Kuwait MPs reject Abbas presence at summit

KUWAIT CITY (AFP) - A group of 21 Kuwaiti MPs said on Tuesday that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was “not welcome” at a planned Arab economic summit next week in Kuwait City, criticising his response to the Gaza war. The deputies, mostly Sunni and Shiite Islamists, in the 50-member house rejected his visit for the summit due to start on Monday as “undesirable”. Abbas has shown “negative and weak stances over the Zionist onslaught on the Palestinian people besieged in Gaza,” the deputies said in a statement, urging the government to declare his visit to the oil-rich country as “unwanted”. Arab governments are divided between supporters of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which seized control of Gaza in June 2007, and backers of Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, which is in charge of the West Bank.

‘Treat Hamas like Japan in WWII’

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AFP) - Israel should follow the example set by the United States when it brought Japan to its knees at the end of World War II, the head of an ultra-nationalist oppostion party was quoted as saying Tuesday. “We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II,” Avigdor Lieberman said, according to the website of the Jerusalem Post newspaper. Japan surrendered in 1945 after atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Lieberman, who quit Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s coalition government last year, said Israel needed to “break the will” of Hamas in Gaza where more than 971 Palestinians have been killed in a war that began on December 27. “Israel won’t be secure so long as Hamas is in power, and therefore we need to come to a decision that we will break the will of Hamas to keep fighting,” he was quoted as saying during a speech at Bar-Ilan University on Monday.

Saudi fighter killed in Gaza campaign

GAZA CITY (AFP) - A Saudi Arabian fighter who went to the Gaza Strip to fight alongside Hamas was killed during Israel’s massive offensive in the Palestinian territory, several Islamic websites reported on Tuesday. Abu Mohammad Al Marri, who reportedly arrived in Gaza 10 days before the start of the Israeli offensive “has become a martyr in the land of Gaza”, the websites said, without giving the date of his death or the way in which he managed to enter Gaza. The man, who came from a town in eastern Saudi Arabia, was a veteran of battles against Russian troops in Afghanistan and in Chechnya as well as against Serb and Croat forces in Bosnia, the websites said. It was the first report of a foreign fighters dying in the Gaza offensive.

Somali pirates release Turkish ship

ISTANBUL (AFP) - A Turkish-owned tanker seized by Somali pirates off Yemen in November was released Tuesday, a company lawyer told AFP. “The ship was released today. The crew is fine,” Kubilay Marangoz, a lawyer for the Istanbul-based YDC Maritime company, said. Marangoz would not comment on how the release was secured, but he had said earlier that the company was negotiating a ransom with the pirates. The vessel, Karagol, with a 14-man Turkish crew, was seized on November 12 off the coast of Yemen with a cargo of 4,500 tonnes of chemicals from Israel to India. It was the second Turkish ship to be released by Somali pirates in a week.

Iran tries 4 over alleged US-backed coup

TEHRAN (AP)- Four Iranians have been tried on charges of seeking to topple Iran’s Islamic government with the alleged the support of the US State Department and the CIA, said a judicial official Tuesday. Judiciary spokesman, Ali Reza Jamshidi, said the trial is over and the verdict and sentencing would take place in a few days. Jamshidi told reporters that the four planned to recruit others to be trained in anti-Iranian activities outside the country. “They were directed by the US State Department and the CIA.” “They were detained and tried in Tehran,” he added. He didn’t elaborate or identify the four. It’s not clear when their trial started or how long it lasted.

Iran judiciary confirms men stoned to death

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran’s judiciary on Tuesday confirmed that two men had been stoned to death for adultery in the northeastern city of Mashhad while a third struggled from the stoning hole and escaped with his life. “As you saw in reports, there were three stonings carried out in Mashhad. They were convicted of adultery, that is an affair with a married woman,” judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi told reporters. He said two of the men died in the executions carried out “about 20 days ago” while the third was spared after he managed to extricate himself from the stoning hole. Under Iran’s Islamic law, adultery is still theoretically punishable by stoning, which involves the public hurling stones at the convict buried up to his waist. A woman is buried up to her shoulders. The convict is spared if he can free himself.

‘Kurdish activist gets 20-year jail term’

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iran’s revolutionary court has sentenced a Kurdish political activist to a 20-year jail term for membership of an illegal party, the Etemad Melli newspaper reported on Tuesday. The report named the activist as Jebreal Khosravi. It did not identify the illegal group but Iran has banned Kurdish parties. Khosravi, arrested last year, is from the western city of Sanandaj, capital of Iran’s Kordestan province which has seen periodic demonstrations and armed clashes between Iranian forces and separatist Kurdish groups. Etemad Melli also reported that Iran had cancelled the licence of the Kurdish-Farsi fortnightly journal, Rojhalat, for a second time after the supreme court last November lifted an earlier ban.

Army rules out explosives at UNIFIL base

BEIRUT (AFP) - A suspect substance thought to be explosives found at the weekend at a UN base in southern Lebanon was nothing more than a cleaning agent used to unblock drains, an army spokesman told AFP on Tuesday. “The substance was something you use to open up clogged drains,” the spokesman said, adding that the two suspects detained in connection with the incident would be released. “We have ruled out any criminal intent,” he said. The substance discovered on Sunday by a sniffer dog in a garbage truck entering the Italian base of the UN force deployed in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL) raised the alarm, especially amid heightened tension in the region because of the Israeli war in Gaza.