More than 20 people have been killed in two suspected US missile attacks in northwest Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, security officials said.
About 15, including an al-Qaeda leader, were killed in an attack near the village of Mirali, North Waziristan.
In a second attack, seven people were killed in South Waziristan.
The US military has not commented. It has launched many missile strikes from Afghanistan against suspected militant targets recently.

Down behind the sweeping tree-lined avenues of Jakarta’s diplomatic area, Indonesians sitting at the roadside food stalls are absorbing the news.
It is only a few hours since the spokesman for Indonesia’s attorney general made the announcement: that the country’s best-known prisoners – Amrozi, Ali Ghufron and Imam Samudra – are due to be executed at the beginning of next month.

OTTAWA — When Mohammad Momin Khawaja becomes the first Canadian to be sentenced for terrorist crimes next month, he could face a stiff sentence under new anti-terrorism laws that oblige judges to stack jail terms for certain offences, rather than allow them to be served concurrently.

OTTAWA (Reuters) – A Canadian man who was the first to be charged under a tough new anti-terror law was found guilty on Wednesday in a trial linked to a plot to carry out bomb attacks in Britain.
Judge Douglas Rutherford of the Ontario Superior Court ruled that software engineer Momin Khawaja was involved in a terrorist group and found him guilty of several charges. Khawaja was tried without a jury.

MELBOURNE, Australia – An Australian man who spent time at an al-Qaida training camp and met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan was sentenced Wednesday to nine months in prison but freed because of time already served.
Joseph Thomas, a 35-year-old Muslim convert dubbed “Jihad Jack” by the Australian media, last week was found innocent at a retrial of receiving funds from a terrorist group but guilty of falsifying his passport.

Pakistan’s parliamentarians are a bit confused about their country’s place in the ongoing campaign against terrorism in South Asia. In a resolution that passed with unanimous support from all parties this week, they called on new President Asif Ali Zardari to undertake “an urgent review of our national security strategy” with a view to negotiating with and accommodating extremist groups and scaling back military operations. The text also demanded that Pakistan pursue “an independent foreign policy” distinct from that of the United States, which has provided Islamabad with $10-billion (U.S.) …

Fighting terrorism necessitates a two-pronged approach: covert action by Special Forces and smart intelligence. Covert action is absolutely central to winning the war on terrorism just as it was the decisive instrument of the Cold War, said a senior U.S. intelligence official. Covert action remains a critical instrument in the war on terror.
And it is thanks to a number of covert operations that the United States, according to a high-ranking Pentagon official, has made headway in the “war on terrorism.”