Mr. Ahmed was speaking four days after al Shabaab pulled most of its forces out of the Somali capital amid signs of deepening rifts among its senior commanders.
“As long as they are in Somali territory, even an inch, I will not rest,” Mr. Ahmed told a news conference after meeting Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete in Dar es Salaam. “Our determination is to clear them out,” he said.

Some regional allies have criticized Mr. Ahmed’s failure to quash the insurgency and push through a new constitution designed to better spread political power among the country’s powerful clans and regions.

Al Shabaab’s four-year rebellion is the latest chapter in Somalia’s two-decade long civil conflict, sparked by the overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. The chaos on land has allowed piracy to flourish off the Horn of Africa’s shores.

Al Shabaab said its retreat from Mogadishu was a tactical move, raising fears it will increasingly resort to al Qaeda-inspired attacks such as suicide bombings and assassinations.

A series of military offensives against al Shabaab in Mogadishu this year and a drying up of “taxes” extorted from traders in the capital and farmers in rural areas affected by drought have deepened the divisions among the rebel commanders.

One faction prefers a more nationalist Somali agenda and wants to impose a harsh Islamic programme on the nation. Another more international wing aims to promote Jihad (holy war) and forge closer ties with regional al Qaeda cells.

By pulling out of Mogadishu, the rebels may hope to spread thin the 9,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force that is propping up Ahmed’s Western-backed administration.

“There is no doubt we need more troops (peacekeepers),” said Mr. Ahmed.

The United Nations has authorized a task force of up to 12,000 soldiers.

When asked whether political negotiations with moderate groups within al Shabaab were an option, Mr. Ahmed said: “Our understanding is that al Shabaab … are not interested in peace, but we will pursue that path if the opportunity arises.”

Rashid Abdi, a Somalia analyst with the International Crisis Group, said al Shabaab was now too divided for any meaningful negotiations to take place.

Tanzania announced on Wednesday it would donate 300 tonnes of maize to Somalia.

Saleh has already agreed to the plan brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) three times, only to back out of it at the last minute. His latest gesture followed prodding to hand over power by the United States, which fears that Yemen’s political vacuum could strengthen the local wing of al Qaeda.

The official said Saleh had met members of Yemen’s ruling party in Riyadh, where he has been receiving medical treatment since being badly injured in an assassination attempt in June.

“He agreed with them to explore ways of restarting the GCC initiative and of creating a mechanism that will ensure a peaceful transfer of power,” the official told Reuters.

Saleh had agreed to work with the main opposition parties, other Yemeni groups, international bodies and concerned countries to finds ways to end the crisis, the official said.

Yemen has been sliding toward civil war during protests demanding Saleh’s overthrow since January. The transition plan brokered by the six-nation GCC has been moribund since he last avoided signing it in May.

The Riyadh meeting was attended by Yemen’s prime minister — who was also wounded in the bomb attack that forced Saleh to seek treatment in the Saudi capital — the head of a security agency and other senior loyalists, the official said.

Saleh emerged Sunday from the Riyadh hospital where he had been receiving treatment for severe burns and other injuries. He renewed a promise to return home even though the United States, which had long made Saleh a cornerstone of its counterterrorism policy, urged him not to.

U.S. diplomats relayed that message to Saleh in Riyadh, diplomatic sources said Tuesday.

Soon after, the United Nations Security Council called for “an inclusive, orderly and Yemeni-led process of political transition that meets the needs and aspirations of the Yemeni people for change.”

Jamal Benomar, the Yemen envoy of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, was expected in Sanaa soon, the Yemeni official said following the meeting of Saleh’s close advisers.

As the crisis over Saleh’s fate has paralyzed Yemen, longstanding conflicts with Islamists have flared up in the country’s south. Militants have seized parts of one southern province, with fighting forcing 90,000 inhabitants to flee.

Saleh’s last refusal sign the GCC plan provoked weeks of fighting with a branch of the al Hashed tribal confederation which left parts of the capital Sanaa in ruins, and led to the assassination attempt.

Forces loyal to Saleh have skirmished in recent days with the other party to those battles, al Hashed chieftain Sadeq al-Ahmar near the latter’s compound in Sanaa, sparking fears of a renewed bout of the fighting that raged there in May.

Three Asian men, two of them brothers aged 25 and 21, died in Birmingham after they were hit by a car. They were reportedly part of a vigilante group guarding the neighbourhood.

Cameron chaired a crisis meet of COBRA and promised a much tougher crackdown. He said the groups indulging in violence are sick and said that more arrests were being made to curb violence. Over 750 people have so far been arrested, Cameron added.

