Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest Saturday as others gathered to pay tribute to her late father on Martyrs’ day.
  Suu Kyi had not been invited to attend the annual ceremony by the ruling military, according to an official from her National League for Democracy party.
  ‘She wasn’t invited to attend the ceremony although the authorities used to send her an invitation,’ the official said.
  Martyrs’ day commemorates the assassination of General Aung San and eight other leaders on July 19, 1942 while they were holding a meeting for Myanmar independence from Britain.
  The military government hosted a short memorial early Saturday morning at the Martyrs’ mausoleum close to the famous Shwe Dagon pagoda in the country’s main city Yangon.
  The mayor, Brigadier General Aung Thein Linn, some government officials and family members of the country’s late leaders all attended the 61st anniversary event.
  But invitations to foreign embassies were cancelled by the foreign affairs ministry without reason, the diplomats confirmed.
  Suu Kyi was only two-years-old when she lost her father. Myanmar got its independence six years later in January 1948.
  Aung San Suu Kyi has spent most of the last 18 years under house arrest and has currently been detained since 2003.
  About 300 NLD members gathered in front of government headquarters on Saturday morning, saluting the spot where the leaders were gunned down.
  Amid tight security and with armed police trucks present, the gathering was peaceful with no shouting or marching as has been known in previous years.
  But the NLD reiterated its call for the immediate and unconditional release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners.
  Earlier this month 14 Suu Kyi supporters were charged for protesting against the extension of her house arrest.
  Myanmar has been ruled by the military since 1962. The NLD won a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the junta never allowed them to take office.

Senior US and Indian officials met the International Atomic Energy Agency chief on Friday and briefed IAEA governors to resolve questions about India’s plan for expanded nuclear inspections.
  India negotiated the safeguards scheme with IAEA experts and the text is to be considered by the UN watchdog’s 35-nation governing board in a special August 1 session. Approval is a precondition for launching a US-Indian nuclear trade accord.
  If it passes, India and the United States must win clearance from a 45-nation group that regulates sensitive nuclear trade, then ratification by the US Congress for the controversial 2005 nuclear agreement to take force.
  India agreed to subject its 14 declared civilian atomic reactors to inspections to help enable it to import ‘trigger list’ nuclear items for peaceful use, even though it has shunned the Non-Proliferation Treaty and tested atomic bombs.
  The Indian foreign secretary, Shiv Shankar Menon, consulted with the IAEA director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, on Friday hours before an afternoon briefing with agency governors as well as delegates from the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
  Mostly technical questions came up at the briefing but no participants expressed opposition against the safeguards proposal, according to a diplomat who attended the meeting. Menon and diplomats coming out of the meeting had no comment.
  ‘Technical questions were posed by a number of countries and Menon addressed them all,’ said the diplomat. ‘He stressed that this was a standard safeguards agreement under the IAEA statute.’
  ElBaradei also received the US undersecretary of state, William Burns, for talks on India. Burns was making a brief stopover in Vienna en route to Geneva where he will join talks with Iran on its disputed atomic work in an unprecedented step by Washington.
  Menon, Burns and ElBaradei had no comment for reporters.
  ElBaradei has endorsed the US-Indian deal as a boost for non-proliferation and peaceful use of relatively clean nuclear energy in the developing world. IAEA lawyers have vetted the India inspections draft as consistent with safeguards standards.
  But India is lobbying hard to defuse concerns about parts of the safeguards text seen as possible loopholes, and possible resistance in the NSG to awarding an unconditional waiver for trade with one of just three non-NPT countries in the world.
  Diplomats wanted India to clarify language in the safeguards draft hinting inspections were not necessarily permanent, and possibly blurring what are now supposed to be clear divisions between New Delhi’s civilian and military nuclear sectors.

