Pakistanis secure Swat town, clash in other areas

Pakistani forces consolidated their hold on the main town in the Swat valley on Sunday and began trucking supplies to 40,000 civilians stranded there, as fighting flared in South Waziristan on the Afghan border.The army said it had captured Mingora on Saturday and troops were out on patrol on Sunday."Mingora has been fully secured and relief activities have started," the army said in a statement. "Security forces are patrolling in all the important areas of Mingora."Pakistan has been carrying out its most concerted offensive yet against an expanding Taliban insurgency.The focus of the Pakistani fighting since late April has been in the former tourist valley of Swat, 120 km (80 miles) northwest of Islamabad, which the Taliban turned into a bastion as authorities alternated between inconclusive military action and peace pacts.Tension has also been rising in South Waziristan, a major al Qaeda and Taliban stronghold, with military officials saying an offensive was likely there after Swat was secured.The United States and the Afghan government have long been pressing Pakistan to root militants out of South Waziristan and other enclaves on the Afghan border, from where the Taliban direct their Afghan war.Militants attacked a paramilitary force camp near the town of Jandola, 80 km (50 miles) east of Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, late on Saturday and fighting went on for hours, security officials said.

Two more Indians attacked in Australia

It's among the favoured destination for hundreds of students every year but four attacks on Indians in three weeks have the over 90,000 Indian students in Australia worried.

Reports have come in of two more attacks on Indian students in Australia, this after there were two attacks over the weekend on Indian students in Melbourne.

In a fresh incident of racial attack on Indians in Australia, a 25-year old student was stabbed in Melbourne, even as another youth from Andhra Pradesh was battling for life after an assault by local teenagers.

Baljinder Singh was stabbed by two men in the abdomen as he was leaving a railway station. The two attackers apparently asked Baljinder to hand over his wallet but even before he could do so they stabbed him in the stomach.

Baljinder Singh, 25 was attacked on Monday night when two men carrying weapons approached him, the 'Herald Sun' reported.

The attackers demanded money and as Singh was searching through his bag to hand over his wallet he was stabbed in the abdomen. As Singh screamed for his life, his attackers laughed and fled the scene, the report said.

"I bent down and one guy stabbed me," Singh said adding "I just wanted to save my life and yelled "just don't kill me."

"They just laughed when they stabbed me in the stomach. They laughed at me. I was screaming." Singh was quoted saying that he believed that the city was a safe place to live, but was now convinced that Indian nationals are being targeted as easy prey.

"We're not safe here now," he said adding, "I thought it was safe here, that's why I came to Australia."

Now there are lots of attacks and you can see that in the western suburbs, but I thought Carnegie was the safest place in Melbourne, Singh added.

Baljinder is now recovering in hospital, he says he pleaded with his attackers to let him go but they just laughed and ran away.

In another attack, 25 year-old Rajesh Kumar suffered 30 per cent burns after a petrol bomb was thrown at him through his window. His flat-mate quickly wrapped him in a blanket and took him to hospital.

The Australian police have arrested two teenagers they say were involved in that alleged racist attack on Saurabh Sharma in a Melbourne train. He was attacked over the weekend.

Twenty one-year-old Saurabh was beaten up and robbed by a group of teenagers in a train on May 9. Police are now questioning the two boys, aged 16 and 18, after searching two homes on Thursday. CCTV footage of the incident helped police identify the alleged attackers. Police are still searching for three other males in relation to the assault.

Bombs, gun battle, rock Pakistan's Peshawar

Two bombs exploded in a market in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Thursday, killing six people, and gunmen on rooftops ambushed police as they arrived at the scene, police said.

A short while later, a suicide bomber attacked a paramilitary checkpost in another part of the city, killing five soldiers, a wounded soldier said.

"He was on foot and as we saw him, he ran and blew himself up when he got close to us," Wasiullah, a paramilitary soldier wounded in the attack, told Reuters as he arrived at a hospital. Police confirmed the attack.

The violence came hours after the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for Wednesday's suicide car-bomb and gun attack in the eastern city of Lahore that killed 24 people, saying it was in revenge for an army offensive in the Swat region.

