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The immediate challenge for the world a week after Asia’s devastating earthquake disaster is a race against time: to find the survivors; bring food and water to the hungry and thirsty; and prevent a massive outbreak of disease.
   In an interview to be broadcast Sunday on US television network ABC, the head of the United Nations cautioned that the rebuilding effort could take between five and 10 years.
   ‘This is the largest disaster we have had to deal with,’ the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, said, underlining ‘the sheer complexity’ of the relief effort spread over a dozen nations.
   And at the same time, the disaster presents a political challenge to governments in the region and around the world.
   Rebuilding and preventing future catastrophes is not for now, aid officials explained Sunday. The battle today is for life, they said.
   As authorities and aid workers from Thailand to India slogged to gather in the bodies of the dead and clean up, a week to the day after a wall of water struck the vast region, the first aid was starting to arrive; by boat, by plane, by truck, car, helicopter and bullock-cart.
   Many of the hundreds of thousands displaced, and the up to five million affected by the disaster, need immediate access to food and to clean water and sanitation, authorities and aid officials said.
   The hungry and the thirsty are the most vulnerable to illness and disease and time runs out soon.
   But with roads and bridges down in the worst-affected regions of Indonesia and Sri Lanka, and with the tiny regional airports clogged with aid flights, the scale of the aid effort launched has yet to get much aid to the people most in need.
   ‘At the moment, the international operation is incredibly strong and it’s getting relief to airports, to depots at district level and we have distribution starting and pretty well going in much of Sri Lanka,’ said a senior official at the World Health Organisation, David Nabarro.
   But it will take time before the aid can get out from the airports and depots to the people who need it in all parts of the affected region, officials agreed.
   ‘It’s going to take weeks before we get out to all the isolated areas,’ a UN official, Michael Elmquist, said of Indonesia’s Aceh province, near the epicentre of the quake which triggered the deadly waves.
   Besides getting food and water to the affected areas, aid officials are also racing to prevent a massive outbreak of communicable diseases.
   The first signs of potentially deadly diseases are threatening survivors in areas hit by the waves, the World Health Organisation said Saturday.
   ‘There are increasing reports of diarrhoeal disease outbreaks coming from displaced persons’ settlements in Sri Lanka, in India,’ Nabarro said.
   ‘What we need to do is to make sure that we continue to distribute all rehydration salts and treatment for diarrhoea and we continue to do our work in sanitation and water supplies,’ Nabarro added.
   Cholera, malaria and typhoid are seen as the worst threats stalking survivors, although dengue fever and respiratory infections are also a concern.
   After the immediate challenges of cleaning up and saving lives, come those of rebuilding the devastated areas, seeing what can be done to prevent such massive loss of life in future disasters, and looking at how to rebuild communities devastated in the past week.
   The rebuilding task will be massive in Indonesia and Sri Lanka in particular, with hundreds of thousands of homes to rebuild; roads, bridges and telecommunications.
   To launch the effort, an international conference is being organised Thursday in Jakarta, to be attended by world leaders including the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and the leaders of Indonesia, Australia and Japan, among others.
   This will be followed by a donor conference in Geneva on January 11, and by a pre-planned UN conference on responding to natural disasters the following week. That conference will take place in Kobe, Japan, a city devastated by an earthquake ten years ago this month.
   After the physical rebuilding, the ordinary people affected by the disaster, the authorities, the community leaders and agencies will need to look at the challenges of rebuilding the lives of individuals, families and communities.
   From trauma counselling to re-training, to community network-building, it will need to be a massive effort to work.
   Meanwhile, in the region most affected, the disaster presents a series of political challenges.

