BEIJING (AP) — A village in southern China where mass protests over land disputes drove out local officials and police has begun preparing for elections to replace the ousted leaders.

December's protests in Wukan village ended after provincial officials intervened and gave in to the protesters' key demands. It was a rare compromise by the Chinese government, which often suppresses protests.

Yang Semao, a deputy head of the village's election preparation panel, says around 60 percent of the village's 7,600 residents participated in a vote Wednesday to select the members of an 11-member election committee.

Yang says the committee will organize the election for new village leaders, which will take place around March 1.

India's biggest auto maker Maruti Suzuki on Wednesday said sales in January rose for the first time in eight months, while rival car makers continued to show a steady pace of growth.

Maruti, majority-owned by Japan's Suzuki Motor Corp, said sales climbed 5.2 percent year on year to 115,433 vehicles, led by higher demand for its hatchback models and a jump in exports.

The last time the firm saw a rise was in May, since when it suffered a series of crippling labour disputes at one of its plants in the northern state of Haryana. The labour unrest has now eased.

Domestic sales were broadly flat at 101,047 vehicles against 100,422 in the same month a year earlier, but exports surged 54 percent to 14,386 units.

India, which has been one of the world's fastest growing car markets in recent years, suffered a slowdown in demand last year as many buyers deferred purchases or cancelled them due to costly auto loans and rising fuel expenses.

However, demand has picked up slightly since November.

Ford said it sold 10,789 cars in January -- a near eight percent increase year-on-year -- while South Korean giant Hyundai Motor's local subsidiary said sales increased 15 percent with sales of 49,901 units in January.

The company sold 43,316 units in the year-ago period.

Leading vehicle maker Tata Motors said its domestic sales in January rose 14 percent year-on-year to 36,770 vehicles but sales of its flagship small cheap car, the Nano, rose by just three percent.

Analysts expect car sales to keep improving in the coming months, with India's central bank expected to start lowering interest rates as inflation shows signs of moderating.

"Maruti's improved data is pulling the industry up," said Mahantesh Sabarad, auto analyst with Fortune Equity Brokers.

"With the macroeconomic conditions improving, demand for cars will rise."

Sales of new cars in India are likely to pick up in the next financial year, the industry body Society of Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) has also predicted.

SIAM forecasts car sales to grow 11 to 13 percent in 2012-2013, well above the zero to two percent growth it expects for this fiscal year.

More than 80 percent of sales in India in 2011 were for diesel rather than petrol cars, as consumers opted for the cheaper fuel which is still heavily subsidised by the government.

The price gap between petrol and diesel is 25 rupees (about 50 cents) per litre, making diesel cars far cheaper to run.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban denied Wednesday that the movement is planning direct talks with the Afghan government to end the 10-year-old war, while a leaked NATO report suggested the insurgents are confident they will regain power after international troops leave.

While both developments were setbacks to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's efforts to broker peace, his government got a boost from Pakistan's top diplomat who declared her nation's support for an Afghan-led reconciliation process.

"Our only prerequisite to be supportive of an initiative is that it should be Afghan-led. It should be Afghan-owned. It should be Afghan-driven and Afghan-backed," Pakistan's Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said at the Afghan Foreign Ministry.

While she didn't mention the United States, Afghan officials have complained privately that the peace effort has so far been dominated by American efforts and talks with Taliban representatives. Washington insists it is only setting the stage, and any eventual talks must involve Karzai's government.

The Taliban were responding to widespread reports that Karzai's government was seeking direct talks with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia — a move seen as an attempt by the Afghan leader to take charge of the peace effort.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid rejected those reports as "baseless," saying in a statement that exploratory talks between the insurgency and the U.S. and its allies have not yet reached the stage for negotiations.

"Before the negotiation phase, there should be trust-building between the sides, which has not started yet," Mujahid said.

The Taliban calls the Afghan government a puppet regime. The insurgency, however, has agreed to set up a political office in the Gulf state of Qatar and has acknowledged having preliminary discussions with the Americans.

U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged Tuesday that to build trust with the Taliban, the United States may release several Afghan Taliban prisoners from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper told Congress that no decision had been made whether to trade the five Taliban prisoners, now held at Guantanamo Bay, as part of the nascent peace talks with the Taliban. He and CIA Director David Petraeus did not dispute that the Obama administration was considering transferring the five to a third country.

