World

DAVOS — Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko accused Russia on Wednesday of sending 9,000 troops to back separatist rebels in the east of his country, and the IMF chief said she backed extra financial help for Kiev as the conflict inflicts severe economic damage.

Moscow challenged Poroshenko to present facts to prove his allegations. However, he won support from NATO, which said the amount of heavy military equipment used by Russian troops in eastern Ukraine had increased, and the alliance repeated its call for the forces to withdraw.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Poroshenko made one of Kiev's boldest assertions yet that Russia's military is directly involved in a conflict in which more than 4,800 people have died since last April.

Russian troops were backed by a range of heavy weapons, including tanks, heavy artillery and armoured vehicles, he said, adding: "If this is not aggression, what is aggression?"

Poroshenko also called on Moscow to comply with a peace plan agreed in Minsk, Belarus, last September between Ukraine, Russia and pro-Russian separatist leaders to end the conflict.

"The solution is very simple — stop supplying weapons... withdraw the troops and close the border," he said. "If you want to discuss something different, it means you are not for peace, you are for war."

The Minsk plan provides for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of foreign fighters and military equipment from Ukraine. But the ceasefire has been very shaky from the start and hundreds of people have died since September in clashes Kiev says have involved regular Russian troops.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov tried to fend off the accusations, saying he hoped for progress at talks on the conflict on Wednesday despite the renewed fighting.

"If you allege this so confidently, present the facts. But nobody can present the facts, or doesn't want to," Lavrov told a news conference before heading to the peace talks in Berlin with the foreign ministers of Ukraine, Germany and France.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, warned against expecting too much from the talks. "I don't want to get hopes up too much," she said. "It is clear that the ceasefire is getting more and more fragile."

In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a news briefing that the Western alliance had monitored Russian troops in Ukraine for several months and seen an increase lately in numbers of tanks, artillery pieces and other heavy equipment.

Ukraine's economy has been pushed close to bankruptcy by the war with the rebels, and economists have warned of debt writedowns if an existing IMF loan programme is not beefed up to plug a estimated $15 billion funding gap.

Poroshenko told IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde at a meeting in Davos that his government had appealed for more funding. "President Poroshenko informed me today that the Ukrainian authorities have requested a multi-year arrangement with the Fund... to replace the existing Stand-By Arrangement," she said in a statement.

Lagarde said the IMF board would discuss the request, and made clear that Ukraine would have to make broad and deep economic reforms in return for any deal. However, she told reporters: "I will submit it to the board which will convene as soon as possible. I will propose to support it."

Also in Davos, Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalia Yaresko told Reuters she was hopeful that a deal with the International Monetary Fund would be reached in the very near future.

Asked if $15 billion would be enough to pull Ukraine out of economic crisis, Yaresko emphasised the urgent need for an IMF decision. "The main thing is that we need a decision. And front-loading is very important. Any number, if it is dribbled out over a long period of time, might not be sufficient," she said.

The existing IMF package, agreed in April last year, is worth $17 billion and has so far paid out $4.6 billion in two instalments.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Tuesday declared America has turned the page on years of war and economic hardship, in a populist-tinged State of the Union address that set up the battle to succeed him.

But Republicans quickly said the speech was more about politics than leadership.

Emboldened by a stronger economy and better approval ratings, Obama called for a new chapter in US history that ushers in a fairer economy with a better shake for the middle class.

"We are 15 years into this new century. Fifteen years that dawned with terror touching our shores; that unfolded with a new generation fighting two long and costly wars; that saw a vicious recession spread across our nation and the world," he said.

"It has been, and still is, a hard time for many. But tonight, we turn the page."

He heralded the "growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production" that have also helped revive his political fortunes as his time in the White House nears its end.

For six years Obama's presidency was often subsumed by an economic crisis that stymied efforts to narrow inequality and put other liberal policy priorities on the back burner.

Appealing to Democrats determined to retain the White House in 2016, Obama on Tuesday called for an increase in the minimum wage, equal pay for women and tax breaks for the middle class.

Drawing a stark contrast with tax-averse Republicans, he dared his foes to oppose proposed tax hikes for the rich that would pay for middle class breaks.

"We have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth. It's now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next fifteen years, and for decades to come."

"Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?" he asked.

