Violence kills 12 Pakistan security forces

AT least 12 Pakistani security personnel have been killed in clashes and a landmine explosion in the two regions of the country most troubled by insurgents, officials say.

In the northwestern tribal belt, officials said dozens of militants attacked a checkpoint overnight, sparking clashes that killed six security personnel and four militants.

The fighting broke out in the northwestern Khyber district, where troops are frequently locked in clashes with homegrown Islamist militia Lashkar-e-Islam.

Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked militants have carved out strongholds in the semi-autonomous tribal belt to plot attacks on Pakistani, Afghan and Western targets.

"Around 100 militants attacked a Frontier Corps checkpost in the Shalobar area of Bara in Khyber tribal region on Monday night, which triggered a firefight," a security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Officials said four paramilitary soldiers and two tribal policemen were killed, and 16 other personnel were wounded.

The area is cut off to journalists and aid workers so it was not possible to confirm the death toll independently.

A spokesman for Lashkar-e-Islam said it carried out the attack but denied that any of its fighters were killed.

"We took four soldiers hostage as well. There was no loss of life on our side in the clashes," said spokesman Abur Rasheed Lashkari in a text message.

In the southwestern province of Baluchistan, six policemen were killed when their vehicle ran over a landmine around 460 kilometres southwest of Quetta.

"A senior police official of intelligence branch and five of his subordinates were on a mission in Panjgur district when their vehicle collided with a landmine. All of them were killed," Balach Aziz, a senior administration official, told AFP.

Twin suicide attacks killed 92 people at a snooker hall in a mainly Shi'ite Muslim area of Quetta last Thursday, the deadliest single sectarian attack on the minority community in Pakistan.

AFP alm/

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Assad may run for 2014 election

SYRIA'S President Bashar al-Assad may defy calls to step down and stand for election in 2014, an official says, as his army pounded rebel zones with shells and air strikes, killing dozens.

In a bloody day for Syria as it marked 22 months since the eruption of an anti-regime revolt that has morphed into a full-scale civil war, a bomb rocked Aleppo University in the country's north killing at least 15 people, while 45 others died in shellings and air raids elsewhere, a watchdog said.

The latest violence came a day after a senior official said Assad should be allowed to run for election in 2014.

"We are opening the way for democracy, or deeper democracy. In a democracy you don't tell somebody not to run," said Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Muqdad in an interview with the BBC on Monday.

He repeated the Syrian regime's insistence that calls for Assad to step down immediately are foreign-backed and illegitimate.

"It is a coup d'etat if we listen to what those armed groups and those elements of Syria are proposing," said Muqdad.

"The president now and many other candidates who may run (in the 2014 elections) will go to the people, put their programs and be elected by the people," Muqdad told the BBC.

Muqdad's remarks come after Assad unveiled in a rare speech on January 5 in Damascus his own three-step peace initiative for the strife-torn country.

He offered dialogue with the opposition to end the conflict - but only with elements he deemed acceptable, not rebel-affiliated groups he termed "killers" and "terrorists" manipulated by foreign powers.

His plan was rejected outright by the entire opposition as well as by the West, and it was criticised heavily by UN-Arab League peace envoy Brahimi who termed it "one-sided".

The United Nations says that more than 60,000 people have died in the Syria conflict which began 22 months ago, on March 15, 2011, with peaceful protests that erupted into deadly violence in the wake of a harsh regime crackdown.

Contradictory reports meanwhile emerged on the origin of Tuesday's blast in Aleppo University, which struck the campus on the first day of exams.

"The explosion caused casualties among both students on their first day of exams, and people displaced from areas of the city damaged by terrorist attacks and who have sought refuge in the university complex," said the official SANA news agency.

State television blamed "terrorists", without specifying the nature of the explosion, while anti-regime activists said it was caused by an air strike.

A military official in Aleppo told AFP the explosion occurred after rebels tried to shoot down a warplane with a missile, but failed to hit their target.

