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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan : Pakistan protested to the U.S.
Pakistani intelligence officials say the U. ambassador Thursday over a deep cross-border missile strike, and a militant group threatened to target foreigners unless the attacks;stop. has staged some 20 missile strikes on Pakistani territory since August, almost all of them aimed at the lawless tribal region along the Afghan border.S. Six suspected insurgents were;killed. But for the first time Wednesday, the missiles targeted militants beyond the tribal areas, deeper inside Pakistan.S.
The strikes have strained relations between the allies, who are fighting al-Qaida and Taliban militants blamed for attacks on U. Al-Qaida leaders Osama bin-Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri are believed to be hiding along the;border. and NATO troops in Afghanistan as well as within Pakistan.S.
Pakistan, which called the attack a “great provocation,” said the U.
The Foreign Ministry summoned U. strikes undermine public support for fighting;insurgents. Ambassador Anne Patterson to protest the strike, the second time she has been called in since;August.S. .

“It was underscored to the U. The foreign secretary stressed the attacks must be stopped, it;added. ambassador that such attacks were a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty,” a ministry statement said.S.
The U.
Also Thursday, militant leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur warned his men would launch suicide attacks on foreigners and government targets around the country unless the raids;stop.
Also Thursday, militant leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur warned his men would launch suicide attacks on foreigners and government targets around the country unless the raids;stop.
“The Pakistani government is clearly involved in these attacks by American spy planes so we will target government interests as well as foreigners,” Bahadur's spokesman, Ahmedullah Ahmedi, told by telephone from an undisclosed;location.
He claimed the group — which is based in the Waziristan tribal area — had “well-trained volunteers.” An Interior Ministry spokesman said the government was not aware of the threat and declined;comment.
Just days ago, NATO and U.S. officers on the Afghan side of the border reported improving cooperation with their Pakistani counterparts in fighting insurgents hiding on, or very close to, the poorly demarcated;border.
And Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani sought to placate Pakistani lawmakers by telling them he expected the raids to stop when President-elect Barack Obama takes;office.
“I think these things are occuring as a result of this transition period,” he said. “I am sure when the government of Sen. Obama is formed, attacks like these will be;controlled.”
Obama has not directly commented on the raids. But his comments on Pakistan before the election were more hawkish than his Republican rival, suggesting Gilani's hopes may be;misplaced.
Gilani also denied speculation that the Pakistan government — which relies heavily on U.S. aid — may have agreed to the missile strikes privately while publicly condemning;them.
Pakistan has been hit by a surge in suicide attacks over the last 18 months and is engaged in a major offensive against militants in the Bajur tribal;agency.
In the latest fighting, troops backed by helicopters killed 17 insurgents Wednesday and Thursday in Bajur, said Jamil Khan, the No. 2 government representative in the tribal;region.
Bajur lies across from an Afghan region where U.S. officers have said they have launched a complimentary operation to squeeze fighters fleeing the offensive, which began in;August.
In another sign of cross-border cooperation, the NATO-led force in Afghanistan said Pakistan's military had responded to a request to attack insurgents on its side of the border earlier this;week.
And on Thursday, a suicide bomber attacked a mosque in Bajur where pro-government tribesmen were praying, killing four and wounding four, said Fazal Rabi, a tribal police;officer.
Authorities are encouraging residents in the tribal regions to form militias to drive out militants, who have responded with;attacks.
_____
Habib Khan in Khar, Munir Ahmed and Zarar Khan in Islamabad contributed to this;report.

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BAN LOMTUAN, Thailand : Thousands of fireflies fill the branches of trees along the Mae Klong River here, flashing on and off in unison - relentless and silent, two times a second, deep into the;night.
Nobody knows;why.
“It's one of the most amazing things you'll ever see,” said Sara Lewis, a professor of biology at Tufts University, close to Boston.
The fireflies, all males, sit on the tips of the leaves and hone their flashes into a single synchronized mating call - and then continue without a pause as if they were driven by an invisible;motor.
In recent years, these pulsating trees have drawn visitors on firefly-watching tours, particularly in Thailand and Malaysia. Evolutionary biologists have studied synchronous flashing for 200 years, she said, and it remains a;mystery.

