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Ecuadorean soldiers firing automatic weapons and concussion grenades rescued President Rafael Correa late Thursday from a hospital where he was trapped most of the day by police rebelling over a cut in benefits.

At least one security force member was wounded in the 35—minute operation, and the government said at least one person was killed and six injured in clashes earlier in the day outside the hospital between Correa’s supporters and insurgent cops.

Correa, 47, told cheering supporters from the balcony of the Carondelet palace after being spirited away from the hospital at top speed in an SUV that the uprising was more than a simple police protest.

“There were lots of infiltrators, dressed as civilian and we know where they were from,” he shouted. But he did not blame anyone specifically.

Correa was trapped in the hospital for more than 12 hours after being treated for a tear—gassing that nearly aphyxiated him during a confrontation with hundreds of angry police officers who also shoved him and pelted him with water.

Correa expressed thanks from the balcony to all his supporters who went to the hospital and “were ready to die to defend demoracy.”

The violence began when hundreds of police angry over the new civil service law plunged this oil—exporting South American country into chaos, roughing up and tear—gassing Correa, shutting down airports and blocking highways in a nationwide strike.

At the hospital, Correa had vowed to leave either “as president or as a corpse.” He also negotiated with some of the insurrectionists, but the outcome of those talks was unclear.

Hours before the rescue, the armed forces chief, Gen. Ernesto Gonzalez, declared the military’s loyalty to Correa. He called for “a re—establishment of dialogue, which is the only way Ecuadoreans can resolve our differences.”

But Gonzalez also called for the law that provoked the unrest to be “reviewed or not placed into effect so public servants, soldiers and police don’t see their rights affected.”

The law, which Congress approved on Wednesday, must be published before it takes effect and that has not happened.

After police took to the streets, the government declared a state of siege, putting the military in charge of public order, suspending civil liberties and allowing soldiers to carry out searches without a warrant.

Police took over barracks in Quito, Guayaquil and other cities. Some set up roadblocks of burning tires, cutting off highway access to the capital.

Schools shut down in Quito and many businesses closed early due to the absence of police protection that left citizens and businesses vulnerable.

Looting was reported in the capital {hbox}” where at least two banks were sacked {hbox}” and in the coastal city of Guayaquil. That city’s main newspaper, El Universo, reported attacks on supermarkets and robberies due to the absence of police.

Peru and Colombia closed their countries’ borders with Ecuador in solidarity with Correa. Along with the rest of the region’s leaders and the United States, they expressed firm support for Correa. Bolivia’s leftist president, Evo Morales, summoned South America’s presidents to an emergency meeting set for Friday in Buenos Aires of the continent’s fledgling UNASUR defense union.

This poor Andean nation of 14 million people had a history of political instability before Correa, cycling through eight presidents in a decade before the leftist U.S.—trained economist first won election in December 2006. Three of them were driven from office by street protests that plagued the country, which is a member of OPEC.

In April 2009, after voters approved a new constitution he championed, Correa became Ecuador’s first president to win election without a runoff. That success has led him at times to act with overconfidence.

Confronting the protesters Thursday morning, Correa was agitated and unyielding.

“If you want to kill the president, here he is! Kill me!” he told them before limping away with the aid of a cane as an aide fitted a gas mask over his face. Correa’s right knee, with which he has had recurring problems, was operated on last week.

Some 800 police officers in Quito joined the protest, which appeared to have arisen spontaneously. The number of participants outside the capital was unclear. Ecuador has 40,000 police officers.

Correa called the unrest “an attempted coup” spurred by his opponents in remarks to reporters at the police hospital, where he at one point was hooked to an intravenous drip. “They’re practically holding the president captive,” he said.

Correa’s leftist ally, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, claimed earlier that the Ecuadorean leader was “in danger of being killed.” Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, said at one point that insurgents were trying to enter the hospital through the roof.

Chavez’s claim was echoed by Cuba while the Organization of American States’ secretary—general, Miguel Insulza, called the situation “a coup d’etat in the making.”

The United States didn’t go that far.

“We urge all Ecuadorians to come together and to work within the framework of Ecuador’s democratic institutions to reach a rapid and peaceful restoration of order,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement.

