North Korea ramped up tensions this week with a series of provocations rarely seen since the 1950-53 Korean War, including war threats, missile launches and a nuclear test that puts it closer to having an atomic bomb.

The joint command for the 28,500 U.S. troops that support South Korea’s 670,000 soldiers has raised its alert a notch to signify a serious threat from North Korea, the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

It is the highest threat level since the North’s only other nuclear test in October 2006.

North Korea looks certain to face fresh sanctions for defying a U.N. resolution by exploding a nuclear device for a second time, Western diplomat said, with a vote in the 15-nation Security Council expected next week.

North Korea could be set for further provocations that include additional short-range missile tests off its west coast, the South’s Yonhap news agency on Wednesday night quoted an unnamed government source as saying.

Analysts said the North’s saber-rattling might be partly aimed at firming leader Kim Jong-il’s grip on power and helping him draw up succession plans in Asia’s only communist dynasty after a suspected stroke in August raised questions over his rule.

Weapons experts point out that while North Korea is pushing hard to develop a nuclear arsenal, it does not have an effective way to attack with an atomic warhead or bomb.

Security Council powers have agreed in principle that North Korea must face sanctions, Western diplomats said on Wednesday.

Possible steps include a ban on importing and exporting all arms and not just heavy weapons, asset freezes and travel bans for North Korean officials, and placing more firms on a U.N. blacklist.

The measures would expand on sanctions approved by the council after Pyongyang’s 2006 nuclear test, penalties that have been widely ignored and left unenforced.

The diplomats said cargo inspections were also possible, although China, worried about instability in its neighbor and the closest Pyongyang can claim as a major ally, is reluctant.

U.S. officials have urged China to pressure North Korea to step back from nuclear brinkmanship and return to stalled disarmament talks. But many Chinese analysts say Washington overstates Beijing’s sway over Pyongyang, as well as their government’s willingness to use that influence.

“Undoubtedly, China also wants a swift and united response, but it probably won’t give the United States all it wants. China has its own worries,” said Shi Yinhong, an expert on regional security at Renmin University in Beijing.

MILITARY ON ALERT

North Korea, which has only become poorer since Kim took over in 1994, has been punished for years by sanctions and is so destitute it relies on aid to feed its 23 million people, but that has not deterred it from provocations.

The U.S. Air Force will deploy 12 advanced F-22 Raptor fighters in the coming days to a base in Okinawa, Japan. The move had been planned in advance and was not related to recent rumblings from Pyongyang, a U.S. Forces Japan spokesman said.

The South’s largest newspaper Chosun Ilbo quoted defense sources as saying the South has been preparing for contingencies such as artillery or missile strikes near a contested sea border off the west coast of the peninsula.

A spokesman for the North’s military on Wednesday said the country could not guarantee the safety of the South’s vessels in those Yellow Sea waters that have been the site of deadly naval skirmishes between the states in 1999 and 2002.

The spokesman also said South Korea’s decision to join a U.S.-led anti-proliferation initiative this week was a declaration of war making the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War invalid. Its military would also attack if the South inspects its ships.

Seoul’s financial markets, which had fallen in the wake of the nuclear test, rose on Thursday although traders said investors were still nervous about what further steps the North might take to raise tension in the economically powerful region.

North Korea kept up its steady string of strident rhetoric, saying in its official media that “a minor accidental clash could lead to nuclear war.”

“As circumstances show, provocations of war on the part of the U.S. and South Korea have gone well beyond the risky level. It’s a matter of time when a fuse for war is triggered,” the North KCNA news agency reported a commentary in a state newspaper as saying.

U.S., South Korea raise military alert on North

The Sri Lankan Government has blocked access to aid workers trying to help the nearly 300,000 civilians displaced by the army’s victory over the Tamil Tigers, raising the prospect of a humanitarian catastrophe.