Unrest was reported in Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Leicester, West Bromwich, Nottingham and Birmingham with shops being looted and set alight.

Attackers set a derelict art college on fire in Gloucester while a Nottingham police station was fire-bombed by almost thirty to forty men.

The deployment of 16,000 police officers might have led to relative calm in London, but neighbouring cities continue to smoulder.

Vigilante groups

Indians in the riot-affected areas in London are starting to set up their own neighbourhood vigilante groups to protect their stores and places of worship.

Hundreds of Sikhs gathered outside their gurdwara in Southall following rumours that it might be on the looters’ hit list. Residents expressed dissatisfaction with the police’s inability to stop widespread looting and arson.

Many Asian groups chased would-be looters out of their neighbourhoods in east London while many shop keepers took to the streets to deter looters. Shopkeepers found little solace in Cameron’s statement that he was determined to see justice done.

Shocking video

As Britain burns, a shocking video emerged of thugs looting an injured teenager. The video from an unspecified location shows a complete lack of police presence in a riot-hit area and the ease with which the thugs operated.

The teenager is shown being assisted by people when they spot him dazed and injured on the ground. But seconds after, the looters start rifling through his backpack.

A man, who is seen picking items from the teenager’s bag, wanders off with his loot. The teenager appears largely unaware that he is being robbed until it is too late, where he swats at one of the robbers. It is unclear in which part of Britain the robbery took place or when exactly it happene

They come under fire. The man dies.

Photographer Andre Liohn’s images of the grim scene provide insight into the risky conditions under which medical personnel in conflict zones operate. It used to be that a red cross on a vehicle or building meant protection. But not anymore.

Assaults on medical personnel and facilities have become all too common, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday in releasing a new report.

“Violence against health-care facilities and personnel must end. It’s a matter of life and death,” said Yves Daccord, the director-general of the organization.

“The human cost is staggering: civilians and fighters often die from their injuries simply because they are prevented from receiving timely medical assistance,” Daccord said.

This came as world powers scurried to find a solution to the five-month-long crisis engulfing the country. At least eight people were killed on Thursday in the ongoing security crackdown on anti-government demonstrators, activists said.

In the latest diplomatic development, U.S. President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan underscored the “urgency of the situation” during a phone call on Thursday, the White House said in a statement.

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“We are, I think, building the — chorus of international condemnation,” she told CBS News. “Rather than us saying it and nobody else following, we think it’s important to lead and have others follow as well.”

Meanwhile, the violence continued. In Saraqib, residents reported hearing heavy gunfire and seeing troops break down doors of local businesses during a search of the city for opposition activists, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

About 200 people had been arrested in Saraqib since troops seized the city earlier in the day, according to the Syrian Observatory group, which cited reports from opposition activists in the city. The identities of the activists were withheld at their request out of concerns for their security.

The site of the latest military action is Idlib province — whence thousands fled their homes in Jisr al-Shugur for Turkey after the Syrian military took control of that town. The operation has raised concerns that thousands may again flee to Turkey to escape the crackdown.

Violence erupted in other towns and amid a growing chorus of international calls for Syria’s government to end its brutal drive on peaceful protesters, the observatory said.

In al-Qusair, at the Syrian-Lebanese border, five people were killed; in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, three people died during raids and some activists’ homes were set afire, the observatory said.

There have been ongoing raids in the city of Daraa and a sit-in in Suwaida, both cities in the south, and heavy gunfire was heard in the Bab Amer neighborhod of the western city of Homs, according to the observatory.

Syrian forces had withdrawn from the center of the western city of Hama after troops laid siege to the city more than a week ago, Syria’s state-run news agency said.

But the observatory said armored personnel carriers and machine guns mounted on vehicles remained in the city and 27 people have been detained.

Seventy-two journalists — including some from the United States and France — toured Hama Wednesday with permission from the government, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported. CNN was not among them; the government has limited access to the country by journalists in recent months.

Scores of people were killed during the siege that coincided with last week’s start of the holy month of Ramadan, according to reports by opposition groups, including the Syrian Observatory and the Local Coordination Committees of Syria — a loose coalition of groups that organize and document protests.

The conflict in Syria erupted five months ago when Syrian forces suppressed protests in the southern city of Daraa. Anti-government fervor caught on nationwide as more protests were met with tougher crackdowns.

By Wednesday, the death toll had reached 2,417 — including more than 2,000 civilians, said the Local Coordination Committees of Syria.

CNN is not able to independently verify accounts of events on the ground or the death tolls.