The striking police were angered by a law passed by Congress on Wednesday that would end the practice of giving members of Ecuador’s military and police medals and bonuses with each promotion. It would also extend from five to seven years the usual period required for a subsequent promotion.

“They are a bunch of ungrateful bandits,” Correa said of the protesters after they set upon him.

He said the new law “is removing bonus payments and decorations from the entire public sector … to prevent abuses of state money. We know the Ecuadorean people support us in all this.”

The U.S. Embassy issued a message warning U.S. citizens “of a “nationwide strike by all levels of police, including military police.” It warned them to “stay in their homes or current location, if safe.”

The president’s policy coordination minister, Doris Soliz, asked Ecuadoreans to be calm and support the government.

Air force troops shut down Quito’s Mariscal Sucre airport as the protests began Thursday morning. Dozens of flights were canceled and it was unclear when international service would be restored to the Quito, Guayaquil and Manta airports.

The head of Ecuador’s civil aviation authority, Fernando Guerrero, said in a statement that international operations were suspended at the latter two airports “due to the lack of immigration and counternarcotics personnel.”

By thehindu.com

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, sitting in a wheelchair and wearing a gas mask, is rescued from a hospital where he was holed up by protesting police in Quito, Ecuador.

A huge mudslide first thought to have buried hundreds of people has left only 11 missing and there are no confirmed dead, authorities said Tuesday night, backing off earlier predictions of a major catastrophe in Mexico’s rain-soaked southern state of Oaxaca.

Federal Interior Minister Francisco Blake and Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruiz both confirmed the drastically reduced toll from the slide that hit the town of Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec early Tuesday.

“So far no one is confirmed dead, only 11 missing who we hope … will be found,” Mr. Ruiz told The Associated Press.

Initial reports from Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec, a rural mountain town 600 kilometres southeast of Mexico City, said a hillside collapsed on hundreds of sleeping residents after several days of heavy rains in the aftermath of a hurricane and tropical storm that hit Mexico and Central America.

Civil protection authorities first reported seven people killed and at least 100 missing, but Mr. Ruiz later reported casualties as four dead and 12 missing.

Jose Alfredo Garcia, spokesman for the Interior Department, told the AP that the initial reports were based on the number of homes hit by the mudslide, but at the time no federal or state officials had reached the site to check the estimates.

Communications with the town were difficult after the pre-dawn slide. Soldiers and civil protection and Red Cross workers couldn’t reach the area for nearly 10 hours because mud and rocks blocked roads and a bridge was damaged, while bad weather prevented helicopters from being used.

President Felipe Calderon reported on his Twitter account Tuesday afternoon that an army commander and 30 soldiers had reached the town by foot and that there was a lot of damage, but “perhaps not of the magnitude initially reported.”

Donato Vargas, an official in Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec reached by a satellite telephone, had said as many as 300 homes were believed to buried, and residents who made it out early in the morning said they had no success digging out neighbours.

“We have been using a backhoe but there is a lot of mud. We can’t even see the homes, we can’t hear shouts, we can’t hear anything,” Mr. Vargas said.

Mr. Vargas said the slide dragged houses packed with sleeping families some 400 metres down the hillside along with cars, livestock and light poles.

“We were all sleeping and all I heard was a loud noise and when I left the house I saw that the hill had fallen,” Mr. Vargas said. “We were left without electricity, without telephone and we couldn’t help them. There was no way to move the mud.”

One person was reported killed in a mudslide in another Oaxaca community, Villa Hidalgo, and 30 people were killed Monday in a slide in Colombia. Heavy rains, including some delivered by the remnants of Hurricane Karl and then Tropical Storm Matthew, also have produced deadly floods in southern Mexico and Central America.

Oaxaca Civil Protection operations co-ordinator Luis Marin said the state had seen three days straight of intense rain. The state government warned residents south of the city of Oaxaca of flooding from overflowing rivers and opened shelters in other parts of the state.

Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec, which had 9,000 residents in 2005 according to Mexican census data, is a community high in the Sierra Norte mountains known for maintaining its indigenous culture, especially its music. Residents speak the native language, Mixe, and its youth orchestra plays throughout Mexico.