In the capital, Colombo, President Rajapakse announced the “complete defeat” of the rebels yesterday as state television showed pictures of what was said to be the corpse of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers’ leader. Mr Rajapakse vowed in an address to the nation to press ahead with a “homegrown political solution” to end ethnic divisions between the majority Sinhalese population and minority Tamils.

As he spoke, an estimated 80,000 people — mostly Tamil, many of them sick, malnourished or suffering from battlefield wounds — were making their way on foot from the war zone In the north to government-run camps that are already swamped. The UN is not being allowed any access to them, The Times has learnt.

Accounts of conditions inside the camps — gained from testimony recorded covertly by aid workers — and the journey to them are horrifying.

Preema, a Tamil woman, arrived at the 400-hectare (990-acre) Menic farm camp on Sunday. She had left Mullaivaikal, the centre of the fighting, where the Tigers had made their final stand before being defeated, days before, after being shelled heavily.

She set out with her husband, mother and two children, to wade through the Nandikadal lagoon — a waterway strewn with mines — in a desperate attempt to reach safety.

There were deep craters where the lagoon had been bombed and people often drowned, she said. A man offered to carry her ten-year-old daughter. Preema never saw them again. Her husband was taken away later by government troops at a checkpoint in Oomanthai, where refugees are being forced to strip before being allowed to pass, after admitting that he had worked for the Tigers. Her mother died in the lagoon.

“Everything is lost,” said Preema, holding her son, 7. “Please help me find my daughter. Not knowing anything is making me crazy.”

Inside one camp, Nandani, 76, described being forced to stand for up to five hours a day queueing for food.

Kala, a middle-aged woman, spoke about the constant indignities of her new life. “I do not have underwear. I am unable to use the Kotex that the Red Cross handed out,” she said, holding a packet of sanitary towels she had been given before the organisation’s access to the camp was restricted.

Kothai, another woman, said: “There is a bad distribution system within the camp. Every time it is the same people that get \. Men crowd around and push the women and children aside.”

Government officials did not answer requests for comment. Access for aid agencies to another 200,000 refugees already in the internment camps — which the Government call “welfare villages” — has been severely restricted since Sunday, preventing the administration of basic care.

Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, is due to travel in Sri Lanka on Friday to offer help to rebuild the ravaged northeast of the country and urge the Government to reach out to the Tamil population.

“These people have endured one of the cruellest military sieges of modern times — daily shelling over several months,” an international aid worker said. “They need urgent help.” There are fears that the camp populations — especially children — will be hit by contagious diseases. Chickenpox, hepatitis A and dysentery outbreaks have been reported. Medical facilities are said to be woefully inadequate.

There are also concerns that the suffering will radicalise previously moderate Tamils, especially amongst the community’s international diaspora, which had been a key source of funding for the Tigers.

Most Sri Lankans are delighted by the defeat of the Tigers, a terrorist force that fought for 26 years for an independent Tamil homeland, propagating a war that left at least 70,000 dead. Many Tamils were against the rebels after they recruited child soldiers and terrorised their own people.

Tamils in the camps describe being fired on by both sides in the conflict.

Vavathan, 59, said that Tiger troops had forcibly recruited children as young as 15 in the conflict zone, even in the final stages when it was clear that they had lost the conflict. “The war was over, why were they still taking the children?” she asked.

There were doubts over the sincerity of Mr Rajapakse’s pledge to build bridges between the Sinhalese and Tamil minority. He has seldom brooked dissent, his opponents say.

Sri Lanka on brink of catastrophe as UN aid blocked

Mas Selamat Kastari was the alleged mastermind of a plot to hijack a plane and crash it into Singapore’s Changi Airport.

Singapore authorities have also accused him of planning several truck bomb attacks across the island state.

A Singapore government spokeswoman confirmed the arrest but gave no other details on where or when.

Officials said Mas Selamat was a leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, a pan-Asian radical Islamic group linked to al-Qaeda responsible for several bomb attacks across Southeast Asia, including the Bali bombings.

