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PANGKALAN BUN/JAKARTA, Indonesia — An Indonesian naval patrol vessel has found what could be the tail of a crashed AirAsia passenger jet, the section where the crucial black box voice and flight data recorders are located, officials said on Monday.

News of the possible breakthrough came as the transport ministry in Jakarta said some officials on duty at the time of the accident will be moved to other roles. It also announced it was tightening rules on pre-flight procedures.

Ships and aircraft scouring the northern Java Sea for debris and bodies from the Airbus A320-200 have widened their search to allow for currents eight days after Flight QZ8501 plunged into the water en route from Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore with 162 people on board.

"We found what has a high probability of being the tail of the plane," Yayan Sofyan, captain of the patrol vessel, told reporters.

He was speaking after his ship returned to the port in Surabaya on Monday, and it was not immediately clear if he was referring to one of the five large objects pinpointed by search vessels over the weekend.

Indonesia's meteorological agency has said seasonal tropical storms probably contributed to the December 28 crash and the weather has persistently hampered efforts to recover bodies and find the cockpit voice and flight data recorders that should explain why the plane crashed into the sea.

The recorders are housed in the tail section of the Airbus, making retrieval of that part of the aircraft crucial.

"I am not saying it's the tail yet," the head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency, Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, told a news conference in Jakarta. "That is suspected. Now we are trying to confirm it."

Transport ministry crackdown

The transport ministry said some officials at the country's airport operator and air traffic control agency who were involved with the AirAsia flight will be moved to other duties while the accident investigation is completed.

The ministry gave no reason.

It also said that, three days after the crash, it had issued a directive making it mandatory for pilots to be briefed in person by an airline official on weather conditions and other operational issues before every flight.

"A circular has been signed by the transport ministry on December 31, stating that pilots must have a face-to-face briefing with a flight operation officer so the briefing officer will know the pilot is in a healthy condition and so on," said Djoko Murjatmodjo, acting director general of air transportation.

Aviation experts said this was a common practice in the industry, but it was not immediately clear if it has been normal procedure in Indonesia.

The main focus of the search is about 90 nautical miles off the coast of Borneo island, where five large objects believed to be parts of the plane — the largest about 18 metres long — have been located in shallow waters by ships using sonar.

While experts say the shallow sea should make the recovery fairly straightforward in good weather, strong winds and big waves have frustrated the multinational force of ships and divers that has converged at the site.

"The seas haven't been very friendly, but the black boxes have a 30-day life and they will be able to find them," said Peter Marosszeky, a senior aviation research fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "It's the weather that is causing the delay."

Thirty-seven bodies of the mostly Indonesian passengers and crew have been recovered, including some still strapped in their seats. Many more may be trapped in the body of the aircraft.

Licence confusion

Indonesia AirAsia has come under pressure from authorities, who have suspended its Surabaya-Singapore licence, saying the carrier only had permission to fly the route on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Flight QZ8501 took off on a Sunday.

It was not immediately clear what difference, if any, the day of the week had on the Decmber 28 flight, and Murjatmodjo made clear that the investigations of the route and the crash were separate.

"Please differentiate between the probe into flight licences and the air crash investigation," he said.

Singapore's civil aviation authority and its Changi Airport Group said AirAsia had the necessary approvals to operate a daily flight between Surabaya and Singapore.

Indonesia AirAsia is 49 per cent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia, whose shares fell nearly 5 per cent on Monday.

While the licence investigation could have serious consequences for the airline's operations, insurance industry experts said insurers were expected to pay claims whether or not the airline was properly licensed to fly on the day.

The crash was the first fatal accident suffered by the AirAsia budget group, whose Indonesian affiliate flies from at least 15 destinations across the archipelago.

DHAKA — Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina accused her besieged opposition rival of trying to trigger anarchy Monday as security forces clamped down on protests on the first anniversary of her controversial re-election.

After main opposition leader Khaleda Zia accused Hasina of trying to cling onto power by force, the prime minister countered that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party chief was responsible for a wave of violence that left at least four people dead in the volatile South Asian nation.

“I am urging the BNP leader to stop these bomb and grenade attacks, these acts of sabotage, and killings, of arson and damage to property,” Hasina said in a televised address to the nation, exactly a year after she was re-elected in what was effectively a one-horse race.

Hasina warned against efforts to create “anarchy and instability” on a day of widespread violence that also saw riot police clash with BNP supporters when Zia tried to break a siege of her headquarters.