Obama's Republican opponents have branded such talk as little more than class warfare and will use their majority in both houses of Congress to make sure the plans never become law.

Republican Senator Joni Ernst, who was tasked with rebutting Obama's speech, said Americans are still suffering from "stagnant wages and lost jobs".

She also decried Obama's "failed policies" and a "stale mind-set" that led to "political talking points, not serious solutions".

Executive authority 

Mitt Romney, passed and potential future Republican presidential candidate, said that, "True to form, the President in his State of the Union speech is more interested in politics than in leadership".

He added: "More intent on winning elections than on winning progress, he ignores the fact that the country has elected a Congress that favors smaller government and lower taxes."

Republican Senator Ted Cruz, said "Tonight, America saw a powerful demonstration that it is time to move on beyond President Barack Obama. Just two months ago we had a national election, in which the American people spoke loud and clear and said the path we're on isn't working. The American people said the Obama economy isn't working, millions are hurting, and we want a different path".

Hillary Clinton, also expected to run for president, said in a tweet minutes after the speech, "Barack Obama #SOTU pointed way to an economy that works for all. Now we need to step up & deliver for the middle class."

In recent months, Obama has used his executive authority — opponents would argue he has stretched it to the limit — to circumvent Republican opposition, imposing and opposing some policies by decree.

Many of his efforts have focused overseas, including attempts to improve relations with America's most implacable foes.

On Tuesday, he redoubled calls to end the half-century-old embargo on Cuba and vowed to veto any move to put further sanctions on Iran.

"Our shift in Cuba policy has the potential to end a legacy of mistrust in our hemisphere," he said.

Polls suggest Americans support the Cuban outreach and Obama hammered home his advantage by inviting Alan Gross, a former US prisoner in Cuba, who whispered "thank you, thank you" during the speech.

On Iran, Obama warned that any move to impose new sanctions could scupper delicate negotiations aimed at reaching a complex nuclear deal.

"New sanctions passed by this Congress, at this moment in time, will all but guarantee that diplomacy fails ," he said.

"That is why I will veto any new sanctions bill that threatens to undo this progress."

Obama also used the speech to call on Congress to authorise the use of force against the Islamic State jihadist group.

"In Iraq and Syria, American leadership — including our military power — is stopping ISIL's advance."

"This effort will take time. It will require focus. But we will succeed."

Just days after jihadist attacks in Paris killed 17 people, Obama said "deplorable anti-Semitism... has resurfaced in certain parts of the world".

He added: "We stand united with people around the world who've been targeted by terrorists — from a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris."

KIEV — Ukraine on Tuesday accused pro-Russian separatists of taking advantage of a ceasefire deal signed last September to seize more territory in the east and said Kiev would demand its return in any future peace talks.

Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin’s charge that the rebels had seized more than 500 square kilometres beyond agreed separation lines opened up a potential new area of discord with Russia in diplomacy aimed at ending the nine-month-old conflict.

At talks under the auspices of the OSCE security watchdog in the Belarussian capital Minsk last September, Ukraine, Russia and separatist leaders agreed a plan which included a ceasefire and a withdrawal of foreign fighters and military equipment.

Subsequent meetings established the separation lines between government forces and the separatists, whom the West and Kiev say are armed by the Russian military, a charge Moscow denies.

Despite the ceasefire call, the Kiev military says more than 200 Ukrainian soldiers and hundreds of civilians have been killed since September.

The separatists have sought to dislodge government forces from the international airport in the rebel-controlled city of Donetsk, an important symbol for both sides in a conflict which has killed more than 4,800 people.

Other areas where Ukrainians say they have lost territory to the rebels are in the southeast towards Mariupol, by the Sea of Azov, and around Debaltseve, a rail hub northeast of Donetsk.

Separation line

Klimkin, speaking on the eve of a meeting in Berlin with Russia’s Sergei Lavrov and the foreign ministers of Germany and France, reaffirmed that Ukraine wants to press ahead with talks only on the basis of the Minsk agreements.

“Taking advantage of the fact that our forces complied with the ceasefire, the terrorists seized very substantial territory, more than 500 square kilometres,” he told a news conference.

He said Ukraine in future meetings of the so-called “contact group”involving separatist leaders would seek a “detailed plan to return to the separation line”.

