WORLD briefs

WASHINGTON.President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick Sonia Sotomayor on Thursday looked headed for confirmation as Senate hearings wound up, but critics planned one last showdown over a controversial race ruling. Sotomayor, poised to become the first Hispanic justice on the top U.S. court, appeared for a fourth day before the Senate Judiciary Committee where she has coolly parried Republican attempts to depict her as unfit for the lifetime job.

KHOST, Afghanistan. A Taliban commander in southeastern Afghanistan said on Thursday a missing U.S. soldier is being held by insurgents and is unharmed but warned the military he will be killed if they try to find him.

The soldier has been missing in southeastern Paktika province since late June, just before thousands of U.S. Marines began a major new offensive in the Taliban heartland of Helmand in the south.

The U.S. military says the soldier is presumed captured and said it is doing all it can to get the soldier back.

SHARM EL-SHEIKH. India and Pakistan said on Thursday they had agreed to continue dialogue and would not link action on fighting terrorism to that process, after their prime ministers met in Egypt.

Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also ordered senior diplomats to meet as often as needed to improve relations.

PHNOM PENH. A senior Khmer Rouge prison guard on Thursday told a war crimes tribunal he was forced to send thousands of detainees to an execution site, where they were brutally killed and their bodies thrown into mass graves.

Him Huy, 54, a guard at Phnom Penh's notorious S-21 prison, said he was ordered by Pol Pot's chief jailor to transport prisoners to a rice field where they were stripped naked and beaten with clubs as they bled to death.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland Iceland's parliament voted by a narrow margin Thursday to apply for membership in the European Union, moving to relinquish some of the recession-hit country's cherished independence in the name of stability.

Members of Iceland's parliament, the Althingi, voted 33-28 to start membership talks with the EU.