Logistical bottlenecks Sunday continued to hamper moving relief supplies to those who need it most in Asia’s tsunami devastated regions, as funds pledged for victims reached two billion dollars.
   Tonnes of international humanitarian aid has arrived in Asia and clean-up operations in accessible areas are underway, but with the destruction on such a large-scale getting to many hard hit communities is fraught with difficulties.
   Relief workers are battling washed-out roads and bridges to get food and medical supplies to survivors in Indonesia’s isolated coastline of Aceh province, where an estimated 100,000 were killed by the tidal waves a week ago.
   Airstrips in the region have been swamped, forcing the relief effort to turn to what the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, called ‘a new and alternative way’ of bringing in aid, largely through the use of helicopters.
   ‘We need to transport a lot of food and equipment by helicopter, which is very expensive and which takes a lot of hardware, and which is also not the easiest way to distribute,’ he said, and warned it would take ‘many days’ to reach some communities.
   The international response to the disaster which the UN estimates has killed as many as 150,000 people across 11 countries has been unprecedented with the UN saying donations had reached two billion dollars.
   ‘International compassion has never, ever been like this,’ said Egeland, adding the money pledged is more than the UN managed to raise in appeals for 20 different nations over the whole of 2004.
   Egeland outlined a wish list to help the relief effort, including ships that carry helicopters, 100 boats and landing craft, C-17 and C-130 cargo planes and several hundred trucks.
   Several countries have already mobilised their military with the United States anchoring aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off Indonesia’s Sumartra island and 17 Sea Hawk helicopters dropping food to cut-off villages along the devastated west coast.
   Australian and American Hercules cargo planes are bringing in tonnes of blankets, medicines and body bags to the province, while C-130 US transport planes were ferrying
   supplies to Thailand and Sri Lanka.
   The United States is also deploying up to 1,500 marines for tsunami relief in Sri Lanka where flash floods triggered a new wave of refugees there Saturday.
   Aid was trickling through to Sri Lanka’s battered south but at levels far below what is required, while in the east downpours Saturday marooned many survivors, relief workers said.
   ‘We urgently need to improve the sanitary condition. We need more toilets,’ the chief civil administrator in Ampara, Herath Abeyweera, said by telephone.
   Ampara was the worst hit in last week’s tsunamis which devastated more than three quarters of Sri Lanka’s coastline.
   One country that is getting on top of its tragedy is Thailand where Interior Minister Bhokin Bhalakula said rescue teams have finished work in its top tourist destination Phuket and would soon wind up in Phi Phi island, although bloated and decomposed corpses were still being pulled from rubble.
   While wealthier nations like Thailand are coping better with the clean-up, smaller countries like the Maldives are struggling with the catastrophic consequences of the tragedy, triggered by an undersea earthquake off Indonesia.
   To better assess the needs of the nation of tiny coral islands which suffered extensive damage, a US marine team was travelling there Sunday.
   France said it was sending the helicopter carrier Jeanne d’Arc and the frigate George Leygues to provide medical aid in Aceh, the defence minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, announced in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche.
   ‘The urgency is to avoid a health disaster,’ the minister said, echoing warnings by the World Health Organisation that disease epidemics could be imminent.
   Dirty water and smashed sewerage systems pose immediate threats and the WHO said it was starting to see growing reports of potentially deadly diarrhoeal disease outbreaks in displacement camps in Sri Lanka and India.
   Major donors will convene on Thursday in Jakarta, which is hosting a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to focus on the disaster.

India’s tsunami-ravaged Andamans islands on Sunday sent an urgent SOS to health workers to report back for duty amid fears of epidemics on the islands where bodies still lie rotting under debris.
   Hundreds of health personnel fled their posts when tidal waves crashed into the remote tropical chain on December 26, wrecking the modest medical infrastructure.
   While some of the absentees are among the officially confirmed 4,500 dead on the Andaman and Nicobar islands, a majority are believed to be at home.
   In the chaos, heightened by daily aftershocks from the huge quake off nearby Indonesia, health workers like many other employees have stayed away.
   Clinics, hospitals, mortuaries and laboratories have struggled to operate, officials said.
   The Andamans’ administration said: ‘All doctors and staff of the health department who are on authorised or unauthorised leave should immediately proceed to their place of posting without fail.
   ‘In view of the emergent situation as well as chances of outbreak of epidemic diseases at various islands, it is very much necessary that the staff strength of all the hospitals should be strengthened to render aid to the earthquake and tsunami affected persons,’ the government order said.
   ‘The stench tells us that there are many bodies under the rubble,’ said lieutenant general BS Thakur, head of an Integrated Relief Command set up for the islands after a week of chaotic attempts to find out how many had died and where.
   The local administration said Saturday it had disposed of 812 bodies, leaving a huge pile of corpses. The po Muslim World.