His escape from the Whitley Road Detention Center in February 2008 prompted a manhunt in Singapore and led to the sacking of several Singapore officials.

Singapore’s most-wanted militant arrested after escape

North Korea launched the rocket at 11:30 a.m. local time, or 10:30 NYTime said the office of the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak. Early reports from the Japanese prime minister’s office indicated that the three-stage rocket appeared to launch successfully, with the first stage falling into the Sea of Japan and the second stage into the Pacific. South Korea vowed a “stern and resolute” response to the North’s “reckless act.”

South Korean officials, after studying the rocket’s trajectory, said it appeared to have been configured to thrust a satellite into orbit, as the North had claimed.

No debris was reported to have fallen on Japanese land. There has been no confirmation of whether the third and final stage of the launching took place.

But what may have mattered most to North Korea was simply demonstrating that it had the ability to launch a multistage rocket that could travel thousands of miles.

The motivation for the test appeared as much political as technological: After acquiring the fuel for six or more nuclear weapons during the Bush administration, and negotiating a halt of its main nuclear reactor in return for aid, North Korea’s recent statements appear to be a bid for attention from the Obama administration.

The Japanese government strongly protested the launching over its territory and asked for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council.

Lee Dong-kwan, a spokesman for the South Korean president, said, “North Korea’s launch of its long-range rocket poses a serious threat to the stability of the Korean Peninsula and the rest of the world at a time when the entire world is pulling its wisdom together to overcome the global economic crisis.”

Over the years the North has sometimes conducted tests as a gambit to extract concessions for more aid and fuel and to demonstrate its nuclear capabilities.

Manufacturing a nuclear warhead that is small enough, light enough and heat-resistant enough to be mounted atop a missile is far more complex than building a basic nuclear device — and intelligence officials and outside experts believe North Korea is still years from that accomplishment. Typically, it takes many years of experimentation for a nation to learn how to shrink an ungainly test device into a slim warhead.

Nonetheless, the series of tests in recent years — in 2006 and 1998 — is prompting fears of North Korean proliferation among Japanese, Chinese and Western leaders. North Korea’s missiles have ranked among its few profitable exports — Iran, Syria and Pakistan have all been among its major customers. If this long-range test ends up a success, it would presumably make the design far more attractive on the international black market.

The launching provides one of the first tests of Mr. Obama’s reaction to a provocation, on the weekend that he is scheduled to lay out for the first time, in a speech in Prague, his strategy to counter proliferation threats.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has ruled out any effort to shoot down the missile if the mission appeared to be a serious effort to launch a satellite. Rather, Mr. Obama’s top aides said during last week’s Group of 20 summit meeting in London that if the missile were launched, they would seek additional sanctions against the country in the United Nations Security Council, perhaps as early as this weekend.

President Bush pressed for similar sanctions after the North’s nuclear test in October 2006, but those sanctions had little long-term effect.

“We have made very clear to the North Koreans that their missile launch is provocative,” Mr. Obama said Friday after meeting with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France in Strasbourg, France. Mr. Obama took the issue up on Wednesday in London with President Hu Jintao of China.

While Washington has signaled calm, the Japanese response has been unusually strong. Japan deployed ships into the Sea of Japan and suggested it would try to shoot down any “debris” from the launching that threatened to hit the country. However, there is no evidence they tried to do so, and on Saturday, to the embarassment of the Japanese military, the country falsely reported twice that the missile had been launched.

With the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, reportedly recovering from a stroke last summer, the missile test may also be an effort by him — or some in the military — to demonstrate that someone is firmly in control and that the country’s missile and nuclear programs are forging ahead. In recent times top American intelligence officials have told Congress they believe Mr. Kim is back in charge of the country, but they admit considerable mystery surrounds the question of whether he has regained all of his faculties.