Zia, a two times former premier, has been confined to her offices in the capital Dhaka since Saturday to prevent her from spearheading protests to denounce the elections on January 5, 2014, and demand new polls.

“Not only am I prisoner, but the whole of the country is being held captive. What kind of country are we living in?” said Zia after she failed to breach the police cordon.

The siege intensified on Monday as security forces parked a convoy of trucks laden with sand and bricks outside the office compound before then padlocking the gates.

When dozens of her supporters tried to break the siege, riot police fired pepper spray at them. Television footage showed BNP members wiping away tears after they tried to prise open the compound gates.

Zia could be seen sitting in her car, with the engine revving. She later spoke to journalists who managed to sneak over the wall.

Hasina and Zia have ruled Bangladesh for most of the last three decades and their hatred of each other is notorious.

“This government is illegal because it was not elected by the people. They sprayed pepper at us. It is not a normal situation. Is the country facing a war?” said Zia, calling the government “illegal” and urging people to join protests.

“They want to hang on to power... by bullets, tear gas and bombs.”

“The protests will continue... No dictator can cling onto power like this,” she added while her party vowed to mobilise a blockade of roads and railways on Tuesday.

Zia’s confinement evoked memories of voting day when she was also prevented by riot police from leaving the compound.

The BNP was one of 20 opposition parties which boycotted last year’s election, claiming that the outcome would be rigged.

Hasina, in power since 2009, had refused to step down before the election so the poll could be organised by a neutral caretaker administration. 

The boycott meant most members in the 300-seat parliament were returned unopposed, handing Hasina another five years in power.

Voting was overshadowed by firebomb attacks on polling booths and clashes which left around 25 people dead.

Deadly clashes

Twelve months on, there were similar scenes in cities and towns around the country.

Police in the northern district of Rajshahi fired live rounds at hundreds of protesters after they attacked them with firearms, petrol bombs and rocks, said local police chief Alamgir Kabir.

“One person was killed in the firing,” he told AFP. 

Two BNP activists were shot dead during clashes with supporters of Hasina’s Awami League in another northern town, Natore, a local inspector said, adding at least 15 people were injured.

In the nearby town of Kansat another protester died of his wounds after clashes with police and border guards, police said. 

In Dhaka, hundreds of pro-opposition lawyers joined the protests at the sprawling complex which houses the supreme court, where they waved black flags to signal the death of democracy. 

Police locked the gates into the main building, confining protesters to the grounds outside. Clashes also erupted at the national press club where the BNP’s deputy leader spoke at a rally.

The election day violence last year was the culmination of the bloodiest year of political unrest in Bangladesh’s short history, with tensions also heightened by the death sentences passed on leading Islamists over their role in the 1971 independence war from Pakistan.

More than 500 people were killed in political violence in 2013.

PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia — Weather was the "triggering factor" in the crash of AirAsia Flight 8501 with icing likely causing engine damage, Indonesian officials said, as rough seas Sunday hampered the search for more bodies and wreckage.

The Airbus A320-200 crashed into the Java Sea on December 28 carrying 162 people from Indonesia's second city Surabaya to Singapore. Searchers are hunting for the "black box" flight data recorders to determine the cause of the crash.

An initial report on the website of Indonesia's meteorological agency BMKG suggested the weather at the time the plane went down sparked the disaster after it appeared to fly into storm clouds.

"Based on the available data received on the location of the aircraft's last contact, the weather was the triggering factor behind the accident," said the report, which referred to infra-red satellite pictures showing peak cloud temperatures of -80^oC to -85^oC at the time.

"The most probable weather phenomenon was icing which can cause engine damage due to a cooling process. This is just one of the possibilities that occurred based on the analysis of existing meteorological data," the report said.

It remained unclear why other planes on similar routes were unaffected by the weather, and other analysts said there was not yet enough information to explain the disaster.

"It's irrelevant to make an assumption on the cause of the crash as we haven't found the black boxes yet," former air force commander Chappy Hakim told AFP.

Five major parts of the Airbus A320-200 have now been found off the island of Borneo. But rough weather last week hampered the search, a huge operation assisted by several countries including the United States and Russia.

During a momentary respite from bad weather, a team of divers went down to the biggest part of the wreckage Sunday morning and recovered one body, while another three were found floating in the sea, bringing the total number recovered to 34.

The divers "managed to go down but the visibility at the sea bottom was zero, it was dark and the seabed was muddy, with currents of three to five knots," search and rescue agency chief Bambang Soelistyo told reporters.

