NEW DELHI, India – Amid mixed reports of a rebel withdrawal and relative calm, there continue to be fierce and bloody clashes on the island nation of Sri Lanka between military forces of the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly known as the Tamil Tigers. Some analysts have begun dubbing the ongoing violence the beginning of ‘Eelam War IV’ — a reference to the repeated failure of peace talks in the 20-year-old civil war in the tiny country off India’s southern tip. But Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa continues to deny such, saying instead [...]
This week, Colombia’s re-elected president, Alvaro Uribe, officially began his second term in office. There has never been a more popular leader in Colombia’s history than Uribe. Last year, he spearheaded a campaign to get the constitution amended to allow incumbent leaders to seek a second term. With his typical unfailing determination he succeeded, paving the way for his historic victory in May. In the 2006 May election, the conservative hard-liner won 26.7 million votes, representing 62.2 per cent of the vote. The Oxford- and Harvard-educated president not only surpassed the number of votes he received in the previous election [...]
On Tuesday night July 25, Hasan Nasrallah gave a speech on al-Manar TV, the satellite station of Hizbullah. It was the fifth time he addressed the Lebanese since the war started July 12. Nasrallah looked calm, confident, and defiant when he announced that Phase Two of the war against Israel had started. During Phase One he had promised to bomb Haifa, the third-largest city in Israel, and he did. He also bombed Kiryat Shmona, Acre, Safad, Tiberias, and the Biblical city of Nazareth. The State of Israel had not witnessed similar attacks on its cities since the start of the [...]
