Afghan president urges Taliban to air grievances

Afghan President Hamid Karzai urged Taliban insurgents on Sunday to lay down their arms and air their grievances while visiting a violent northern province, adding that foreign forces would not leave the country as long as fighting continued.
In the country's south, meanwhile, a bus carrying Afghans working for a U.S.-supported demining group was struck by a roadside bomb in Kandahar province Sunday, killing five workers and wounding 13 others.
Also Sunday, NATO said an Afghan soldier shot and lightly wounded a Polish soldier with whom he had been arguing. The Afghan soldier fled after the shooting and was being sought by Afghan and international forces.
NATO also reported a member of the international security force was killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan. No other details were given in keeping with standard procedure.
Addressing a gathering in Kunduz province, Karzai repeated his standing invitation to meet with any insurgent who renounces violence and terrorism and embraces the Afghan constitution. Karzai's outreach has so far done little to stem the violence, while sometimes confusing efforts to decisively defeat opponents on the battlefield.
"Come, no one will stop you. Come and have your say, not by the gun," Karzai said.
"You say that 'foreigners are here.' As long as you fight, they won't leave," he said, referencing what the insurgents say is their main goal of driving foreign forces from the country.
Karzai's visit followed his accusations of foreign interference that put a strain on ties with his main backer, the United States, although both sides have since indicated they wished to put the tensions behind them. While referring vaguely to "a little foreign interference," Karzai offered none of the bluster of recent days, in which he had threatened to join the Taliban if the West didn't stop pressuring him to fight harder against graft, cronyism and electoral fraud.
Security has been deteriorating in Kunduz for the past two years, particularly since the opening early last year of a route through the province for supplies traveling from Europe through Russia and down to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
Taliban fighters last week killed three German troops based in the area, and Afghanistan's Ministry of Defense reported Sunday that three Afghan soldiers were killed and three others wounded Saturday in the province.
NATO has mainly been concerned with security in the country's south, having just completed an assault on the Taliban in Helmand province and gearing up for a push into the group's spiritual heartland of Kandahar.
However, Kunduz governor Mohammad Omar told reporters the situation in his province was even more dire and required a monthlong military operation to prevent the Taliban and its al-Qaida allies from taking over. Omar said a Taliban commander in the neighboring province of Takhar vowed to conquer Kunduz within the year.
In the latest blow to crucial demining efforts in Afghanistan, the bus belonging to the Demining Agency for Afghanistan was struck early Sunday in Kandahar province, according to Mohammed Ibrahim, chief of medicine at Kandahar Hospital.
It wasn't clear if the blast was random or specifically targeted the demining agency, known as DAFA, which receives more than half its funding from the U.S. State Department, according to its Web site.
The group clears mines across southern Afghanistan that are a legacy of 25 years of near-continuous warfare and continue to kill scores of Afghans each year.
The unidentified Pole shot Saturday night at a joint command center in the eastern province of Ghazni was transferred to a medical facility for treatment, according to a NATO spokesman in Kabul, speaking on routine condition of anonymity.
The Ghazni base is headquarters of the 2,600 Polish troops stationed in Afghanistan as part of the NATO effort to root out Taliban remnants and extend the central government's remit into rural areas.
While rare, Afghan troop attacks on international forces risk damaging the trust between Afghan police and soldiers who work side-by-side with their foreign mentors on training and combat missions. An Afghan soldier killed a U.S. service member and wounded two Italian soldiers in December in the western province of Badghis, about one month after a rogue policeman in Helmand province shot and killed five British soldiers.
Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammad Zahir Azimi said the shooting resulted from an argument, but details weren't immediately known. He said both had pulled weapons and fired. The whereabouts of the Afghan soldier weren't known, Azimi said.
"It seems to have been a fight and the soldier was operating on his own," Azimi said.
Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, said the Afghan soldier had escaped, killing four Afghan soldiers in the process, and was now with the insurgents. The claim could not be verified, and the Taliban has a history of making false and exaggerated claims.
Also Sunday, Interior Ministry spokesman Zemari Bashary said investigators were questioning three Italian medical workers detained the day before as part of an investigation into an alleged plot to kill the governor of Helmand province. They were among nine people held after suicide bomb vests, hand grenades, pistols and explosives were discovered in a hospital storeroom in Helmand's capital Lashkar Gah.
Emergency, the Milan-based organization that runs the hospital, has denied involvement in any plot.
Bashary said the investigation would proceed cautiously in recognition of the work done by Emergency, which has provided health services in Afghanistan since 1999.
Emergency has had a tense relationship with local authorities in violence-wracked Helmand, due in part to its policy of treating all patients, including those who may be Taliban.
Helmand's governor, Gulab Mangul, alleged Saturday that Taliban insurgents had paid hospital authorities $500,000 to kill him, but Bashary said the ministry could not confirm that charge.