Mr. Vargas said a second hill threatened to give way in another part of town.

“We are in a serious risk situation,” he said. “In all of our neighbourhoods there are houses and roads cracked and about to fall.”

Huge swaths of riverside communities in southern Mexico were still under water Tuesday – flooding exacerbated by the passage of Karl and Matthew. Before Tuesday’s landslides, at least 15 deaths in Mexico were blamed on the hurricane.

In Honduras, authorities said four people, including a child, drowned in rivers and creeks swollen by Tropical Storm Matthew. The National Emergencies Commission said Tuesday that three adults died in the town of El Oregano and a 10-year-old child in the Caribbean coast town of La Lima.

In Colombia, about 30 people were killed Monday by a landslide northwest of Bogota, the capital. Many were changing from one bus to another because a mountain road was blocked, but the residents of five houses also were buried, rescue officials said.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos visited the scene Tuesday between the towns of Giraldo and Canasgordas in Antioquia state, northwest of Bogota. “The situation is very difficult,” he told reporters as rescue teams with sniffer dogs probed tons of earth.

Witnesses described a roar as first rocks and then earth swept over the road Monday afternoon. Amateur video shows the slide bearing down and scouring away the houses.

Heavy rains in recent weeks across Colombia have triggered flooding that has claimed at least 74 lives.

By theglobeandmail.com

People carry the body of a landslide victim as another body lies in the bed of a home that collapsed in Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec in Oaxaca state, Mexico, Wednesday Sept. 29, 2010. A hillside collapsed on the town in the rain-soaked southern state of Oaxaca.

• Drone attacks intercept militants based in Pakistan

• Western intelligence agencies confirm plot fears

A plot to launch “commando-style” attacks on Britain, France, and Germany has been intercepted and foiled by drone attacks on militants based in Pakistan, security and intelligence sources said last night.

The plan for suicidal onslaughts similar to the 2008 atrocity in Mumbai – where 166 people were killed in a series of gun and grenade assaults – was disrupted after a combined operation involving US, UK, French and German intelligence agencies, officials said.

British security and intelligence sources, who have been concerned for some time about the possibility of a Mumbai-style attack in Europe, confirmed that they believed a plot was being hatched from Pakistan.

The increased rate of coordinated US drone raids along the border with Afghanistan is believed to be a response to intelligence gathered about the plot. Security sources insisted that attacks in Europe were not imminent.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris, however, has been evacuated twice because of a bomb scare in the past two weeks, a precaution that may have been prompted by the intelligence.

No further evidence of such a plot was provided. Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, earlier this month spoke publicly about the continuing threat of terror attacks in the UK. In his speech, he suggested that around 50% of the plots identified had links to Pakistan – a decline on previous estimates that suggested the figure was nearer 75%.

The terror group behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks was the outlawed, Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba.

In the aftermath of the attack western intelligence agencies gained access to computers seized from the Islamist group which listed other potential targets outside the Indian subcontinent for commando-style terror strikes.

Nine of the gunmen were killed – but a lone survivor gave Indian investigators a full confession that the assault was planned in Pakistan by Lashkar, a militant group that originally began an armed campaign against the Indian army in Kashmir.

US military briefings suggested the latest missile attacks in Pakistan had been coordinated by the CIA and were an unusual example of using drones to pre-empt possible terror plots.

“There are some pretty notable threat streams,” one US military official told the Wall Street Journal, adding that the significance of the threats is still being assessed by counterterrorism experts.

The CIA is believed to have launched at least 20 drone strikes this month in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the region bordering Afghanistan That is the highest monthly total in the past six years, according tofigures from the New America Foundation think tank which monitors drone operations.

Four people were reported killed in the latest raid on Monday by US Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that are operated remotely out of air force bases in the US. A senior al-Qaida leader was among one of those killed in drone raids, Pakistani and US officials said yesterday.

There has also been speculation that some of the attacks may be targeted against the Islamist Haqqani network, a group that has not previously operated outside the region.

The group controls the area in north-western Pakistan where intelligence officials suspect Osama bin Laden may be hiding.

