Washington — US claims that North Korea helped
Syria build a nuclear reactor may wreck a
six-party deal under which the hardline
communist state agreed to end its nuclear
weapons drive, experts said.
Colombo — At least 165 Sri Lankan soldiers were
killed and 20 more went missing in a major
battle with Tamil separatists this week,
military sources told AFP Friday as journalists
attacked widening censorship. The toll makes
Wednesday’s clash the bloodiest in recent years
and saw the authorities extend “unofficial”
press censorship to hospitals and funeral
parlours, a media rights group said.
Sydney— Hundreds of thousands of Australians and
New Zealanders honoured their war dead Friday at
dawn services across the two nations and at
battlefields around the globe where their
soldiers have fallen.
Washington— The United States denied a report
that it gave the green light to Israel to expand
settlements that it would retain as part of a
final peace deal with the Palestinians.Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, quoted by The
Washington Post, said this week that President
George W. Bush four years ago gave a letter to
Olmert’s predecessor Ariel Sharon allowing
Israel to expand those West Bank settlements.
THESE are dangerously unsettled times in the
Middle East. There are so many bitter scores to
settle, so much violent dissension, such
implacable hatreds, that it would take only a
spark to set the whole region alight. Or so it
would seem. Many observers predict a hot and
bloody summer. What they have in mind is not
only a continuation of the calamitous wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, and the possible extension
of the Afghan conflict to the tribal areas of
Pakistan, but rather a major war in the Levant.
