Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
Sports «
National «
Editorial «
Op-Ed «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplement «

The Fatah party of Mahmud Abbas accused Hamas Saturday of courting civil war, as relations between the moderate Palestinian leader and the government hit crisis point less than a month after the radical Islamists took power.
   Fatah accused Hamas supremo Khaled Meshaal of being hysterical for saying on Friday, in a thinly veiled reference to Abbas, that he was part of a plot to undermine Hamas and remove it from power.
   ‘We view Khaled Meshaal’s speech with concern,’ a statement said, referring to an address to an enthusiastic crowd of supporters in a Palestinian refugee camp in a Damascus suburb.
   ‘We can only describe this speech as divisive, because it aims to provoke tensions in the Palestinian territories and spark civil war.’
   The war of words began when Abbas vetoed a Hamas government decision to create a new special force of armed militants headed by a wanted radical.
   The move, the first time Abbas has revoked decisions of the new Hamas-led government, followed US criticism of the security appointment and Israeli threats to target the militant in question.
   In response, Meshaal told his audience: ‘What is happening in Palestine is a policy carried out by a parallel government, a counter-government which deprives us of our prerogatives and the people of their rights. It is a plot.
   ‘A certain part of our people is plotting against us. They are carrying out a premeditated plan which is aimed at our undoing.’
   In its harsh response, Fatah said the speech was by ‘a man whose ambition is and always has been to cause Palestinian blood to flow ... while he lives in (Damascus exile) and benefits from the experiences of certain people to provoke divisions and civil wars.’
   It described Meshaal’s remarks as ‘hysterical,’ and the speech as ‘full of plots, calumnies, lies and deception.’
   A member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an armed offshot of Fatah that would theoretically participate in the Hamas-proposed security body, rejected Meshaal’s comments and called for an apology.
   ‘Khaled Meshaal should apologise and (prime minister) Ismail Haniya should explain himself, because he is a member of the Hamas politburo,’ he said at a press conference in Gaza City, without giving his name. ‘We reject these kinds of statements.’
   Only hours before the news of Abbas’s decree, Haniya declared his backing for the new force.
   Since Friday night, pro-Abbas groups have been demonstrating in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
   Around 500 Al-Aqsa members marched in the West Bank city of Ramallah, shouting: ‘Long live President Abbas’ and ‘Khaled Meshaal wants to start a civil war’.

Opponents of outgoing Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra have vowed disrupt by-elections Sunday in 40 constituencies held to fill seats left vacant after snap polls earlier this month.
   Thaksin’s critics want the 4.2 million voters, mostly in southern provinces, to tear up their ballot papers, wear black clothing or choose the ‘none of the above’ option in a poll they say lacks legitimacy.
   The by-elections are being held after the inconclusive April 2 poll Thaksin called three years early to end weeks of street protests against him. The three main opposition parties boycotted that poll.
   Sunday’s polls are crucial to pulling Thailand out of a months-long political crisis as parliament cannot convene to name a new prime minister until all 500 seats are filled.
   The vote also brings the possibility of violence, as seven of the empty seats are in the troubled provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala, where more than 1,200 people have been killed in near-daily attacks since January 2004.
   Thai security forces said they would step up patrols Sunday after three people were killed during voting for the senate Wednesday, and nine wounded on April 2.
   The People’s Alliance for Democracy, a loose coalition that organised two months of street protests in Bangkok that led to Thaksin stepping aside April 4, urged voters not to comply with the poll.
   ‘We think that this election is not legal or legitimate,’ alliance spokesman Suriyasai Katasila said Saturday.
   He said he expected the response to the poll to be muted after two elections already this month.
   The main opposition Democrat Party, whose stronghold is the southern provinces, said it supported the by-elections and did not condone ballot-tearing.
   The main opposition Democrat Party, whose stronghold is the southern provinces, said it supported the by-elections and did not condone ballot-tearing, but would let voters decide if they wanted to disrupt the poll.
   Chalee Noppawong Na Ayuuthaya, head of the Love Songkhla group in Songkhla province, urged residents to wear black to protest the election regulator which, he said, favoured the government.
   Thaksin’s ruling Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party, which won the April 2 poll, will run unopposed in 19 seats, the Election Commission announced Friday.
   Somsri Hananuntasuk, coordinator of the Asian Network for Free Elections, said members will be monitoring voting to make sure Thai Rak Thai gets the 20 per cent of votes legally required for single-candidate seats.
   Somsri said she would not speculate about any violence, but expected the region to be tense.
   Polling stations across 17 provinces open at 8:00am (0100 GMT) and close seven hours later.
   