“But this line is the line fixed... in Minsk,” he said.

Ukraine has used the same argument to justify its forces launching a counteroffensive at Donetsk airport, saying they were pushing back separatists to the agreed separation lines.

Russia has criticised the Kiev military’s move as a “strategic mistake”.

The Kremlin says President Vladimir Putin, in a letter to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, has put the emphasis on the need to pull large-calibre weapons out of the conflict zone.

Ukrainian officials imply Moscow is seeking to avoid other parts of the Minsk agreements — specifically the need to withdraw foreign fighters and military equipment from Ukraine.

YOLA, Nigeria — Boko Haram says it is building an Islamic state (IS)that will revive the glory days of northern Nigeria's mediaeval Muslim empires, but for those in its territory life is a litany of killings, kidnappings, hunger and economic collapse.

The Islamist group's five-year-old campaign has become one of the deadliest in the world, with around 10,000 people killed last year, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Hundreds, mostly women and children, have been kidnapped.

It remains the biggest threat to the stability of Africa's biggest economy ahead of a vote on February 14 in which President Goodluck Jonathan will seek re-election.

But while it has matched IS in Syria and Iraq in its brutality — it beheads its enemies on camera — it has seriously lagged in the more mundane business of state building.

"The Islamic State is a figment of their imagination. They are just going into your house and saying they have taken over," said Phineas Elisha, government spokesman for Adamawa state, one of three states under emergency rule to fight the insurgency.

Unlike its Middle East counterparts wooing locals with a semblance of administration, villagers trapped by Boko Haram face food shortages, slavery, killing and a lock down on economic activity, those who escaped say.

"[They] have no form of government," Elisha, who saw the devastation caused by Boko Haram after government forces recaptured the town of Mubi in November.

Boko Haram, which never talks to media except to deliver jihadist videos to local journalists, could not be reached for comment.

‘Muslim territory’

Boko Haram's leaders talk about reviving one of the West African Islamic empires that for centuries prospered off the Saharan trade in slaves, ivory and gold, but they demonstrate little evidence of state building.

In August a man saying he was Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau — the military says it killed Shekau — issued a video declaring a "Muslim territory" in Gwoza, by the Cameroon border.

There were echoes of IS’ proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria two months earlier. Boko Haram controls an area just over 30,000 square kilometres of territory, about the size of Belgium, according to a Reuters calculation based on security sources and government data.

But while in Syria, after initially brutal takeovers, IS has tried to win over communities, those who escaped Boko Haram say the rebels do little for them beyond forcing them to adopt their brand of Islam on pain of death.

"They provide raw rice to cook, the rice that they stole from the shops. They provide a kettle and... scarves to cover up the women," said Maryam Peter from Pambla village.

"People are going hungry. They are only feeding on corn and squash. No meat, nothing like that. The insurgents are not providing anything else," she added.

Maryam said most daily interactions with the militants involved them questioning villagers on their movements and forbidding them from trying to escape — a rule she managed to flout when she fled a week ago.

A government-run camp in a former school is now her home, along with 1,000 others, where mothers cook on outdoor fires while children run around. Some 1.5 million people have been rendered homeless by the war, Oxfam says.

Bodies pile up

And those the militants kill, they often fail to bury. The first thing the Nigerian Red Cross has to do when a town falls back into government hands is clear the corpses, Aliyu Maikano, a Red Cross official, told Reuters.

After the army recaptured Mubi in November, Maikano had to cover his nose to avoid the stench of rotting corpses.

Those still alive "were starved for food, water, almost everything there. There's no drinking water because [in] most of the wells there you'll find dead bodies," Maikano said.

Many residents looked tattered and malnourished, and some were unable to speak.

"They are heartless. ISIS [Islamic State] is a kind of organised group, it's a business. These guys are not."

A former resident of Mubi said the rebels had renamed the town "Madinatul Islam" or "City of Islam".

But when government spokesman Phineas Elisha walked into the emir's palace after its recapture, everything had been looted, even the windows and doors.

"Mubi was a ghost town... Virtually all the shops were looted," he said. It took him hours to find a bottle of water.

Sometimes the rebels simply loot the unprotected villages and hide out in bush camps, security sources say. Murna Philip, who escaped the occupied town of Michika five months ago, said a few dozen fighters had occupied an abattoir, a school and a lodge, but little else.

