Sri Lankan troops surged forward on Monday after seizing the last big town held by Tamil Tiger separatists, aiming to strike a death blow to a 25-year insurgency, the military said.
   On Sunday, the army announced the capture of the last big town held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the eastern port of Mullaittivu the rebels seized in 1996 and turned into a major military operations and command center.
   With that, the LTTE is now confined to 300 square km of jungle in the Indian Ocean island’s northeast, down from 15,000 square km when the war re-ignited in 2006.
   That leaves the LTTE — on US, EU and Indian terrorism lists — with a handful of bases and village scattered across the jungles from which they have fought since the war kicked off in earnest in 1993.
   And many are asking just how quickly the ground war will be over. The army’s commander, Lieutenant-General Sarath Fonseka, has forecast total victory by mid-April.
   ‘The troops are consolidating their positions in Mullaittivu today, and the other troops are moving toward Puthukudiruppu and others are fighting south of there,’ military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said, referring to an LTTE-held village.
   He brushed off analysts who said the Tigers were at home in the thick jungles and could mount a major counter-attack.
   ‘We met them in the jungles. They cleared the underbrush when we were moving forward, which shows they are afraid to face us in the jungles,’ Nanayakkara said.
   The army has scored three major victories this month, starting with the capture of the rebels’ self-proclaimed capital of Kilinochchi on January 2 and the expulsion of the Tigers from the Jaffna Peninsula a week later.
   Aid agencies say about 230,000 civilians fleeing the fighting are trapped in the war zone. Rights groups and the government accuse the LTTE of keeping them as human shields.
   At least 100 civilians were killed in artillery exchanges last week, according to a top government official working in the Tiger-controlled area.
   The army set up a 32 square km safe zone, but said the LTTE had moved its artillery and heavy weapons inside it.
   The LTTE could not be reached for comment. The pro-rebel web site www.TamilNet.com accused the military on Monday of hitting the safety zone and killing 22 civilians and wounding 60, citing medical sources it did not identify.
   ‘We have not targeted this area. It is the LTTE that does these kind of things. They are the people who exploded the Kalmadukulam tank bund and flooded an entire village,’ Nanayakkara, the military spokesman, said.
   He was referring to a dam at the Kalmadukulam reservoir, which the military said the Tigers blew on Saturday to prevent a rapid advance by soldiers.
   It is difficult to get a clear picture from the war zone, since both sides block independent media from entering it.
   The LTTE say they are the sole representatives of the Tamil minority, which complains of mistreatment by successive governments led by the Sinhalese ethnic majority since independence from Britain in 1948.

Nepal’s Maoist prime minister Prachanda on Sunday banned the dowry system and criminalised caste-based discrimination in a bid to win public support for his faltering government.
   In a thirty-minute national televised address, the prime minister expressed dissatisfaction over his government’s performance and called on all parties to forge a new political understanding.
   ‘I would like to appeal to all the political parties to come forward for a new political consensus to build a peaceful and prosperous Nepal,’ said Prachanda, whose real name is Pushpa Kamal Dahal.
   The former rebel chief, whose nom-de-guerre means ‘the Fierce One’, took charge of the country after the constituent assembly abolished the unpopular monarchy last year.
   The prime minister announced plans to abolish the dowry system and banned caste-based discrimination, in keeping with his election pledge to transform Nepalese society.
   Recent months have seen an upsurge in reported dowry-related violence against women in Nepal’s far-flung districts.
   ‘A week from today, (the) dowry system will be completely banned. (Those) who give or take dowry will be severely punished as by the law,’ he said.
   Prachanda also announced a ban on caste-based discrimination, calling it ‘inhuman’.
   Those who faced discrimination were ‘the most oppressed in the country,’ he said, describing the caste system as ‘a national shame.’
   The Dalit (untouchable caste) community accounts for 14 per cent of the total 27 million population in Nepal.
   Reports of discrimination against the community in rural areas are frequent and include bans on worshipping at some Hindu temples or drinking from public water taps or wells.
   ‘Untouchability is a heinous social crime and stern actions will be taken against the offenders by amending the law if necessary,’ the former rebel leader said.
   Prachanda’s statement comes amid growing public frustration at the poor performance of the government.
   In his address he admitted that he had struggled to deliver on earlier promises of reform.
   ‘We had no experience of running the government and we had limitations and complexities because the coalition government included parties of different ideologies and preferences,’ said Prachanda.