He said the fifth major part of the plane, located early Sunday, measured about 10 metres by one metre.

The search, focused on a site southwest of the Borneo town of Pangkalan Bun, has also been extended east because parts of the plane may have been swept by currents, Soelistyo said.

The operation has prioritised finding the bodies of those on board the flight, of whom 155 were Indonesian, with three South Koreans, one Singaporean, one Malaysian, one Briton and a Frenchman — co-pilot Remi Plesel.

Indonesian warship commander Yayan Sofyan told MetroTV Sunday that three of the bodies so far recovered had been found still strapped into their row of seats, detached from the main plane body.

The daughter of the plane's pilot, Captain Iriyanto, made a televised plea to the public not to blame her father.

"He is just a victim and has not been found yet. My family is now mourning," said Angela Anggi Ranastianis.

"As a daughter, I cannot accept it. No pilot will harm his passengers," she told TV One.

AirAsia investigated 

The families of victims have been preparing funerals as the bodies are identified in Surabaya, where a crisis centre has been set up at a police hospital with facilities to store 150 bodies.

Yunita Syawal, at a wake for her 23-year-old brother, said she first feared that he was on the AirAsia Flight when she was sent a selfie of him and his friends boarding one of the carrier's planes at Surabaya airport.

"Even after days, we still kept thinking he's alive, but now that we have seen his body, we know he's gone for sure," she said.

"There is a void left in my heart, but I hope in time I will heal."

Indonesia has pledged to investigate alleged flight violations by AirAsia, saying the aircraft had been flying on an unauthorised schedule when it crashed. The airline has now been suspended from flying the Surabaya-Singapore route.

But the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore said it had granted permission for the airline's Sunday flight.

It was unclear how the airline, a unit of Malaysia-based AirAsia, had been able to fly without the necessary authorisation from its starting point.

Before take-off, Iriyanto had asked for permission to fly at a higher altitude to avoid the storm. But the request was not approved due to other planes above him on the popular route, according to AirNav, Indonesia's air traffic control.

In his last communication, the experienced former air force pilot said he wanted to change course to avoid the menacing storm system. Then all contact was lost, about 40 minutes after take-off.

KANO, Nigeria — Suspected Boko Haram militants have seized a military base in northeastern Nigeria in a series of blistering raids near Lake Chad, sending soldiers and civilians fleeing, witnesses said on Sunday.

Local residents reported that the gunmen killed several people, burnt hundreds of homes and looted scores of businesses in Saturday's attacks, although there was no official death toll.

The Islamists are believed to control large swathes of land in northeastern Nigeria since launching an uprising in 2009 that has now claimed more than 13,000 lives.

The base outside the town of Baga is used by the Multinational Joint Task Force, which was established in 1998 to battle cross-border crime but whose mandate was expanded to fighting the deadly Boko Haram insurgency.

The gunmen seized the base near Lake Chad after engaging troops in a fierce battle that lasted several hours, witnesses said.

"They [the militants] overwhelmed the troops and forced them to abandon the base which the gunmen took over," local resident Usman Dansubdu told AFP after fleeing to neighbouring Chad.

Hundreds of fear-stricken residents from Baga and five other Nigerian towns and fishing villages poured into Chad to escape the Islamist raids on their homes, witnesses said.

Maina Ma'aji Lawan, the senator representing northern Borno where Baga is located, confirmed the attack on the military base and other five locations.

'Overpowered the troops' 

"Boko Haram insurgents launched attacks in Baga area yesterday [Saturday], destroying six towns and several settlements, forcing the people in the affected places to flee into Chad.

"They came in unbelievably large numbers and overpowered the multinational troops and local vigilantes," he told AFP.

"They took over the multinational troop base in Baga and sent the soldiers fleeing," he told AFP.

The force is made up of troops from Nigeria, Niger and Chad, Nigerian army spokesman Brigadier General Olajide Laleye told AFP.

Residents of Kauyen Kuros, Mile 3, Mile 4, Baga, Doron-Baga and Bundaram fled across the lake in fishing boats and canoes into Chad following the hours-long attacks by hundreds of militants from the Islamist group.

"We are now seeking refuge in Gubuwa, Kangallam and Kaiga villages inside Chad near the border with Nigeria," Dansubdu told AFP by telephone from Gubuwa.