"We were looking for this target for a long time. It was a reaction to the Swat operation," Hakimullah Mehsud, a militant commander loyal to Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, said by telephone.

Militant violence in nuclear-armed Pakistan, an important U.S. ally, has surged since mid-2007, with attacks on the security forces, as well as on government and Western targets, and the Taliban on Thursday threatened more violence.

The two bombs were planted on motorbikes in the Storytellers Bazaar in Peshawar's old city and caused extensive damage. Six people were killed and about 70 wounded, provincial government minister Bashir Ahmed Bilour told Reuters.

Soon afterwards, gunmen on rooftops began firing at police in lanes below. Television showed policemen firing back while colleagues strapped on bullet-proof vests. Police later said two gunmen had been killed and two suspects detained.

Spy Fired Shot That Changed West Germany

The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.

Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting as a Stasi spy for East Germany.

It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper.

“It makes a hell of a difference whether John F. Kennedy was killed by just a loose cannon running around or a Secret Service agent working for the East,” said Stefan Aust, the former editor in chief of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel. “I would never, never, ever have thought that this could be true.”

The revelation last week that researchers, looking into Berlin Wall deaths and East German intelligence, had stumbled across Mr. Kurras’s Stasi files raised a host of uncomfortable issues that are suddenly the subject of national debate.

For the left, Mr. Kurras’s true allegiance strikes at the underpinnings of the 1968 protest movement in Germany. The killing provided the clear-cut rationale for the movement’s opposition to what its members saw as a violent, unjust state, when in fact the supposed fascist villain of leftist lore was himself a committed socialist.

There is the sobering reminder of the Stasi infiltration of West German structures, but also the question of whether it went much deeper than has ever been uncovered. The Stasi’s reach in East Germany is well known; Chancellor Angela Merkel said just last week that the security service had tried to recruit her, though she had turned it down.

The most insidious question raised by the revelation is whether Mr. Kurras might have been acting not only as a spy, but also as an agent provocateur, trying to destabilize West Germany. As the newspaper Bild am Sonntag put it in a headline, referring to the powerful former leader of the dreaded East German security agency, Erich Mielke, “Did Mielke Give Him the Order to Shoot?”

The historians who unearthed the 17 volumes of files that revealed Mr. Kurras’s double life say there is no evidence to support the theory that the Stasi was behind the killing. Berlin officials have resisted public calls from victims’ groups and others to retry Mr. Kurras. He was acquitted in 1967, the year of the shooting, of manslaughter charges and was later allowed to rejoin the police force after the verdict was upheld.

In an interview with the Bild, Mr. Kurras, 81, confirmed that he had been in the East German Communist Party. “Should I be ashamed of that or something?” Mr. Kurras was quoted as saying. As for the Stasi, he said, “And what if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything,” the paper reported.

Mr. Kurras does not deny that he shot the demonstrator, Benno Ohnesorg, in the back of the head, but has said the shooting was an accident. He denied records showing he had been paid by the security service, and said the agents who had put those details in his file must have been lining their own pockets.

Mr. Kurras was born in East Prussia and volunteered for military service in 1944 when he was 16 years old. He was imprisoned not long after the war by the Soviets at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for three years. He was known to be an enthusiastic gun collector and an excellent marksman.

He began leading a secret double life in 1955, when he went to the authorities in East Berlin and asked to move to East Germany and join the police there. Instead, according to files unearthed by the historians Helmut Müller-Enbergs and Cornelia Jabs, he was told to stay with the police in West Berlin while spying for the Stasi, and he had a cover name, Otto Bohl.

If Mr. Kurras seemed to fit the bill of the “fascist cop,” Mr. Ohnesorg came across as the most innocent of victims. A student who also wrote poetry, he was married, his wife pregnant with their first child, when he went to a demonstration against a state visit by Iran’s leader, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

Mr. Ohnesorg’s death had a powerful mobilizing effect. The photograph of a woman cradling his head as he lay on the ground is among the most iconic images in Germany. Average students who might never have joined the 1968 protest movement were moved to action. And on a darker note it became the chief justification for violent action by terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction and the Second of June Movement, which even took its name from the day of Mr. Ohnesorg’s killing.