   Thaksin to meet Chirac
   Thaksin, who stepped aside earlier this month after weeks of protests, will meet the French president, Jacques Chirac, in Paris Tuesday, a report said Saturday.
   Thaksin, who said he would not accept the post of prime minister when parliament convenes early May, will explain his position to the French president and try to reassure countries interested in investing in Thailand, the Bangkok Post reported citing an unnamed source.

Barriers to regional cooperation and gaps in approaches to fighting Islamic militancy have serious implications for global efforts to defeat terrorism, security experts said on Saturday.
   At the end of a three-day counter-terrorism forum in the central Philippines, experts from 60 countries issued a communique calling on participants to further explore a ‘middle way’ to counter the growing threat of militancy.
   ‘We don’t take terrorism seriously,’ said retired general Benjamin Defensor, Manila’s counter-terrorism ambassador, adding most governments only take actions when attacks happen.
   ‘Perception differs. There were differences on how countries perceived terrorist threats in their regions.’
   Defensor said political and other vested interests often interfere in the exchange of information, a problem that must be overcome by countries to effectively defeat militancy.
   While participants agreed terrorism was a global challenge, he said they also recognized barriers to regional cooperation based on differences in understanding the problem.
   There were also wide disparities in the capacities and capabilities between Western and developing states in dealing with it.
   The one-page communique, named the ‘Cebu Concord,’ called for measures to bridge these gaps, suggesting nations find a path based on common ground and measures to fight terrorism.
   Among the approaches were respect for human rights and the rule of law and develop social and economic policies that would address causes and factors that create militancy.

Australia, helping to keep the peace in the Solomon Islands after two days of violent protests in the capital, said on Saturday the need for economic reform was a matter of life or death for the South Pacific country.
   The Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, during a brief visit to the still smouldering Honiara, also said corruption must be wiped out, but that there was a limit to what peacekeepers could do.
   ‘Continuing with economic reform is a life or death issue for the Solomon Islands,’ Downer told reporters after meeting new prime minister Snyder Rini, seeking to calm fears about foreign influence.
   ‘In the end, the future of this country is in the hands of the government and the people of the Solomon Islands. They ultimately have to chart their own destiny and be responsible—we can only help.’
   Tuesday’s election of Rini, who had been the deputy prime minister, sparked two days of rioting and looting in Honiara, where a curfew has been imposed and Australian troops are now patrolling the streets to ward off further trouble.
   Dozens of buildings still smoulder in Honiara and derelict shops are daubed with obscene graffiti directed at Rini and an Australian-led police operation, but the central market was again bustling on Saturday as a sense of normality returned.
   The military will lock down the Solomons parliament on Monday when MPs meet for the first time since an election earlier this month, the first poll since Australian-led peacekeepers restored law and order in 2003 after violent ethnic unrest.
   Opposition parties have already moved a no confidence motion against Rini, which is due to go to a vote on Wednesday, with both sides claiming they have the numbers to be successful.
   Former prime minister and leader of the opposition Liberal Party, Bartholomew Ulufa’alu, who was ousted from power during a coup in 2000, described the government as a repressive regime that was only paying lip service to economic reform.