The gunmen killed several people, burnt hundreds of homes and looted scores of businesses in the attacks that lasted over seven hours, said Doron-Baga resident Lawan Ajikalumbu who also fled to Gubuwa.

There was no official casualty toll.

Abubakar Gamandi, head of the fishermen's union in Borno state and a resident of Baga, said he received several calls from union members who fled to neighbouring Chad informing him of the attacks.

PANGKALAN BUN, Indonesia — Indonesia pledged Saturday to investigate flight violations by AirAsia, as search teams found four large parts of the airline's plane that crashed into the sea last weekend with 162 people on board.

The country's transport ministry said the ill-fated aircraft had been flying on an unauthorised schedule when it crashed, and the airline has now been suspended from flying the route from the city of Surabaya to Singapore.

"It violated the route permit given, the schedule given, that's the problem," director general of air transport, Djoko Murjatmodjo, told AFP.

He said AirAsia's permit for the route would be suspended until investigations were completed, while other airlines in the country would also be examined.

"We will carry out an audit or an evaluation on all airlines in Indonesia over whether there are any violations related to route, time and schedule," he said.

Major parts of the Airbus A320-200 were found in the Java Sea off the island of Borneo late Friday and Saturday, raising hopes that the remaining bodies and the black box recorders, crucial to determining the cause of the crash, would soon be located.

But no bodies have been found since Friday, when the total recovered stood at 30, because rough seas have prevented diving operations, officials said.

"The height of waves hampered the search effort at sea. They are four to 5 metres high," search and rescue agency chief Bambang Soelistyo told reporters late Saturday.

"Up to now, with our geo-survey ship which has capacity to detect objects underwater, we have found four larger parts of the plane that we are looking for," he said.

Toos Sanitioso, an investigator from Indonesia's KNKT (National Transportation Safety Committee), said he was hopeful they would find the all-important black boxes within a few days.

"It seems that they have found the major [plane] parts," he told reporters in Surabaya.

'Suspected tail'

A presentation shown to reporters described one of the debris pieces as the "suspected tail" of the plane, but strong currents were making it difficult to operate a remotely-operated underwater vehicle to get a picture of the objects that are 30 metres underwater.

The huge relief operation has been assisted by several countries, including the United States and Russia, but rough weather throughout the week has hampered the recovery of Flight 8501, which went down early Sunday during a storm.

A statement from the Indonesian transport ministry spokesman J.A. Barata said AirAsia Indonesia had not been permitted to fly the Surabaya-Singapore route on Sundays and had not asked to change its schedule.

But the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore said it had granted permission for the airline's Sunday flight.

It was unclear how the airline, a unit of Malaysia-based AirAsia, had been able to fly without the necessary authorisation from its starting point.

AirAsia Indonesia chief Sunu Widyatmoko told reporters that the company would not comment until the results of the investigation were known, adding that the airline would "fully cooperate with the government in that evaluation process".

The families of victims have been preparing funerals as the bodies recovered are identified in Surabaya, Indonesia's second biggest city, where a crisis centre has been set up at a police hospital with facilities to store 150 bodies.

About 100 grieving Catholic relatives and well-wishers crowded into a small church in the police headquarters for a memorial mass Saturday afternoon, singing hymns and praying for the victims to be found quickly. Some broke down in tears.

"Everyone felt a mixture of sadness, confusion and uncertainty. What we do is just keep them company," said Surabaya's Bishop Vincentius Sutikno Wisaksono.

"I hope all this will be over soon, that the bodies will be found soon, as it will bring a lot of relief."

Of the 162 passengers and crew on board, 155 were Indonesian, with three South Koreans, one Singaporean, one Malaysian, one Briton and a Frenchman — co-pilot Remi Plesel.

Before take-off, the pilot of Flight 8501 had asked for permission to fly at a higher altitude to avoid a storm, but the request was not approved due to other planes above him on the popular route, according to AirNav, Indonesia's air traffic control.

In his last communication, Captain Iriyanto, an experienced former air force pilot, said he wanted to change course to avoid the menacing storm system. Then all contact was lost, about 40 minutes after the plane had taken off.

HONOLULU — The United States says its new round of sanctions against North Korea is just the opening salvo in its response to an unprecedented cyber attack on Sony. Yet there may be little else the US can do to further isolate a country that already has few friends in the world.

Even the latest sanctions, handed down by President Barack Obama in an executive order, may not sting quite as badly as US would have hoped. After all, North Korea is already under a strict sanctions regime imposed by the US over the North's nuclear programme.