To survive under their watch you have to pretend to support them, said Andrew Miyanda, who escaped the rebels last week, walking for days to the Benue River.

"They would write Jama'atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda'Awati Wal-Jihad [Boko Haram's full name] on their trouser legs in marker or the back of their shirts," he said. "You had to turn up your trousers with the marker on to show that you are a member."

Buildings were torched and boys were abducted for "training", he said, a practice reminiscent of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army.

Slowly, with the help of traditional hunters armed with homemade guns and a reputation for magic powers, government forces have pushed Boko Haram out of some of its southern possessions.

Morris Enoch, a leader of the hunters, says they found an arsenal of military weapons: rocket launchers, machine guns, dynamite, anti-aircraft guns and grenades.

The rebels rarely leave behind much else.

BRUSSELS — EU foreign ministers called Monday for an alliance with Muslim countries to fight the growing Islamist militant threat as anger over the Charlie Hebdo cartoons fed fresh protests and violence.

Foreign policy head Federica Mogherini met Arab League chief Nabil Al Araby to urge better cooperation in the wake of last week's deadly Paris attacks and anti-terrorism raids in Belgium.

On the other side of a widening divide, hundreds of thousands of people rallied in Russia's Chechnya while dozens of churches were torched in Niger during protests over the publication of the Prophet Mohammad caricatures.

In jittery Brussels, where Belgian troops guarded the EU headquarters and other sensitive buildings, ministers were discussing how to prevent battle-hardened jihadis returning home from Syria and Iraq.

"Terrorism and terrorist attacks are targeting most of all Muslims in the world so we need an alliance," Mogherini told reporters.

"We need to strengthen our way of cooperating together, first of all with Arab countries but also internally. The threat is not only the one we faced in Paris but also spreading in many other parts of the world."

Araby, the Arab League secretary general, added that "every country in the world is suffering from terrorism”.

"It is not just a military or security issue, it covers the intellectual, cultural, media and religious spheres and that is what we are trying to get," he said.

Europe on alert 

Europe is on high alert after three French gunmen killed 17 people at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and a Jewish supermarket in Paris earlier this month, claiming they were acting on behalf of Al Qaeda and IS. Two suspected militants were also killed in a police raid in Belgium on Thursday.

Many of the ministers will meet again on Thursday in London when US Secretary of State John Kerry co-hosts talks with some 20 countries, including Arab states.

The EU meeting Monday was to prepare for a special European summit on February 12 dedicated to fighting terrorism.

But so far many EU states have been reluctant to open up their intelligence networks to anyone except their most trusted allies for fear of harmful leaks, let alone with the Arab world.

Efforts to push through a system for exchanging air passenger information which many states say would help track suspected militants have also been held up by a sceptical European Parliament.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said however in Brussels that the Paris attacks had “changed Europe and the world”, calling for “possibly increased exchanges with Muslim countries”.

His British counterpart Philip Hammond made the same point and pressed the need for progress on the passenger data system.

In London, however, the government found itself embroiled in a damaging spat over a letter sent to British imams with its call for community leaders to do more to root out extremism.

Belgium seeks mastermind

Belgian authorities meanwhile were still hunting for Abdelhamid Abaaoud, considered the brains behind an Islamist cell plotting to kill Belgian police that was broken up last week.

Greek prosecutors will consider Monday a Beglian extradition request for a suspect arrested in Athens on Saturday who could be linked to the cell.

In Germany, police banned a rally by the anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement in the eastern city of Dresden after a reported threat from IS on the movement’s leader Lutz Bachmann.

Denmark was due on Monday to host its first march by PEGIDA, whose rallies have spread rapidly since they started in October.

But in the Muslim world anger still raged at the publication of a new Prophet Mohammed cartoon on the front of Charlie Hebdo’s comeback issue last week.

Russia’s interior ministry claimed 800,000 people had flooded into Grozny, the capital of the Muslim province of Chechnya — three-quarters of the republic’s population — to demonstrate.

“We say firmly that we will never allow anyone to go unpunished for insulting the name of the Prophet and our religion,” strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov told the crowd.

In Niger, 45 churches were torched over the weekend and five people killed in protests against the cartoons.