David Mikael Taclino
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Thai protesters reject talks after deadly clashes

Anti-government protesters dug into their encampments around Bangkok and rejected talk of negotiations Sunday after a monthlong standoff escalated into clashes that killed 21 people in Thailand's worst political violence in nearly two decades.
Bullet casings, pools of blood and shattered army vehicles littered the streets near a main tourist area where soldiers had tried to clear the protesters. At least 874 people were injured in what one newspaper called "The Battle for Bangkok." Protesters are demanding that the prime minister dissolve Parliament, call early elections and leave the country.
Dozens of foreign governments issued warnings for citizens visiting Thailand, where tourism is a lifeblood industry.
Quiet returned to Bangkok on Sunday after hours of fierce fighting Saturday that erupted when troops tried to clear one of the protest sites and ended when they retreated. But protesters continued to occupy two main bases — one in the capital's historic district and another along the main upscale shopping boulevard.
Protesters showed off a pile of weapons they had captured from the troops, including rifles and heavy caliber machine-gun rounds. More than half a dozen military vehicles, armored personnel carriers, Humvees and a truck, were crippled by the protesters, who ripped off the treads of the armored cars.
Some of the heaviest fighting occurred near the backpacker mecca Khao San road, where protesters came in throngs Sunday to pose for pictures on top of seized army vehicles. Others strolled around in confiscated army riot gear.
Government spokesman Panithan Wattanayakorn said the government's objective was to avoid more violence and "to return the city to normal," but indicated there was no clear solution.
On Sunday, the protesters broke into a satellite communications complex in a northern Bangkok suburb, forcing the operators to restore the Red Shirts' vital People Channel television station, which the government has twice shut down.
Jatuporn Prompan, a leader of the Red Shirt movement that contends the current government is illegitimate because it does not reflect results of the last elections, said Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's hands were "bloodied" by the clashes.
"Red Shirts will never negotiate with murderers," Jatuporn announced from a makeshift stage. "Although the road is rough and full of obstacles, it's our duty to honor the dead by bringing democracy to this country."
But another protest leader, Veera Musikapong, called on followers to refrain from further violence against government forces and cooperate with authorities who might come to investigate Saturday's clashes.
"Please don't tarnish the victory we are very close to winning now," he said ahead of funeral rites for 14 dead demonstrators.
Each side blamed the other for the violence. Red Shirt leaders accused the military of opening fire into the crowds, while army spokesman Col. Sansern Kaewkamnerd accused protesters of firing live rounds and throwing grenades.
Panithan said the military only fired live ammunition into the air. He said authorities have found grenades, assault rifles and homemade weapons among the protesters.
Four soldiers and 17 civilians were killed, according to the government's Erawan emergency center. At least 874 people were injured, according to the emergency center. The deaths included Japanese cameraman Hiro Muramoto, who worked for the Thomson Reuters news agency. In a statement, Reuters said he was shot in the chest and the circumstances of his death were under review.
Police spokesman Lt. Gen. Pongsapat Pongcharoen said an autopsy committee, which would include two Red Shirt members, was set up to examine corpses of those killed, including Muramoto.
It was the worst violence in Bangkok since four dozen people were killed in a 1992 antimilitary protest.
South Korea and China both urged their nationals Sunday to avoid visiting Bangkok. Australia warned its citizens of a "strong possibility of further violence" in Thailand, and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told tourists to stay away from the protests.
The U.S. has not updated a travel alert issued last week when a state of emergency was imposed that advised citizens to be careful in Bangkok. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Saturday that Washington "regrets the violence" and urged the protesters and government to show restraint.
Apichart Sankary, an executive with the Federation of Thai Tourism Associations, said that if street protests continue the number of foreign visitors could drop to 14.5 million this year, against an earlier official projection of 15.5.
Merchants say the demonstrations have cost them hundreds of millions of baht (tens of millions of dollars), and luxury hotels near one of the sites have been under virtual siege.
The demonstrations are part of a long-running battle between the mostly poor and rural supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and the ruling elite they say orchestrated the 2006 military coup that removed him from power amid corruption allegations.
The protesters, called "Red Shirts" for their garb, see the Oxford-educated Abhisit as a symbol of an elite impervious to the plight of Thailand's poor and claim he took office illegitimately in December 2008 after the military pressured Parliament to vote for him. Thaksin's allies had won elections in 2007 but court rulings removed two governments on charges of conflict of interest and vote-buying.
Saturday's violence and the failure to dislodge the protesters are likely to make it harder to end the political deadlock and raised questions about how much control Abhisit has over the police and army.
The prime minister "failed miserably," said Michael Nelson, a German scholar of Southeast Asian studies working in Bangkok.
Arrest warrants have been issued for 27 Red Shirt leaders, but none is known to have been taken into custody.

