Government officials handed confidential police intelligence about environmental activists to the energy giant E.ON before a planned peaceful demonstration, according to private emails seen by the Guardian.

Correspondence between civil servants and security officials at the company reveals how intelligence was shared about the peaceful direct action group Climate Camp in the run-up to the demonstration at Kingsnorth, the proposed site of a new coal-fired power station in north Kent.

Intelligence passed to the energy firm by officials from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) included detailed information about the movements of protesters and their meetings. E.ON was also given a secret strategy document written by environmental campaigners and information from the Police National Information and Coordination Centre (PNICC), which gathers national and international intelligence for emergency planning.

Undercover police are running a network of hundreds of informants inside protest organisations who secretly feed them intelligence in return for cash, according to evidence handed to the Guardian.

Undercover police are running a network of hundreds of informants inside protest organisations who secretly feed them intelligence in return for cash, according to evidence handed to the Guardian.They claim to have infiltrated a number of environmental groups and said they are receiving information about leaders, tactics and plans of future demonstrations.

The dramatic disclosures are revealed in almost three hours of secretly recorded discussions between covert officers claiming to be from Strathclyde police, and an activist from the protest group Plane Stupid, whom the officers attempted to recruit as a paid spy after she had been released on bail following a demonstration at Aberdeen airport last month.

Later in the evening, opposition leaders and supporters gathered outside parliament for a rally, as they have daily since 9 April.

On Tuesday, Mr Saakashvili claimed his government had put down a brief mutiny among a tank battalion. Tbilisi had said it was part of a Russian-linked coup attempt to kill Mr Saakashvili. But opposition parties said the alleged mutiny was a deliberate attempt by the government to distract attention from the new phase of anti-government protests.

Riot police fired in the air to disperse pro-reform demonstrators in central Tehran on Thursday, nearly four weeks after a disputed election triggered mass protests across Iran, a witness said.

Police detained several people among hundreds of protesters who turned up near Tehran University in defiance of a ban on gatherings for the anniversary of violent student demonstrations in 1999, the witness told Reuters. Another witness said police also used tear gas.

Another witness at the scene in downtown Tehran said: "Police used tear gas twice to disperse the crowd. There were also many Basij militia on motorbikes patrolling the area."

Initially, Buner was a hard place for the Taliban to crack. When they attacked a police station in the valley district last year, the resistance was fearless. Local people picked up rifles, pistols and daggers, hunted down the militants and killed six of them.

But it was not to last. In short order this past week the Taliban captured Buner, a strategically vital district just 60 miles northwest of the capital, Islamabad. The militants flooded in by the hundreds, startling Pakistani and American officials with the speed of their advance.

That Buner fell should be no surprise, local people say. Last fall, the inspector general of police in North-West Frontier Province, Malik Naveed Khan, complained that his officers were being attacked and killed by the hundreds. Mr. Khan was so desperate — and had been so thoroughly abandoned by the military and the government — that he was relying on citizen posses like the one that stood up to the Taliban last August.

At least 30 people have died in the Peruvian Amazon during clashes between police and indigenous groups protesting against oil and gas exploration on ancestral lands.

Violence erupted when police attempted to clear a road blocked by thousands of indigenous Peruvians protesting against a law they say makes it easier for foreign firms to exploit their lands.

Protest leaders said police opened fire from helicopters with bullets andtear gas, while police said protesters attacked officers with firearms.

New protests have flared in the western Chinese city of Urumqi, two days after more than 150 people died in clashes involving ethnic groups and police.About 200 ethnic Uighurs, who are a Muslim minority, faced off against police to protest over the arrest of 1,434 people over Sunday's unrest. Groups of ethnic Han Chinese have now armed themselves with batons and stones and have gathered in Urumqi.

Witnesses to Sunday's protests said Uighur protesters attacked vehicles before turning on local Han Chinese.

The unrest was apparently sparked by a brawl between Uighurs and Han Chinese several weeks earlier in a toy factory thousands of miles away in Guandong province.

The Military Advocate General, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit, made the decision to close the case in which the Criminal Investigation Department of the Military Police investigated statements made by soldiers at the Rabin Military Preparation Center in reference to Operation Cast Lead.

he Military Advocate General, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit, made the decision to close the case in which the Criminal Investigation Department of the Military Police investigated statements made by soldiers at the Rabin Military Preparation Center in reference to Operation Cast Lead.