American officials declined to comment on specific plots in Europe or elsewhere but acknowledged that targeted drone strikes in Pakistan were meant to disrupt militant networks planning attacks.

“It shouldn’t surprise anyone that links between plots and those who are orchestrating them lead to decisive American action,” a US official told Reuters.

“The terrorists who are involved are, as everyone should expect, going to be targets. That’s the whole point of all of this.”

By guardian.co.uk

One hundred and sixty-six people were killed in a series of gun and grenade assaults in Mumbai in 2008. Photograph: EPA

Pirates released a Greek-operated cargo ship with a crew of 12 Ukrainians aboard that was hijacked off Somalia over the weekend, the ship’s operator says.

“Yesterday night, the captain contacted us,” said George Tripakis, managing director of TDM Carrier, the Athens-based operator of the cargo ship MG Lugela.

“He informed us that everybody is OK, alive, the pirates not on board, and the vessel in proceeding to Bombay (Mumbai, India).” Pirates attacked the vessel on Saturday some 900 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia, after it left the Gulf of Aden, the Brussels-based the European Union NAVFOR command said.

The ship altered course a short time later and headed for the Somali coast, NAVFOR said, No information was immediately available concerning the circumstances of the release of the Panama-flagged ship.

The ship had left the Egyptian port of Alexandria and was heading to Mauritius carrying steel bars and cable, the owners said. The ship has since its release been ordered to change course for Mumbai to undergo an examination.

“We would like to check the vessel,” in the Indian port, Tripakis said.

Foreign naval powers have deployed dozens of warships since 2008 in a bid to secure the Gulf, a crucial maritime route leading to the Suez Canal through which tens of thousands of merchant vessels transit each year.

But pirates have gradually extended their area of operations, seizing ships as far east as the Maldives’ territorial waters and as far south as the Canal of Mozambique.

Naval missions, including the European Union’s Atalanta deployment, have boasted success in curbing attacks but the number of hijacked ships and detained seafarers remains at one of its highest levels since Somali piracy surged in 2007.

By timeslive.co.za

A ship is docked outside the container terminal at the southern Yemeni port of Aden

Swedish authorities who released a passenger taken into custody after a plane made an emergency landing are trying to find a caller who tipped off police that a man onboard had explosives — an assertion that proved untrue.

The plane — which had 273 people aboard and was flying from Canada to Pakistan — landed Saturday morning after the phone call, authorities said.

The man, in his late 20s, was confronted by authorities in a “very nondramatic fashion” as all passengers filed off the plane and was cooperative, said Stockholm Police spokesman Kjell Lindgren.

“He said that he doesn’t understand anything and that he has no idea what this is all about,” Lindgren said. “He also said that he could not understand why he had been the subject of these accusations.”

After several hours, the Swedish Prosecution Authority issued a statement saying, “The on-call prosecutor has decided not to arrest the man who has been held suspected of bringing explosives onto an airplane. The suspicions against this man are not strong enough to formally arrest him and he is therefore free to leave Sweden.”

The plane was allowed to continue to Pakistan later Saturday.

Lindgren initially said the man was suspected of “preparation of aviation sabotage,” though a search of the aircraft and the individuals yielded no evidence of explosives.

Pakistan International Airlines Flight 782 was heading from Toronto, Canada, to Karachi, Pakistan, when it landed because of “security reasons,” said Sultan Hassan, an airline spokesman.

The plane landed at Arlanda airport in Stockholm, Sweden, at 7:30 a.m. (1:30 a.m. ET) Saturday after a woman calling from a pay phone in Canada tipped off police that a man on the plane had explosives, police spokesman Janne Hedlund said.

Canadian authorities contacted the plane while it was in Swedish airspace, Hedlund said.

The man is from Pakistan and has a Canadian passport, Hedlund said.

The investigation is still ongoing, but is now focused on the caller in Canada, Lindgren said.

By cnn.com

Sept. 25: Two anti-terrorist policemen, center, secure one of the passengers as a Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 777 is evacuated at Stockholm Arlanda International airport. The aircraft was en route from Toronto to Karachi, when Canadian authorities received a tip-off that a passenger could be carrying explosives and the plane was diverted to Stockholm. Swedish police detained a man described as a Canadian citizen of Pakistani origin aboard the plane, but a bomb squad that searched the plane found nothing suspicious on board.