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Poles go silent to mourn crash deaths

Thousands of people stood silent in the streets of Poland's cities Sunday, in a silent memorial to President Lech Kaczynski and the other 95 people killed in a devastating plane crash.
The two minutes of silence were preceded by the thundering pealing of church bells and din of emergency sirens for nearly a minute before everything faded away. In front of the presidential palace, hundreds of people stopped what they were doing and stood, some with their eyes closed and heads bowed.
Earlier, at the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army in Warsaw, hundreds gathered for a morning Mass and left flowers and written condolences. Among the dead were Poland's army chief of staff, the navy chief commander, and heads of the air and land forces, who were all making the emotional trip to honor Polish officers slain by the Soviet secret police in 1940 in and near the forest of Katyn in western Russia.
In Moscow, Russia's transport ministry said that Russian and Polish investigators had begun to decipher flight data recorders of the aging Soviet-built Tu-154 airliner that crashed Saturday while trying to land in deep fog in Smolensk, killing all aboard.
Russian officials had initially said 97 people were killed but revised the figure to 96. Poland's Foreign Ministry also confirmed the figure.
Polish government spokesman Pawel Gras said that despite the loss of so many leaders, the country's armed forces were operating normally, and all state offices were doing the same.
That the crash occurred near Katyn served as a stark reminder to Poland of the horrors of that place. Kaczynski and those aboard the flight were headed there to remember the thousands of Poles systematically executed by Josef Stalin's NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, in 1940.
About 4,000 Polish army officers were killed in Katyn itself. In total some 22,000 officers and others were killed there and in other areas.
Polish-Russian relations had been improving recently after being poisoned for decades over the massacre.
Russia never has formally apologized for the murders but Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Kaczynski wasn't invited to that event because Putin, as prime minister, had invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk.
In Warsaw on Sunday, one mourner, Boguslaw Staron, said he turned out to honor Kaczynski, "a great patriot."
"He taught Poles how to respect our traditions, how to fight for our dignity, and he made he made his sacrifice there at that tragic place," said Staron, 70.
Kaczynski, 60, was the first serving Polish leader to die since exiled World War II-era leader Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski in a mysterious plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943.
The bodies of Kaczynski and his wife were expected in Warsaw by early afternoon, the Foreign Ministry said. Kaczynski's twin brother Jaroslaw flew to Smolensk on Saturday evening and identified the bodies.
People also continued to stream to the stately presidential palace in Warsaw's historic center, where large sections of the street were blocked to traffic to allow the flow of people expressing their grief. Mourners carried candles and roses and joined a long line to sign a book of condolences in the palace.
Lech Walesa, the anti-communist dissident who went on to become Polish president, was among those who signed the book. A day earlier he called the crash the nation's greatest misfortune since Katyn. "The elite of our country has perished," Walesa said.
Children also placed simple drawings and messages of mourning: "I love our president," said one, alongside a picture of a human figure and a cross.
Polish television carried black-and-white montages of those killed in the crash and devoted nonstop coverage to the crash, including lingering looks at Kaczynski and his wife, Maria Kaczynska.
Besides Kaczynski, aboard the plane were the national bank president, the deputy foreign minister, the army chaplain, the head of the National Security Office, the deputy parliament speaker, the Olympic Committee head, the civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers.
Some on board were relatives of the officers slain in the Katyn massacre. Also among the victims was Anna Walentynowicz, whose firing in August 1980 from the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk sparked a workers' strike that spurred the eventual creation of the Solidarity freedom movement.
President Dmitry Medvedev declared Monday a day of mourning in Russia.
Polish and Russian investigators were examining the plane's recorders, which will be key to the investigation because they contain crew conversations and flight data essential to determine the cause of the Tu-154's crash.
The Tu-154 was the workhorse of Eastern Bloc civil aviation in the 1970s and 1980s. Poland has long discussed replacing the planes that carry the country's leaders but said it lacked the funds.
According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154s in the past four decades, including six in the past five years. The Russian carrier Aeroflot recently withdrew its Tu-154 fleet from service, largely because the planes do not meet international noise restrictions and use too much fuel.
The Polish presidential plane was fully overhauled in December, the general director of the Aviakor aviation maintenance plant in Samara, Russia, told Rossiya-24. The plant repaired the plane's three engines, retrofitted electronic and navigation equipment and updated the interior, Alexei Gusev said. He said there could be no doubts that the plane was flightworthy.
News of the crash left Poland reeling, grasping for answers.
"I was traveling on a plane last night and everyone was discussing the crash — why it happened and what comes next for Poland," said Hanna Wojcik, 70, in Warsaw. "And everybody was saying that it is some tragic fate for the nation that it loses its most valuable sons near Katyn."