Sri Lanka’s army chief said Saturday his forces had wiped out two-thirds of the Tamil Tigers’ military capability, and that the decades-old conflict with the rebels was at its tail-end.
  Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka said the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam would gradually start collapsing, the state-run Daily News paper said.
  ‘We are almost at the beginning of the end... we are nearing the turning point now, through the way LTTE is reacting. In another three to four months time you would see very clearly how the things change,’ he said.
  He said security forces had already advanced 40 kilometres into rebel-controlled territory in the north.
  The military drive is now moving fast, he said, indicating that rebels either offered little assistance or melted away. ‘Every week we move about three kilometres unlike in the past,’ he said.
  He said the Tigers had lost at least 9,000 fighters in the latest round of fighting, and put the rebels’ current strength at 5,000 combatants – with around 200,000 civilians forced to provide logistic support.
  ‘Now we hear that they are training anybody over 15 years and below 50 years. But they cannot be motivated to fight a battle,’ Fonseka said.
  The rebels have not released their estimate of casualties. Figures from either side cannot be independently verified as journalists are barred from reporting from front line areas.
  Fonseka said the enemy was no longer able to resist security forces using conventional tactics and were resorting to hit-and-run attacks.
  The rebels, led by 53-year-old Velupillai Prabhakaran, still maintain a few fixed-wing aircraft, a formidable sea force and a band of suicide bombers known for daring attacks against security, economic and political targets.

More than 10,000 people marched by a US navy base near Tokyo on Saturday, calling for the Japanese government to stop the deployment of a nuclear-powered warship for the first time to Japan, rally organisers said.
  The protest by local residents and activists against basing the aircraft carrier USS George Washington in Yokosuka, 45 km southwest of Tokyo, came amid growing concerns safety after a fire on the ship in May.
  ‘The US military does not disclose any information on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier’s structure, as well as its navigation and accident records,’ said Masahiko Goto, a lawyer who participated in the protest.
  ‘This is the same as bringing a nuclear reactor into another country. Something is wrong here. The Japanese government is sacrificing the local residents’ safety for its national interests.’
  The USS George Washington was originally scheduled to be deployed to Yokosuka in August, but its arrival is likely to be delayed due to the fire, which left one sailor with minor burns, Japanese media have reported.
  It will become the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to be stationed in Japan, the only country to suffer atomic bombing at the end of Second World War.
  Earlier in the week, the commander of US forces in Japan acknowledged local concerns but said those voices were a minority.
  ‘I think that the majority of the Japanese people and the majority of the people where it will be home ported... are looking forward to the arrival of this very significant improvement in our capability to defend Japan,’ Lieutenant General Edward Rice told reporters on Tuesday.
  Nearly 50,000 US troops are stationed in Japan under the US-Japan security alliance, a pillar of Tokyo diplomacy, but friction with local communities often occurs.
  Residents were angered earlier this year in Yokosuka, where about 2,800 US military personnel are stationed, after a sailor was arrested in April on suspicion of murdering and robbing a taxi driver.

Cambodia has asked the United Nations to intervene in its border dispute with Thailand, a Thai official said on Saturday, the fifth day of a tense stand-off between the neighbours.
  More than 600 Thai troops and well over 1,000 Cambodian soldiers are stationed around a small Buddhist pagoda on the slope of a mountain leading to the ruins of an ancient temple at the centre of the territorial dispute.
  ‘The Thai ambassador to the UN has reported to the Thai government that Cambodia has filed a complaint with the UN over the dispute between Thailand and Cambodia,’ Thai government spokesman Wichianchote Sukchotrat said.
  He said Cambodia wanted the UN to intervene and the Thai government would study the complaint before sending a letter to UN officials.
  Military commanders from both sides said they were seeking to calm the soldiers to ensure that violence does not erupt ahead of peace talks planned for Monday.
  The confrontation began when three Thai protesters illegally broke across on Tuesday vowing to reclaim the Preah Vihear temple, which they say rightly belongs to them.
  US, Chinese, French and Vietnamese embassy staff flew to the disputed territory on Saturday, adding to diplomatic pressure to end the confrontation.
  They toured the area and took photographs but did not speak to either side and declined to talk to reporters.
  ‘They came here because they don’t want to see a confrontation between the troops of both countries. It is useless for both countries if any armed conflict happens,’ Sao Sokha, commander of Cambodia’s military police said of the officials.
  Cambodian and Thai top brass briefly met in the small Buddhist pagoda at the centre of the stand-off Saturday morning to discuss disarming troops stationed there.

