WASHINGTON: The United States expressed hope Tuesday that India would persuade Afghan President Hamid Karzai to sign a deal allowing US troops to stay, as lawmakers voiced outrage at the delay. Testifying before a Senate committee, a senior US official voiced confidence that Afghanistan would eventually complete an agreement for some 12,000 US troops to stay after 2014, despite Karzai’s insistence that he will leave the decision to his successor. “His upcoming visit to India could, I think, be quite influential, because he highly respects and has good relations with the Indian government,” said James Dobbins, the US special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

NEW DELHI: India’s top court is due to rule Wednesday on decriminalising gay sex between consenting adults, in a decision which could change the fate of the country’s largely-closeted homosexual community. The landmark verdict is slated to be handed down four years after the Delhi High Court ruled that an existing statute banning homosexual acts was discriminatory and a “violation of fundamental rights” according to the constitution. The statute in question is a British colonial-era law outlawing “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”. Conviction carried a fine and a maximum 10-year jail sentence.

KIEV: Security forces clashed with protesters as they began tearing down opposition barricades and tents set up in the center of the Ukrainian capital early Wednesday, in an escalation of the weeks-long standoff threatening the leadership of President Viktor Yanukovych. Several thousand police in riot gear used their shields to push back protesters and successfully removed some of their tents and barricades. But thousands of protesters, their ranks swelling through the night, put up fierce resistance for hours, shoving back at the police lines to keep them away from the center of the protest camp on Independence Square in downtown Kiev.

The US is to help fly African Union peacekeeping troops into the Central African Republic (CAR), officials say. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered US forces “to begin transporting forces from Burundi to the Central African Republic,” his spokesman said in a statement. It follows a request from France, which has deployed 1,600 soldiers to the CAR. President Obama has called for calm and the arrest of those behind the violence. ‘Catastrophe’ French soldiers started to remove weapons from fighters on Monday.

KIEV: Ukrainian security forces on Monday moved in on pro-EU demonstrators to end a week-long blockade of the government headquarters, prompting Washington to urge Kiev to “immediately de-escalate the situation”. With the authorities apparently keen to regain control of the city centre, the party of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko said that armed police had raided their offices although this was denied by police. Upping the stakes after more than two weeks of protests over the government’s rejection of a pact with the European Union, the protesters a day earlier symbolically toppled the statue of the Soviet Union’s founder Vladimir Lenin in Kiev.