David Mikael Taclino
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Official: no survivors in Kaczynski plane crash

The governor of a Russian region where a plane carrying Poland's president has crashed says there are no survivors.
Smolensk governor Sergei Anufriev made the statement to state news channel Rossiya-24 about an hour after the Saturday crash.
The Tu-154 plane crashed near the Smolensk airport, about 400 kilometers (275 miles) west of Moscow.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife were aboard the plane, according to the Polish foreign ministry.

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China's $7.24B March trade deficit 1st in 6 years

China reported its first monthly trade deficit in nearly six years in March, a shift expected to be shortlived that may give Beijing only a slight respite from pressure to revalue its currency.
The $7.24 billion trade deficit in March reported Saturday by China's customs administration was China's first since a $2.26 billion deficit in April 2004. Though expected, it was significantly bigger than many economists had forecast. It follows four straight months of narrowing trade surpluses.
The return to deficit after many years of surplus comes as China is being pressured to let the value of its currency rise against the dollar — a key source of friction with the U.S. and other trading partners.
Zheng Yuesheng, chief of the customs agency's statistics department, said the 60 percent rise in China's imports in January-March, compared to a year earlier, was a boon to "the balanced growth of the world economy."
"This kind of trade deficit is healthy because it appears when exports and imports both grow rapidly," Zheng said on national television.
Zheng echoed other officials in predicting that China's trade will soon return to surplus, though he said that it will likely tend to be more balanced than in the past.
In March, China's exports totaled $112.11 billion in March, up 24.3 percent from a year earlier. Imports reached US$119.35 billion, up 66 percent compared to the same period last year, the Customs Administration said in data posted on its Web site.
In the first three months of this year, China still posted a global trade surplus of $14.5 billion, down 76.7 percent from the first quarter of 2009. The trade surplus was $7.6 billion in February and the combined January-February surplus was $21.8 billion.
China is due to announce other economic data for the first quarter on Thursday.
Exports plunged last year as demand evaporated in markets stricken by the global recession. But massive stimulus spending helped rekindle growth at home, and the economy expanded by 10.7 percent in the final quarter of 2009.
"China's trade deficit will likely prove temporary. With an anticipated recovery in developed economies this year, Chinese exports should improve gradually over the coming months," Jing Ulrich, head of China equities for J.P.Morgan, said in a note to clients.
Economists say the deficit for March reflected relatively weak exports to the United States and other major markets. Strong imports of commodities and components to fuel China's own booming industrial sector contributed to the 66 percent jump in imports — albeit from a relatively low base the year before when China was also just emerging from a slowdown.
"Surging raw materials prices, for crude oil, iron ore, and nonferrous metals, which China buys a lot of for its own strong domestic economy, are another factor," said An Yun, an analyst at Chang Xin Asset Management.
China recorded a $9.87 billion trade surplus with the United States in March and a $30.7 billion surplus for the first quarter, the customs figures showed.
Exports to the United States rose nearly 20 percent in March year-on-year, while imports climbed 43 percent.
China's trade surplus with the European Union was $7 billion in March and $29.3 billion for the first three months of the year.
Chinese officials insist that the stability of China's yuan is crucial because the trade sector remains vulnerable to weaknesses elsewhere.
Beijing broke a decades-long link with the U.S. dollar in 2005, allowing the yuan to rise by about 20 percent through late 2008. The government slammed on the brakes after the crisis hit and has since held its currency steady against the greenback, saying China cannot afford further change after losing millions of factory jobs to the plunge in global demand.
Critics say the yuan is undervalued by up to 40 percent, giving its exporters an unfair advantage and swelling its trade surplus.
Some U.S. lawmakers have pushed for President Barack Obama to have China declared a currency manipulator in a Treasury Department report that was due out this month and could have added to tensions between the two countries over their chronic trade imbalance.
In a conciliatory gesture, Washington postponed the report ahead of a visit by President Hu Jintao to the U.S. to attend a nuclear conference. Following a brief stopover in Beijing by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for talks with a top Chinese official, Wang Qishan, many expect Beijing to allow at least a modest change in the yuan's value.
Economists caution, however, that any shift will be gradual and is unlikely to narrow U.S. and European trade deficits and create jobs.
Supporters of a loosening of controls on the Chinese currency argue that keeping the yuan's value steady is helping to fuel inflation and limiting Beijing's ability to manage the economy effectively.
"China can go a lot further in internationalizing its economy and promoting world growth by making its currency more flexible," Pieter Bottelier, an economist who formerly headed the World Bank's Beijing office, told a conference in Shanghai this week.
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