Edinburgh—NATO
Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on
Tues-day he was confident the alliance would
substantially increase its forces bat-tling
Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. U.S.
President Barack Obama is weighing several
options for boosting U.S. troop levels in
Afghanistan as a debate rages in his
administration over whether to persist with a
counter-insurgency strategy or whether to narrow
it to a counter-terrorism drive against al
Qaeda.
Brussels—The
European Union on Tuesday joined the US in
discouraging Palestinian intentions to seek
international recognition of an independent
state, urging instead a return to stalled peace
talks with Israel. “I don’t think we are there
yet,” Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, whose
country holds the EU’s rotating presidency, told
reporters in Brussels. “I would hope that we
would be in a position to recognise a
Palestinian state but there has to be one first,
so I think it is somewhat premature,” he said.
Prague—With their country in
deep political crisis, Czechs took to the
streets throughout the country Tuesday to
commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of
decades of repressive communist rule. They will
celebrate with exhibitions, concerts, speeches
and rallies. Thousands of people in the capital,
Prague, plan to participate in a reenactment of
a stu-dent protest - an evocation of the event
that triggered the Velvet Revolution that
peacefully toppled the communist regime in what
was then Czechoslovakia.
Rome—Somewhere in the
world, a child dies of hunger every five seconds
— even though the planet has more than enough
food for all. Ban Ki-moon, the U.N.
secretary-general, laid out the sobering
statistic as he kicked off a three-day summit on
world food security in Rome. “Today, more than 1
billion people are hungry,” he told the
assembled leaders. Six million children die of
hunger every year — 17,000 every day, he said.
FINALLY, it seems, the penny has dropped.
America’s ‘good war’ cannot be won militarily.
Signs indicate that the US president, who was so
gung ho on Afghani-stan before taking office,
has got the message. More troops just won’t cut
it. “We have no illusions,” said Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton on ABC last Sun-day.
