Seoul— South Korea said Thursday it wants direct
talks with North Korea to discuss providing
badly needed food aid, apparently softening its
position that the communist state must first ask
for help.
Yangon, Myanmar—Myanmar’s junta warned Thursday
that legal action would be taken against people
who trade or hoard international aid in the
aftermath of this month’s devastating Cyclone.
Canberra, Australia — Australia has told the
United States it will no longer honor a deal to
swap refugees who attempt to reach the two
countries by boat, the Australian immigration
minister said Thursday.
Hanwang, China —The loss of a child is always
unbearable, but the grief of parents in China’s
earthquake zone has been deepened by the
government’s controversial one-child birth
control policy.The most searing images of this
massive disaster are of ruined school buildings
and numbed parents waiting outside as small
broken bodies are lifted from the wreckage.
WHEN we learned last week that Abdallah Salih
Al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in
northern Iraq, the US government presented this
as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a
former inmate of the detention camp at
Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says his attack on
Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to
have detained him and that it is dangerous ever
to release the camp’s prisoners. On the
contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put
them there in the first place.