Other sources said a car bomb attack was behind the blast.

Elsewhere in Syria, an artillery attack on the town of Houla in the central province of Homs killed 12 people, including seven minors, the Observatory said.

In Homs city, warplanes struck the besieged districts of Jobar and Sultaniyeh, while in the northern province of Aleppo, an air raid in on the rebel-held town of Al-Bab killed at least eight people, including three women and two children.

Near Damascus, warplanes raided the southeast and northeast outskirts of the capital, where the army is pressing its bid to take back rebel strongholds, said the Observatory, which relies on a network of activists, doctors and lawyers across Syria to compile its reports.

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US stocks open lower on weak German data

US stocks have opened lower following a disappointing German report on growth.

Five minutes into the trade, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 40.97 points (0.3 per cent) to 13,465.35.

The broad-based S&P 500 lost 6.22 points (0.4 per cent) to 1464.46.

The Nasdaq Composite fell 19.09 points to 3098.4141.

The declines followed a fourth-quarter contraction in Germany of 0.5 per cent, said Briefing.com. The results mean full-year registered growth of 0.7 per cent instead of the consensus expectation for 0.8 per cent, Briefing said.

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New Dan Brown novel 'Inferno' out in May

A NEW Dan Brown novel is coming in May, and the subject is Dante.

Doubleday announced on Tuesday that Brown's book is called Inferno, named for Dante's epic journey in verse. Brown again will feature Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, the protagonist for his blockbuster The Da Vinci Code and for the million-selling follow-up The Lost Symbol.

The new book might seem familiar in other ways, as Brown again takes on a masterpiece of Western civilisation. The Da Vinci Code centered on an iconic painting, the Mona Lisa.

"Although I studied Dante's Inferno as a student, it wasn't until recently, while researching in Florence, that I came to appreciate the enduring influence of Dante's work on the modern world," Brown said in a statement. "With this new novel, I am excited to take readers on a journey deep into this mysterious realm. a landscape of codes, symbols, and more than a few secret passageways."

Brown may also be returning to the religious controversies of The Da Vinci Code, when he infuriated some Catholics by suggesting that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children. Dante himself was a Catholic who was critical of church leaders.

Inferno comes out on May 14, a week before another likely top seller of 2013, Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed.

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Alleged KGB spy couple in German trial

A MARRIED couple accused of spying for the Russian secret services for more than 20 years have gone on trial in Germany in one of the biggest espionage court cases since the Cold War.

The pair, identified only by codenames Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag, are accused of having been planted in West Germany from 1988 by the Soviet Union's KGB and later used by its SVR successor secret service.

The defendants, whose alias surname means "attack" in German, declined to confirm any details about their identity or the charges as the trial got underway in the higher regional court in the southwestern city of Stuttgart.

Defence lawyer Horst-Dieter Poetschke said they had Russian citizenship.

Prosecutors say one of them arrived in still divided Germany in 1988 - a year before the Berlin Wall fell - and the other in 1990, posing as Austrian citizens who had been born and grew up in South America.

According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, light could only be shed on the last three years of their alleged activities as agents.

They had "the mission from SVR headquarters to obtain NATO and EU political and military secrets", federal public prosecutor Wolfgang Siegmund said, adding: "Particularly also geo-strategic findings on the relationship of NATO and the EU with the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia."

Prosecutors say the couple set up a "middle-class existence" to cover up their activity for the secret services.

Andreas Anschlag studied engineering and worked in the car industry while Heidrun was a housewife. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung weekly, even their own daughter had no idea about their double lives.

The couple allegedly passed on documents they obtained from a Dutch official in the foreign ministry between 2008 and 2011.

The court heard that the official, Raymond Valentino Poeteray, obtained several hundred pages of classified, partly secret documents from different Dutch embassies and received more than 72,000 euros ($A92,000).

The accused left the documents in "dead-letter boxes", for example under certain trees, from where they were picked up by employees of the Russian consulate general in the western city of Bonn, according to the federal prosecutor.