“The biggest milestone on the road toward violence was not what people thought it was,” said Mr. Aust, who also wrote a book on the Red Army Faction. “The pure fact that he was an agent from the East changes a lot, whether he acted on orders or not.”

While the East German government highlighted the killing for propaganda purposes, the dissension and upheaval sowed by the shooting were temporary and had the unintended consequence of making the West a far more attractive alternative to the East in the long run.

According to Marek Dutschke, the son of the student-movement leader Rudi Dutschke, Mr. Ohnesorg’s death ignited the modernization of West Germany, leading to greater democracy, gender equality and sexual freedom.

“Germany would not have become this liberal place, not in the same way, if this event hadn’t happened,” Mr. Dutschke said.

North Korea 'fires more missiles'

North Korea has fired two more missiles, hours after the UN Security Council unanimously condemned its nuclear test, South Korean reports say.
The communist state fired two short-range missiles off an east coast base, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported, citing an official.
At least three missile tests accompanied Monday's nuclear test. Those on Tuesday involved one ground-to-ship missile and one ground-to-air missile, Yonhap said.
'Strong measures'
Late on Monday US President Barack Obama spoke to the leaders of both Japan and South Korea to assure them of America's commitment to security in Northeast Asia.
The conversations followed an emergency session of the UN Security Council, where members voiced strong opposition to the test and condemned it.
Russia's UN envoy told reporters the nuclear test was a clear violation of UN Resolution 1718. That resolution imposed sanctions on North Korea after its first nuclear test, in October 2006.
On Tuesday, Asian and European foreign ministers attending the two-day biennial Asem Summit in Hanoi issued a statement condemning the test and calling for an immediate return to talks.
The issue was also expected to dominate talks between Chinese and South Korean defence ministers as they met in Beijing.
Seoul announced early on Tuesday that it would delay no longer in joining the PSI - a US-led non-proliferation campaign involving searching ships carrying suspect cargo, aimed at stopping the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction.
North Korea has repeatedly warned that the South's participation in the PSI would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

11 injured as groups clash in Vienna gurudwara

At least 11 people were injured, nine of them seriously, when rival Sikh groups clashed with each other using knives and a handgun during a sermon in a gurudwara in Vienna.
Police said nine people were severely wounded when members of two families started shooting at each other. Five people suffered head shots and stab wounds, Austrian Press Association said in a report on its website.
Police spokesman Michael Takacs said five men entered the gurdwara early on Sunday afternoon and started firing at those present. Five suspects have been arrested, he said.
Austria Press Agency quoted a witness Jasuf Kalden as saying that the fight erupted after a dispute over the sermon, given by Guru Ravidas Sabha.
Police said at least six men, one wielding a gun and the others knives, attacked the preacher. Others rushed to his aid, resulting in the melee.
The Gurdwara is situated in Vienna-Rudolfsheim, the capital's 15th district.
The wounded were evacuated in three helicopters to several hospitals, rescuers said.
"All the people implicated in the incident have been arrested," Takacs said.
Tension in Jalandhar: Followers of Dera Sachkhand and various Dalit bodies on Sunday blocked traffic on the national highway, damaged three buses and torched a vehicle soon after news regarding firing on Sant Niranjan Dass, the Dera head, in Vienna, Austria spread.
Activists of various Dalit bodies, including Ambedkar Sena and BSP, blocked vehicular traffic in Phagwara for nearly an hour on National Highway No 1 on the over-bridge near Sugar Mill crossing to protest the Vienna incident, police said.
Some of the protesters pelted stones at vehicles, damaging three buses, they said, adding no passenger was injured in the incident.
Protesters also gave a call for Phagwara bandh on Monday.

Madhav sworn in as Nepal PM

Veteran Communist leader Madhav Kumar Nepal was on Monday sworn in as the Prime Minister of Nepal, ending the week-long political crisis and easing the Maoists out of power after a short stint.

Fifty-six-year-old Nepal, who was elected unopposed as the Prime Minister on Saturday by the Constituent Assembly, was sworn-in by President Ram Baran Yadav at 11 am.

A mini-cabinet of four-five ministers are expected to sworn-in later in the day.