Violence will persist in Afghanistan unless the US-led coalition starts to negotiate with the toppled Taliban regime and other armed groups, the Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan said.
   The warning from Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner, came this week as fighting continued in the Afghan countryside. A US soldier was killed Friday in a gunbattle and suspected Taliban militants killed six Afghan policemen, afterward burning four of their bodies.
   In recent months, Afghanistan has seen a surge in bombings and shootings targeting coalition troops and Afghan forces, particularly in southern Taliban strongholds near the Pakistan border. The violence has grown even though many former Taliban fighters have been welcomed by the government under an amnesty program.
   Zaeef’s call was rejected Friday by US and Afghan authorities, who said military action was the only way to bring to justice the militants with blood on their hands.
   ‘We don’t negotiate with terrorist organisations and the Taliban extremists have committed themselves to violence,’ US military spokesman colonel Tom Collins said.
   In January, the president, Hamid Karzai, urged Taliban leader Mullah Omar to ‘get in touch’ if he wants to talk peace. A day later, a statement purportedly issued by Omar turned down the offer and warned of increased Taliban attacks.

Nepal’s King Gyanendra, who has pledged to ‘return sovereignty to the people’ after massive and violent street protests, has seen his god-like status badly shaken.
   Now, with demonstrators’ cries of ‘Hang the king’ and ‘Leave the palace, we will run the country’ still ringing in the air, the question remains whether the wily king can remain on the throne or even whether the monarchy as an institution will survive in the desperately poor nation.
   King Gyanendra was vaulted to the throne in June 2001 in bizarre circumstances when his brother, King Birendra, and other royals were murdered at the palace by a drunken crown prince who later shot himself.
   But the unsmiling monarch never attained the popularity of his more genial, well-loved brother, who was seen as a symbol of unity in Nepal.
   The monarch, traditionally revered as the incarnation of the Hindu god of protection, Lord Vishnu, sacked the government and seized power in February 2005, saying the move was necessary to crush a deadly decade-old Maoist revolt.
   King Gyanendra gave himself three years to restore elected rule and end the insurgency. But instead he was forced Friday to announce he was cutting short his absolute rule after just 14 months.
   During that time, he became even more unpopular and the political parties formed a loose pro-democracy alliance with the Maoists.
   Gyanendra was best known before he became king for the nightclub antics of his errant son Paras who is now crown prince.
   King Gyanendra had missed the 2001 massacre because he was away in the west of Nepal. Paras was present but escaped unscathed.
   Maoists rebels accused the king of stage-managing the killings and at his coronation large crowds shouted slogans against him. An official probe found that Crown Prince Dipendra was responsible for the massacre.
   Some observers have compared King Gyanendra’s style to that of his autocratic father King Mahendra who staged a coup in 1960 against the then-elected government. Mahendra imposed a party-less system that remained in place until 1990.
   King Gyanendra has a reputation as politically shrewd, but is believed to have opposed Birendra’s decision in 1990 to reduce the monarchy to a constitutional figurehead.
   He was educated at a Jesuit school in Darjeeling, India, and graduated from Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu in 1969.
   King Gyanendra, the middle son of Mahendra, is said to be one of the world’s wealthiest royals, with substantial properties and investments abroad. He is known for his keen interest in poetry and the environment.
   During political upheavals in 1950, he was declared monarch at the age of five after being left behind as insurance when then-king Tribhuvan—his grandfather—fled to India.
   The crown reverted back to his grandfather when the family returned a year later and Birendra took over the throne in 1972.
   Kapil Shrestha, an academic and one of hundreds of people detained during the protests, told AFP earlier this month that while the majority of Nepalese want some form of monarchy they do not want King Gyanendra.

A top leader of India’s opposition nationalist Hindu party was shot and critically wounded Saturday by his brother in Mumbai in an apparent property dispute, the police said.
   Pramod Mahajan, a senior general secretary of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, was rushed to hospital with several bullet wounds and doctors immediately operated on him, the police and party members said.
   ‘He was shot at by his real brother just at the entrance of his (Pramod Mahajan’s) residence,’ Mumbai police commissioner AN Roy said, adding the brother had turned himself in to police.
   ‘We understand it is regarding a family property matter,’ he said.
   A doctor at the hospital told NDTV news channel that four bullets were lodged in Mahajan’s body.