The new round of sanctions unveiled Friday hit three organisations closely tied to the North's defence apparatus, plus 10 individuals who work for those groups or for North Korea's government directly. Any assets they have in the US will be frozen, and they'll be barred from using the US financial system.

But all three groups were already on the US sanctions list, and officials couldn't say whether any of the 10 individuals even have assets in the US to freeze.

Still, American officials portrayed the move as a swift and decisive response to North Korean behaviour they said had gone far over the line. Never before has the US imposed sanctions on another nation in direct retaliation for a cyber attack on an American company.

"The order is not targeted at the people of North Korea, but rather is aimed at the government of North Korea and its activities that threaten the United States and others," Obama wrote in a letter to House and Senate leaders.

North Korea has denied involvement in the cyber attack, which led to the disclosure of tens of thousands of confidential Sony e-mails and business files, then escalated to threats of terrorist attacks against movie theatres. Many cybersecurity experts have said it's entirely possible that hackers or even Sony insiders could be the culprits, not North Korea, and questioned how the FBI can point the finger so conclusively.

Senior US officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, repeated their assertion that North Korea was responsible and said independent experts don't have access to the same classified information as the FBI.

With this round of sanctions, the US also put North Korea on notice that payback need not be limited to those who perpetrated the attack.

The 10 North Koreans singled out for sanctions didn't necessarily have anything to do with the attack on Sony, senior US officials said. Anyone who works for or helps North Korea's government is now fair game, said the officials — especially North Korea's defence sector and spying operations.

Yet prominent lawmakers were already calling for an ever harsher stance. Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who is set to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this year, said it was time to concede the US policy on North Korea isn't working.

Added Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce: "We need to go further to sanction those financial institutions in Asia and beyond that are supporting the brutal and dangerous North Korean regime."

Obama has said the US is considering whether to put North Korea back on its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Beyond that, it's unclear what additional penalties the US has in its arsenal. There is no appetite for a military intervention. The US has said that some elements of its response may not be seen publicly, however.

The sanctions target the country's primary intelligence agency, a state-owned arms dealer that exports missile and weapons technology, and the Korea Tangun Trading Corp., which supports defence research. The individuals sanctioned include North Koreans representing the country's interests in Iran, Russia and Syria.

There was no immediate response from North Korea. Sony declined to comment.

While denying any role in a cyber attack, North Korea has expressed fury over the Sony comedy flick "The Interview”, which depicts a fictional assassination plot against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Sony initially called off the film's release after movie theatres decided not to show the film. After Obama criticised that decision, Sony decided to release the film in a limited number of theatres and online.

The White House called the sanctions "the first aspect of our response" to the Sony attack, a declaration that raised fresh questions about who was behind a nearly 10-hour shutdown of North Korean websites last week. The shutdown prompted a blunt response from North Korea's powerful National Defence Commission, which blamed the US and hurled racial slurs at Obama, calling him a reckless "monkey in a tropical forest.

PANGKALAN BUN/SURABAYA, Indonesia — A body recovered on Wednesday from the crashed AirAsia plane was wearing a life jacket, an Indonesian search and rescue official said, raising new questions about how the disaster unfolded.

Rescuers believe they have found the plane on the ocean floor off Borneo, after sonar detected a large, dark object beneath waters near where debris and bodies were found on the surface.

Ships and planes had been scouring the Java Sea for Flight QZ8501 since Sunday, when it lost contact during bad weather about 40 minutes into its flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.

Seven bodies have been recovered from the sea, some fully clothed, which could indicate the Airbus A320-200 was intact when it hit the water. That would support a theory that it suffered an aerodynamic stall.

Two bodies, in coffins bedecked with flowers and marked 001 and 002, arrived by an air force plane in Surabaya, TV pictures showed.

The fact that one person put on a life jacket suggests those on board had time before the aircraft hit the water, or before it sank.

And yet the pilots did not issue a distress signal. The plane disappeared after it asked for permission to fly higher to avoid bad weather.

"This morning, we recovered a total of four bodies and one of them was wearing a life jacket," Tatang Zaenudin, an official with the search and rescue agency, told Reuters.

He declined to speculate on what the find might mean. AirAsia Chief Executive Tony Fernandes told reporters there had been no confirmation yet of the sonar image, nor of the discovery of the body wearing a life jacket.

A pilot who works for a Gulf carrier said the life jacket indicated the cause of the crash was not "catastrophic failure". Instead, the plane could have stalled and then come down, possibly because its instruments iced up and gave the pilots inaccurate readings.