As for Obama and Erdogan, they “reiterated their deep concern about the Syrian Government’s use of violence against civilians and their belief that the Syrian people’s legitimate demands for a transition to democracy should be met,” the White House said.

“They agreed on the need for an immediate halt of all bloodshed and violence against the Syrian people. They further agreed to closely monitor the actions that the Syrian government is taking, and to consult closely in the days ahead.”

Both the satellite and rocket are currently in good condition, the official media quoted a spokesman of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, as saying.

The 30-transponder satellite will give Pakistan some strategic advantages in military and cross-border propaganda areas besides helping the country meet its communications needs, observers said.

It has been “manufactured exclusively” for Pakistan, the National Space Agency of Pakistan, said recently. It will work on both KU and C bands and controlled by earth stations in Karachi and Lahore, the agency said.

Pakistan is a member of the Beijing headquartered Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization, which is implementing a project sharing of remote sensing data among member states. Other members include Bangladesh and Iran, who will also share date on early warning and mitigating disasters and exploitation of resources in the APSCO circuit. China began assisting Pakistan’s space program after signing a strategic cooperation agreement in 2007.

‘The palace will get a fund of only NRS 30 million,’ Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat said in an interview with the Nepali daily Annapurna Post Friday.

‘That sum too will be taxed.’

After King Gyanendra tried to rule the kingdom by staging a coup in 2005, he increased the royal budget through a decree. During the 15 months of his absolute reign, marked by fiscal mismanagement and arbitrary expenditure, the palace had the power to spend over NRS 6500 million.

After his ascension to the throne in June 2001, King Gyanendra began manipulating the government from October 2002, when he sacked the them prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and installed three successive premiers of his own choice before deciding to head the cabinet himself in 2005.

Between 2002 and early 2006, before he was forced to step down, the king spent NRS 280 million on buying Rolls Royces and Jaguars in a country that is among the poorest in the world.

However, after a public revolt ended his regime in April 2006, the new government that came to power allocated a little over NRS 210 million for the royal family in its budget for 2006-7.

Now the new budget for 2007-8 to be tabled in parliament on July 13 will see still more drastic cuts.

The change comes after the left parties in the ruling right-party coalition, especially the Maoists and the Communist Party of Nepal-Marxist Leninist, exerted great pressure on the government to produce a ‘people’s budget’.

This year, a new constitution came into effect, putting Nepal’s 238-year-old monarchy on hold till the historic election, to be held in November, when voters will choose between the king and a republic.

The new constitution has no function for the king, stripping him of his earlier position as constitutional head of government, and transferring the role to the prime minister.

With the constitution mentioning no role for the king, the budget too has no provisions for the royal family.

The sum that will be allotted for the royals is for the maintenance of the royal palace, to pay power and water bills and other administrative expenses, like staff salaries, finance ministry spokesman Ran Bahadur Shrestha told IANS.

The budget will come as an undesirable birthday gift for the king who celebrates his birthday a week earlier.

As the king turns 61 on July 7, the queen, Komal, is hosting a lavish birthday bash on July 6 to celebrate the ‘diamond’ birthday with a guest list that includes about 900 VVIPs and VIPs.

The long-awaited debut of the vessel, a refitted former Soviet craft, marked a step forward in China’s long-term plan to build a carrier force that can project power into the Asian region, where seas are spanned by busy shipping lanes and thorny territorial disputes.

“Its symbolic significance outweighs its practical significance,” said Ni Lexiong, an expert on Chinese maritime policy at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law.

“We’re already a maritime power, and so we need an appropriate force, whether that’s aircraft carriers or battleships, just like the United States or the British empire did,” he said in a telephone interview.

The carrier “left its shipyard in Dalian Port in northeast Liaoning province on Wednesday morning to start its first sea trial,” said the official Xinhua news agency, describing the trip as a tentative test run for the unfinished ship.

The aircraft carrier, which is about 300 meters (984 feet) long, plowed through fog and sounded its horn three times as it left the dock, Xinhua said on its military news microblog.

Xinhua said that “building a strong navy that is commensurate with China’s rising status is a necessary step and an inevitable choice for the country to safeguard its increasingly globalised national interests.”

Chinese citizens said the carrier launch showed their country deserved more respect from the rest of the world, despite problems it faces at home.

A high-speed train crash last month left many Chinese people bemoaning what they called officials’ reckless hunger for passing technological milestones.

“An aircraft carrier is the mark of major powers,” Pan Chunli, a 29-year-old IT technician in Beijing told Reuters.

“China has grown dramatically. The whole world should take a fresh look at China, viewing it as a rising power that it has the ability to defend its rights and territory.”