Karzai was angry that Qatar had agreed to host a Taliban political office without consulting his government, according to a senior Afghan official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. Karzai prefers Saudi Arabia or Turkey where he believes he would have the upper hand in guiding the talks, the official said. The Afghan government fears that the U.S., anxious to wrap up a decade in Afghanistan, will try to impose a political settlement with the Taliban, the official said.

Khar was the first high-level Pakistani official to visit Kabul since last fall when relations between the neighboring countries soured after the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president and former head of the government's peace council. He was killed in his Kabul home Sept. 20, 2011 by a suicide bomber posing as a peace emissary from the Taliban. Afghan officials blamed the killing on insurgents based in Pakistan.

Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmay Rasoul hailed Khar's visit as a breakthrough toward better relations and said the region will find no permanent peace until Pakistan offers serious and honest cooperation.

The ministry also announced that Karzai would travel to Islamabad Feb. 16 and 17. During the visit, he is expected to push Pakistan to follow through on concrete steps Afghanistan wants Pakistan to take to facilitate the peace process, according to an Afghan official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate negotiations.

Khar's visit to Kabul came on the same day that a classified NATO report was released, claiming that the Taliban believe they will return to power after the U.S.-led coalition ends its combat role in Afghanistan in 2014, NATO officials said. The captured Taliban fighters also believed they were receiving support from Pakistan and that they were doing well on the battlefield, the officials said.

Khar denounced the report, which was based on the interrogation of thousands of insurgent prisoners.

"This is old wine in an even older bottle. I don't think these claims are new," she said.

"So I think that I can just disregard this as potentially a strategic leak or otherwise."

NATO officials cautioned that the report was a summary of interrogations and was not based on an intelligence analysis.

"There is an expression in the report that they are basing themselves on the support from Pakistan," said Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, a spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan.

Jacobson said the report was a "compilation of investigations, or interrogations straight after detainment, so we can not really put that high a value on what they are saying. They are talking (about) their perception of the campaign, what they believe about how the campaign is going, and what they want us to believe about how their campaign is going."

He said most of the captured fighters think that "they are still having a successful role" on the ground but that perception was wrong.

"The insurgency is clearly on the back foot. We have been pressurizing them over the summer, we have taken vast amounts of land out of their hands and we have detained a high number" of militants, Jacobson said.

In Brussels, a senior NATO official also said the alliance has no doubt that insurgents are infiltrating the Afghan security forces. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of standing rules.

The assertion came after a string of killings of foreign forces by their Afghan counterparts.

U.S. defense officials told the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the number of insider attacks in Afghanistan has dramatically increased. Seventy-five percent of the more than 40 incidents since 2007 happened in the past two years. Most of the attackers acted out of personal motivation, and were not directed by insurgents.

The attacks have killed 70 coalition troops and wounded another 110.

In the latest such incident, an Afghan soldier shot and killed a NATO service member in southern Afghanistan late Tuesday, although the circumstances were unclear. The U.S.-led military coalition said it was an attack, while an Afghan commander called it an accident.

___

Associated Press writers Patrick Quinn in Kabul and Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report.

China has blamed "trained separatists" for a wave of unrest in Tibetan-inhabited areas last week that left at least two people dead and dozens injured, state press reported Wednesday.

The southwestern province of Sichuan -- which has big populations of ethnic Tibetans, many of whom complain of religious repression and a lack of freedom -- was rocked by three violent clashes last week.

Rights groups say security forces shot dead peaceful protesters in each of the incidents but China has acknowledged only two of them, and says they were triggered by a violent crowd of demonstrators.

"Initial evidence showed that the riots and assaults were well planned beforehand and instigated by trained separatists against the country," the official China Daily newspaper said, citing the Sichuan government.

It said protesters attacked police stations with stones and molotov cocktails, prompting the police to take action and "defend themselves".

Chinese authorities have barred foreign journalists from going to the affected areas, making independent attempts to verify the situation there near impossible.

"The riots were serious crimes plotted by Tibetan separatist forces in and outside of China," the English-language Global Times said, also citing the Sichuan government.

"Local police were forced to open fire, killing two rioters and wounding several others."

Officials at the Sichuan information office refused to comment when contacted by AFP.

Chinese-language media has made scant mention of last week's violence in Tibetan-inhabited areas, in an indication of official concern the unrest will spread.

According to the English-language China Daily, 24 police officers and firemen were injured in the violence.

Tibetans have long chafed under Chinese rule, saying they suffer religious repression and government surveillance, and that their culture is gradually being eroded by an influx of majority Han Chinese into the areas they live in.