Aid groups and government officials are concerned that orphans are being split among relatives more eager to obtain money promised for tsunami survivors than to care for the children.
   Jayashree, aged three, like thousands of other children across Asia, lost her parents in the tsunami.
   Now she has been separated from her siblings by a grandmother who picked her up from a relief camp in Nagapattinam, the worst-hit district on the Indian mainland with 5,500 deaths.
   Dressed in a crumpled pink dress that she found among a pile of used clothes from nearby Akkrapattai fishing hamlet, Jayashree pines continually for her sister Nithya, 6, and brother Gunasekaran, 10.
   Her maternal grandmother appears patient when visitors are around but snarls at the child when she thinks no-one is watching.
   The paternal grandmother picked up Nithya and Guna.
   Both grandmothers stand to collect 100,000 rupees (2,272 dollars) promised by the state and another 100,000 rupees pledged by the federal government as the nearest relatives.
   The government money is, however, intended to go into fixed deposits for an orphaned child to access when he or she turns 18.
   Jayashree said sadly that her parents have gone ‘kizhakku poyirukkaanga’—gone east, which in her village of some 5,000 fishing families means going to the beach to trade fish.
   Jayashree’s story is repeated almost in every relief
   centre across the Tamil Nadu shoreline.
   One UNICEF official said a man, who turned up claiming to be an uncle of an orphaned boy turned out to be a fraud after the child refused to go with him.
   ‘Obviously, these orphans are precious to their relatives and even others not related, for the money relief offered by the government,’ said S Vidyaakar, founder-director of Madras-based ‘Udhavum Karangal’ (Helping Hands), a voluntary institution,
   The organisation, which cares for destitute children, old people and the terminally ill, placed an advertisement in the newspapers offering to take tsunami orphans into care. It received not a single response.
   Vidyaakar, however, fears his time will come sooner than later, when the relatives grab the relief money and then dump the orphans on the road.
   ‘Then we will step in and take care of those unfortunate ones,’ he said.
   Started in 1982, Udhavum Karangal cares for about 2,000 people, almost 500 of them children.
   ‘We are worried about the plight of these kids as we find in most cases that their relatives have staked (a) claim over them only with an eye on the relief money from the government,’ said a Tamil Nadu state official at a relief camp near Thiravur, close to Nagapattinam.
   According to Thanjavur District Collector J Radhakrishnan, a top administrator overseeing relief operations, 145 orphaned children have been identified so far in Thanjavur.

One week after tsunamis engulfed Sri Lanka’s coastlines—sweeping away thousands of children with
   them—anguished parents of the missing are refusing to give up hope.
   The killer waves that battered Sri Lanka claimed the lives of more than 29,700 people across the nation, with children accounting for a third of the death toll according to relief workers.
   Distraught parents, relatives and friends who survived last week’s devastation are trying to track down ‘missing’ boys and girls, many of them five or six years old.
   One family took out a newspaper advertisement asking help to track down five-year-old Nikhil Lissenburgh, last seen at the southern tourist resort of Yala when the tsunami struck.
   ‘He may be dazed and confused and unable to express himself,’ pleads the advertisement, five days after the tragedy devastated a family that was otherwise enjoying a Christmas holiday by the beach.
   They are hoping for the safe return of Nikhil, son of a Sri Lankan mother and English father. The colour picture of a smiling boy, clutching a doll, could be an icon of the human tragedy.
   Friends and family of six-year-old Dimagee Prabhasha Ekanayake are also hopeful of finding her, even though she has not been since the giant waves swept her off the beach.

