U.S. officials pull Pakistani politician off plane

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan said he was pulled off a flight to New York by U.S. agents on Friday and interrogated about his views on drone strikes.

Khan has been a vociferous opponent of killings by the unmanned U.S. aircraft in Pakistan and has promised to instruct the Pakistani air force to shoot them down if he wins next year's elections.

"I was taken off from plane and interrogated by U.S. Immigration in Canada on my views on drones. My stance is known. Drone attacks must stop," he wrote on Twitter.

U.S. authorities say they cannot give detailed comments on individual immigration cases due to privacy laws but a State Department official confirmed Khan had been delayed.

"We're aware that he was briefly delayed in Toronto before boarding his flight to the United States. The issue was resolved and Imran Khan is welcome in the United Sates," said the official.

Earlier this month, Khan led a march to northern Pakistan to protest the drone strikes, which have killed between 2,600 and 3,400 Pakistanis, according to the independent London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Most victims were reportedly militants but women and children have also been killed. Exact casualty figures are unclear since foreigners are rarely granted access to Pakistan's tribal areas, where several Islamist militant groups are based and many of the killings have been carried out.

Some Pakistanis say Khan is fanning anti-American sentiment to bolster his political career and criticize him for refusing to condemn atrocities by the Taliban or Pakistani army.

Others praise him for reaching out to the long-neglected population in Pakistan's northern tribal areas and say he is standing up for a war-ravaged population ignored by mainstream politicians.

(Reporting by Katharine Houreld; editing by Andrew Roche)

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Little Festivity As Syria's Holiday Cease-fire Fails

Enlarge Manu Brabo/AP

Displaced Syrian children run after a truck loaded with presents for Eid Al-Adha in a refugee camp near Atma, Idlib province, Syria, on Friday. A powerful car bomb exploded in Damascus on Friday and scattered fighting broke out in several areas across Syria, quickly dashing any hopes that a shaky holiday ceasefire would hold for four days.

Manu Brabo/AP

Displaced Syrian children run after a truck loaded with presents for Eid Al-Adha in a refugee camp near Atma, Idlib province, Syria, on Friday. A powerful car bomb exploded in Damascus on Friday and scattered fighting broke out in several areas across Syria, quickly dashing any hopes that a shaky holiday ceasefire would hold for four days.

Eid al-Adha is one of the holiest days on the Muslim calendar. The day marks the end of the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. It's the feast of the sacrifice, when any Muslim who is able should sacrifice an animal and donate the meat to the poor.

There is little to celebrate in Syria's largest city, Aleppo, however. A cease-fire called for the holiday is already crumbling, and in some areas it never took hold.

Inside Aleppo's old city, where fighting between government troops and rebel fighters has stepped up in recent weeks, there's an old stone shop where a few dozen sheep await their fate.

The sheep sell for about $150, but compared to last year they aren't selling. This shop sold about 100 last year, but this Eid it's only sold 25.

People are going through the streets, some shopping and trying to have a normal holiday, but our interpreter says that most of the shops are closed. People have no money, so they don't have money to eat.

The city is quiet in the early morning hours on the first day of Eid, but then news spreads that the cease-fire has been broken around the country. In one rebel area of Aleppo, fighters claim government forces shot and killed two rebel fighters. Rebels fired back, and the fighting flared up all over again.

Variety Of Weapons Increases In Syrian Conflict Oct. 27, 2012

Syria's Cease-Fire Barely Lasts A Few Hours Oct. 26, 2012

Like every Friday for the past year and a half, there are protests. Activists claim government troops fired on protesters in eastern Syria and in the capital, Damascus. The government says the rebels were the first ones to break the cease-fire. Both sides take pains to list all the violations that they say the other has made.

A recent protest in Aleppo wasn't big â€" most aren't these days â€" but it was lively. Banners said, "We want to celebrate our Eid with freedom."

It's an Eid tradition in Syria to dress up the family in new clothes and go and visit relatives. Some families are out and about, but others have either left the city or stayed home.

Another Eid tradition is to take the kids out for a swing. At a nearby concrete playground, scores of kids piled onto a huge steel structure that looked like a merry-go-round suspended from the air, swinging back and forth.

Abu Waheed says he's grateful for the reduction in violence. At the very least, the regime's army has stopped flying fighter jets over the city â€" jets that often let loose their bombs in civilian areas.

Waheed hopes that the cease-fire will hold and they keep on like that all the time. We just want to go and live, he says, and for the children to be safe in the streets.

Waheed says parents try to tell their kids as little as possible about the fighting and to try and pretend things are normal. This year, he says, Eid is for the kids. Us adults, we have no Eid.