This retreat is part of a broader problem that is drawing new attention from scientists: Here and there around the world, it seems, firefly populations are;disappearing. But the traffic of motorboats and the riverbank development they have attracted seem to be driving the fireflies;away. “Where are they going? Why? What's happening to;them?”
Like many creatures, from orangutans to salmon, the fireflies appear to be suffering from the worldwide destruction, degradation and fragmentation of their habitats as human development;spreads.
“It's only recently that we are having these questions,” said Christopher Cratsley, a firefly specialist at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts.
Male fireflies flash to attract females, and, when a female winks back, the two can meet and mate.
Unlike most others, they also face a threat that is as ephemeral as their tiny flashes: light pollution, the same blurring of the skies that has made it difficult, in much of the modern world, to see stars;clearly.
“Anyone with a bright flashlight or a set of headlights that sweeps through will make them get off rhythm for a while, and then they get back,” said Lynn Frierson Faust, a firefly researcher from Knoxville,;Tennessee. Light from buildings or urban development - or even reflected off low-lying clouds on a dark night - can blind or distract;them.
The scientists were here not long ago as part of the second annual symposium of firefly specialists - a small niche in the ecosystem of scientific;specialties.
In controlled experiments with calibrated levels of light, the scientists say they have observed what they call “failure to mate” as the lights get;brighter.
“Where there used to be fireflies there are now big houses with garden lights,” he said.
The symposiums were organized by Raphaël De Cock, a firefly expert at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, who has begun to map their populations in order to track their apparent;decline. Of course, no one was examining for fireflies - or glow worms - so we go with the information that we;have. “But we have only had surveys the last couple of years. A generation ago, they say, the flashing trees were so thick along the riverbank that they served almost as highway beacons for boatsmen in the;night.”
The people who live along the Mae Klong River, an hour south of Bangkok, offer the kind of anecdotal evidence that has caused concern.
Fishermen worked in their nighttime glow, said Pisit Ek Thaiprasert, 40, a firefly conservationist who lives close toby.
“The light from the fireflies helped us see the curves and junctions of those canals at night and helped us paddle through,” said Klao Sakulnum, 68, who has lived here since she was a;child.
Since then, he said, development and firefly tourism have reduced their population along this part of the river by;two-thirds.
Since then, he said, development and firefly tourism have reduced their population along this part of the river by;two-thirds. .
“We're still at the level of trying to figure out how many species we have, what exactly they are, how to tell them apart,” she;said.
The most common estimate is that there are about 2,000 species; new ones continue to be;discovered.
On the other hand, researchers have studied the flash patterns of some species with such precision that they can masquerade as a female and bring a male flying to;them.
“We can actually go out into a natural population of fireflies and we can actually talk to fireflies using a simple, drugstore LED light,” Lewis said. “Really, really;great.”
Fireflies live for only two or three weeks in their adult stage after spending a year or two as grubs. Most adult males spend the evenings drifting through the air flashing sedately until they find their mate - or until they are chased down by a child and put into a glass;jar.

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URUMQI, China : An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government's unambiguous take on the history of this border region: “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent;sign.
But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different;story.
One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one traditionally thinks of as;Chinese. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous;Region. .

At the heart of the matter lie these questions: Who first settled this inhospitable part of western China? And for how long has the oil-rich region been part of the Chinese;empire?
Uighur nationalists have gleaned evidence from the mummies, whose corpses span thousands of years, to support historical claims to the;region.
The Chinese authorities here face an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in;Xinjiang.
Foreign scholars say that at the very least, the Tarim mummies - named after the vast Tarim Basin where they were found - show that Xinjiang has always been a melting pot, a place where people from various corners of Eurasia founded societies and where cultures;overlapped. “It's historically been a place where cultures have mixed together,” said Yidilisi Abuduresula, 58, a Uighur archaeologist in Xinjiang working on the;mummies.
Contact between peoples was particularly frequent in the heyday of the Silk Road, when camel caravans transported goods that flowed from as far away as the Mediterranean. The oldest, like the Loulan Beauty, date back 3,800;years.
The Tarim mummies seem to indicate that the very first people to settle the area came from the west - down from the steppes of Central Asia and even farther afield - and not from the fertile plains and river valleys of the Chinese interior. A modern, nationalistic pop song praising the Loulan Beauty has even become;popular.
Some Uighurs have latched on to the fact that the oldest mummies are most likely from the west as evidence that Xinjiang has belonged to the Uighurs throughout history.
“The people found in Loulan were Uighur people, according to the materials,” said a Uighur tour guide in the city of Kashgar who did not want his name published for fear of running afoul of the Chinese authorities.
“The people found in Loulan were Uighur people, according to the materials,” said a Uighur tour guide in the city of Kashgar who did not want his name published for fear of running afoul of the Chinese authorities.”
Scholars generally agree that Uighurs did not migrate to what is now Xinjiang from Central Asia until the 10th century. There have been many since ancient;times.
By that official account, Zhang Qian, a general of the Han dynasty, led a military expedition to Xinjiang in the second century B. But, uncomfortably for the Chinese authorities, evidence from the mummies also offers a far more nuanced history of settlement than the official Chinese;version. His presence is often cited by the ethnic Han Chinese when making historical claims to the;region.C.
What is indisputable is that the Tarim mummies are among the greatest recent archaeological finds in China, perhaps the;world.
The mummies show, though, that humans entered the region thousands of years earlier - and almost certainly from the;west. Their skin is parched and blackened from the wear and tear of thousands of years, but their bodies are strikingly intact, preserved by the dry climate of the western;desert.
Four are enclosed in glass display cases in the main museum in Urumqi, the regional capital. As a result, they say, the government has been unwilling to give broad access to foreign scientists to conduct genetic tests on the;mummies. As a result, they say, the government has been unwilling to give broad access to foreign scientists to conduct genetic tests on the;mummies.
“In terms of advanced scientific research on the mummies, it's just not happening,” said Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania who has been at the forefront of foreign scholarship of the;mummies.
Mair first spotted one of the mummies - a red-haired corpse called the Cherchen Man - in the back room of an older regional museum in Urumqi while leading a tour of Americans there in 1988, the first year the mummies were put on;display.