It was as if the US navy helicopter were a miracle, a dream come true.
   One man dropped to his knees and held up his clasped hands as if in prayer as the helicopter hovered just over his head. Another refugee strained against the blast of the rotor, his right hand reaching out.
   Aboard the navy Sea Hawk, aircrewman Joseph Sabia Jr, 31, his eyes moist with sadness, scrambled to toss bottles of water down to them.
   Relief workers say that people in this isolated region are dehydrated and on the brink of starvation one week after an earthquake and tidal wave killed tens of thousands, severed roads and left people completely isolated.
   Helicopters from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln flew a second day of sorties Sunday over the western coast of Indonesia’s badly-hit Aceh province in an effort to bring relief to refugees whose communities have been wiped out.
   As they flew on, past empty beaches lapped by gentle waves, the destruction became even more evident.

Medical teams from eight European nations were struggling to identify 57 corpses of foreign nationals killed in the tsunami that struck Sri Lanka last week, an undertaker said Sunday.
   The AF Raymond funeral undertakers said out of the 89 bodies brought to them, 32 were positively identified and repatriated or cremated here according to the wishes of the next of kin.
   ‘There are forensic teams from almost all European nations taking DNA samples and copies of dental structures,’ Aubrey Raymond said. ‘Among the unidentified bodies are six children not more than five years (old).’
   The authorities were trying to identify the remaining 57 bodies, he said, adding it would take weeks before the identities are established.
   Teams from Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Austria, Italy the Netherlands and Belgian were involved in the effort, he said.
   Sri Lankan officials had said more than 100 foreigners were killed and another 60 reported missing after the tsunamis killed nearly 30,000 people and left another 5,240 people missing.

The Muslim World League called on its members and Muslim humanitarian organisations to help countries hit by the Asian earthquake and tsunami tragedy, the official SPA news agency reported Sunday.
   The league’s secretary general, Akmal al-Din Oghali, called in a statement for ‘providing the most aid that can be offered to deal with the aftermath of the disaster, which is well beyond the means of the afflicted countries.’
   The league is ready to ‘coordinate the efforts of Islamic relief in order to deliver aid to those who need it in the speediest way possible,’ he said.

The tsunami disaster in southern Asia has brought to the fore the delicate question of humanitarian and development aid from the United States, one of the least generous of the world’s rich countries.
   A UN official’s comment that certain unnamed countries were ‘stingy’ with aid touched the heart of a Republican administration that has said helping poor countries develop economically is a key tool in the fight against terrorism.
   ‘It’s true that the United States gives a lot of money in absolute terms, but that’s just a reflection of our size,’ said David Roodman, a researcher at the Centre for Global Development Research, a Washington think tank.
   ‘In terms of aid given per person, the United States is one of the least generous rich countries. Privately Americans are generous, but our generosity as a country is definitely not what you would expect from the leader of the free world,’ he said.
   Such assertions are strongly rejected by the US president, George W Bush.
   ‘I felt like the person who made that statement was very misguided and ill-informed,’ Bush said Wednesday, responding to the ‘stinginess’ charge by Jan Egeland, head of humanitarian operations for the United Nations.
   To emphasis his point, and as Germany and France backed a proposal to cancel the foreign debt of countries hardest hit by the disaster, Bush announced Friday that Washington would donate 350 million dollars to victims of the catastrophe.
   That increased tenfold United States pledges thus far and placed the United States well in the lead of countries furnishing emergency aid to South Asian nations.
   Bush waited until three days after the disaster to emerge from his ranch here Wednesday to announce the formation of an international coalition for emergency assistance grouping the United States, Australia, Japan and India. Canada joined Friday.
   The United States devotes 0.14 per cent of its gross national product (GNP) to humanitarian aid and development, according to 2003 figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
   That is much less than Norway and Denmark, which donate 0.92 per cent and 0.84 per cent of their GNP, respectively.
   Even France–which was recently criticised as ungenerous by the director of the American Agency for International Development –gave 0.4 per cent of its GNP in 2003, almost three times the percentage provided by the United States.
   In launching his ‘war on terror’ in 2001 following the September 11 attacks on the United States, Bush said he wanted to use development aid as a tool and decided to increase it by 50 per cent by 2006, bringing it to an annual total of 15 million dollars.
   He therefore created a ‘Millennium Challenge Account’ in 2002 to distribute funds to countries that demonstrate sound political and economic management, and increased the allocation of gifts relative to loans.
   At the moment 16 countries are eligible to receive funds from the account and six others can receive financial aid to help them become eligible.