North Koreans Launch Rocket Over the Pacific

The recording appeared Thursday on Web sites used by al-Qaida-linked militant groups.

The speaker says Somalis should fight and dethrone President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, who the recording claims is “paid by the enemies” of al-Qaida’s cause.

The 11.5-minute message was entitled “Fight On, Champions of Somalia” and included a picture of bin Laden with the audio.

President Sheikh Sharif is a moderate Islamist elected by lawmakers in January, after a peace deal between the previous government and Islamist opposition groups.

The new government plans to make Islamic law the basis of Somalia’s legal system, in an effort to appease hardline Islamists still fighting the government.

One Somali politician, Mohamed Amin Osman, told VOA that bin Laden’s alleged call to topple the president may anger many Somalis, who are tired of war.

Militant groups like al-Shabab control most of southern and central Somalia, after more than two years of fighting in the Horn of Africa country.

Al-Shabab has also rejected the new president, and continues to fight government forces and African Union peacekeepers.

The government controls only portions of the capital, Mogadishu.

Somalia has not had a stable central government since 1991, when a coup toppled President Mohamed Siad Barre.

New Bin Laden Tape Calls for Somali President’s Ouster

But Hamas officials quickly rebuffed Mr Fayyad’s announcement, casting doubt on whether or not his gesture would help lead to reconciliation between the sides.

The main goal of such a government would be to end the current situation in which the militant Hamas movement rules the Gaza Strip and Fatah, considered more moderate and supported by the West, rules the West Bank.

”This government did not work for the sake of the Palestinians, it worked for its own agenda. This end was expected for a government that was illegal and unconstitutional,” said Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said.

Mr Fayyad was appointed as prime minister after a violent showdown between the factions in June 2007 in which Hamas seized control of Gaza.

Mr Fayyad said he was resigning in hopes that a unity government between the sides might follow.

The two factions held their first reconciliation talks last week and have agreed to form a caretaker government that would then lead to new elections for both the president and the parliament.

Even if the sides find a way to share power it is not clear the international community will be supportive. The European Union, for example, refused to directly aid the previous and short-lived Palestinian unity government after Hamas failed to adhere to several peacemaking principles, among them recognising Israel’s right to exist.

Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad resigns – Election Updates

Tiversa, headquartered in Cranberry Township, Pa., reportedly discovered a security breach that led to the transfer of military information to an Iranian IP address, according to WPXI. The information is said to include planned engineering upgrades, avionic schematics, and computer network information.

The channel quoted the company’s CEO, Bob Boback, who said Tiversa found a file containing the entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One.

“What appears to be a defense contractor in Bethesda, Md., had a file-sharing program on one of their systems that also contained highly sensitive blueprints for Marine One,” Boback told WPXI.

Tiversa makes products that monitor the sharing of files online. A representative for the company was not immediately available for comment.

Boback believes that the files probably were transferred through a peer-to-peer file-sharing network such as LimeWire or BearShare, then compromised.

Data about Obama’s helicopter breached via P2P?

“At no time did Russian planes enter Canadian air space, but within 24 hours of the president’s visit here … we did scramble F-18 fighter planes from NORAD in Canada command,” Peter MacKay said in a news conference in Ottawa.

The Russian planes were in international waters, about 118 miles (190 kilometers) northeast of Tuktoyuktuk, in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

“It was a routine flight over international airspace,” Yevgeniy Khorishko, a spokesman at the Russian Embassy in Washington, told CBC news.

NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, is a joint U.S.-Canadian agency in charge of aerospace control for the North American continent.

“As has been done on previous occasions, (Canadian pilots) sent very clear signals that are understood, that (the) aircraft was to turn around, turn tail and head back to its own air space, which it did,” MacKay said.

The Russian planes were identified as TU-95 Bear aircraft by NORAD spokesman Michael Kucharek.

Canadians intercepted Russian bombers before Obama visit

The corpses of at least 66 people were unearthed at the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) headquarters on Friday, two days after a revolt by hundreds of border guards protesting over pay and conditions.

Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque in Dhaka said: “The senior officers killed are just the first out of the mass graves.
“There are flies all over the place, you can smell gun powder. There is an eerie feeling … the smell, the tension and the drama are palpable.”

‘Cold-blooded murder’

Syed M Kamruzzaman, an army officer who managed to escape the guards holding him, told the AFP news agency: “They hurled abuse at us and gunned down whoever they wanted. I was shot at seven times and was lucky to get out alive.

“It was cold-blooded murder.”

More than 230 guards are reported to have been arrested in Dhaka and 68 more near the town of Savar after nearly 2,000 guards opened fire on their officers and seized control of the BDR base.

Haque said: “Government officers often go on strike about pay conditions here, but to kill your superior is quite unusual. The government is asking who is behind this, and is it solely about pay?

“Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the prime minister, had [originally] said the mutineers would be forgiven, but that now looks very unlikely – the attacks have been so brutal.”

Imtiaz Ahmed, a political analyst from Dhaka university, told Al Jazeera: “Initially there was some support for the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR), especially on the issue of grievances, but as the killings came to light and dead bodies are being found, there seems to be almost a turnaround.

“Support for the BDR has vanished absolutely. People are shocked at what they’re seeing.”

‘No right to kill’

Checkpoints have been set up across the country and ferries were being searched for fleeing mutineers.

The guards surrendered on Thursday after Sheikh Hasina sent tanks and troops into the streets of Dhaka and threatened to put down the mutiny by force.

Hasina had offered the mutineers an amnesty and agreed to look into their demands, but later said the offer would not apply to those who carried out any killings, adding: “No one has the right to kill anyone.”

Manzoor Hasan, the director of BRAC University’s Institute of Governance Studies in Dhaka, said the mutiny had taken the country and Hasina by surprise.

“It was a bit of a baptism by fire for her. It was a critical test, but I think in the end she tackled it competently,” he said.

The violence is the first major crisis facing the prime minister since she was elected in late December, when Bangladesh returned to democracy after nearly two years of army-backed emergency rule.

Police chiefs across Bandladesh said BDR members had revolted in 15 border districts.

Guards within the BDR have opposed being led by army officers, saying they want commanders to be drawn from their own ranks.

The BDR’s main task is to guard the country’s borders, but it often supports the army and police.

Bodies unearthed after Dhaka mutiny

The news, which is unconfirmed, comes hours after PM Sheikh Hasina offered the troops a general amnesty.

At least five people died and a number were wounded in the mutiny, which was said to be over pay, conditions, career advancement and alleged discrimination.

The rebels battled troops sent to quell the mutiny for several hours.

A number of passersby were injured when they were caught in the crossfire.

Sheikh Hasina and senior ministers met 14 of the renegade Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) troops at her office late on Wednesday after they were escorted there from their headquarters in the capital, Dhaka.

The prime minister offered the general amnesty and urged the paramilitaries to set free officers they had taken hostage.

She said she would look into their grievances over pay and conditions.

‘Exploiting us’

The mutineers seized the military barracks in the Pilkhana area of Dhaka on Wednesday morning, reportedly taking more than 100 people hostage.

Thousands of police and troops were deployed outside the compound to try to put down the mutiny.

Exactly how many people were killed and injured in the uprising remains unclear. The fate of all the hostages has also not been confirmed.

The bodies of two senior officers seized by the renegade guards were discovered dumped in a drain outside the camp earlier on Wednesday.

It is hard to imagine how a dispute over pay could have escalated so rapidly and so violently, says the BBC’s Mark Dummett in Dhaka.

One of the mutineers told the BBC that the guards had had to take up arms to resolve problems with their officers.

“Our families might suffer because of what we have done, but they have been exploiting us for more than 200 years,” the man said.

Bangladesh mutineers ‘surrender