Retired Chinese navy Rear Admiral Yin Zhuo told state-run television that his country intended to build an air carrier group, but the task would be long and difficult.

“As for forming a carrier group, I think that will take at least ten years,” he told a Chinese television broadcast on the carrier launch.

PRESTIGE AND POWER

Last month, China confirmed that it was refitting the old, unfinished Soviet carrier hull bought from Ukraine’s government, and sources told Reuters it was also building two of its own carriers.

“China has had a longstanding fascination with the national prestige attached to aircraft carriers, and this first sea trial may be seen as a crucial step toward the goal of achieving great naval power status,” said Chengxin Pan, an expert on China at Deakin University in Australia.

If Beijing is serious about having a viable carrier strike group, however, it will need three carriers, Ashley Townshend at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney told Reuters in an interview before the debut of the vessel.

China would also have to develop support ships and aircraft for any carrier group, Townshend said.

In China’s neighborhood, India and Thailand already have aircraft carriers, and Australia has ordered two multi-purpose carriers. The United States operates 11 carriers.

Before the launch, a Pentagon spokesman played down the likelihood of any immediate leaps from China’s carrier program. U.S. experts on the Chinese navy agreed.

“A newly-wed couple wants a ‘starter home’, a new great power wants a ‘starter carrier’,” Andrew Erickson of the U.S. Naval War College and Gabriel Collins, a security analyst, wrote in a note about the carrier launch

“China’s ‘starter carrier’ is of very limited military utility, and will primarily serve to confer prestige on a rising great power, to help the military master basic procedures, and to project a bit of power,” they wrote.

LONG-STANDING DISPUTES

But the carrier is just one part of China’s naval modernization drive, which has forged ahead while other powers tighten their military budgets to cope with debt woes.

“For many neighbors, it may symbolize something different and more unsettling,” said Pan, the Deakin University lecturer, referring to China’s carrier.

“It is inevitable that neighboring countries will react with some alarm, especially given recent disputes in the South China Sea as well as the maritime incident between China and Japan last year,” he said.

China has been building new submarines, ships and anti-ship ballistic missiles as part of its naval modernization.

The country’s growing reach at sea is triggering regional jitters that have fed into long-standing territorial disputes, and could speed up military expansion across Asia.

In the past year, China has had run-ins at sea with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. The incidents — boat crashes and charges of territorial incursions — have been minor, but the diplomatic fallout often heated.

“They want to assert their dominance in East Asia as well as the Chinese sea and they have very ambitious plans of asserting their claims over some islands,” retired Indian Major General Ashok Mehta, a defense analyst in Delhi, said of China.

“India has lot of catching up to do and the history of India’s catching up is not very impressive,” he said, noting New Delhi’s plan to have three aircraft carriers by 2015.

Last week, Japan warned that China’s naval forces were likely to increase activities around its waters.

But China did not want to rile its neighbors with the carrier debut, said Ni, the Shanghai professor.

“A single, solitary aircraft carrier floating on the sea, without the accompanying forces, doesn’t constitute a battle force,” said Ni. “It would be a sitting duck if you tried to send it out.”

WHAT we’re seeing in London, as looters and rioters run amok and impotent police stand around watching, is the problem of politically correct policing writ large.

It is the triumph of a managerial, bureaucratic process-driven style of policing hatched in the rarefied confines of academia rather than on the harsh reality of the streets.

Every now and then the two meet and you get bloody anarchy. No prizes for guessing who comes off second best.

“It’s absolute bedlam on the street,” one resident of Clapham, interviewed on the BBC, said of Tuesday, the fourth night of rioting.

“People have been openly looting for an hour, two hours, and the police have been ineffectual. They’ve done nothing.”

Did Britain’s police fail in their duty to protect cities against the rioters? Join the debate and comment on Miranda’s blog

Onelia Giarratano, who was trapped in her hair salon in Clapham Junction while a mob smashed its way in and trashed it, told the BBC: “They were mocking us, (saying) ‘look, look, they look scared’.

“Where is the police? I want protection. This is what they’re here for . . . I’m not secure at my workplace. I’m not secure at my home place.

“Will they be there to protect us tonight? They weren’t here to protect us last night.”

She vented her anger on London Mayor Boris Johnson, who had just rushed back to his strife-torn city from a campervan holiday in Canada, leaving behind his wife and four children.

“I was in the salon here when a brick came through the window,” she told him, when he visited her rubble strewn street, “and no one was here to defend me.”