This decision was made after the Military Police investigation found that the crucial components of their descriptions were based on hearsay and not supported by facts. In particular, the investigation addressed two alleged incidents that raised suspicion of acts in which uninvolved non-combatants were fired upon.

The police chief for Afghanistan’s southern province of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold, and eight other officers were killed in a clash with U.S.-trained Afghan special forces on Monday, senior provincial officials said. The clash erupted after the soldiers entered the prosector’s office in Kandahar city and forcibly removed an unidentified prisoner, said Ahmad Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar provincial council and a brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Senior U.S. military commanders have said violence in Afghanistan has reached its highest level since the Taliban were ousted after a U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been re-elected as president of Iran in a resounding victory, the interior minister says.With more than 80% of results in, official figures said he won 62.6% of the vote, amid a record high turnout.

But reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi has also claimed victory, calling the result a "dangerous charade", as backers vowed to appeal for a re-run. Police have sealed off Mr Mousavi's campaign HQ, preventing his supporters from holding a news conference.

There have been reports of police deploying on the streets of Tehran and beating people with truncheons as small groups gather to protest.

International alarm at the Talibanisation of parts of northern Pakistan near Islamabad was mounting last night after militants ambushed a convoy of soldiers deployed to prevent extremists taking over a district only 60 miles from the capital.

Snipers opened fire on police escorting four platoons of Frontier Corps paramilitary troops into Buner district, a day after militants overran government buildings and looted western aid offices. One policeman was killed and one injured, an army spokesman said.

Locals said the ambush had forced the Frontier Corps to retreat. "Now Buner is ruled by the Taliban," one resident told the Guardian by phone. "They go anywhere they want."

A deadly outburst of violence appears to be overwhelming Iraq’s police and military forces as American troops hand over greater control of cities across the country to them. On Friday, twin suicide bombings killed at least 60 people outside Baghdad’s most revered Shiite shrine, pushing the death toll in one 24-hour period to nearly 150.

The bombings on Friday ominously echoed attacks like the one at a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 that unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed and pushed the country toward civil war.

The latest bombings — there have been at least 18 major attacks so far this month — so far have not prompted retaliatory attacks, but they have strained what remains a fragile society deeply divided between Sunnis and Shiites.

Israel's new Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has been questioned by police for at least seven hours over corruption allegations.

Police said Mr Lieberman was questioned under caution on suspicion of "bribery, money-laundering and breach of trust" as part of an ongoing investigation.

A spokesman for Mr Lieberman said it was "the same investigation that has been ongoing for the past 13 years and which he has petitioned the courts to have speeded up.

Thousands of Italians have marched through Naples in one of the largest anti-mafia protests of recent years. Police said 100,000 people gathered for the protest, held annually on the first day of spring.

They called for more police action against mafia clans, who have killed more than 900 people in recent decades.

Organised crime in Italy is dominated by four mafia clans: Sicily's Cosa Nostra; the Camorra around Naples; Calabria's 'Ndrangheta; and the Sacra Corona Unita, in Puglia. The Italian authorities have hit the Cosa Nostra hard in recent years, says the BBC's Mark Duff in Milan, but other groups maintain their grip and have seen their influence spread. The global economic downturn has also thrown up fresh money-making opportunities for the mafia - such as lending cash to credit-starved businessmen.

Palestinian attack suspected after two Israeli policemen shot dead • Prisoner-swap deadline on eve of PM's departure• Gazan militants captured 22-year-old three years ago Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 March 2009 01.42 GMT Article history Two Israeli policemen were shot dead in the West Bank yesterday in what Israeli police said they suspected was a Palestinian attack.No Palestinian group claimed responsibility for the shooting, which took place near the mainly agricultural settlement of Massuah, in an area of the West Bank close to the border with Jordan that is under Israeli security control. "The main suspicion points to a nationalistic motive," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.The attack came as the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, sent two senior negotiators to Cairo yesterday in a final attempt to secure the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Gazan militants nearly three years ago.

the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, sent two senior negotiators to Cairo yesterday in a final attempt to secure the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Gazan militants nearly three years ago.

He sent Yuval Diskin, head of Israel's domestic security agency, Shin Bet, and Ofer Dekel, a long-time negotiator and former security official, with a reported offer that would have seen the release of some but not all the prisoners Hamas has demanded be freed in return for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.