Beijing, though, insists that Tibetans enjoy freedom of religious belief and says their lives have been made better by huge ongoing investment into Tibetan-inhabited areas.

An Indonesian court on Wednesday sentenced 10 Islamist extremists to jail terms of between five and eight years over a suicide bomb attack on a police mosque last April.

Tried separately, all 10 were sentenced Wednesday for their parts in a suicide attack in Cirebon, West Java province.

Musola, 35, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name, was sentenced to eight years for "possessing firearms and preparing explosives to be used in the bomb attack at the Cirebon police mosque," presiding judge Riyadi Sunindyo told the district court in Tangerang on the outskirts of Jakarta.

Dzulkifli Lubis also received an eight-year prison term for buying and supplying firearms, judge I Made Supharta said.

Eight other defendants were handed five to seven-and-a-half-year jail terms for their involvement in the attack, including delivering and hiding firearms.

Thirty people, mostly policemen and including the Cirebon police chief, were wounded in the April attack when a 32-year-old suicide bomber detonated explosives strapped to his body as worshippers began their prayers.

Nails, nuts and bolts lodged in the victims' bodies in what was the first suicide mosque bombing in the world's largest Muslim-majority nation of 240 million people.

Indonesia is struggling to deal with the threat of homegrown Islamist militants who oppose the country's secular, democratic system and want to create an Islamic caliphate across much of Southeast Asia.

A series of bombings in recent years in the country have been blamed on regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah, including the 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 people, among them 88 Australian tourists.

The World Trade Organization approved a waiver on Wednesday allowing 75 Pakistani products duty free access to European markets for two years to help textile exports after devastating floods in 2010.

"This waiver is unprecedented. This shows the human face of the WTO. The Pakistani people have faith in the multi-lateral trade system," Shahid Bashir, Pakistan's ambassador to the international trade body told, AFP.

Trade officials said the EU is Pakistan's largest trading partner, receiving almost 30 percent of its exports -- worth almost 3 billion euros ($3.9 billion).

Pakistan's trade with the EU consists mainly of textiles, which account for more than 70 percent of its exports to European countries.

The products chose for the waiver would amount to around 900 million euros in import value, accounting for about 27 percent of EU imports from Pakistan.

The WTO has not in the past offered such special trade terms to one member, but the EU requested it due to Pakistan's exceptional circumstances following the floods in the south Asian country.

Bashir said the agreement on textiles, leather goods and industrial alcohol could boost Pakistan's exports by 15 to 20 percent.

"We are very happy about the agreement," he said that had come after 18 months of wrangling.

The deal faced delays over objections raised by countries such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

To allay their opposition to the waiver, the list includes 20 products with tariff rate quotas that will be applied instead of full liberalisation.

Bangladesh, which also relies heavily on textile exports, relented as it viewed the circumstances for the agreement as exceptional.

The waiver needs to be ratified at the general council meeting of the WTO on February 14 and 15 and if approved will apply until the end of 2013.

Baluch rebels attacked Pakistani security forces overnight, killing 14 soldiers and a driver working for the military in clashes that raged for five hours, officials said Wednesday.

Gunmen attacked two posts in the Margut area, about 60 kilometres (40 miles) east of Quetta, capital of the insurgency-torn southwestern province of Baluchistan. The soldiers were responsible for guarding coal mines, they said.

"A total of 15 people including 14 soldiers, one civilian driver of the Frontier Corps (FC) were killed and other 12 wounded in the attack," an FC spokesman told AFP.

A local intelligence official confirmed the toll.

Earlier, a senior military official said two dozen gunmen armed with light and heavy weapons attacked the paramilitary posts and killed 11 soldiers.

The assailants belonged to a Baluch militant group led by Harbiar Marri who is living in self exile in London, the official said.

Baluch rebels have been fighting since 2004 for political autonomy and a greater share of profits from Baluchistan's wealth of natural oil, gas and mineral resources.

Wednesday's clashes continued for five hours, the senior military official said, adding that militants came from mountain hideouts and planted remote-controlled bombs to block reinforcements.

"Harbiar is responsible for these attacks. He has been guiding his militants from Europe to target security forces.

"We want to make it clear that the FC cannot be deterred by these attacks. The militants will be given a befitting reply," he added.

On January 26, a similar attack on a Pakistani checkpost killed six soldiers in Dera Bugti, 400 kilometres (250 miles) southeast of Quetta.

Pakistan is also fighting a Taliban insurgency in its northwestern border areas with Afghanistan, where 14 soldiers have been killed in the last week.