BBC News: 22 October 2008
Exiles of the Chagos Islands will not be able to return to their homeland, the House of Lords has ruled. … He added: “Our appeal to the House of Lords was not about what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. It was about decisions taken in the international context of 2004.” … The exiled residents had hoped that if the Law Lords ruling had gone in their favour, their heritage could be rebuilt around a new tourist industry. …
The Independent, Thursday, 23 October 2008
War has come to the world’s only Muslim nuclear state. Not just terrorist bombs, but pitched battles bringing refugees down from the mountains and even into Afghanistan. In a powerful dispatch, Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich report on the conflict which has left 200,000 people caught between the Pakistani Army, the Taliban and the tribal warlords.
There was a loud, sharp sound followed by flames and massive blast of wind that threw the young boy twenty yards through the air. It felt as if he had fallen off the mountain. When he pulled himself to his feet, dazed and battered, he discovered nine members of his family were dead and that his mother was badly wounded. All were victims of a deadly artillery shell fired by the Pakistani military battling with Taliban fighters in the country’s mountainous border region. …
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/exclusive-dispatch-pakistans-hidden-war-969784.html
Asia Times Online – Kowloon,Hong Kong
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON – The final draft of the United States-Iraq Status of Forces agreement on the US military presence represents an even more crushing defeat for the policy of the George W Bush administration than previously thought, the final text reveals.
