue moon" is a misnomer that can be traced back to an editorial blooper 65 years ago in the normally irreproachable magazine Sky and Telescope.

The original meaning was the third full moon in a season with four, a more common occurrence.

There is also a cocktail -- curacao, gin and a twist -- by that name, and a turn of the (20th) century expression meaning something absurd.

Top US general stresses importance of Iraq vote

BAGHDAD – Upcoming elections in March that will determine who will lead Iraq as American forces go home are of "enormous importance" to the country's future, the leading U.S. general who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan said on Friday.

Gen. David Petraeus, who used to be the top American commander in Iraq, also warned during a visit to Baghdad that al-Qaida in Iraq as well as Iranian-backed militias will continue to be a threat as insurgents target government facilities in order to undermine Iraqis' confidence.

"Iraq will continue to be tested throughout the course of this year," Petraeus said.

Iraq is preparing to hold nationwide elections on March 7, but military commanders have warned that attacks could spike ahead of the vote.

Under a plan by President Barack Obama, U.S. forces currently at about 110,000 will drop to about 50,000 by the end of August, and those remaining will be focused on non-combat missions such as training. They in turn, will leave by 2011.

The general's comments came as U.S. forces in Iraq held a ceremony marking a change from what had formerly been called Multi-National Force-Iraq to United States Force-Iraq. Structurally the U.S. forces in Iraq will remain largely the same for the time being, but the name change symbolizes the changing nature of the U.S. mission here and acknowledges that a coalition that used to have troops from 32 countries now has just one.

Petraeus called the ceremony a "milestone in the continued drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq."

Speaking of freed British hostage Peter Moore, Petraeus said that Moore spent at least part of his captivity in Iran, but that it was difficult to tell whether the Revolutionary Guard or the Quds force — an arm of the Guard involved in foreign operations — had a role in his capture.

Moore was freed Wednesday after spending more than two years in captivity. He, and four of his bodyguards, were kidnapped during a brazen, daytime attack in front of the Finance Ministry in Baghdad in 2007. The bodyguards are believed to be dead.

Commenting on the release of Qais al-Khazali, an Iraqi militant heading a group believed to have been holding Moore and the others, Petraeus said his release from U.S. to Iraqi custody was done according to an agreement with the Iraqi government to transfer detainees in American custody over or release them.

Al-Khazali, the leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, was in U.S. custody, accused of helping play a role in an attack in the southern city of Karbala that left 5 U.S. soldiers dead in 2007.

The militant group had been pushing for al-Khazali's release along with the release of other militants in U.S. custody. U.S. and British authorities have said there was no deal to trade al-Khazali for Moore although the timing of al-Khazali's release — said by the British government to have happened the same day Moore was released — has raised questions.