The United Nations refugee agency said Monday it was concerned about the fate of 126 boat people from Myanmar who were detained in Thailand, as authorities refused to reveal their location.
   The UN refugee agency last week officially requested access to the group after reports that Thailand had abandoned up to 1,000 members of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya minority out at sea in ill-equipped boats with scant supplies.
   Kitty McKinsey, Asia spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said it had not received a response from the Thai government.
   ‘We have no idea where they are right now, but we continue to press for access to any Rohingya remaining in Thailand,’ she said.

Paramilitary troops were deployed on the streets of Pakistan’s southwestern city of Quetta Monday to quell violent protests against the killing of a Shia Muslim politician, the police said.
   Gunmen riding on a motorbike shot dead Ghulam Hassan Yousufi, a prominent Shia figure, in an attack claimed by a banned Sunni extremist group.
   ‘The Frontier Corps has been called to assist local police control the law and order situation,’ senior police official Wazir Khan Nasir said.
   He said the police were questioning at least 18 people arrested for suspected links to the assassins.
   The FC fanned out across the city centre after hundreds of protestors took to the streets and turned violent, setting ablaze private vehicles and smashing the windows of a bank in the main boulevard where Yousufi was killed.
   ‘Police launched tear gas shells and baton-charged the protestors in a bid to prevent any untoward incident and to disperse them,’ Nasir said.
   The drive-by shooting took place on Jinnah road in Quetta, the capital of gas-rich Baluchistan province, which borders Afghanistan and Iran.
   Yousufi, who led the Hazara Democratic Party, a predominantly Shiite movement, was shot as he got out of his car outside a travel agency and died on the way to hospital.

Thailand’s justice ministry wants to launch an overseas campaign to educate foreigners about its laws protecting the monarchy, an official said Monday, after an Australian was jailed under the harsh rules.
   Harry Nicolaides, 41, was sentenced to three years in jail after pleading guilty last week to lese majeste — slandering the royal family — in a novel he self-published in 2005.
   ‘The ministry has an idea to seek cooperation from the foreign ministry to ask all Thai embassies abroad to educate foreigners about lese majeste laws,’ an aide to the justice ministry said.
   ‘Foreigners misunderstand the lese majeste laws,’ she said, adding that they mistakenly believe the crime is not serious and carries a light sentence.
   In fact, lese majeste carries a maximum jail sentence of 15 years — one of the harshest in the world for the crime — and some MPs from the ruling Democrat Party are pushing to increase it to 25 years.
   Nicolaides was not the first foreigner to fall foul of the laws.
   Swiss national Oliver Jufer was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2007 for defacing pictures of deeply-revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

India celebrated Republic Day on Monday with a grand military parade in New Delhi held under tight security conditions, two months after the terror attacks on Mumbai.
   The police shot and killed two suspected Pakistani militants near the capital on the eve of the national day celebrations, as 20,000 troops were deployed to prevent extremist strikes.
   India says Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group, was behind November’s carnage in Mumbai, during which 10 gunmen killed 172 people.
   ‘The concerted and well-planned attacks in Mumbai stand out as an example of a ruthless operation undertaken to damage the confidence of India,’ the president, Pratibha Patil, said in an address to the nation.
   ‘Countries must own up to their responsibilities,’ she said, without naming arch-rival Pakistan.
   The Delhi police commissioner YS Dadwal had warned Islamist militants could try to attack the parade, which emphasises India’s role as a regional economic and military power, as it passed through the ceremonial heart of New Delhi.
   ‘There are intelligence inputs (of possible strikes by guerrillas),’ Dadwal said.
   The centre of New Delhi was virtually shut down for Monday’s celebrations, which attracted large crowds, and security was focused on areas close to the parade route such as metro stations and shopping centres.

