Iranian reformists have clashed with police after the funeral of a dissident cleric, opposition websites say.

Earlier, tens of thousands took part in a procession for Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri in the holy city of Qom.

Clashes reportedly broke out, but the scale of the confrontation is not clear, says a BBC correspondent.

Montazeri - who died aged 87 of natural causes in Qom on Saturday night - had decried President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election in June as a fraud.

The reformist Jaras website said mourners chanted slogans in support of the cleric and also of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Guinea's military leader should be charged with crimes against humanity over the killing of opposition protesters, a leaked UN report says.

The UN panel says Capt Moussa Dadis Camara bears "direct criminal responsibility" for the killings.

The report said it could identify 156 people who were killed at the protest - contradicting claims from the ruling junta than fewer than 60 people died.

Earlier this month Capt Camara was shot and wounded by one of his own soldiers.

US President Barack Obama has hailed the Senate's healthcare vote as a "big victory for the American people".

Senators voted in the early hours of Monday to end debate on a compromise bill, putting the legislation on course to face a final vote on Christmas Eve.

President Obama has set health reform as a key plank of his first term.

The legislation, which aims to cover 31 million uninsured Americans, could lead to the biggest change in US healthcare in decades, if approved.

China has lost an appeal to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against a ruling that called for it to stop restricting US film and music imports.

The WTO ruled in August that China's policy of allowing the goods to be imported only by state-run firms broke global trade rules.

The WTO wants Chinese firms to be able to import US DVDs, CDs, computer games, books and magazines and films.

The US and China have been embroiled in a number of trade disputes recently.

A US Army general in northern Iraq has defended his decision to add pregnancy to the list of reasons a soldier under his command could face court martial.

It is current army policy to send pregnant soldiers home, but Maj Gen Anthony Cucolo told the BBC he was losing people with critical skills.

That was why the added deterrent of a possible court martial was needed, he said.

The new policy applies both to female and male soldiers, even if married.

The male sexual partners of female soldiers who get pregnant would also "face the consequences", he said.

It is the first time the US Army has made pregnancy a punishable offence.

Iranian authorities are holding several family members of Osama bin Laden, according to Abdul Rahman bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader's second son.

In an interview published on Al Jazeera Arabic's website on Monday, Abdul Rahman bin Laden said that Eman, his sister, one of his stepmothers and five of his brothers have been detained in Tehran since 1997.

He alleged that his sister had managed to escape several weeks ago while on a shopping tour permitted by authorities every six months.

She has since taken refuge in the Saudi Arabian embassy.

Israeli ministers have held lenghty meetings to discuss exchanging hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for a captured Israeli soldier held in the Gaza Strip.

The seven senior ministers in Israel's security cabinet met twice at the office of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, on Monday but were reportedly deadlocked over the conditions for Gilad Shalit's release.

Shalit was captured in a cross-border raid on an army post by Palestinian fighters in June 2006.

Between the two meetings, Netanyahu met Shalit's parents, who earlier made an impassioned plea for ministers to agree to a swap.

The United States has sent home 12 detainees from its Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba.

Six Yemenis, four Afghans and two Somali prisoners, from the the autonomus Somaliland region, were transferred over the weekend, the US department of justice said in a statement on Sunday.

"These transfers were carried out under individual arrangements between the United States and relevant foreign authorities to ensure the transfers took place under appropriate security measures," it said.

"Consultations with foreign authorities regarding these individuals will continue."

After the latest transfer, 198 detainees remain at the facility on the southern tip of Cuba.

Myanmar's supreme court is to hear an appeal against the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's opposition leader, after she was sentenced to a further 18 months in detention.

The court did not release a date for the hearing, but Nyan Win, Suu Kyi's lawyer, said he expected to present the case within a month.

Lawyers are appealing the 64-year-old democracy leader's house arrest, which she received for sheltering a US intruder who swam to her lakeside home.

Suu Kyi was initially sentenced last August to three years in prison with hard labour, but that sentence was commuted by General Than Shwe, Myanmar's junta chief.

A man accused of taking part in a deadly siege in the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008 has retracted his confession, claiming that police tortured him into admitting his role in the attacks.

Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, 22, told the judge in a special court on Friday that he came to Mumbai as a tourist and was arrested 20 days before the siege began.

"I was not present at VT [Victoria Terminus, the former name of Mumbai's main railway station]. I do not know what has happened," Kasab said.

"Witnesses have come and recognised me because my face looks similar to the terrorists ... that is why I was picked up. I have been framed", he said.