GENEVA — Diseases linked to lifestyle choices, including diabetes and some cancers, kill 16 million people prematurely each year, the World Health Organisation said Monday, urging action to stop the "slow-moving public health disaster".

Unhealthy habits like smoking, alcohol abuse and consuming too much fat, salt and sugar have sparked an epidemic of diseases which together constitute the leading cause of death globally, WHO said.

This "lifestyle disease" epidemic "causes a much greater public health threat than any other epidemic known to man", said Shanthi Mendis, the lead author of WHO's Chronic Diseases Prevention and Management report.

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), like cardiovascular conditions, diabetes, lung disease and a range of cancers, killed a full 38 million people around the globe in 2012 — 16 million of them under the age of 70.

"Not thousands are dying, but millions are dying ... every year in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, not in their 80s and 90s," said Mendis.

"It's beyond belief that it is seemingly invisible," she told reporters ahead of the launch.

Most of the world's 16 million premature NCD deaths each year — 82 per cent — occur in poor and middle income countries, and most of them could be averted with just small investments, the report found.

"The global community has the chance to change the course of the NCD epidemic," WHO chief Margaret Chan said in a statement.

Millions of lives could be saved if the world over the next decade invests just $11.2 billion each year, or $1-3 per person, on promoting healthier habits, the report found.

Devastating consequences

Today, some six million people die prematurely each year due to tobacco use, 3.3 million deaths are linked to alcohol abuse, 3.2 million to lacking physical activity and 1.7 million to eating too much salt, according to WHO findings.

A full 42 million children under the age of five are considered to be obese, and an estimated 84 per cent of adolescents do not get enough exercise, Mendis said, describing the situations as "extremely frightening”.

The international community has staked out nine global targets for shifting unhealthy habits with the aim of slashing premature NCD deaths by a quarter between 2011 and 2025.

Simple and inexpensive steps like banning advertising of tobacco and alcohol products and taxing foods and drinks that contain high levels of salt and caffeine has already proven successful in a range of countries, WHO said.

In Turkey, for instance, an advertising ban on tobacco products combined with significant price hikes and health warnings has pushed smoking rates down 13.4 per cent since 2008.

A move in Hungary to heavily tax unhealthy food and drink components has, meanwhile, led to a 27 per cent drop in junk food sales, the report said.

But while some countries have made progress, most will fall short of the 2025 target, WHO said, warning that inaction would have far-reaching consequences.

"When people fall sick and die in the prime of their lives, productivity suffers, and the cost of treating diseases can be devastating," the UN health agency said.

It has estimated that if nothing is done to improve the situation, premature NCD deaths will suck $7 trillion out of the global economy over the next decade.

KIEV — Pro-Russian separatists renewed attacks on Ukrainian forces at an airport complex in the east on Monday after Kiev launched a mass operation to reclaim lost ground there that Russia called a “strategic mistake”.

Ukrainian officials said three soldiers had been killed and 66 wounded over the past 24 hours, during which they said they had returned battle lines at the airport to the status quo under a much violated international peace plan.

Russia expressed concern at what it called escalation by Kiev and published its own peace plan on Monday in the form of a letter from President Vladimir Putin to Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, which it said Poroshenko had rejected.

“It’s the biggest, even strategic mistake of the Ukrainian authorities to bank on a military solution to the crisis,” Interfax quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin as saying. “This may lead to irreversible consequences for Ukrainian statehood.”

Ukrainian officials have insisted Moscow sticks to the 12-point peace plan agreed in Minsk in September, which they say was not violated by its airport counter-offensive, launched after troops had appeared to be pinned down inside the complex.

Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said the situation was still very tense around the airport, which has symbolic value for both sides, and separatists continued attacks on government forces there and elsewhere in the east.

A military source told Reuters that up to 25 Russian tanks had crossed the border near Luhansk.

Since plans for another round of peace talks last week were abandoned, fighting has flared up again in Ukraine, whose Crimean peninsula was annexed by Russia in March last year, prompting a crisis with the West, which has imposed sanctions.

In Brussels, European Union foreign ministers said now was not the time to ease the economic sanctions against Russia despite conciliatory proposals from the EU’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.

Mogherini had suggested that member states could start talking to Russia again on a range of issues if Moscow implemented peace agreements, but hawkish states such as Lithuania said this would send the wrong message to Russia’s Putin that the EU’s resolve was cracking.