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Pakistani politician: U.S. officials pulled me off plane

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan said he was pulled off a flight to New York by U.S. agents on Friday and interrogated about his views on drone strikes.

Khan has been a vociferous opponent of killings by the unmanned U.S. aircraft in Pakistan and has promised to instruct the Pakistani air force to shoot them down if he wins next year's elections.

"I was taken off from plane and interrogated by U.S. Immigration in Canada on my views on drones. My stance is known. Drone attacks must stop," he wrote on Twitter.

U.S. authorities say they cannot give detailed comments on individual immigration cases due to privacy laws but a State Department official confirmed Khan had been delayed.

"We're aware that he was briefly delayed in Toronto before boarding his flight to the United States. The issue was resolved and Imran Khan is welcome in the United Sates," said the official.

Earlier this month, Khan led a march to northern Pakistan to protest the drone strikes, which have killed between 2,600 and 3,400 Pakistanis, according to the independent London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Most victims were reportedly militants but women and children have also been killed. Exact casualty figures are unclear since foreigners are rarely granted access to Pakistan's tribal areas, where several Islamist militant groups are based and many of the killings have been carried out.

Some Pakistanis say Khan is fanning anti-American sentiment to bolster his political career and criticize him for refusing to condemn atrocities by the Taliban or Pakistani army.

Others praise him for reaching out to the long-neglected population in Pakistan's northern tribal areas and say he is standing up for a war-ravaged population ignored by mainstream politicians.

(Reporting by Katharine Houreld; editing by Andrew Roche)

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Sudan rebels shell southern city during defense minister visit

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Sudanese rebels shelled the main city of the oil-producing South Kordofan state during a visit of Sudan's defense minister, Abdel Raheem Muhammad Hussein, rebels and residents said.

Sudan's army has been fighting rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-North) in South Kordofan, which borders South Sudan, since June last year. But the state capital Kadugli was until this month mainly kept out of the fighting.

SPLM-North spokesman Arnu Lodi said the rebels had fired shells on army positions inside Kadugli on Friday after coming under fire from government warplanes.

"There was an aerial bombardment against SPLM-North positions and villages so we fired back against military positions in Kadugli," he said.

Residents said the shelling started when the defense minister, a close ally of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was addressing worshippers during prayers marking Eid al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice.

"Some seven rockets hit the town, one of them close to the place where the minister spoke," a resident said, asking not to be named. "Worshippers were really afraid."

Sudan accuses South Sudan, which seceded from the north in July 2011, of backing the SPLM-North, whose fighters were part of the southern rebel army during Sudan's long civil war. South Sudan denies the accusation.

Events in Sudan's border states are hard to verify as the government bans foreign media from travelling there.

Sudan's army spokesman al-Sawarmi Khalid could not be reached on his mobile phone, but the newspaper al-Intibaha, run by an uncle of Bashir, confirmed on Saturday that rebels shelled Kadugli when the defense minister was in town to celebrate Eid.

This was the fourth reported shelling of the state capital this month. The rebels first shelled Kadugli on October 8. At least one rocket hit a U.N. compound, prompting the United Nations to move its staff out of the town.

Lodi, the rebels' spokesman, also accused the army of bombing the rebel-held area of Kauda in South Kordofan on Saturday.

Fighting in South Kordofan and nearby Blue Nile state has displaced or severely affected 900,000 people, the United Nations said a week ago. Sudan agreed in August to let aid into rebel-held areas but the United Nations has been unable to win government approval to go ahead with distributing food.

Under international pressure, Sudan and South Sudan agreed last month to establish a buffer zone along their border after clashing along it several times in the past year. Indirect talks between Khartoum and the rebels, however, have made scant progress.

(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz and Ulf Laessing, editing by Rosalind Russell)

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Italy's Berlusconi says plans to stay in politics

ROME (Reuters) - Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, reacting to a Milan court's conviction for tax fraud, said on Saturday he would stay in politics.

Berlusconi told an Italian television interviewer that he felt "obliged to stay in the field" in order to protect other Italians from what he called judicial injustices.

But it was not clear if Berlusconi, now a member of the lower house of parliament, meant he would run for high office again or just stay on as an unelected political force of the center-right.

"There will be consequences," Berlusconi said, referring to his jail sentence on Friday - which will not be enforced until his appeals are exhausted.

"I feel obliged to stay in the field to reform the justice system so that what happened to me does not happen to other citizens," he told Italy's Channel Five television, part of his Mediaset empire.

The move came as a surprise because last Wednesday Berlusconi said he would not run in next year's elections as the leader of his People of Freedom (PDL) party, ending almost 19 years as the dominant politician of the center-right.