The Pakistani national denies being the man photographed with an assault rifle in pictures taken at Mumbai's main train station, one of several sites targeted by the gunmen.

POLOKWANE, South Africa -- Men in Westenburg Township went hunting Zimbabweans. They prowled its dirt roads by the truckload as night fell recently, brandishing clubs and throwing stones.

At dawn that day, the body of Steven Hamilton, a 24-year-old local man, had been found near a tavern. In a flash, word spread that drunken Zimbabweans had stabbed him in the chest. By the time people returned home from work, the township had erupted. Men shouted for the Zimbabweans to be killed, or for them to go back where they came from.

Mike Mpofu, 34, a former high school art teacher from Zimbabwe who sells vegetables from a shed, saw the mob coming. Charneal Carelse, a South African teenager whose family had befriended Mr. Mpofu, happened to be walking by. "I told her, `There is war coming,' " he said.

Charneal said she told him to hide in her house, and he took off running.

In May 2008, South Africa's image as a home to people of all races and nationalities took a hard knock as xenophobic violence leapt from city to city, victimizing poor Africans who had sought asylum and opportunity in the region's richest country.

Cuban President Raul Castro has lashed out at the US, accusing Barack Obama's administration of endorsing efforts to undermine the communist regime.

In his annual address, Mr Castro said the US had sent a government contractor to supply dissidents. The unnamed US citizen was detained two weeks ago.

Speaking during his annual address, he said "the enemy is as active as ever".

The comments came as US band Kool and the Gang performed in Havana, in what some saw a sign of improving ties.

kool and the gang... words fail. i guess it wasn't metallica, they play the guantanamo gig.

~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~

The three suspects, who were charged in federal court in New York, are believed to be from Mali and were arrested in Ghana during a Drug Enforcement Administration [DEA] sting. Although U.S. authorities have alleged that Al Qaeda and the Taliban [?] profit from Afghanistan's heroin trade, the case is the first in which suspects linked to Al Qaeda have been charged under severe narco-terrorism laws, federal officials said....

Al Qaeda in the Maghreb -- a North African ally of Osama bin Laden's organization -- has muscled into the lucrative cocaine smuggling routes of the Sahara, according to Western and African officials. It existed for two decades under other names before declaring allegiance to Bin Laden in 2006....

Anti-terrorism investigators cite a harbinger: An Al Qaeda-connected cell of North Africans financed their 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 190 people, by dealing hashish and Ecstasy. Moreover, officials said, conversations among informants and suspects have suggested that the lawless region around the Gulf of Guinea is a crossroads for groups united by hatred of the United States -- Al Qaeda, Mexican gangsters, Colombian guerrillas and Lebanese militant groups....

Authorities say the three suspects charged Friday are not members of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb but allege that they are associates. The case against them is based largely on conversations in which, authorities say, the suspects described the smuggling trade and Al Qaeda's involvement to informants posing as representatives of the FARC guerrillas of Colombia.

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As the president's job performance numbers and ratings on his handling of virtually every domestic issue have fallen below 50 percent, the Democratic base has become demoralized, and Independents have gone from his source of strength to his Achilles Heel, it's time to reflect on why. The conventional wisdom from the White House is those "pesky leftists" -- those bloggers and Vermont Governors and Senators who keep wanting real health reform, real financial reform, immigration reform not preceded by a year or two of raids that leave children without parents, and all the other changes we were supposed to believe in.

Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president's leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress's penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.

What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

The problem is not that his record is being distorted. It's that all three have more than a grain of truth. And I say this not as one of those pesky "leftists." I say this as someone who has spent much of the last three years studying what moves voters in the middle, the Undecideds who will hear whichever side speaks to them with moral clarity.

According to Ahilan Arulanantham, director of Immigrant Rights for the ACLU of Southern California, the Los Angeles subfield office called B-18 is a barely converted storage space tucked away in a large downtown federal building. "You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voilà, you're in a detention center," Arulanantham explained. Without knowing where you were going, he said, "it's not clear to me how anyone would find it. What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole host of problems concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel."

It's also not surprising that if you're putting people in a warehouse, the occupants become inventory. Inventory does not need showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, mail, attorneys or legal information, and can withstand the constant blast of cold air. The US residents held in B-18, as many as 100 on any given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally revolving stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back, shackled to one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These transfers made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as there would be no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At times the B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of forced air and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours of sitting in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant further physical and mental duress.

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