Tropical Storm Matthew made landfall over Nicaragua Friday afternoon and pushed through to Honduras, bringing with it a threat of heavy rain, flash floods and mudslides.

The weather system was centered about 80 miles (130 kilometers) west of the Nicaraguan town of Cabo Gracis a Dios Friday evening and was heading west at 15 mph (24 kph). Its maximum sustained winds had quickened slightly to 50 mph (85 kph), according to the Miami, Florida-based National Hurricane Center.

The governments of Nicaragua and Honduras dropped a hurricane watch they had issued earlier for parts of their countries. Tropical storm warnings remained in effect, as did a tropical storm watch for the coast of Belize, the Hurricane Center said.

The weather system could dump between 6 and 10 inches of rain over portions of Nicaragua and Honduras, with up to 15 inches falling in isolated areas, forecasters said. Both those countries are mountainous and have in the past suffered from treacherous rain-triggered mudslides.

“Torrential rains will be the biggest threat for the next few days,” the Hurricane Center said.

Track-prediction maps indicate that Matthew, the 13th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, will continue westward over the next 48 hours or so, taking it across Honduras and into Belize and Guatemala.

Forecasters say the storm could weaken and become a broad area of low pressure by Sunday.

It could regain strength once it moves back over warm Gulf of Mexico waters and head north toward the United States.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Lisa strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane, the center said, becoming the seventh hurricane of the season.

As of 7 p.m. ET, the center of Lisa was about 385 miles (615 kilometers) northwest of the Cape Verde Islands and was heading north in the Atlantic Ocean. The storm’s maximum sustained winds had quickened to 75 mph (120 kph).

There were no watches or warnings in effect associated with Lisa. The storm could continue to strengthen in the coming day, the Hurricane Center said, before weakening by late Saturday as it heads out over cooler Atlantic waters.

By the CNN Wire Staff

Tropical Storm Matthew could linger for days over Central America with torrential rains.

President Obama called on fellow world leaders Thursday to back up his efforts to help forge peace in the Middle East, and he challenged Iran to meet its international obligations to negotiate the terms of its nuclear program.

“The door remains open to diplomacy should Iran decide to walk through it,” Obama told leaders in his second annual address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. “But the Iranian government must demonstrate a clear and credible commitment and confirm to the world the peaceful intent of its nuclear program.”

So far, efforts to engage Iran have failed, leading to the toughest set of sanctions ever against the country. “Iran must be held accountable,” Obama said.

In his own speech before the assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took to the podium to propagandize about capitalism and the 9/11 attacks. A host of diplomats walked out of the room when he said the United States either orchestrated the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 in order to boost the economy or at least supported the attacks as a way to strengthen Israel.

THE OVAL: Israel seats empty for Obama speech

U.N. SPEECH: U.S. walks out on Ahmadinejad

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Israel’s seats in the chamber already were empty. The diplomats were absent all day, observing the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

Outside the U.N. complex, Iranian-American protesters carried signs denouncing Ahmadinejad, the adultery stonings imposed in Iran and the exile of those who support democracy.

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican who was in office on 9/11, told the crowd that “your goals are our goals. They are the goals of all democratic people. You want to see freedom of religion … of the press.”

None of the Iranian-American protesters would give their names, expressing concern that their relatives in Iran would be sought out and punished.

“It’s a shameful day for New York, a shameful day for the USA,” said retired Swedish teacher Osborn Hommstramd, who carried two signs, one reading “Iran hangs children” and the other, “Iran stones their women.”

Obama will take his message directly to the Iranian people in an interview today with BBC Persia, the White House announced after his U.N. speech.

Obama will “build on the same message that he’s delivered repeatedly over the last 20 months, including today, which is that we seek a better relationship with the people of Iran,” national security aide Ben Rhodes said.