The court sentence included a five-year ban on running for political office but since the sentence does not become executive until all appeals are exhausted, Berlusconi can run for parliament in the next national elections in April.

The 76-year-old billionaire media magnate, who was convicted three times during the 1990s in the first degree before being cleared by higher courts, has the right to appeal the ruling two more times before the sentence becomes definitive.

Berlusconi has often accused magistrates of waging a political war against him.

(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Myra MacDonald)

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Syria bombards major cities, weakening truce: activists

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian opposition activists reported a return to heavy government bombardment in major cities on Saturday, further undermining a truce intended to mark the Muslim Eid al-Adha religious holiday.

Activists in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor, the suburbs of Damascus and in Aleppo, where rebels hold roughly half of Syria's most populous city, said that mortar bombs were being fired into residential areas on Saturday morning.

The bombardment came on the second day of a truce called by international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who had hoped to use it to build broader moves towards ending the 19-month-old conflict which has killed an estimated 32,000 people.

"The army began firing mortars at 7 a.m. I have counted 15 explosions in one hour and we already have two civilians killed," said Mohammed Doumany, an activist from the Damascus suburb of Douma, where pockets of rebels are based. "I can't see any difference from before the truce and now," he added.

The Syrian military has said it responded to attacks by insurgents on army positions on Friday, in line with its announcement on Thursday that it would cease military activity during the holiday but reserved the right to react to rebel actions.

A statement from the General Command of the Armed Forces detailed several ceasefire violations in which it said "terrorists" had fired on checkpoints and bombed a military police patrol in Aleppo.

More than 150 people were killed on Friday, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based opposition organization with a network of sources within Syria.

Most were shot by sniper fire or in clashes, the Observatory said, highlighting a temporary drop in intensity of the civil war in which Assad's forces have been conducting daily airstrikes and heavy artillery raids in most cities.

Forty-three soldiers were killed in ambushes and during clashes, it added, and state TV reported a powerful car bomb which killed five people in Damascus.

Violence had initially appeared to wane in some areas on Friday but truce breaches by both sides swiftly marred Syrians' hopes of celebrating Eid al-Adha, the climax of the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca, in peace.

Brahimi's ceasefire appeal had won widespread international support, including from Russia, China and Iran, President Assad's main foreign allies.

The war in Syria pits mainly Sunni Muslim rebels against Assad, from the minority Alawite sect which is distantly related to Shi'ite Islam. Brahimi has warned that the conflict could suck in Sunni and Shi'ite powers across the Middle East.

Brahimi's predecessor, former U.N. chief Kofi Annan, declared a ceasefire in Syria on April 12, but it soon became a dead letter, along with the rest of his six-point peace plan.

(Reporting by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Myra MacDonald)

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UAE upbraids European Parliament over human rights resolution

DUBAI (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates has condemned a European Parliament resolution criticizing its human rights record as "biased and prejudiced", accusing the chamber of insufficient research.

The resolution, which was passed on Friday, attacked the Gulf Arab state's treatment of political dissidents and its use of the death penalty while calling on the major oil producer to respect the rights of women and migrant workers.

The UAE is the world's fifth-largest oil exporter and is an important business partner for the European Union, with bilateral trade last year reaching 41.4 billion euros. Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the richest, most populous of the seven emirates, are also home to many European nationals.

"The biased and prejudiced report leveled unsubstantiated accusations without examining the facts of the situation on the ground," UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash said late on Friday.

He praised the UAE's achievements "particularly in the field of migrant workers rights ... and the empowerment of women", saying that people from more than 200 nations lived in the country "in an atmosphere of openness and tolerance".

The European resolution was not backed up by any threat of action against the UAE, but international criticism of the U.S. ally in the Gulf has caused friction in the past.

This summer the UAE blocked BP from bidding for a major oil concession partly because of London's response to the Arab Spring and due to criticism from British newspapers, several well-placed sources in the emirates told Reuters in August.

The European parliament resolution said the UAE had "accelerated its crackdown on human rights defenders and civil society activists, bringing the number of political detainees to 64", most held in solitary confinement and without legal help.

It said others had been subjected to harassment, travel bans and deportation.

In March, the UAE closed two international thinktanks promoting democracy overseas, Germany's Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the U.S.-funded National Democratic Institute, without giving reasons.

The UAE says it has no political prisoners and says the detainees whose cases have been cited by international rights groups are Islamist militants who threaten the state.

Last week, Gargash sent a tweet criticizing Britain's Guardian newspaper for an editorial in which it questioned the UAE's human rights record.

(Reporting By Angus McDowall; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

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