The Indian government and tribal separatist guerrillas agreed to extend a truce in the northeast by another year—just days before it was due to expire, a rebel leader said Saturday.
   There were fears the five-year-old truce in Nagaland state, slated to run out April 28, could collapse.
   But home ministry officials and leaders of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland’s SS Khaplang faction (NSCN-K) met in New Delhi Friday and agreed in principle to extend the ceasefire by 12 months, Kughalo Mulatonu, one of the rebel leaders, said. There was no immediate government comment.
   The NSCN-K, an influential Christian Naga group fighting for an independent homeland in Nagaland, struck the truce with New Delhi in 2001.
   Its fate was in doubt after the group accused Indian soldiers of backing a rival group headed by Isak Chishi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah.
   At least 100 rebels have died in the past two years in clashes between the groups who are engaged in a war for territorial supremacy in Nagaland.

Millions of people queued up in front of polling centres on Saturday as voting began in two states, including West Bengal where the world’s longest-ruling communist government is seeking another term.
   Paramilitary troops holding automatic weapons kept a close watch for any trouble as voters in colourful ethnic dresses arrived in the second of the five-phase election process in West Bengal.
   The Congress party, which heads the ruling federal coalition, rules three of the five states facing election this year.
   The party and its allies are fighting stiff battles against the coalition’s own communist allies and other regional
   parties.
   Voting also began in Kerala where the Communist-led opposition is bidding to defeat the ruling alliance led by the Congress party.
   The first-phase of election process concluded on April 17 in three Maoist-dominated districts of West Bengal without any trouble despite a boycott call from the rebels.

Shia MPs of the dominant United Iraqi Alliance have endorsed compromise candidate Jawad al-Maliki for the premiership, paving the way for an end to four months of deadlock, a leading Shia politician said.
   ‘The political body of the alliance met today and approved the candidacy of Jawad al-Maliki as the prime minister,’ said Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who headed the alliance’s slate in December elections.
   He said it was also agreed that incumbent vice president Adel Abdel Mahdi would remain the alliance’s candidate for the position, while Sheikh Khalid al-Attiya would be its nominee for deputy parliament speaker.
   Speaking on Saturday for the first time since his nomination, Maliki said he would work to form a ‘national unity government’.
   ‘I intend to form a national unity government that will face the challenges of terrorism and corruption,’ he said.
   ‘I will work to eradicate injustice that the Iraqis have suffered, whether it is Arabs, Kurds, Shias or Yezidis (a non-Muslim Kurdish group), under the former regime. We have to work together to establish the dignity of people that was lost in the former regime.’
   He said he needed a month to form the cabinet that will consist of ministers who work for the ‘whole of Iraq.’
   ‘I hope to form a strong and able team to face the political, security and economic challenges,’ Maliki said.
   ‘Each ministry will be run professionally and not as minister’s own property, dictated by his ethnic background.’
   In recent months, the Sunni Arab former elite has stepped up accusations that forces under the command of the Shia-run interior ministry have been carrying out sectarian killings of civilians in revenge for attacks by Sunni insurgents.
   Maliki said that he would attempt to have ‘ministers who are technocrats and have the background to face these challenges.’
   ‘My government will also give priority to establish best relations with the Arab and Islamic neighbours. These relations will be different than what they were in the previous regime which fought with Kuwait and Iran.
   ‘We will see that our security forces get the ability to take over the entire security of the country,’ he added.
   Maliki, a hard-nosed lawmaker from the Dawa, the same Shia religious party headed by outgoing prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari, was nominated to the premiership after the incumbent finally gave in to intense national and international pressure to step down.
   Jaafari said he would be ‘happy to serve the country as a simple parliamentarian.’
   
   Australia suffers first fatality in Iraq
   The Australian military suffered its first fatality in Iraq when a soldier accidentally shot himself while cleaning his weapon, the defence minister, Brendan Nelson, said Saturday.
   Nelson said the soldier, part of an Australian deployment providing security to embassy officials in Baghdad, was carrying out routine duties when the accident occurred on Friday.
   ‘The soldier was simply handling his weapon and maintaining his weapon as soldiers are required to do, and for some unexplained reason the firearm discharged and the bullet unfortunately entered the soldier’s head,’ he told reporters.
   ‘Several hours after the injury, despite receiving the best of medical care, he unfortunately passed away.’