The Bolivian president, Evo Morales, celebrated victory Monday after his supporters approved constitutional changes to empower the country’s indigenous majority and allow the president to seek re-election.
   Exit polls by two of Bolivia’s largest television networks showed that the new constitution had been approved in Sunday’s referendum by a comfortable margin, receiving 60 per cent of the votes cast, according to the Unitel television network.
   The ATB television network reported 58-per cent voter approval. Official returns were expected later Monday.
   ‘Now Bolivia is being re-founded!’ Morales told supporters who gathered at the Plaza de Armas in La Paz to hear him speak from the balcony of the presidential palace.
   ‘Here the colonial state ends, and internal and external colonialism end,’ said the leftist Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president.
   Morales called on the country’s governors and mayors ‘to work together to implement the new constitution.’
   The new document scraps the single-term limit for the president, allowing Morales to stand for a second five-year term.
   The changes also allow 36 indigenous communities and groups to win the right to territory, language and their own ‘community’ justice, and enacts agrarian reform measures by limiting the size of landholdings.
   ‘It is a victory for the government, which shows that positive momentum remains on its side,’ commented political analyst Herve do Alto of the French Institute of Andean Studies.
   However, the exit polls also showed that the referendum was badly defeated in the eastern departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni and Pando, hotbeds of activity against the leftist president.
   Morales earlier said that he expected the measure to be approved by 70 per cent of voters, so the results encouraged his opponents.
   In Chuquisaca, governor Savina Cuellar held a rally and called for her people to refuse to abide by the document.
   Santa Cruz governor Ruben Costas told supporters at a rally that hundreds of thousands of Bolivians voted against the measure, and that this shows that the opposition has gained strength.
   Tarija governor Mario Cossio, another Morales opponent, called for a ‘national pact’ — negotiations between Morales and eastern governors — that could lead to a new constitution.
   And former vice president Victor Hugo Cardenas said that if voters did not vote for the referendum in Bolivia’s nine departments it would be considered illegitimate and fuel divisions.
   The eastern Bolivian governors are seeking increased autonomy and more authority over mineral resources — especially oil and gas — found in their region.
   Some Catholic and evangelical clerics had opposed the referendum, fearing that the new constitution’s declaration that the country is ‘independent’ from religion could pave the way for abortion rights and gay marriage.
   Ahead of the vote the vice president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, made it clear that the national result was binding and applied to all Bolivians.
   Although Morales is widely popular, his rise has heightened deep geographic, racial and class divisions in the country that are not expected to ease with the vote.
   Bolivia already flirted with unrest bordering on civil war in September, when 20 indigenous government supporters were killed in a northern state.
   Conflict has been brewing since Morales took office in 2005 and announced he would upset a centuries-old political order inherited from Spanish colonial times and subsequent military regimes.

US president Barack Obama will start reversing former president George W Bush’s climate change policies on Monday by taking steps to allow states to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and by ordering 2011 vehicle fuel efficiency standards to be set by March.
   An administration official said late on Sunday that Obama, who took office last week, would direct the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider a request by California to impose its own strict limits on car emissions.
   The request was denied under the Bush administration. The official said a final decision by the EPA would likely take several months.
   Another official familiar with the policy shift said Obama would instruct the EPA to approve the waiver allowing California to impose the rules.
   California last week asked the new administration to reconsider the state’s request.
   California and other states sued the EPA after Stephen Johnson, the agency’s chief under the Bush administration, denied California’s request for federal permission to impose new limits on carbon dioxide emissions from cars.
   In a letter to Obama, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger asked the president to ‘direct the US EPA to act promptly and favourably on California’s reconsideration request.
   The White House official said Obama would also direct the transportation department to move forward with setting 2011 vehicle fuel efficiency standards by March.
   Obama’s memorandum would also instruct the agency to reconsider how such standards are set for later years in a separate process.
   Obama promised on the campaign trail to take aggressive action to fight global warming and reduce emissions blamed on heating the earth.
   
   ‘US ‘committed’ to int’l
   battle against hunger’
   The United States is ‘committed’ to working with other nations to meet the goal of halving the number of people worldwide living in poverty and hunger by 2015, the US secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said Monday.
   ‘Food insecurity and high food prices pose a threat to the prosperity and security of many developing countries,’ she said in a video message broadcast at a UN-sponsored meeting on food security in Madrid.
   ‘Millions of people are at risk of being pushed back into poverty, jeopordising the achievements of the Millennium Development Goal to cut poverty and hunger by half by 2015,’ she said, adding that ‘governments and nations are more likely to become unstable when their populations are hungry and underfed.’
   ‘We are committed to building a new partnership among donor states, developing nations, UN agencies, NGOs, the private sector and others to better coordinate policies to achieve the Millennium Development Goals,’ she said.