“I don’t think that we now should think how to re-engage. Russia should think how to re-engage,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius told reporters.

Apart from calling for a ceasefire, the Minsk agreement called for the withdrawal of armed groups and foreign fighters as well as military equipment -—meaning, for Kiev, weapons and rocket systems which it says Moscow is supplying to the rebels.

Despite what Kiev and the West says is incontrovertible proof, Russia denies its troops are involved or that it is funnelling military equipment to the separatists.

Putin’s letter

Putin’s letter called for urgent moves to withdraw large-calibre weapons from the conflict zone. “This is now an absolute priority,” said a Russian foreign ministry statement.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry hit back, calling for Moscow to show its readiness to comply with the Minsk agreement by signing a timetable for implementing its main points.

“It is very important that a concrete plan is signed for fulfilling all, without exception, the points of the Minsk agreements, and not just those that Russia or the terrorists like,” foreign ministry spokesman Evhen Perebynis said on TV channel 112.

Military spokesman Lysenko said Russia was continuing to send significant quantities of military equipment into Ukraine.

The World Health Organisation says more than 4,800 people have been killed since the conflict erupted in Ukraine’s coal-mining eastern territories last April.

Brussels — Europe remained on high alert Sunday as the suspected mastermind of a jihadist cell in Belgium remained at large and anti-Islamist rallies were blocked by nervous authorities in Germany and France.

Amid the heightened tensions, the second gunman in the Charlie Hebdo magazine attack was given a secretive burial in an unmarked grave near Paris late on Saturday, designed to ensure it did not become "a pilgrimage site" for radical Islamists. 

Meanwhile, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, considered the brains behind the cell plotting to kill Belgian police, was still on the run days after the group was busted by intelligence services. 

DNA tests showed the 27-year-old was not among suspects arrested in Athens and is still at large, Belgium's Justice Minister Koen Geens told VRT television.

German police banned a rally by the anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement and other open-air gatherings planned for Monday in the eastern city of Dresden, saying there was a "concrete threat" of an attack against its leadership.

The PEGIDA marches have grown steadily since they began in October and drew a record 25,000 people last Monday in the wake of the Paris attacks that left 17 people dead.

The group claimed the threat came from the Islamic State group based in Syria and Iraq, with local media reporting that PEGIDA's most prominent leader Lutz Bachmann was the target.

Also on Sunday, a French court prevented a rally by anti-Islamist groups in Paris on the grounds that they were promoting Islamophobia.

Discreet burials

Cherif Kouachi, one of two brothers who killed 12 people in the attack on satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on January 7, was buried in a cemetery in Gennevilliers, a day after the funeral of his older brother Said in the northeastern city of Reims.

Cherif's family, including his widow, kept away from the funeral, the mayor's office said.

The brothers were shot dead by police after a three-day manhunt following their attack on Charlie Hebdo, which had enraged many Muslims around the world with its repeated publication of cartoons lampooning Islam's Prophet Mohammad.

Anger erupted in a string of majority Muslim countries after the magazine responded to the decimation of its staff by running another caricature last week, showing the prophet under the headline “All is forgiven”.

The worst unrest was in Niger, where at least 10 people were killed and eight churches torched over two days of rioting.

Around 1,000 youths wielding iron bars, clubs and axes rampaged through the capital on Saturday, hurling rocks at police who responded with tear gas.

Charlie Hebdo’s chief editor has defended the cartoons.

“Every time we draw a cartoon of Mohammad, every time we draw a cartoon of prophets, every time we draw a cartoon of God, we defend the freedom of religion,” Gerard Biard told NBC’s “Meet the Press” programme.

The weekly has sold 2.7 million copies of the post-killings “survivors’ issue” in France alone and said it would extend its print run to 7 million copies — up from only 60,000 normally.

President Francois Hollande said France was committed to “freedom of expression” and people should not change their habits since “to do so would be to yield to terrorism”.

But a poll published in Le Journal du Dimanche found 42 per cent of French people thought publications should avoid running cartoons of Prophet Mohammad, and 50 per cent favoured limiting freedom of expression on the Internet and social networks.