In addition to pressuring Iran’s leaders, Obama called on Israel to tamp down tensions in the Middle East by extending its moratorium on building new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and to embrace the notion of a Palestinian state. He also called on Arabs to “stop trying to tear Israel down” and reaffirmed U.S. support for Israel.

“It should be clear to all that efforts to chip away at Israel’s legitimacy will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the United States,” Obama said.

Referring to the willingness of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, to join a fresh round of peace negotiations with Israel, Obama said, “Make no mistake: The courage of a man like President Abbas — who stands up for his people in front of the world — is far greater than those who fire rockets at innocent women and children.”

By usatoday.com

"The door remains open to diplomacy should Iran decide to walk through it," said President Obama during his U.N. address Thursday.

For the last several years, one big theme has dominated talk of the future of Asia: as China rises, its neighbors are being inevitably drawn into its orbit, currying favor with the region’s new hegemonic power.

The presumed loser, of course, is the United States, whose wealth and influence is being spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and whose economic troubles have eroded its standing in a more dynamic Asia.

But rising frictions between China and its neighbors in recent weeks over security issues have handed the United States an opportunity to reassert itself — one the Obama administration has been keen to take advantage of.

Washington is leaping into the middle of heated territorial disputes between China and Southeast Asian nations despite stern Chinese warnings that it mind its own business. The United States is carrying out naval exercises with South Korea in order to help Seoul rebuff threats from North Korea even though China is denouncing those exercises, saying that they intrude on areas where the Chinese military operates.

Meanwhile, China’s increasingly tense standoff with Japan over a Chinese fishing trawler captured by Japanese ships in disputed waters is pushing Japan back under the American security umbrella.

The arena for these struggles is shifting this week to a summit meeting of world leaders at the United Nations. Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, has refused to meet with his Japanese counterpart, Naoto Kan, and on Tuesday he threatened Japan with “further action” if it did not unconditionally release the fishing captain.

On Friday, President Obama is expected to meet with Southeast Asian leaders and promise that the United States is willing to help them peacefully settle South China Sea territorial disputes with China.

“The U.S. has been smart,” said Carlyle A. Thayer, a professor at the Australian Defense Force Academy who studies security issues in Asia. “It has done well by coming to the assistance of countries in the region.”

“All across the board, China is seeing the atmospherics change tremendously,” he added. “The idea of the China threat, thanks to its own efforts, is being revived.”

Asserting Chinese sovereignty over borderlands in contention — everywhere from Tibet to Taiwan to the South China Sea — has long been the top priority for Chinese nationalists, an obsession that overrides all other concerns. But this complicates China’s attempts to present the country’s rise as a boon for the whole region and creates wedges between China and its neighbors.

Nothing underscores that better than the escalating diplomatic conflict between China and Japan over the detention of the Chinese fishing captain, Zhan Qixiong, by the Japanese authorities, who say the captain rammed two Japanese vessels around the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. The islands are administered by Japan but claimed by both Japan and China.

The current dispute may strengthen the military alliance between the United States and Japan, as did an incident last April when a Chinese helicopter buzzed a Japanese destroyer. Such confrontations tend to remind Japanese officials, who have suggested that they need to refocus their foreign policy on China instead of America, that they rely on the United States to balance an unpredictable China, analysts say.

“Japan will have no choice but to further go into America’s arms, to further beef up the U.S.-Japan alliance and its military power,” said Huang Jing, a scholar of the Chinese military at the National University of Singapore.

In July, Southeast Asian nations, particularly Vietnam, applauded when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the United States was willing to help mediate a solution to disputes that those nations had with China over the South China Sea, which is rich in oil, natural gas and fish. China insists on dealing with Southeast Asian nations one on one, but Mrs. Clinton said the United States supported multilateral talks. Freedom of navigation in the sea is an American national interest, she said.

President Obama meets on Friday with leaders from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean. The Associated Press reported that the participants would issue a joint statement opposing the “use or threat of force by any claimant attempting to enforce disputed claims in the South China Sea.” The statement is clearly aimed at China, which has seized Vietnamese fishing vessels in recent years and detained their crews.

On Tuesday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, criticized any attempt at mediation by the United States. “We firmly oppose any country having nothing to do with the South China Sea issue getting involved in the dispute,” she said at a news conference in Beijing.