"There was time. It means the thing didn't just fall out of the sky," said the pilot, who declined to be identified.

He said it could take a minute for a plane to come down from 9,843 metres and the pilots could have experienced "tunnel vision... too overloaded" to send a distress call.

Most of those on board were Indonesians. No survivors have been found.

Hernanto, head of the search and rescue agency in Surabaya, said rescuers believed they had found the plane on the sea bed with a sonar scan in water 30-50 metres deep. The black box flight data and cockpit voice recorder has yet to be found.

Authorities in Surabaya were making preparations to receive and identify bodies, including arranging 130 ambulances to take victims to a police hospital and collecting DNA from relatives.

"We are praying it is the plane so the evacuation can be done quickly," Hernanto said.

Strong wind and waves hampered the search and with visibility at less than a kilometre, the air operation was called off in the afternoon.

"We are all standing by," Dwi Putranto, heading the air force search effort in Pangkalan Bun on Borneo, told Reuters.

"If we want to evacuate bodies from the water, it's too difficult. The waves are huge and it's raining."

Indonesian President Joko Widodo said his priority was retrieving the bodies.

Relatives, many of whom collapsed in grief when they saw the first grim television pictures confirming their fears on Tuesday, held prayers at a crisis centre at Surabaya airport.

Experienced pilot

The plane was travelling at 9,753 metres and had asked to fly at 12,468 metres. When air traffic controllers granted permission for a rise to 11,156 metres a few minutes later, they received no response.

Online discussion among pilots has centred on unconfirmed secondary radar data from Malaysia that suggested the aircraft was climbing at a speed of 353 knots, about 100 knots too slow, and that it might have stalled.

Investigators are focusing initially on whether the crew took too long to request permission to climb, or could have ascended on their own initiative earlier, said a source close to the inquiry, adding that poor weather could have played a part as well.

The Indonesian captain, a former air force fighter pilot, had 6,100 flying hours under his belt and the plane last underwent maintenance in mid-November, said the airline, which is 49 per cent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia .

Three airline disasters involving Malaysian-affiliated carriers in less than a year have dented confidence in the country's aviation industry and spooked travellers.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing in March on a trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew and has not been found. On July 17, the same airline's Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

On board Flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, and one person each from Singapore, Malaysia and Britain. The co-pilot was French.

The AirAsia group, including affiliates in Thailand, the Philippines and India, had not suffered a crash since its Malaysian budget operations began in 2002.

ATHENS — Greece's parliament was dissolved Wednesday ahead of an early election warily watched by markets and international creditors concerned that the austerity-weary country could starting unwinding unpopular fiscal reforms.

A statement from the chamber said the election would be held on January 25 — as announced Monday by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras — and the new parliament would reconvene on February 5.

Samaras had warned Tuesday that the financially stricken nation may be forced out of the eurozone if the election is won by radical leftist party Syriza which has vowed to reverse years of austerity imposed in return for financial aid.

"This struggle will determine whether Greece stays in Europe," Samaras told President Karolos Papoulias.

On Wednesday, Samaras warned again that Syriza planned "not to pay interest rates, and therefore to lead the country to a payment default and bankruptcy".

His assertion followed comments by two Syriza officials alluding to a debt repayment freeze if Greece's creditors refuse to renegotiate the country's bailout deal.

"Perhaps we shall not pay. Because we will negotiate and say that this programme is not viable," Yiannis Milios, the party's economic policy head, told Antenna TV.

Another party cadre, Yiannis Tolios, told Action 24 TV: "It's in our party platform, we may decide to stop paying interest rates on maturing debt."

Fears of a potential Greek exit from the eurozone have already rattled markets and sparked concern throughout European Union capitals.

Greek stocks closed down almost 4 per cent when the election was announced on Monday, after losing a massive 11 per cent earlier in the day.

On Wednesday, the bourse was trading 0.5 per cent higher.

It was parliament's failure to choose a new president in three successive votes this month that triggered the snap poll.

As its first order of business, the new chamber must elect a successor to 85-year-old Papoulias, whose five-year term ends in March.

'No alternative'
to austerity 

Syriza, currently the front-runner in opinion polls, has pledged to unwind many of the reforms imposed by Greece's creditors — the so-called "troika" of the International Monetary Fund, European Union, and European Central Bank — by cutting taxes and increasing state aid and public services.