Heidrun Anschlag was responsible for communicating with the SVR via short-wave radio, the court heard.

The pair, who allegedly were jointly paid around 100,000 euros a year, communicated with their Moscow masters using text messages via satellite phone or hidden messages in comments in YouTube videos under agreed names, it heard.

In mid-2011, Siegmund said the pair had received orders to withdraw from Germany because of the risk of being exposed and were preparing to do so when they were arrested in October of that year.

They face up to 10 years in prison if found guilty.

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Guardian makes Aussie expansion official

BRITISH daily newspaper The Guardian has announced its intention to launch a digital edition in Australia.

Due to start up this year, the operation aims to capitalise on an existing substantial Australian readership, launch editor Katharine Viner said.

"We already have a large number of Australian readers, who tell us they want more of our on-the-ground reporting, lively commentary and groundbreaking open journalism," Viner said in a statement announcing the venture on Tuesday.

"We will build a small Australian team to cover the issues that really matter to the nation and connect our Australian readers to the Guardian's global network of correspondents and commentators."

The statement said The Guardian already has a global digital audience of about 39 million, of which some 1.3 million are based in Australia, making the nation the masthead's fourth-largest market.

The operation will launch with the help of "founding investor" and chair of not-for-profit news and features website The Global Mail, Graeme Wood.

Outgoing director of editorial policies at the ABC Paul Chadwick will become non-executive director of the Guardian's Australian entity.

"I welcome the contribution to media diversity that the Australian operation of the Guardian will make," the Walkley Award winner said.

"The Guardian, with its long and distinguished tradition of editorial independence and valuable investigations, is a leading innovator in digital news and information.

"Its decision to commit to Australia is cause for optimism that quality journalism will continue to fulfil its democratic function in this era of rapid media change."

Guardian News and Media editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said the Australian expansion comes as a "natural next step" for the publication, which dates back to 1821 in regional England.

"Our Australian digital edition will not only offer our unique take on Australia, a significant nation both regionally and globally, but will also serve as a base for reporting on, and engaging with, people across Asia," Rusbridger said.

"It will be of real benefit to our global audience, to see how dominant questions of our time - economics, geopolitics, climate change, immigration, media, democracy and more - are being grasped in such an important part of the world."

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West Bank teen killed by Israeli fire

ISRAELI troops have shot dead a Palestinian teenager near the separation barrier in the northern West Bank, Palestinian medical and security sources say.

Samir Ahmed Awad, 17, died after being hit by three bullets during an incident which took place in the West Bank village of Budrus, medical sources and the mayor said.

The shooting took place by a school 200 metres from Israel's separation barrier, where a handful of students had thrown stones at Israeli troops after finishing their exams, Budrus Mayor Mohammed Morar told AFP.

"It was the last day of school and some students threw stones. The soldiers caught him and tried to arrest him, but he escaped so they fired six bullets at him," he said.

Medics said he sustained bullet wounds to the back, head and leg.

An army spokeswoman said troops had "responded" after several Palestinians "approached the security fence near Budrus and damaged it in an attempt to infiltrate Israel" although police said troops had fired in the air after Palestinians threw stones at the barrier.

Several hours later, more than 2000 Palestinians from Budrus and the surrounding villages gathered for the teenager's funeral and protesters threw stones at troops..

In a separate incident, Palestinian medics said troops had shot and injured one person by the nearby village of Deir Nidham who was taken to Israel. The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the incident.

Awad was the fourth Palestinian shot dead in the past five days.

Two Gazan farmers in their early 20s were killed near the border fence with Israel - one on Friday and another on Monday. And on Saturday, a West Bank labourer was shot dead south of Hebron as he tried to cross the security barrier to find work, medics said.

The Gaza deaths were both close to the security fence where Israel maintains a no-go zone, and where troops habitually fire warning shots towards anyone coming within 100 metres of the frontier.

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