China has also been objecting to American plans to hold military exercises with South Korea in the Yellow Sea, which China claims as its exclusive military operations zone. The United States and South Korea want to send a stern message to North Korea over what Seoul says was the torpedoing last March of a South Korean warship by a North Korean submarine. China’s belligerence only serves to reinforce South Korea’s dependence on the American military.

American officials are increasingly concerned about the modernization of the Chinese Navy and its long-range abilities. In March, a Chinese official told White House officials that the South China Sea was part of China’s “core interest” of sovereignty, similar to Tibet and Taiwan, an American official said in an interview after the visit. American officials also object to China’s telling foreign oil companies in recent years not to work with Vietnam on developing oil fields in the South China Sea.

Some Chinese military leaders and analysts see an American effort to contain China. Feng Zhaokui, a Japan scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in an article on Tuesday in the Global Times, a populist newspaper, that the United States was trying to “nurture a coalition against China.”

In August, Rear Adm. Yang Yi wrote an editorial for the PLA Daily, published by the Chinese Army, in which he said that on the one hand, Washington “wants China to play a role in regional security issues.”

“On the other hand,” he continued, “it is engaging in an increasingly tight encirclement of China and is constantly challenging China’s core interests.”

Asian countries suspicious of Chinese intentions see Washington as a natural ally. In April, the incident involving the Chinese helicopter and Japanese destroyer spooked many in Japan, making them feel vulnerable at a time when Yukio Hatoyama, then the prime minister, had angered Washington with his pledges to relocate a Marine Corps air base away from Okinawa.

His successor, Mr. Kan, has sought to smooth out ties with Washington and has emphasized that the alliance is the cornerstone of Japanese foreign policy.

“Insecurity about China’s presence has served as a wake-up call on the importance of the alliance,” said Fumiaki Kubo, a professor of public policy at the University of Tokyo.

By nytimes.com

Premier Wen Jiabao of China spoke about tensions with Japan during a meeting with representatives of Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans on Tuesday in New York.

Al-Qaida’s North Africa branch claimed responsibility in an audio message broadcast Tuesday for kidnapping five French nationals that disappeared in the deserts of Niger last week.

Seven foreign workers were kidnapped from a uranium mine operated by the French company Areva in Niger Thursday and were last seen heading toward the neighboring countries of Mali and Algeria with about 30 captors before vanishing in the vast desert.

“The men were able to attack the mine of Arlit in Niger which is considered one the most important sources of uranium that France has been stealing from for decades,” said the excerpt purported to be from al-Qaida in the North Africa that was broadcast on Al-Jazeera news channel.

The message said fighters from the group overcame security in the area and kidnapped “five French nuclear experts” and said it would issue its demands to the French government “shortly.”

“We also warn them from doing anything stupid,” it added.

In July, AQIM said it executed a 78-year-old French aid worker it had taken hostage three months before, saying the killing was in retaliation for the deaths of six al-Qaida members in a French-backed military operation against the group.

There was no way to authenticate the message, but in the past al-Qaida and its affiliates have claimed responsibility for operations through messages sent to Al-Jazeera.

Those abducted from Arlit mining town include five French nationals, one from Togo and one from Madagascar. One of the men taken worked for Areva, along with his wife, and the others were employees of a subcontractor called Satom.

Al-Qaida’s affiliate in North Africa operates in the vast desert region from Mauritania to Chad. The group grew out of an Algerian insurgency movement that officially joined with the terrorist network in 2006.

Areva, a leading global nuclear manufacturer, gets much of its uranium from Niger. Aid groups say almost half of Niger’s population desperately needs food and up to one in six children suffers from acute malnutrition.

By kansascity.com

This undated photo provided by French nuclear manufacturer Areva shows the uranium mine of Arlit, northern Niger. French soldiers operating out of a hotel in Niger's capital and using reconnaissance flights over the Sahara searched Monday Sept. 20, 2010 for seven foreign workers who were kidnapped near a French-operated uranium mine and seemingly swallowed by the vast desert. Armed assailants kidnapped last week seven people near the uranium mining town of Arlit, in northern Niger.