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HONG KONG : The hijacking of a Saudi supertanker has not led to alerts and alarms in Asia, which has weathered its own previous storms of;piracy.
“It will be very difficult to copycat the Somalia situation in Asia,” said Noel Choong, head of the Piracy Reporting Center at the International Maritime Bureau in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In fact, the attacks here are coming;down. .
Meanwhile, the hijacking of the Saudi tanker is just another red push-pin on the 2008 master piracy map maintained by the maritime bureau, a private group in the Malaysian;capital.”
A regional piracy-monitoring agency in Singapore said maritime attacks in Asia in the first nine months of the year dropped 11 percent compared to 2007 and 32 percent from;2006. But the vast majority of the incidents off Indonesia, and throughout Southeast Asia, are low-level attacks against small vessels, the petty theft of cargo or the robbery of crew;members.
The hundreds of pins denoting attacks and hijackings are heavily clustered in three regions — the Gulf of Aden and the eastern coast of Somalia; the coast of West Africa, particularly off Nigeria; and the Indonesian archipelago. Satellite monitoring also is;used.

Maritime experts in Southeast Asia cite naval patrols by Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore — known in the anti-piracy business as “the littoral states” — for the significant reduction in attacks, and particularly a decrease in hijackings. Even large cargo vessels and tankers became vulnerable as pirates began to arm themselves with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled;grenades.
Stepped-up sea patrols began three years ago when pirates began to increase their attacks in the Strait of Malacca — the long, narrow funnel between peninsular Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. 1 hot spot for seagoing piracy — in effect declaring it a war zone — and placed an insurance premium on any ships using the;passageway.
In 2005, the insurer Lloyds of London listed the strait as the world's No. An estimated 40 percent of the world's seaborne commerce moves through the strait, including shipments of oil from the Middle East to East;Asia.
The losses from the attacks, the new vulnerability of tankers and the extra costs for insurance led to tremendous anxiety among ship captains, owners, insurers and governments. The last major act of piracy in the Asia-Pacific region was in December 2005, Choong said, when a large chemical tanker was hijacked en route from Indonesia to Singapore.
“If oil would get disrupted in the Malacca Straits, Japan would get very concerned because that's their oil lifeline,” said Choong.
“With the tracker, she had nowhere to run,” Choong said. The ship had a “tracker” on board, the equivalent of an airplane transponder, and was quickly found in the South China;Sea.”
Piracy in the region still happens, of course. “The recovery of ships is very high in;Asia. Typically, the ship is seized at night by lightly armed pirates in speedboats. The more serious incidents involve the seagoing theft of oil or gas from small tankers. The stolen oil and gas is then sold in small amounts in regional villages and;ports. The stolen oil and gas is then sold in small amounts in regional villages and;ports.
In a transcript from the maritime bureau, this minor incident in Kalimantan, Indonesia, was the only one reported from Asia in the last week: “Four robbers armed with catapults, knives and hacksaws boarded a bulk carrier at anchor. They threatened the duty crew with catapults and stole ship's stores from forward locker. Alarm raised and ship's whistle sounded. Robbers jumped overboard and escaped in a wooden fast boat. Incident reported to coastal;authorities.”
“The severity is much greater in Somalia, where the pirates are very heavily armed, as compared to Southeast Asia, where the robbers usually just have knives,” said Lee Yin Mui, assistant director of research at the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships at Sea. The 16-nation network, known as ReCAAP, is based in;Singapore.
In the first quarter of this year, the maritime bureau recorded 83 ships being hijacked or fired upon worldwide. The Gulf of Aden had more than half those attacks, 47 in all, while only two incidents occurred in the Straits of;Malacca.
“Hijacking incidents here involve much smaller ships, usually tugboats which are slow-moving and easy to board,” Miss Lee said. “The pirates escape in their own boats. The crews are often abandoned on a remote beach. We see this as quite;compassionate.”