Romanians awoke Saturday to the prospect of spending the Orthodox Easter weekend battling floodwaters threatening to burst the banks of the mighty river Danube.
   In neighbouring Hungary meanwhile thousands were forced to leave their homes after a crack was discovered in a dyke on the swollen river Koros in the southeast of the country.
   Romania Friday deliberately ruptured a dyke on the Danube to save homes elsewhere from floods and launched a 24-hour watch on bulging embankments where the river flows through a low-lying delta into the Black Sea.
   As gangs strove to shore up the embankments with sandbags in 10 locations, environment minister Sulfina Barbu said they were unlikely to hold out much longer near the delta towns of Caraorman, Crisan and Sulina.
   ‘We decided to create a breach in the dyke of Litoral Cord in order to flood an uninhabited area and reduce the pressure on the three localities,’ Barbu said. Interior minister Vasile Blaga urged local authorities and citizens along the Danube to man the flood defences despite their Easter celebrations.
   ‘It’s very important to remain watchful for 24 hours a day, in particular during Easter,’ he said.
   Nearly 150 localities have been flooded, nearly 800 houses damaged and 42,000 hectares of arable land inundated. More than 5,000 people have been forced to leave their homes, though some had returned in spite of warnings not to.
   In Hungary evacuations took place along the Koros river from the towns of Csepa, Szeleveny and Tiszasas in what was described as a precautionary measure because of the cracked dyke.

One of three earthquakes that hit Russia’s remote northeastern Kamchatka peninsula almost completely destroyed three small villages, local authorities were quoted as saying early Saturday by Interfax news agency.
   Inhabitants called the Koryakiya region’s administration on a satellite phone to report that ‘the villages are practically entirely destroyed, even brick stoves fell apart,’ officials said, adding that rescuers flown in by helicopter were assessing the situation.
   Up to 180 people were evacuated Saturday from the villages of Korf and Tilichiki, including more than 70 children and seven pregnant women, the region’s chief federal inspector, Vladimir Ilyukhin, said as quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency.
   A total of some 300 people asked for a chance to leave their villages, mostly children, the sick, invalids and the elderly, Ilyukhin said, while ruling out a total evacuation of the villages’ 4,000-strong population.
   The temblor measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale struck at 1114 GMT, at a depth of 40 kilometres. It was located in Koryakiya, some 250 kilometres northeast of Il’pyrskiy and 6,300 kilometres north-northeast of Moscow.
   The quake was the third that rocked the peninsula on Friday, according to the Kamchatka seismological service, the first measuring a massive 7.9 degrees and the second 6.2.
   Thousands of people in Koryakiya, a sparsely populated district, were affected by the earlier quakes, but only four required medical attention, with about 50 more believed to have only minor injuries, the emergency situations ministry said.
   The Kamchatka peninsula, which is roughly the same size as Japan, is one of Russia’s wildest regions, known for hot springs, 29 active volcanos and a large population of brown bears.