As Hezbollah boasted of victory in this week’s prisoner swap with Israel, analysts said that the exchange gave the Shia group increased political leverage at home.
  On Wednesday Israel handed over its last five Lebanese prisoners, including convicted murderer Samir Kantar, and the bodies of 199 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters.
  In exchange Hezbollah returned the bodies of Israeli soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev who were captured on July 12, 2006, sparking a devastating 34-day war.
  ‘This doesn’t change anything in the equation of Hezbollah and Israel,’ said Timur Goksel, former spokesman for the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon.
  ‘It just closes one subject, but there are still other issues. I don’t expect peace to break out.’
  Tens of thousands of people attended celebrations on Wednesday after the swap, including Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah making a rare live appearance.
  In Israel the picture was one of sadness.
  ‘Israel came out of it looking like the humanitarian country, receiving bodies in mourning and playing the victim, while the other side looked like the aggressors, celebrating death,’ said Nadim Shehadi, a Lebanon expert at Chatham House in London.
  ‘This image is far from reality where Lebanon was the victim of Israeli brutality in 2006 and Israel was the aggressor.’
  The 2006 war killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
  Israelis were particularly appalled by the welcome for Kantar, who had been serving five life terms for a 1979 triple murder viewed as one of the most brutal attacks in the country’s history.
  ‘The joy that was expressed in Lebanon was mostly psychological and wasn’t about one man,’ Goksel said, however.
  ‘They don’t think very much about the content of the exchange, but the fact that Hezbollah was able to impose its own demands on the Israelis and get away with it. It made people say ‘Hey – we won something for a change’.
  Kantar belonged to a secular Palestinian faction and was jailed four years before Hezbollah was even formed. He was the longest-serving Arab prisoner in Israel.
  His release was ‘a major feat for Hezbollah... It is precisely that he is Druze and not a Hezbollah fighter that his release has added value aside from the symbolism of it all,’ said Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, author of ‘Hezbollah: Politics and Religion.’
  ‘The fact that Hezbollah fought so hard for a prisoner that was not one of their own, who belonged to a secular group... is healing the wounds of the May clashes’ this year, she said.
  Fierce sectarian fighting killed 65 people in May after the Hezbollah-led opposition, backed by Syria and Iran, took over large swathes of predominantly Sunni west Beirut.
  The fighting led to an accord being signed in Qatar that saw the election of Michel Sleiman as president after a six-month vacuum and the later formation of a national unity government.
  Sleiman joined usually divided political leaders including the prime minister, Fuad Siniora, parliament speaker Nabih Berri and the entire cabinet in presenting a united front to greet the returning prisoners at Beirut airport.
  ‘The swap burnishes its (Hezbollah’s) national credentials, especially since it was able to unify the Lebanese, even on a very cosmetic level,’ Saad-Ghorayeb said.
  ‘Hezbollah was able to impose that unity... There was no Lebanese politician that could have possibly not greeted the prisoners. It was because it was Kantar that they all had to show up.’
  Hezbollah’s arsenal, which it maintains is necessary to resist Israel, caused great controversy after the May clashes.
  The swap ‘puts us one small step closer to an extended period in which there will be discussion of Hezbollah’s arms,’ said Paul Salem, head of the Carnegie Middle East Centre.
  ‘The discussion will be about the relationship between the armed resistance and the state and not about disarmament.’
  Nasrallah said on Wednesday that he was open to dialogue on all issues, including Hezbollah weaponry.
  Saad-Ghorayeb sees this as evidence that Hezbollah ‘is at the peak of its power.’

Chinese dissident Huang Qi, who campaigns for the parents of children killed in the Sichuan earthquake, has been arrested for ‘illegal possession of state secrets,’ his wife said on Saturday.
  Qi was detained in the Sichuan capital Chengdu on June 10 and has not been seen since.
  ‘Yesterday afternoon, his mother went to the police station in Wuhou district (of Chengdu) and was given the arrest warrant,’ his wife Zeng Li said by telephone from the city in southwest China.
  ‘His mother told them that since they had issued the arrest warrant, they should allow his lawyer to see Huang. But the police said that was not possible, that it would be another two months before the lawyer could ask to see him,’ she said.
  Huang’s lawyer, Mo Shaoping, however said the ruling was against the law and that he had the right to see his client, Zeng said.
  Contacted by AFP, the Public Security Bureau (police) in Wuhou said it did not know Huang’s current whereabouts.
  According to his family, Huang, 44, was arrested because he was supporting parents of children killed in the May 12 quake and had requested government figures.
  The 8.0-magnitude earthquake in Sichuan on May 12 left nearly 87,000 people dead or missing, and millions more homeless, according to official reports.