Peru declared a state of emergency in the southern Andean town of Andahuaylas on Saturday where an armed group led by a radical former soldier stormed a police station and was holding 10 officer’s hostage.
   Seven people were injured–two seriously– a gunfight in the early hours of New Year’s Day after former army major Antauro Humala and around 160 followers burst into the station in the town, 560 miles southeast of Lima, to demand the resignation of the Peruvian president, Alejandro Toledo.
   Toledo cut short a beach holiday and summoned ministers and key officials to declare a state of emergency, which restricts citizens’ rights and puts the area under the control of the security forces.
   Police and army reinforcements were sent in to restore order swiftly and Toledo told a news conference he was ‘in command of this operation, and I hope it goes well.’
   Humala earlier told Reuters by cell phone that some 800 police and 600 soldiers were massed and preparing to attack.
   ‘It all looks like it’s going to be tonight,’ he said. He has vowed to resist until Toledo quits.
   Humala, who gained notoriety in 2000 when he joined his brother in a failed uprising against then the president, Alberto Fujimori, said thousands of locals were backing his movement against a president he accused of ‘generalised corruption.’
   ‘We’ll defend ourselves,’ Humala said. ‘If they want to risk their lives defending a president like Toledo, that’s their problem.’
   Polls show Toledo’s popularity rating is down to just 9 per cent 3-1/2 years into his five-year term. Many Peruvians are weary of constant government corruption scandals and believe Toledo has not delivered on promises of more wealth and jobs.
   New Year’s Day was chosen for the police station attack because of the ‘surprise factor,’ Humala said, and because of an annual military reshuffle that included the retirement of his brother, Ollanta, who had been military attache at Peru’s Embassy in South Korea.
   The brothers’ political movement, whose members are mostly former soldiers in military-style uniforms, wants to nationalise industry and legalise the coca crops that make cocaine. Ferrero dismissed it as a fringe group, and said it was probably funded by drug-trafficking.

The 109th Congress convenes on Tuesday with Republicans flexing more political muscle. Yet it is unclear how far they can, or in some cases want to, push the president, Bush, ambitious second-term agenda.
   The record federal deficit, the rising cost of the Iraq war, plus competing positions of rival Democrats and even within the Republican Party, all pose risks to such White House goals as overhaul of the federal tax code and the Social Security retirement programme.
   Still, Bush has high hopes. He sees his re-election, coupled with bigger Republican majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, as a mandate for his stewardship.
   Yet as Republican, Deborah Pryce of Ohio, a member of the House Republican leadership says: ‘Everything is going to be hard.’
   ‘There are no slam dunks,’ Pryce said in discussing Bush’s legislative agenda, which also seeks to revamp immigration laws and obtain a sweeping energy plan.
   Separately, Bush on Friday pledged $350 million in aid for tsunami victims.
   In the November 2 elections, Republicans expanded their majority in the 100-member Senate by four to 55–five short of the 60 needed to end a Democratic procedural roadblock known as a filibuster. Republicans boosted their majority in the 435-member House by three to 232.
   Yet differences cross party lines on such matters as spending priorities, possible additional tax relief, changes to immigration laws and a major restructuring of Social Security.
   ‘Increased numbers in the Senate will make them more pugnacious, but they still don’t have enough to jam things through,’ Ornstein said.
   Larry Sabato of University of Virginia’s Centre for politics offers a different view. He predicts a ‘fairly productive’ Congress–for at least half of 2005.
   ‘Historically, a president who is re-elected and adds congressional seats tends to get to get a good six months window of opportunity,’ Sabato said.
   ‘That doesn’t mean everything will go smoothly. There will be fights about everything. That’s Washington,’ Sabato said.
   Bush should move fast, though, Sabato said. Traditionally, he said, lawmakers soon see second-term presidents as ‘lame ducks’ and focus more on their priorities than his.
   To be sure, Bush and his fellow Republicans are certain to present a united front on some goals, such as putting more conservative judges who oppose abortion on the federal bench.
   Congress may also pass legislation Bush seeks to reduce class-action lawsuits, yet there are doubts about passage of a measure to limit medical malpractice lawsuits.
   They intend to take another crack at a proposed constitutional amendment backed by the White House to ban gay marriage.
   While there was plenty of partisan gridlock in the Senate during the past four years, it could get worse in 2005.
   That would be likely if Republicans carry out threats to change Senate rules to eliminate filibusters on judicial nominees. Democrats vow to retaliate with other procedural moves that can tie the Senate into knots.
   ‘Republicans would rue the day they changed the rules,’ warns incoming Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