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BEIJING : A high-ranking Chinese military official has hinted that China's fast-growing navy is seeking to acquire an aircraft carrier, a move that would surely stoke tensions with the U.S. military and its allies in;Asia. But the general, a senior official of Chinese Ministry of National Defense, said that having one is the dream of any great military power and he suggested that the United States had nothing to fear should China acquire one for strictly defensive;purposes.
In an interview published in The Financial Times of London on Monday, the official, Major General Quan Lihua, did not say whether China was in fact building a carrier.
“Even if one day we have an aircraft carrier, unlike another country we will not use it to pursue global deployment or global;reach.
“The question is not whether you have an aircraft carrier, but what you do with your aircraft carrier,” he said in the;interview.”
In recent years, Pentagon officials have been warily following Beijing's ambitious naval build up.

Tensions between China and the United States were heightened the previous month after the Pentagon announced the sale of $6 billion in advanced weapons to Taiwan. Since 2000, China has constructed at least 60 warships, and its fleet of 860 vessels includes about 60;submarines. The deal includes Apache attack helicopters and a sophisticated array of missiles, radars and anti-aircraft defense;systems. China reacted angrily to the news, warning that the move could worsen relations between the two countries. “Navies of great powers with more than 10 aircraft carrier battle groups with strategic military objectives have a different purpose from countries with only one or two carriers used for offshore defense,” he;said.
In the interview, the general insisted that China would not deploy a carrier with aggressive intent. .
Although he did not mention any country by name, his comments were clearly aimed at the United States, which has 11 aircraft carriers, including the George Washington, which was recently deployed to;Japan.

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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan : Taliban militants have rejected an offer of peace talks with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, saying there would be no negotiations until foreign troops leave;Afghanistan.
Karzai offered on Sunday to provide security for the reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar if he enters negotiations and said the United States and other Western nations could leave Afghanistan or oust him if they;disagree.
“The Taliban will pursue jihad against foreign forces” as well as Karzai's government, he said on Monday, speaking from an undisclosed;location.
But Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said there could be no talks while foreign troops are in the;country.S.
In Washington, a U.

“One can't imagine the circumstances where you have the senior leadership of the Taliban - that there would be any safe passage with respect to U. State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, questioned Karzai's security;guarantee. forces.S.
The White House also made clear its distaste for the idea of talking with Taliban leaders now, particularly;Omar. Certainly, it's hard to imagine those circumstances standing here right now,” McCormack;said. We think that he is a leader that has only the best interests of his country in mind.
“We support Hamid Karzai.
Karzai has dismissed the demand for foreign troops to leave, saying they are needed to keep Afghanistan;safe. What we have seen from the Taliban, however, and from Mullah Omar - who we haven't heard from in some time - is an unwillingness to renounce violence,” said Dana Perino, the White House press;secretary. .
The Afghan president has long supported drawing the Islamist militia into the political mainstream if they accept the country's Constitution and repudiate Al Qaeda.S.
U. Afghanistan is going through its worst violence since the 2001 U. political and military leaders are also considering negotiating with some elements of the Taliban as the insurgency gains sway in large areas of Afghanistan, especially its south and east.-led invasion ousted the Taliban;government.S.”
Mujahid said the peace overtures were a political ploy by Karzai ahead of next year's planned presidential;elections.”
Mujahid said the peace overtures were a political ploy by Karzai ahead of next year's planned presidential;elections.

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TAIPEI, Taiwan : Former President Chen Shui-bian was taken from his jail cell to a hospital on Sunday when a doctor found he had an irregular heartbeat after a five-day hunger strike, a prison official;said.
A prison doctor recommended that Chen be hospitalized, said Lee Ta-chu, an official at Tucheng Jail, where Chen had been held since Wednesday for investigation on graft;allegations.
Earlier Sunday, Chen rejected repeated pleas to end the hunger strike he had begun to protest what he called his politically motivated arrest.
Chen “is having difficulty breathing and is complaining of pain on the left side of his chest,” Lee said, adding that the former president was conscious when taken to the;hospital.
Prosecutors say they have enough evidence to hold Chen as they prepare a formal indictment and have denied government interference in the;case. He spent time reading legal documents about his case in solitary confinement, Lee;said. He said he was being persecuted by his successor, President Ma;Ying-jeou.