A memorial rally was due to be held in Paris on Sunday for policewoman Clarissa Jean-Philippe, who was gunned down by Amedy Coulibaly, another Islamist gunman who claimed to be working with the Kouachi brothers and was also shot dead by police.

He had killed four Jews in a siege at a kosher supermarket in Paris on January 9. 

French investigators were focusing on 12 people detained Friday and being questioned over “possible logistical support” they may have given to the Paris gunmen, sources said.

Britain will hold a meeting on Thursday of the coalition against IS, which one of the Paris gunmen claimed to represent, hosted by Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and US Secretary of State John Kerry.

KIEV — Ukraine’s president vowed Sunday to reassert government control over eastern regions as the army unleashed a counter-offensive against Russian-backed separatist fighters vying for command over the airport in the city of Donetsk.

The separatist stronghold was shaken by intense outgoing and incoming artillery fire over the weekend as a bitter battle rages for the air terminal and surrounding areas.

Streets in Donetsk, which was home to 1 million people before unrest erupted in spring, were completely deserted Sunday and the windows of apartments in the centre rattled by incessant rocket and mortar fire.

The warring sides exchanged rocket fire along several points in the roughly 350-kilometre front line.

Regional authorities loyal to the government said two children, aged 7 and 16, were killed when a rebel shell hit their home in Vuhlehirsk, a town 75 kilometres northeast of Donetsk.

A little further west, in the rebel-controlled city of Horlivka, two were killed and another 16 injured as a result of rocket attacks, city council secretary Oleg Gurbanov said in a statement.

President Petro Poroshenko told a crowd of several thousand gathered in the centre of the capital, Kiev, that Ukraine wouldn’t “give up an inch” of its land to Russian-backed separatists.

The separatists upped the ante last week by successfully taking over large sections of Donetsk airport, where Ukrainian troops remained despite coming under rocket attacks for months on end. Both sides have incurred losses in the close-quarter combat.

The rebels’ progress has sparked a desperate Ukrainian fight-back supported by a hasty reinforcement of troops and heavy armory.

Yuriy Biryukov, an adviser to Poroshenko, said on his Facebook account Sunday that Ukrainian troops had received orders to unleash heavy shelling of known rebel positions.

“Today we will show just how much we can smash their teeth in,” Biryukov wrote from a location near the fighting.

Separatist statements indicate Ukrainian forces may have attempted to burst into Donetsk itself, the first such effort since the unrest started in the spring.

The self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic breakaway government said its forces had repelled a Ukrainian advance toward a bridge leading from the airport into the centre.

Ukrainian military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said Sunday that four servicemen were killed in the previous day’s clashes. The office of the general staff said separately that three troops had been killed in the airport alone.

A new truce agreed in early December unravelled one week into the new year despite concerted international efforts to forge a lasting settlement. High-level peace talks expected to take place in Kazakhstan on Thursday were postponed indefinitely.

The US has accused separatists of occupying territory beyond the line of contact agreed upon after a much-violated cease-fire deal in September. Russia, which has been unambiguous in its diplomatic support of the separatist stance, accused the Ukrainians of weakening the prospects of that cease-fire deal reached in the Belarusian capital, Minsk.

Speaking to a Moscow radio station, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov expressed concern over the surge in fighting in Donetsk, calling it a setback for the prospects of a settlement.

KABUL — Afghan security forces have arrested five men suspected of involvement in last month's massacre at a school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, an Afghan security source said Saturday.

Several Taliban gunmen stormed the school in the northwestern city of Peshawar last month, killing 150 people, mostly children, in the country's deadliest ever militant attack.

The December 16 attack on the Army Public School, which drew international condemnation, prompted a bout of national soul-searching even in a country used to high levels of violence.

On Saturday, an Afghan security source, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to AFP that his force had recently made five arrests, after Pakistan supplied information to Kabul.

The official said the men, who were not Afghan nationals, were arrested in the troubled border areas between the two countries.

They were accused by Pakistan of aiding the Peshawar school attackers, he said, insisting that the investigation by the Afghan security agencies had not yet established the suspects' direct association with the attack.

Pakistani officials declined to immediately comment.

Afghanistan has long accused Pakistan of supporting the Afghan Taliban to try to maintain its influence in the region. Pakistan says Afghanistan is doing the same with the Pakistani Taliban in return.