Gunmen storm Philippine city jail; 3 killed

Manila: Dozens of black-clad gunmen armed with grenades and bombs stormed a southern Philippine jail trying to free a detained comrade, but they were repulsed by police in a chaotic night battle that killed three people, officials said on Monday.

Fifteen persons were wounded, most of them civilians caught in the firefight on Sunday outside Kidapawan’s city hall compound and along a key commercial road. Military and police officials blamed former members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, but a spokesman for the Muslim rebel group denied the claim.

South Yemen clashes raise tensions, threaten vote

Sanaa: Security forces and armed southern separatists on Monday clashed in Yemen’s port city of Aden, witnesses said, as rising tensions in the country’s south threatened to disrupt Tuesday’s presidential vote. Troop reinforcements with dozens of armoured vehicles arrived in Aden from the capital Sanaa late on Sunday to reassure voters after hardline members of the separatist Southern Movement threatened violence on election day, security officials said.

Witnesses said Government troops and armed separatists exchanged fire on Monday in the Mansoura neighbourhood of Aden, a stronghold of the movement, where a mass protest against the poll was expected later in the day.

Egypt: candidates can register from March 10

Cairo: Candidates seeking to contest the first post-Hosni Mubarak era Egyptian presidential polls can register themselves from March 10, a committee overseeing the votes has said, even as no final polling dates have been announced. Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court said that the nomination period for presidential candidates will open March 10 and close on April 8.

Farouk Soltan, the head of Egypt’s highest court and the committee chief, said counting expatriate votes for the presidential election would be harder than during the parliamentary election since the vote would happen on one day, rather than over nearly three months.

EX-East German rights activist to be German Prez

Berlin: Former East German civil rights activist and protestant pastor Joachim Gauck has been nominated as a consensus candidate to become Germany’s next President, two days after the resignation of Christian Wulff over allegations of corruption. Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday night nominated Gauck as the joint candidate of her centre-right coalition and the two main opposition parties for the largely ceremonial post. Gauck had lost the presidential race as the opposition candidate against Wulff 20 months ago.

S Korea to hold firing drill despite N Korea threat

Seoul: South Korean troops will on Monday hold a live-fire artillery exercise near the disputed Yellow Sea border with North Korea despite the North’s threats of retaliation, officials said. Military officials said the “routine” drill, their second this year, would involve self-propelled howitzers, Vulcan cannon, mortars and Cobra attack helicopters. The defence ministry gave no start time for the exercise, saying it would depend on the weather. It would last one to two hours.

‘Algeria finds missiles near LibyaN border’

Algiers: Algeria has uncovered a large cache of weapons believed to originate from Libya, including dozens of shoulder-held missiles that can be used to shoot down airliners, newspapers said on Monday. According to the French-speaking El Watan, 15 SA-24 and 28 SAM-7

Russian-made man-portable surface-to-air missiles were found at a location in the southern desert called In Amenas. The cache, 43 kilometres from the Libyan border, also included large amounts of ammunition. The weapons were buried in the sand and discovered at an unspecified date thanks to information provided by smugglers operating in the area.

Myanmar lifts campaign restrictions

Yangon: Myanmar election authorities on Monday lifted restrictions on political campaigning in an unusually swift response to complaints by pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party. The National League for Democracy said earlier in the day that the restrictions risked making upcoming by-elections unfair.

The state Union Election Commission's decision to lift all restrictions was unusual. Bureaucratic wheels grind slowly even where there are no political hurdles in the country where an elected, nominally civilian government took office almost a year ago after a half-century of military rule.

Three Italian soldiers killed in Afghan car crash

Rome: Three Italian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Monday when their armoured jeep overturned in a river in Herat province as it raced to the rescue of another unit, Italy’s defence ministry said. The Italian-made VTLM Lince vehicle “flipped over in the river, trapping the soldiers inside,” read the statement.

It said the accident happened some 20 kilometres southwest of Shindand in western Afghanistan. “The soldiers, all of them based in Shindand, had been trying to rescue another unit “blocked by particularly adverse weather conditions.”