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BBC NewsQuote:
A group of Liberian women refugees who have held naked protests by the roadside are to be deported from Ghana, a minister has told the BBC.
Hundreds of the women were arrested on Monday and taken away from a refugee camp in 10 buses, witnesses say.
They were protesting at plans to send them home with $100 - they demand $1,000 and to be resettled in the West.
Stripping naked is a traditional form of protest amongst poor and powerless women in Africa.
Interior Minister Kwamena Bartels said that the Liberian war had ended. He denied it was forced repatriation.
He said they had broken local laws by not informing the police of their protest.
"When women strip themselves naked and stand by a major highway, that is not a peaceful demonstration," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme.
He said they would be deported later this week.
Some 27,000 Liberians are in Ghana after years of conflict at home.
But the civil war ended in 2003.
Some of the refugees told the BBC they had been beaten by the Ghanaian police at Buduburam camp, west of the capital, Accra.
They refuse to be integrated into local society and say they will continue protesting at the UN refugee agency's offer.
"$100 is not anything you can start life with. We are all lost," one woman said.
Never would have though stripping naked was a form of protest.
reutersQuote:
AN Australian woman faces execution in Vietnam, after an appeals court upgraded her life jail term for heroin trafficking.
The Court of Appeals yesterday accepted a proposal by prosecutors in Ho Chi Minh City to upgrade the sentence for Jasmine Luong, 34, an Australian of Vietnamese origin, the state-run Liberation Saigon newspaper said.
She now has 15 days to appeal against the sentence to the president.
Luong was arrested at the city's Tan Son Nhat International Airport while boarding a flight to Melbourne in February last year after Customs officials found 1.55kg of heroin in her shoes and luggage.
Trafficking of more than 600 grams of heroin is punishable by death or life imprisonment in Vietnam. Executions are carried out by firing squad.
Several Australians of Vietnamese descent have been arrested for trafficking heroin to Australia from Vietnam in recent years
.Quote:
US-led coalition troops killed three men, two children and a woman, in a raid in southeastern Afghanistan, the district chief and village residents said today.
They said the victims, from the families of two brothers, were all civilians, but the US military said the two brothers were involved in conducting improvised explosive device operations.
The issue of civilian casualties is a sensitive one as it undermines public support for the presence of foreign troops and the pro-Western government of President Hamid Karzai.
"We will join the jihad'' and "Death to Bush'', chanted residents of the village of Muqibel in the province of Khost where the incident happened overnight.
Foreign troops raided two adjacent houses belonging to two brothers and killed three men, two children and a woman from the two families, district governor Gul Qasim said.
The children, both boys no older than 10-years-old bore bullet wounds to the head and chest, a witness said.
A large angry crowd of men gathered as villagers helped the local imam wash the bodies before burial. Women could be heard screaming and wailing from inside the houses.
Troops were searching the compounds for one of the brothers when they came under fire, the US military said.
"Several armed militants, two of whom were barricaded in a building, opened fire on coalition forces after they entered the compound,'' coalition spokesman Major Chris Belcher said in a statement.
"Coalition forces returned fire killing Bismullah, his brother Rahim Jan, as well as several other armed militants.''
Troops discovered the bodies of a woman and a child in the buildings after the fighting, the statement said, blaming the militants for putting the woman and child in harm's way.
Two men were detained during the raid, the US military and residents said.
The US-led coalition has about 7,000 troops in Afghanistan, separate from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), involved in anti-terror operations.
The killings came a day after two members of parliament said ISAF planes had killed more than 30 people, including civilians, in the southern province of Helmand.
ISAF denied any civilians were killed in the airstrike which it said killed around 12 Taliban insurgents travelling in three vehicles on an isolated road some distance from any houses.
It was impossible to independently verify the conflicting accounts
reuters
ReutersQuote:
CHINA has warned of a "life and death" struggle against the Dalai Lama, as it sought to end a wave of protests in its Tibetan regions with arrests and tightened political control.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has accused the Tibetan spiritual leader of masterminding the protests - which culminated in a riot on Friday in Tibet's capital, Lhasa - from his base in the Indian town of Dharamsala, where he lives in exile.
"We are in the midst of a fierce struggle involving blood and fire, a life and death struggle with the Dalai clique," Tibet's Communist Party secretary, Zhang Qingli, told a teleconference of the region's government and Party leaders.
"Leaders of the whole country must deeply understand the arduousness, complexity and long-term nature of the struggle," he said in remarks carried online by the China Tibet News.
Mr Zhang also suggested greater political control in the region.
"We must continue to deepen our nationalist education and practically strengthen the building of political power at the grassroots," he said.
China's authorities are keen to stem the violence quickly and regain stability in the remote far-west before August's Olympic Games in Beijing, which they hope will showcase their country's prosperity and unity.
The Tibetan unrest adds to the ruling Communist Party's headaches ahead of the Olympics, including the risk of social instability due to mounting inflation after years of breakneck growth and criticisms of the pollution levels in Beijing.
Some activists overseas have called for the mountainous region to be withdrawn from the Olympic torch relay that starts on Monday.
France is reportedly considering boycotting the opening ceremony of the Games.
Mr Wen dismissed calls for a boycott, and in Tibet, Mr Zhang repeated Mr Wen's charge that the protests were aimed at undermining the Games, which open on August 8.
China's state-run media says 105 people surrendered to police for taking part in the Lhasa protests after authorities set a midnight deadline for rioters to turn themselves in over the violence that the Dalai Lama's officials believe killed 99.
China, whose Communist troops entered Tibet in 1950 after taking power in Beijing, puts the death toll in Lhasa at 13.
"Epicentre of lies"
A human rights watchdog has called on China to allow independent monitors to have access to detained Tibetans and said the government should publish names of those in custody.
"Only by giving access to independent monitors can China give the world some confidence that detainees are not being tortured or mistreated," Brad Adams, Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, has said.
Despite reports that Lhasa was returning to normal, with tight security but schools and businesses operating as usual, overseas groups reported continuing protests in ethnic Tibetan towns and villages in western China.
Tibetan monks were being prevented from leaving the region, a Beijing-based Buddhism scholar said.
The Free Tibet Campaign said it had two, independent accounts of a peaceful demonstration in the Gansu province town of Gannan, and the Dharamsala-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said there had been unrest in Sichuan province.
Both groups also cited a protest in Bora, near Gannan. The reports could not be independently confirmed. Witnesses have also reported that the monastery in the ethnic Tibetan town Lithang was surrounded by troops and that there had been arrests of Tibetans in that area.
The Dalai Lama called for an end to the violence in Tibetan regions on Tuesday, and said he would step down as the head of Tibet's exiled state if that would stop the bloodshed.
But China's official media called Dharamsala an "epicentre of lies", repeating Mr Wen's assertion that the unrest was "organised, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique".
"The Dalai clique maintained real-time contacts, sources say, through varied channels with the rioters in Lhasa, and dictated instructions to his hard core devotees and synchronised their moves," the state news agency Xinhua reported.
The Dalai Lama says the rioting, which followed several days of peaceful marches by Tibet's Buddhist clergy, was spontaneous.