Encouraged by the signing of a peace deal with southern rebels, the Sudanese president suggested Sunday that he may hold power and wealth sharing talks with rebels fighting army forces in the western region of Darfur.
   Thousands of Sudanese turned out in the capital, Khartoum, to welcome the return of the government delegation that negotiated the deal in the Kenyan city of Naivasha on Friday to end the 21-year southern civil war.
   Opposition groups also embraced the peace accords and cease-fire agreement signed by government officials and southern rebels.
   The agreements cleared the way for warring sides to sign a comprehensive peace deal next month in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
   The South African president, Thabo Mbeki, who witnessed the deal signing in Naivasha, also was greeted by 50,000 people in Darfur, the site of a separate conflict in western Sudan that has killed tens of thousands of villagers and displaced nearly 2 million from their homes since fighting started in February 2003.
   The United States and Sudanese officials hope the momentum behind the peace deal to end the southern war will help steer rebels and the Sudanese government, which is believed to be backed by Arab militiamen known as the Janjaweed, toward a similar result in Darfur, a region roughly the size of France.
   The president, Omar el-Bashir, urged all Sudanese — particularly opposition groups — to engage in a comprehensive reconciliation and work to end the Darfur crisis.
   ‘We call upon all the sons of Sudan, inside and outside, to embrace peace, to listen to the voice of wisdom and to give priority to dialogue by making it the only path to solving our problems,’ the president said in his annual speech to the Sudanese parliament marking his country’s independence from British rule.
   El-Bashir, wearing a traditional white headdress and brown gown, also indicated he was willing to enter into power- and wealth-sharing negotiations with Darfur rebels as he did with his southern adversaries.

Mohamed ElBaradei will run unchallenged for a third term as head of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Saturday, despite Washington’s campaign to oust him.
   ElBaradei, an Egyptian lawyer, recently announced he would seek reelection as director general of the agency he has headed since 1997. No other candidates came forward before the deadline for nominations at the turn of the year, the IAEA said.
   Some US and other countries’ officials have privately complained that ElBaradei was not only soft on Iraq and Iran, but had also withheld information from the IAEA board of governors that could boost the US campaign to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for economic sanctions.
   ElBaradei says there is no clear proof that Washington is right and Iran is seeking the bomb—an allegation that Tehran denies. But he has repeatedly said the jury was still out.

Quake fears spook Assam state
Spooked by the tsunami devastation, panic gripped India’s north-eastern state of Assam after media picked up a major earthquake alert. Across Assam, people were performing special community prayers after news spread of a possible tremor hitting the hilly region. ‘If at all there is quake, no body can really save us. So we are offering prayers to seek divine blessings to ward off any potential disaster,’ said a community elder in eastern Jorhat district, Taranath Goswami, on Sunday. Indian media reported a warning from a Centre for Earth Observing and Space Research at George Mason University in Virginia on Saturday saying that last week’s killer quake off Sumatra could trigger more tremors northwards towards Assam.
— AFP

Rains bring new misery to SL victims
Torrential rains brought fresh hardship to tsunami survivors in eastern Sri Lanka on Sunday, flooding refugee camps, forcing the evacuation of at least one and leaving others dotted with stagnant pools. The new deluge was too much for some. ‘We already lost our homes. We came here then the rains came and took away our bundles, everything we had left,’ said GK Sambasivam, 65, waving his arms in despair. Sambasivam, who fears some 50 relatives may have died in the tsunami one week ago, said he was forced to move to a ramshackle government building on Saturday after several feet of water flooded his camp at a nearby school in the village of Karaitivu.
— Reuters