The last election in 2012 plunged Greece into weeks of political uncertainty, and there are fears of a repeat next month given the close race between Samaras' conservative New Democracy party and Syriza.

Opinion polls indicate Syriza leads New Democracy by three to
six points.

A new SKAI TV poll on Wednesday gave the leftists 29.5 per cent against 25 per cent for New Democracy.

However, analysts note that even if Syriza was to win it would still probably need to form a coalition — and to do so, it would have to tone down some of its rhetoric to find a partner.

Syriza had dismissed warnings that its electoral programme would rattle markets and creditors, but within hours of the election being called on Monday, the IMF said it was suspending further bailout payments to Greece until a new government was formed.

The European Union has renewed its calls on Greeks to stick by the often painful reforms adopted as part of a massive international bailout for the eurozone member state.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble was more direct in warning the cash-strapped country against abandoning the agreed economic reforms, saying "they have no alternative".

Greece recently secured a two-month extension to February from its EU-IMF creditors to conclude a fiscal audit that will determine the release of some 7.0 billion euros ($8.6 billion) in loans.

A new extension is now likely to be required if Syriza comes to power, outgoing Finance Minister Gikas Hardouvelis said this week.

MOSCOW — Top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was detained by police on Tuesday after he violated his house arrest to join a protest in Moscow over a guilty verdict against him and his brother in a controversial fraud case.

Dozens of other people were also detained as hundreds gathered in central Moscow after the charismatic 38-year-old opposition leader called on Russians to take to the streets against President Vladimir Putin's regime following Tuesday's court ruling.

A Moscow judge found both Navalny and his brother Oleg guilty of embezzlement and sentenced them to three and a half years, but while Navalny's sentence was suspended, his younger brother, who is not involved in politics, was ordered to serve the time behind bars.

The sentence against his 31-year-old brother infuriated Navalny and was interpreted by his allies as an attempt to muzzle him and thwart his presidential ambitions ahead of a 2018 election.

Navalny, who was put under house arrest earlier this year, managed to escape and took a selfie on the Moscow metro as he sought to join the crowd bound for Manezhnaya Square.

But a policeman grabbed him and hauled him into a van.

"That I am detained means nothing," he wrote from the van on FireChat. "They cannot detain everyone," he said, asking people to stay put and brave the freezing temperatures of -15oC.

"It's not about me or my brother but about the outrageous hideousness that is happening in our country," he told Echo of Moscow radio.

Russia's prison service said it was notifying the court about Navalny's house arrest violation — a move that could see his suspended sentence converted to a term behind bars.

Over 130 other people were detained at the rally, which did not receive the required authorisation from city hall, according to OVD-Info, an NGO that monitors arrests.

Navalny described Tuesday's verdict as "the most mean and disgusting possible" and said Putin's regime was using a strategy to "torture and torment the relatives of its political opponents”.

"This regime has no right to exist, it must be destroyed," he said.

Thorn in Kremlin's side 

Navalny has become a major thorn in the Kremlin's side over the last few years.

He first built a massive support base on the Internet as an anti-corruption blogger, then rallied tens of thousands during the 2011-12 anti-Putin protests and most recently coming in second in last year's Moscow mayoral race after a grassroots campaign against the Kremlin's candidate.

The Navalny brothers were accused of defrauding French cosmetics company Yves Rocher of nearly 27 million rubles (more than half a million dollars at the exchange rate at the time), although the firm has said that it suffered no damages.

Prosecutors had asked the court to jail Alexei for 10 years and Oleg for eight.

Tuesday's hearing was brought forward two weeks in a move seen as a tactic to avoid massive protests and make it impossible to request authorisation for rallies.

The session took only about 15 minutes — unusual for Russia where judges usually read sentences for hours.

"What are you jailing him for, what sort of disgrace is this? This is to punish me even more?" Navalny yelled, slamming his fists on the table, as the judge announced that Oleg, a father of two young children, would be jailed.

Observers say that because of Navalny's prominence the verdict could not have been issued without Putin's personal approval.

However, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Kommersant FM radio that Putin merely followed the case in the media.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini's spokeswoman said the verdict "appears to be politically motivated" and stressed the "importance of judicial decisions to be free from political interference”.

Brother taken 'hostage' 

In a country dominated by Putin for years, observers see Navalny — a maverick politician who exposed the exorbitant wealth of the elite — as the one figure who can pose a threat to the strongman.