EU nations expressed support Monday for US moves to close the Guantanamo ‘war on terror’ prison camp but few are keen to accept the freed detainees.
   EU foreign ministers underlined the need to help the president, Barack Obama, close the notorious prison at the US naval base in Cuba, which has blighted the American standing in the world.
   Legal procedures differ in each of the 27 European Union nations and defining a common stance on the way the 245 inmates should be hosted is virtually impossible.
   ‘It is not an easy question and it is up to each state how they will decide,’ said the Czech foreign minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, whose country holds the EU’s rotating presidency.
   Portugal’s prime minister Luis Amado, who has led calls to help Obama, said: ‘I think that we should show a strong commitment to cooperate with the new US administration to close Guantanamo.’
   He added that the EU needs ‘a common umbrella so that the different member states can deal with the United States.’ He said that up to seven states might be ready to host released inmates.
   The camp, with its special military tribunals, has been condemned as a legal black hole that used evidence obtained by force and denied defendants their rights.
   Around 60 prisoners might have to be transferred to other countries because they could face the death penalty at home, while others could be tried in US courts. Some may prove impossible to try, transfer or release.
   The Finnish foreign minister, Alexander Stubb, said the EU could faced legal obstacles over refugee and humanitarian issues if some inmates apply for asylum or if they are considered at risk of persecution in their home countries.
   ‘If there are some people who are not tried in the US in national tribunals and they get a refugee status, we’ll have to look at that individually,’ he said.
   The EU also has to ‘look at this from a humanitarian, human rights perspective. If there are people who were not tried they are free but can’t go back to their own country. Europe should take our responsibility,’ he said.

Opposition demonstrators ransacked and set fire to the building that houses Madagascar’s state radio station on Monday as political tensions mounted on the Indian Ocean island.
   Hundreds of rioters raided the Radio Nationale Malgache building in the capital Antananarivo after answering a weekend strike call by city mayor Andry Rajoelina, who has led a wave of anti-government demonstrations.
   The mob were among tens of thousands of demonstrators who had turned up earlier at a city square gathering, addressed by the mayor.
   Some rioters looted furniture, computers and files from the building before setting it ablaze and damaging vehicles parked nearby.
   Rajoelina has ratcheted up opposition to the government, which he brands a dictatorship, since last month when it shut down his television network Viva for broadcasting an interview with former president Didier Ratsiraka.
   In other parts of town, protestors erected road barriers and blocked traffic, witnesses said.
   Rajoelina defied government warnings to hold a major rally on Saturday in the capital at which he addressed more than 20,000 and called for a general strike.
   The mounting tensions forced President Marc Ravalomanana to cut short his trip to South Africa and he returned home late Sunday and accused the mayor of calling for a revolt.

Four US soldiers were killed on Monday when two helicopters crashed in northern Iraq, American and Iraqi military officials said.
   ‘Four coalition forces members were killed when two aircraft went down in northern Iraq,’ a US army spokesman said in a statement.
   The cause of the incident is unknown and is under investigation, the statement added, without giving any further details.
   An Iraqi military official told the news agency two helicopters were involved in the incident.
   A police official said the helicopters collided near Kirkuk, 255 kilometres north of the capital Baghdad.
   The US military is currently taking a back seat to an increasingly large Iraqi force made up of 5,60,000 policemen and 2,60,000 military personnel, with the US providing military logistical and air support on request.
   According to the Pentagon, 1,43,000 US troops are deployed in Iraq.

Hamas rivals Fatah called Monday for the forming of a national unity government acceptable to the international community before Gaza’s crossings open,a position in apparent conflict with that of Hamas.
   ‘We want a government of national unity which will supervise reconstruction and crossing points so the crossing points are completely open, so that we can bring in products necessary for reconstruction such as cement and steel,’ Azzam al-Ahmed, who heads Fatah’s parliamentary group, told journalists.
   The declaration came after envoys from Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, met with the Fatah which controls the occupied West Bank, in Cairo to discuss shoring up the fragile Gaza ceasefire.
   ‘We must guarantee that any future government will not be boycotted,’ Ahmed said, referring to the West’s refusal to deal with a Hamas government unless the Islamists renounce violence and recognise Israel.
   Ahmed stressed that Fatah is obliged to take the position of the international community, which calls for Hamas to satisfy certain conditions and for forces loyal to Fatah to return to the Gaza Strip.

A New Zealand man has found confidential US military files on an MP3 player he bought in an Oklahoma thrift shop, it was reported in Wellington Monday.
   Chris Ogle paid 18 dollars ($9) for the player and when he plugged it into his computer he found 60 pages of military data, Television One News said.
   The files contained the names and personal details of US soldiers, including some who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as information about equipment deployed to bases and a mission briefing.
   ‘The more I look at it, the more I see and the less I think I should be (seeing),’ Ogle said.
   Although most of the files are dated 2005, TV One said it rang some of the phone numbers and they were answered by the corresponding personnel.