The long-term effects of the Chernobyl disaster could cause up to 66,000 extra deaths from cancer, 15 times more than UN officials predicted last year, two British scientists have claimed.
   Nearly 20 years after the world’s worst-ever nuclear accident, the impact of the 1986 catastrophe on the world beyond the borders of the erstwhile Soviet Union may never be fully realised.
   The study, commissioned by Greens in the European Parliament, claims that more than half of the fallout landed outside Belarus, Ukraine and Russia—contaminating about 34 per cent of the British land mass alone.
   Restrictions are still in place on 374 farms covering 750 square kilometres as well as 200,000 sheep in Britain. Throughout Europe, a total area of 3.9 million square kilometres was contaminated.
   The findings were published in a report, ‘The Other Report on Chernobyl’, which was to be discussed at a conference in London on Saturday ahead of next week’s 20th anniversary of the disaster.
   Penned by British scientists Ian Fairlie and David Sumner, it claims that up to 66,000 people around the world could die from cancer due to Chernobyl, on top of the number who would normally die from cancer.
   This conflicts sharply with a forecast from the International Atomic Energy Agency and World Health Organisation in September which set the number of Chernobyl-related extra cancer deaths at 4,000.
   Sumner said the International Agency for Research on Cancer—part of the WHO—has released estimated figures only ‘a little bit lower’ than those in his report, while the IAEA is no longer holding to the 4,000 figure.
   ‘The main message is that this was a very, very serious accident. The consequences are very bad in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia,’ he said.
   ‘But the consequences extend all over the northern hemisphere and worldwide really. The full extent of the damage will perhaps never be known of cancer induced by radiation after exposure.’
   ‘We have to think carefully about engaging in nuclear programmes,’ added Sumner, referring to a debate in Britain over whether to build more nuclear power stations.
   Sumner said it was difficult to work out exact figures of cancer deaths linked to Chernobyl because the exposure to the radiation that spilled out of the plant is long-term.
   When it exploded on April 26, 1986, radioactive gases and debris were sent hurtling more than five miles into the air, worsened by a fire that raged for five days.
   The radiation emitted from the disaster was 200 times that of the combined releases of the US atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to end Second World War in the Pacific.
   Sumner said studies had been done on survivors exposed to short-term high-level radiation, but that not enough is known about the inverse—long-term low-level radiation.

The Central Intelligence Agency warned the US president, George W Bush, before the Iraq war that it had reliable information the government of Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, a retired CIA operative disclosed.
   But the operative, Tyler Drumheller, said top White House officials simply brushed off the warning, saying they were ‘no longer interested’ in intelligence and that the policy toward Iraq had been already set.
   The disclosure, made in an interview with CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ programme due to be broadcast late Sunday, adds to earlier accusations that the Bush administration used intelligence selectively as it built its case for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam’s regime.
   The administration claimed in the run-up to the war that Baghdad had extensive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was working clandestinely to build a nuclear arsenal, therefore, presenting a threat to the world.

The Central Intelligence Agency has fired an unidentified officer who acknowledged leaking classified information to members of the media, a spokesman for the agency said.
   The firing arose from an internal investigation into media leaks that cantered on officers who were ‘involved in or exposed to certain intelligence programmes,’ said CIA spokesman Tom Crispell.
   ‘During the course of these investigations, the CIA officer acknowledged having unauthorised discussions with members of the media in which the officer knowingly and wilfully shared classified intelligence, including operational information,’ he said.
   ‘Yesterday, that officer was terminated,’ he said.

Still staggering after Hurricane Katrina ravaged their city, voters on Saturday were selecting the candidate they want to lead one of the biggest reconstruction projects in US history.
   Twenty-two candidates — including Mayor Ray Nagin, who has sometimes been criticised for his freewheeling and occasionally inflammatory speech — will appear on the ballot in the first municipal election since Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast August 29.
   If no candidate gets more than 50 per cent, a runoff between the top two vote-getters will be held May 20.

Baton charged against Pak quake survivors
The police fired warning shots and charged with batons Saturday as hundreds of Pakistani Kashmir earthquake survivors took to the streets demanding compensation payments. Shopkeepers also went on strike in protest at tax demands and utility bills issued despite desperate conditions since the massive quake which killed more than 73,000 people in October. ‘It was a complete strike in Muzaffarabad and protestors staged rallies in different parts of the city,’ a police officer said. Protesters burned tyres and blocked roads leading to Jhelum and Neelum valleys and Kohala district, they said, adding that public transport had ground to a halt.
— AFP

NASA satellite launch delayed by a day
The US space agency NASA has delayed for ‘logistical’ reasons the launch of two satellites designed to help unlock the secrets of Earth’s cloud cover, a NASA official said early Saturday. Alan Buis, a spokesman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the CloudSat and CALIPSO satellites will not be launched at 1002 GMT Saturday, as previously scheduled, because a refueling aircraft needed to sustain a flying radar that was to monitor the launch was not available. The launch is now scheduled for 1002 GMT Sunday.
— AFP