A talented orator, he is handsome, with a photogenic wife and two children, an unassuming middle-class lifestyle and he lacks ties to the 1990s political scene that many Russians despise.

Navalny — who has said he intends to run in the 2018 election — has seen half a dozen criminal cases lodged against him and his allies, which he says are politically motivated.

Tuesday's verdict came with Putin facing a plunging ruble and an economy teetering on the edge of recession against the backdrop of Moscow's standoff with the West over Ukraine.

"In essence, Oleg has been taken hostage, and Navalny will get discredited due to innocent people sent to jail because of him," opposition politician Boris Nemtsov wrote on Facebook.

"They hope to control Alexei Navalny's political activity... in the years before the 2018 elections" while still keeping the possibility of jailing Navalny himself later, his ally Leonid Volkov wrote.

The decision is also aimed at "intimidating other critics of the government”, said Human Rights Watch.

"The Kremlin seems to be telling independent voices to expect a harsher crackdown in 2015."

LONDON — A British nurse who contracted Ebola in West Africa was being treated in a specialist London hospital on Tuesday as infection rates grew again in eastern parts of Sierra Leone where the outbreak had subsided.

The volunteer, who returned Sunday from a treatment facility in Kerry Town in Sierra Leone run by the Save the Children charity, was transferred overnight from a Glasgow hospital in a Royal Air Force plane.

British media named her as Pauline Cafferkey, a nurse who was part of a 30-strong team of medical volunteers sent to Sierra Leone last month.

In an emotional diary written for The Scotsman newspaper, Cafferkey talked about her work at the facility, including meeting an orphan boy.

"The sad thing is that this is a regular occurrence and we see and hear of whole families being wiped out by this awful disease," Cafferkey wrote.

It is the first time someone has tested positive for Ebola in Britain and she is the second to be treated for the virus in the country after fellow nurse William Pooley, who made a full recovery earlier this year and has since returned to Sierra Leone.

The world's deadliest-ever outbreak, which has killed 7,842 people out of 20,081 cases, has been centred on Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea in West Africa.

In October, a Spanish nurse who treated two Ebola-infected Spanish missionaries became the first person to be diagnosed with the disease in Europe and the first to contract it outside of Africa.

Around 100 people have been tested for Ebola in hospitals across England alone so far this year, with all of them testing negative so far.

A second person returning from the affected region was being tested for the virus in Cornwall in southwest England and a third, also a healthcare worker, was to be tested in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Officials said that as far as they knew neither of the two had contact with the confirmed case and the test results were expected later on Tuesday.

The new case is being treated at the Royal Free Hospital in London, which has a high-level isolation unit ready to handle Ebola cases and equipped with its own ventilation system to avoid contagion.

The patient had travelled to Glasgow from Sierra Leone on Sunday, via Casablanca in Morocco.

Health authorities said they had contacted 63 of the 70 people who were on the plane with her on the last leg of her journey from London Heathrow Airport to Glasgow.

The National Health Service worker was admitted to hospital on Monday after feeling feverish.

"She did not have the symptoms that make us worried about transmission before she was in the isolation facility in Glasgow," said Professor Paul Cosford from the Public Health England agency.

Ebola is transmitted through contact with bodily fluids and officials emphasised that the risk of the virus spreading was "negligible".

Sierra Leone's deputy government spokesman Abdulai Bayratay defended screening measures in place.

"The screening process she went through at the Lungi International Airport was of quality standard and as far as was detected, she left the country without any symptoms of Ebola," he told AFP.

But British medic Martin Deahl, who said he had travelled with Cafferkey from Sierra Leone, criticised what he called the "shambolic" testing process at Heathrow.

"They ran out of testing kits and didn't seem to know what they were doing," he told The Daily Telegraph newspaper.

In Sierra Leone, a five-day Christmas lockdown in the north aimed at preventing new Ebola infections ended on Monday.

However, Ebola infections have increased in the diamond-rich Kono district in the country's east, where the infection rates had been decreasing.

Quoting updates from the National Ebola Response Centre, the national broadcaster said Kono had recorded 21 new Ebola cases on Friday and Saturday.

Meanwhile scientists said insect-eating bats that inhabited a hollow tree in a remote village in Guinea may have been the source of the epidemic.

The first death was that of a two-year-old boy died in the village of Meliandou in December 2013.

Reporting in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, scientists led by Fabian Leendertz at Berlin's Robert Koch Institute said the contamination may have come from a tree 50 metres from the boy's home.