China suspended high-level exchanges with Japan on Sunday and promised tough countermeasures after a Japanese court extended the detention of a Chinese captain whose trawler collided with two Japanese coastguard ships.

The spat between Asia’s two largest economies has flared since Japan arrested the captain, accusing him of deliberately striking a patrol ship and obstructing public officers near uninhabited islets in the East China Sea claimed by both sides.

“China demands that Japan immediately release the captain without any preconditions,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement on the ministry’s website (www.mfa.gov.cn), repeating that Beijing viewed the detention as illegal and invalid.

“If Japan acts willfully despite advice to the contrary and insists on making one mistake after another, the Chinese side will take strong countermeasures, and all the consequences should be borne by the Japanese side,” Ma said.

Japan’s decision has “seriously damaged Sino-Japan bilateral exchanges,” Chinese state television added, reading out a separate response from the Foreign Ministry.

China has suspended ministerial and provincial-level bilateral exchanges with Japan, halted talks on increasing flights between the two countries and postponed a meeting about coal with Japan, the report said.

Xinhua news agency added that Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Guangya had made “solemn representations” to the Japanese ambassador, Uichiro Niwa, and expressed “strong indignation” over the captain’s detention.

Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that the trawler captain’s detention, which had been due to expire on Sunday, had been extended until September 29.

The Japanese court could not be reached for comment.

Sino-Japanese ties have long been plagued by feuds over wartime history and rivalry over territory, resources and military intentions, although they had improved after a chill in 2001-2006, as deep economic ties raise the risk from rows.

GAS FIELD FEUD

Japan urged calm and said the captain’s case would be dealt with appropriately according to its domestic laws.

“Regarding individual issues, what is needed is to respond calmly without becoming emotional,” said Noriyuki Shikata, a spokesman for the Japanese prime minister’s office.

“Japan’s basic stance is that we should seek to create cooperative Sino-Japanese ties based on strategic, mutually beneficial relations,” he told Reuters by telephone.

Takeshi Matsunaga, assistant press secretary for Japan’s foreign ministry, said the unilateral steps that China has taken are “regrettable.”

The Chinese captain, Zhan Qixiong, has remained in custody after a Japanese court approved for the first time on September 10 an extension of his detention. Prosecutors can hold him for up to a total of 20 days while deciding whether to take legal action.

The latest feud over the uninhabited isles — called the Diaoyu islands in China and the Senkaku islands in Japan — has stirred mutual distrust over sovereignty and control of potentially valuable oil and gas reserves.

China has repeatedly demanded Japan free the captain and has shown its anger by cancelling planned talks with Japan over natural gas reserves.

On Saturday, about a hundred protesters in several Chinese cities demanded Japan free the boat captain. Police presence was still heavy at the Japanese embassy in Beijing on Sunday but there were no signs of protests.

The Nikkei business daily reported earlier on Sunday that Japan may start drilling near a gas field in disputed waters of the East China Sea if China does the same.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his foreign minister said Tokyo will take “countervailing steps” if China starts drilling at the Chunxiao gas field to which Beijing recently sent equipment, Nikkei said, adding that Tokyo had looked into possibly taking the case to the international maritime court.

The two countries are at odds over China’s exploration for natural gas in the East China Sea, while Beijing is also involved in territorial feuds with southeast Asian nations in the South China Sea over an area rich in energy and key to shipping.

The Sino-Japanese row centers on where the boundary between the two sides’ exclusive maritime economic zones falls. In 2008, the two countries agreed in principle to solve the feud by jointly developing gas fields.

Estimated net known reserves in the disputed fields are a modest 92 million barrels of oil equivalent, but both sides have pursued the issue because there may be larger hidden reserves.

By Ben Blanchard and Linda Sieg

A Chinese fishing boat is inspected by Japan Coast Guard crew members after it collided with two Japanese coast guard vessels near the disputed islands in the East China Sea, known as the Senkaku isles in Japan and Diaoyu in China, September 7, 2010. Japanese authorities say the Chinese vessel was fishing illegally in their waters and that the collision appeared to have happened while Japanese Coast Guards were chasing the vessel out.