A panel that will draft terms of reference for a Southeast Asian human rights body aims to complete its work within a year, a regional official said Saturday.
  Each member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will nominate two people to join the 20-member panel, said the official.
  He said the panel hopes to complete its work in time for submission to an annual meeting of the group’s 10 foreign ministers in Bangkok about one year from now.
  ‘The terms of reference for the human rights body hopefully would be ready for submission to the ASEAN ministerial meeting next year,’ the official said.
  As an example of those who could join the panel, he said one country will likely nominate an ambassador and an academic who specialises in human rights, he said.
  The official was speaking after senior regional officials met with the Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism, a coalition of experts, non-governmental representatives, officials and human rights commissioners.
  Their talks came ahead of the annual foreign ministers’ meeting which begins in Singapore Sunday night.
  Singapore’s foreign ministry, which will chair the meeting, said in a statement that during their gathering the ministers intend to meet with the panel which will draft the rights body’s terms of reference.

A leading rights group urged Thai security forces on Saturday to stop returning refugees to neighbouring Myanmar.
  New York-based Human Rights Watch said ethnic Karen groups faced persecution by the Myanmar military if forced to leave a Thai refugee camp near the border.
  ‘Forcing civilians back into an active war zone may be an easy answer for Thailand, but it’s brutal – a completely inhumane and unacceptable solution,’ said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
  ‘The Thai government should cooperate with international relief agencies and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to ensure that it upholds the rights of civilians under international law,’ he added.

Pope Benedict XVI offered a historic full apology for child sex abuse by predatory Australian priests Saturday, saying he was ‘deeply sorry’ and calling for those guilty of the ‘evil’ to be punished.
  The Pope apologised before leading more than 200,000 Catholic pilgrims in a candlelight vigil a day ahead of an even bigger papal mass to cap off a week of Catholic World Youth Day celebrations here.
  During a mass for local clergy, the Pope strayed from a prepared speech to express his shame and make his first direct and explicit apology to victims of some corrupt clergymen in Australia.
  ‘I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them that, as their pastor, I too share in their suffering,’ he said in a line absent from the prepared text of his homily circulated to journalists.
  His remarks to Australian bishops, seminarians and novices in Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral were his strongest yet in confronting the scourge that has rocked the Catholic church globally.
  ‘Here I would like to pause to acknowledge the shame which we have all felt as a result of the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy and religious (order members) in this country,’ Benedict said.
  The World Youth Day festivities have been partly overshadowed by pressure from victims for a full apology amid claims the church had not adequately addressed the issue over recent years.
  But groups representing Australian victims said the Pope’s words alone were not enough and that he should have apologised in front of sex abuse victims, not priests.
  ‘Sorry may be a start but we want to see a lot more,’ said Chris MacIsaac, spokeswoman for the victims’ group Broken Rites, adding that she wanted victims to be treated fairly and not to be ‘re-abused by church authorities.’
  Helen Last from the clergy sexual abuse advocacy group In Good Faith and Associates, said the Pope’s words would not ease decades of victims’ suffering.
  ‘It is just a drop in a bucket – a bucket full of tears that all of us who work with victims have been sitting with for 25 to 30 years in Australia,’ she said. ‘It’s not really a hands-on response is it? It’s just a few words from the CEO.’
  In a visit to the United States in April, the Pope spoke of the shame and suffering that abusive priests had brought upon the church, but stopped short of a direct apology.
  In Sydney, he went further, calling also for compensation for sex abuse victims, ordering Australian clergy to help them recover from their ordeals and demanding that abuser priests be punished.
  ‘Victims should receive compassion and care, and those responsible for these evils must be brought to justice,’ he said.
  ‘These misdeeds, which constitute so grave a betrayal of trust, deserve unequivocal condemnation.’