Guyanese minister assassinated
The Guyanese agriculture minister, Satyadeow Sawh, was killed along with three other people early Saturday after a group of gunmen burst into his house outside the capital, the police said. ‘The minister and others were outside the house at the moment of the attack,’ police commissioner Winston Felix told reporters. ‘We know that some demands of money were initially made.’ The other victims were the minister’s brother, sister-in-law and a bodyguard. Sawh’s villa was located in the community of La Bonne Intention, about 10 kilometres east of the Guyanese capital.
— AFP

Rebel ambush kills 16 of Colombian forces
Leftist rebels ambushed a military convoy in remote northeastern Colombia, killing 16 soldiers and secret police officers in the deadliest attack on security forces this year, the army said Friday. The attack took place Thursday in Norte de Santander province, 260 miles northeast of the capital, Bogota. Ten of those killed were DAS secret police officers, Colombia’s hybrid equivalent of the CIA and FBI. The other six were soldiers. The agents and soldiers had been carrying out operations against the country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, when explosives were detonated alongside their convoy. Rebels then attacked the survivors.
— AP

Ex US president Ford defends Rumsfeld
Former US president Gerald Ford on Friday defended the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, under fire from six retired generals who said he has bungled the Iraq war and should resign. Ford, 92, became president in 1974 after Richard Nixon resigned. He made a rare statement from his California retreat. Rumsfeld, now 73, served in the Nixon administration and as Ford’s secretary of defence. ‘I have been extremely troubled by the efforts of a group of retired generals to force the resignation of our defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. ‘President George W Bush is right to keep him in his post. It is the president’s decision—and his alone.
— AFP

Native protest continues in Ontario
Demonstrators at a native Indian blockade in southwestern Ontario vowed on Friday to resist further attempts to remove them from a housing construction site in a land-claims dispute that has raised memories of earlier confrontations that turned fatal. A second related demonstration in eastern Ontario that blocked trains on the Canadian National Railway main line ended late on Friday, although not before some 3,500 Via Rail passengers were forced to use buses between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.
— Reuters

Peru volcano prompts evacuation
Gas and cinder ejected by Ubinas volcano in southern Peru drove 200 persons from their homes Friday and threatened 7,000 more, many of whom are reluctant to leave, officials said. ‘Some people do not want to leave because they do not want to abandon their homes, their farms and their animals,’ Moquegua regional vice president Alberto Portugal said. Residents wore masks in the area, which was declared a state of emergency on Thursday in the town of Querapi, 900 kilometres south of the capital Lima. Three weeks after the 5,672-meter volcano began erupting, teams of physicians and geologists have been sent to the area to monitor the volcano and the health risks it
brings.
— AFP

Dalai Lama to attend Colombia confces
The Dalai Lama will attend a series of conferences here May 10-12 focused on the theme of peace in Colombia, a country ravaged by rebel and paramilitary violence for more than 50 years, organisers of his visit said here Friday. ‘We have confirmed four meetings and a news conference which he prefers to call ‘a meeting with the press,’’ Claudia Bonitto, head of the Yamantaka Meditation Centre, said. The centre invited the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader three years ago. The Buddhist leader, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, will present conferences at a central Bogota convention centre titled ‘Transform Our Mind’ and ‘Peace, Everyone’s Responsibility’ on May 10 and 11.
— AFP

Bush hails Prodi on election victory
The president, George W Bush, on Friday phoned Italian centre-left leader Romano Prodi to congratulate him on his election win, which unseated Bush ally prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the White House and Prodi’s office said. Bush also will call Berlusconi Friday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. Bush telephoned his congratulations to Prodi aboard Air Force One to California, US and Italian officials said. ‘The president said he looks forward to working with him, and looked forward to seeing him again soon,’ McClellan told reporters. According to a statement from Prodi’s office, Bush ‘expressed the hope he would be able to begin working with the new Italian government as soon as possible.’
— AFP