Uniform crisis for Sri Lankan police
Hundreds of Sri Lankan constables lost their belongings, including uniforms, in the tsunami tragedy, but a local tailor has come to their rescue by donating new khaki kit, police said Sunday. Bristol Tailors donated 250 sets of uniforms for police who survived last week’s sea surge but lost their clothing, allowing them to be redeployed to help with the relief effort, a spokesman said. ‘This is a big help so that we can have police deployed at a time when we need manpower to help with the relief and clearing work,’ an officer here said. Sri Lankans have been queuing up to donate food, clothes and money to help survivors as international aid pours in to what the president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, said was a ‘magnificent response from our foreign friends.’
— AFP

Seafood off menus in Sri Lanka
Seafood has disappeared off Sri Lankan dinner tables with people fearful of eating fish that may have been feeding on corpses washed out to sea by last week’s tsunami, shopkeepers said Sunday. Fish markets were virtually closed in the capital Colombo while supermarkets sold only canned tuna, salmon and mackerel imported from South American states. The main fish wholesale market was deserted although stocks were on offer. ‘There is fish coming into the market from trawlers that are returning, some after spending three weeks at sea,’ a supervisor at the main St John’s Fish Market, WS Dharmawardene, said.
— AFP

Violence erupts as Argentine death toll rises to 177
Crowds got into a shoving match with police outside Buenos Aires’ morgue on Saturday as relatives tried to reclaim bodies of loved ones lost in a disco fire, which killed 177 and injured 889. Weary families, some of whom had kept a 36-hour vigil outside the morgue, led a march of about 400 persons from the Cro-Magnon Republic club, which burned before midnight Thursday, to the city morgue to demand access to their relatives’ remains. One protest sign said: ‘For the dreams that died here.’ Police arrested the owner of the nightclub, where authorities said locked exits had sealed the fate of at least 177 people.
— Reuters

Croatia holds presidential poll
Polls have opened in Croatia’s presidential election, where the incumbent, Stipe Mesic, is hoping to be elected for a second five-year term. His main rival is the deputy prime minister, Jadranka Kosor, of the conservative Croatian Democratic Union. The campaign has been dominated by the prospect of the European Union membership for Croatia. The issue of the handover of suspects to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague has also featured prominently. The extradition to The Hague of the fugitive general, Ante Gotovina, is seen as a key condition for Croatia to start membership talks with the European Union.
— AFP

South Africa begins gun amnesty
South Africa has begun a nationwide amnesty for gun owners in an attempt to reduce the country’s high crime levels. For the next three months, people who own illegal weapons will be able to hand them in to police stations without fear of prosecution. Possession of an illegal weapon is normally punished by a sentence of up to 15 years in prison. The amnesty had been due to start in October but got delayed until now to allow for more organisations. ‘When you think about the fact that if you are discovered in possession of an illegal firearm or ammunition, you risk being sentenced for a maximum of 15 years,’ safety and security ministry spokesman, Trevor Bloem said.
— AFP

Uganda to clamp down on rebels
The Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, has vowed to step up military action against rebels in northern Uganda, after a seven-week truce expired without agreement. The government says the Lord’s Resistance Army rejected a deal meant to pave the way for peace talks, and staged an ambush on the army. Mediators said the LRA wanted more time to study the government’s proposed memorandum of understanding. Some 1.5 million Ugandans have been displaced during 18 years of fighting. Rebels accused of abducting more than 20,000 children, making the boys fight and the girls work as sex slaves, and of mutilating and burning its civilian victims.
— AFP

17 killed in Colombian New Year ‘massacre’
Suspected left-wing rebels in Colombia killed 17 peasants at a party to celebrate New Year’s Eve, police say. A source said guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) burst into the party outside Tame, near the Venezuelan border. A witness to the alleged massacre said the group opened fire after saying the villagers were co-operating with right-wing paramilitaries. Police said the victims included four children and six women. The attack took place in the province of Arauca, one of the country’s most violent and remote areas, where left and right-wing groups fight for control of drug-smuggling corridors.
— BBC