The British prime minister, Gordon Brown, speaking after talks with his Iraqi counterpart in Baghdad, said on Saturday he wanted to cut the number of Britain’s troop in Iraq but would not set some artificial timetable for this.
  ‘Our intention is to reduce our troop numbers but I am not going to set out an artificial timetable,’ Brown told reporters in the Iraqi capital where he was meeting Iraqi leaders to assess the country’s security and economic development.
  After a nearly hour-long meeting with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, Brown went into a meeting with the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani. He also met several Iraqi MPs.
  Before heading to the southern city of Basra, the British premier told a news conference that he saw four stages as crucial to the development of Iraq, particularly in the Basra region where Britain’s 4,000 troops are based.
  ‘We have set four clear objectives for what we want to achieve in those areas where we have had responsibility,’ Brown said.
  ‘The first is to train Iraqi forces themselves so that they are in a position to take full responsibility for the security of the Iraqi people and for the area.
  ‘The second is to make sure that we can push forward the local government elections and train also the police,’ he added.
  Focusing particularly on Basra improvements, Brown said: ‘The third is to pursue the economic and social development of the Basra area so that the people can enjoy prosperity, jobs and businesses.
  ‘And the fourth is the airport for which we have responsibility (which) will be transferred, where it can be, from military to civilian use.’

Iranian officials ruled out any freeze in uranium enrichment on Saturday at the start of talks over Tehran’s nuclear programme attended for the first time by a senior US diplomat.
  ‘Any kind of suspension or freeze is out of the question,’ an Iranian official said, rejecting the main condition set by the United States and other major powers for formal negotiations to end the long-running dispute.
  The high-level US participation in the one-day meeting in Geneva, together with Iranian comments playing down the likelihood of an attack by the United States and Israel, had raised hopes of progress and helped ease record oil prices.
  But the optimism was tempered by US insistence that despite the presence of its envoy William Burns, real negotiations cannot begin until Iran has frozen sensitive nuclear work, a step Tehran has repeatedly ruled out.
  ‘That remains the US position and it will continue to be the US position,’ the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, told a news conference in Washington.
  Iran’s ambassador to Switzerland said Iran would not accept freezing enrichment. ‘It is not in Iran’s agenda to discuss this issue,’ Keyvan Imani told reporters.
  ‘As our supreme leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) clearly said, our path is very clear: We are not going to abandon our rights.’
  Khamenei said on Wednesday Iran was ready to negotiate, but showed no sign of backing down on the Islamic Republic’s refusal to halt atomic activities.
  The Iranian comments dampened hopes which had been raised by upbeat statements ahead of the talks, which the Iranian foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, portrayed as ‘positive and constructive.’
  ‘Today’s meeting might continue with several others so that the viewpoints of all sides can be put on the table so that we reach ... agreement,’ he told reporters.
  He did not elaborate what he meant by agreement, but added that he hoped the talks would pave the way for agreeing on ‘a modality and a framework’ for further negotiations.
  Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili also spoke of his ‘positive intentions’ as he arrived in Geneva on Friday for the talks with officials from the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany – the so-called sextet.

Zimbabwe’s crisis has weakened the unity of the southern African body SADC, Angola’s foreign minister said on Friday, suggesting the region is divided over how to deal with president Robert Mugabe’s disputed re-election.
  Talks between Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change have stalled, with the MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, refusing to agree to full-blown negotiations that could pave the way for a national unity government.
  Several African nations, including Zambia and Botswana, have broken ranks and condemned Mugabe’s landslide victory in the June 27 run-off poll, which Tsvangirai boycotted because of attacks on his party’s supporters.
  ‘The SADC region is experiencing an unprecedented situation vis-a-vis the situation in Zimbabwe,’ Joao de Miranda said at the opening of a summit of the Southern African Development Community in Durban.
  The Angolan foreign minister added that regional unity and cohesion had become more fragile because of the problems in Zimbabwe, where the collapse of the economy has sent millions of refugees into neighbouring states.
  The South African president, Thabo Mbeki, has been mediating the preliminary talks between Mugabe’s officials and the MDC, but has been accused of failing to make any progress and of favouring Mugabe with his discreet diplomatic approach.