Chen, an ardent supporter of Taiwan's formal independence from China, has denied any wrongdoing. Despite not being formally indicted, he can be held in jail for up to four months under Taiwanese law while officials pursue his;case. . But he appears to have won new support as the party has used his arrest to step up its criticism of the ruling Nationalists' policy of greater engagement with China and what it says was the Nationalists' persecution of former officials in Chen's;administration.
The corruption investigation began soon after Chen finished eight years in office in May, forcing him to withdraw from his pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party in disgrace.
At the time, prosecutors said they wanted to determine whether the money had been donations left over from political campaigns, as Chen insisted, or whether bribery may have been;involved.
In August, Chen admitted he had broken the law by not fully disclosing campaign donations he had received, after a Nationalist lawmaker charged that Chen's son and daughter-in-law moved $21 million to Switzerland in;2007.

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SEOUL : To conservative critics, a popular textbook's version of how U.S.
The facts no one disputes are that, at the end of World War II, the Soviet military swept into northern Korea and installed a friendly Communist government while a U. and Soviet forces took control of Korea from Japanese colonialists in 1945 exemplifies all that's wrong with how South Korean history is taught to young people;today. military administration assumed control in the;south.S. It argues that the Japanese occupation was followed not by a free, self-determining Korea, but by a divided peninsula dominated once again by foreign;powers.
But then the high school textbook takes a direction that is raising hackles among conservatives. “The flag that flew in its place was the American Stars and Stripes.
“It was not our national flag that was hoisted to replace the Japanese flag,” reads the textbook published by Kumsung Publishing.”
The critics include the government of President Lee Myung Bak, the conservative who came to power this year with a pledge to overturn a decade of liberal policies that Lee said coddled North Korea and denigrated the U. Our liberation through the Allied forces' victory prevented us from building a new country according to our own;wishes. alliance - the alliance that liberals, for their part, accused of propping up South Korean dictators in the name of;anti-Communism.S. 30, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology demanded that the authors of the Kumsung book and five other textbooks currently used in high schools delete or revise 55 sections in their texts that it said “undermine the legitimacy of the South Korean;government.

On Oct.
The authors rejected the interference, saying their critics were trying to “beautify” the country's problematic history, overexamining Korean collaboration with the Japanese occupiers and postwar dictatorships.”
“A textbook of modern history should be written in a way that does not hurt our national pride,” it;said.
“National pride? Patriotism? They should be based on historical facts,” said Hong Soon Kwon, a history professor and co-author of the Kumsung;textbook. The liberal opposition in Parliament said the government's attempt to censor the textbooks raised the specter of those dictatorships, which once controlled everything from what books South Koreans could read to the proper length of women's;skirts. But in 2003, to encourage diversity in historical views, the government approved six privately published history textbooks for high school;use.
South Korea used to teach its teenagers with a single government-issued modern history textbook.
Conservatives say the “left-leaning” textbooks poison the minds of teenagers by reveling in dark corners of history.
Ever since, the textbooks have drawn criticism from conservatives, sharpening the larger debate in South Korea over how to appraise past leaders - such as the founding president, Syngman Rhee, and the military strongman Park Chung Hee - and the complicated relationship with the United;States. .
“The textbooks are teaching a patricidal history,” said Park Hyo Chong, a professor of ethics education at Seoul National University and head of Textbook Forum, a conservative group that campaigns against the textbooks. “They teach that South Korea is a country that should not have been;born.”
Complaints like these were brushed aside by the previous liberal government. But after Lee took office in February, government agencies issued their own complaints about the;books.
One popular textbook, published by the Institute for Better Education, says that Rhee, revered as the nation-builder by the conservatives but detested by liberals as someone who ruthlessly suppressed dissent in the name of anti-Communism, exploited the North Korean threat to “shore up his dictatorial;regime.”
The Ministry of National Defense has demanded that this be rewritten to read: “He did his best to contain;Communism.”
According to the Kumsung textbook, Park Chung Hee - who seized power in a coup in 1961 and tortured political dissidents while mobilizing the nation for export-driven economic growth - was “a president who placed himself above the nation's;Constitution.”
The Defense Ministry wants this to be replaced with: “a president who contributed to the nation's;modernization.”
As for the “sunshine policy” of engagement with North Korea espoused by former President Kim Dae Jung, whose inauguration in 1998 ousted the conservative establishment and brought many former dissidents into positions of power, the Ministry of National Unification now suggests that this term be replaced in textbooks with the official if drier “policy of reconciliation and;cooperation.”