The distinctly underwhelming Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, had also belatedly returned home from his summer holiday in Tuscany, just as the riots spilled into his cultural milieu of Notting Hill, where youths attacked a Michelin-starred restaurant, stealing wallets and jewellery from customers until being beaten back by cooks with rolling pins and knives.

Cameron thundered at a media conference outside 10 Downing Street: “You will face the full force of the law.”

But it was all a bit late for tough words and empty threats. The needless terror that ordinary Londoners and others in Birmingham, Manchester and across the UK have been subjected to is an utter failure of British policing.

The post-apocalyptic scenes of riot police, flames, dogs, megaphones, helicopters, sirens and feral balaclava-clad figures flitting around the ruins of civilisation we have been watching the past four nights from the UK could be from Robocop or The Terminator.

They are a manifestation of an emasculated police force so risk-averse and politically correct it has forgotten its primary purpose is to stop bad guys hurting good guys.

Despite attempts by Leftists such as former London mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone to blame the mayhem on spending cuts, what’s been happening in London is wanton lawlessness unchecked by authority. Excusing it just emboldens the perpetrators.

AS ANGRY victims demanded a more robust security response, the Cameron Government ordered 16,000 police on to the streets on Tuesday night, but declined to give them the tools that effective force requires, and ruled out calling on the army for back-up.

Theresa May, the UK Home Secretary, espoused the British philosophy of failure: “The way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon. The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities.”

Well, I don’t think anyone in those traumatised communities agreed to being bashed unconscious and robbed, or to have their shops looted, destroyed and burned to the ground.

They didn’t consent to their houses being broken into as they cowered inside. They didn’t consent to being forced to strip naked so thugs could steal their clothes.

All this has been done under the watch of useless police, whose culture of impotence for more than a decade has just emboldened the mob.

“Doesn’t matter if the police arrive cos well just chase dem out because as you’ve seen on the news they are NOT ON DIS TING,” as one BlackBerry message, purported to be from the rioters and re-transmitted on Twitter, put it yesterday.

No, the police were not “on Dis ting” at all.

One YouTube video posted on the Anon Ops blog, and titled “Police flee London rioters”, shows a dozen riot police with helmets and puny shields backing very fast down a dark street as a mob of black youths runs at them, throwing bricks and bottles and large planks of wood.

The mob finally tires of the sport and runs away, as whoever is filming from a second-floor apartment swears in astonishment at this show of criminal power.

But you can’t blame the police for retreating. Frontline police are as much victims of the academic policing disease as the shopkeepers and people who have been attacked and robbed.

They have been let down by their commanders.

Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, typified the deskbound managerial mindset of the modern-day police commander: “Police officers are working tirelessly to find those resources and manage their own policing territory,” he told the BBC yesterday.

It’s all about “finding resources” and managing, not arresting offenders and preventing the looting with whatever reasonable force is deemed necessary.

Ironically, Theresa May last week reportedly blocked the appointment of the legendary former New York and Los Angeles police chief, Bill Bratton, from taking the job of Metropolitan Police commissioner. Cameron, sensing a problem with the British model, had “sounded out” Bratton, whose enforcement of zero-tolerance policing slashed crime rates in New York and LA, and whose take-no-prisoners style is sorely needed in the UK.

In Australia, the British model of policing has been in vogue for over a decade in NSW and Victoria.

On a smaller scale, we saw the same phenomenon of impotent policing during the Cronulla, Redfern and Macquarie Fields riots in Sydney. In the hard-scrabble western suburb of Macquarie Fields in 2005, we saw police looking like sitting ducks as youths pelted them with rocks and molotov cocktails, and one officer was knocked unconscious with a plank of wood.

The same thing happened a year earlier in the Redfern riots, after which a NSW parliamentary inquiry declared that the police who had been attacked needed more “cultural awareness training”.

What is the point of spending taxpayer money on police if they can’t protect people from lawlessness, and seem fit only for handing out parking tickets or providing target practice for thugs.

Patek, who had been apprehended by security agencies from Abbottabad in March this year has been sent back to Indonesia after the government of Indonesia requested an extradition.

The decision to handover the alleged Bali Bombing mastermind was made at the request of the Indonesian government.

Being one of the most wanted men in southeast Asia, he had a 1 million dollar bounty on his head.

He has been taken to the Benazair Bhutto airport in Islamabad under tight security, where he will be sent to indonesia through a special plane.

Pakistan government has decided to handover Umar Patek to Indonesia after the negotiations with Indonesian government.

The October 2002 attack in Bali, in which a suicide bomber along with a powerful car bomb killed 202 people, including 26 Britons and 88 Australians.