Arab foreign ministers were on Saturday to hold crisis talks on how to deal with the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s bid to arrest the Sudan president, Omar al-Beshir, for alleged genocide in Darfur.
  ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo on Monday asked ICC judges to issue a warrant for Beshir’s arrest on genocide charges, which, if granted, would be the first ever issued by The Hague-based court against a sitting head of state.
  Some of the Arab League’s 22-members have criticised the move, saying it threatens peace prospects in Darfur, while also fearing a dangerous precedent for other leaders in the region.
  ‘The ministers will discuss the possibility of asking the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution asking for the ICC to suspend its procedures for 12 months,’ one Arab diplomat said.
  Such a suspension, which is indefinitely renewable, is necessary because the penal process against Beshir ‘reduces the chances of peace in Darfur,’ the diplomat said.
  The request would be in tandem with African efforts, after the Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade, on Thursday asked the ICC to freeze its prosecution for a year, citing Article 16 of the Rome Statute which created the court.
  ‘If the prosecution of al-Beshir continues, the situation in Darfur could worsen and plunge into indescribable chaos,’ Wade warned.
  Fouad Riad, who was a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said that the Arab League was already studying judicial and political ways to resolve the crisis.
  Following a judicial committee’s meeting on Wednesday with League secretary general Amr Moussa, Riad said there were two other options on the table besides asking for a suspension.
  The UN Security Council could be asked to rescind its 2005 decision to refer the case of alleged war crimes in Darfur to the ICC, or Sudan could immediately start a serious process to judge those accused of crimes in Darfur, he said.
  Khartoum has consistently rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction, saying it would try alleged war criminals in its own courts, although credible trials have so far failed to materialise.
  Sudan has refused to surrender two suspects named last year in connection with war crimes in Darfur and hopes to persuade veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council to defer any ICC prosecution of Beshir.
  Arab nations cannot simply reject the ICC’s jurisdiction, despite the fact that only three League members signed up to it – Jordan, Djibouti and the Comoros – as this would mean a confrontation ‘with the entire international (legal) system,’ Riad said.
  League chief Mussa and other Arab leaders have suggested that the ICC could not prosecute Beshir because he has immunity as a head of state, but Article 27 of the Rome Treaty specifically excludes that possibility.

Blame the DJ: loud bar music makes people drink more and drink faster, a study released Friday has found.
  ‘Previous research had shown that fast music can cause fast drinking, and that music versus no music can cause a person to spend more time in a bar,’ said Nicolas Gueguen, a professor of behavioural sciences at the Universite de Bretagne-Sud in France, and corresponding author for the study.
  ‘This is the first time that an experimental approach in a real context found the effects of loud music on alcohol consumption.’
  Gueguen and his colleagues discretely visited two bars over the course of three Saturday nights whose owners agreed to let them manipulate the sound levels.

Millions of Iraqis displaced by sectarian conflict are still struggling to get sufficient food, shelter and basic services like water and health care, the International Organisation for Migration said.
  In a mid-year review distributed late on Thursday, the Geneva-based aid agency said fewer Iraqis were fleeing their homes, but the roughly 2.8 million Iraqis who were already internally displaced faced worsening living conditions.
  Nearly three quarters of them were unable to access regularly the government food rations they depend on, one third could not get the medicines they needed and 14 per cent had no access to health care at all.

Hitting the ground with enough force to lift a worker off the ground, one of the nation’s largest mobile cranes collapsed at a Houston oil refinery, killing four workers and injuring seven others.
  As federal officials prepared to investigate the latest in a string of fatal accidents involving cranes, the Louisiana company that owns the 300-foot-tall piece of equipment said it would pursue its own probe of Friday’s incident.
  Deep South Crane & Rigging spokeswoman Margaret Landry issued a statement from the company’s headquarters in Baton Rouge, saying it was investigating ‘to determine the root cause, correct it and ensure that this type of tragedy does not occur again.’

Pop star Shakira is to lead nationwide demonstrations in her native Colombia on Sunday demanding the liberation of hundreds of hostages held by rebels in the jungle for years.
  Around 80 solidarity rallies are also to take place in other cities around Latin America and the rest of the world, including one in Paris that will include recently freed Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt.
  ‘On July 20, I want to shout out, with you, for the independence and liberty of those who are still hostage of the FARC in Colombia,’ Betancourt told the French parliament early this month.
  The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia continues to detain an estimated 700 hostages.
  Sunday’s rallies are calling for their immediate release, and those of prisoners held by other rebel groups.
  Around five million people are expected to take part in the Colombian demonstrations
  to be held in some 1,000 towns and cities across the country.
  The marches coincide with Colombia’s independence day celebrations, which are to be attended by the president, Alvaro Uribe, and his guests, the president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Alan Garcia of Peru, in the southern town of Leticia.
  Shakira, Colombia’s world-famous pop icon, is to sing Colombia’s national anthem at the start of that commemoration before launching into a concert in support of the hostage liberation demonstration.
  Juanes, another Colombian singer, and other high-profile musicians will also be lending their voices to the liberation initiative.