On 17 August Indonesia celebrates Independence Day, a traditional time for the release of prisoners.”If Bill Clinton had suggested this, he would probably have got a stiff response,” said a diplomat in Jakarta.”But next to Mother Teresa, it’s hard for them to know what to do with Mandela. He’s got such broad clout, particularly in the Third World.”It’s pressure on the Indonesians but it also gives them a kind of cover to solve this problem without losing so much face.”. The flattened scrubland in the arch of the River Spree, where Helmut Kohl hopes one day to indulge in his passion for breeding rabbits, is hallowed ground. There is nothing here now, except the bulldozers levelling the earth so work can soon begin on the new chancellery. But some time ago, before the machines, the barbed wire and the bunkers, there stood a very special building on this plot. But hesitantly – and despite a mortifying hiccup this week – things may at last be moving, thanks to the discreet personal intervention of the South African president.With piquant symbolism, Mr Mandela is concentrating his diplomatic efforts on the fate of a celebrated political prisoner – Xanana Gusmao, the leader of the East Timorese resistance, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence. Ever since its act of annexation the following year, Jakarta has refused to brook any compromise, and brutally crushed the dwindling East Timorese resistance.United Nations-supervised talks between Indonesia and Portugal, which is still recognised in the UN as the administering power, have been deadlocked for years.

He died along with Hussein Qassir, one of his senior officers. Sheikh Badran was believed by the Israelis to have been responsible for an attack that killed nine Israeli occupation soldiers inside southern Lebanon two years ago; local intelligence sources say that the subsequent Israeli bombing of a house near Nabatea – in which 14 civilians, most of them women and children _ were slaughtered, was intended to strike Badran’s home more than a mile away. But, against all expectations, the two have become correspondents. And hopes are rising that their unexpected entente could provide a solution to one of the most stubborn small wars in the world.
The conflict in question is that of East Timor, the former Portuguese colony invaded by Indonesia in 1976. President Suharto of Indonesia, by contrast, is a polar opposite: a stern autocrat and liberal bogeyman with a grim record of political oppression.

The Israelis later claimed that the death of the 14 civilians was due to a “technical error”.At an angry funeral service for the dead Hizbollah men yesterday, Sheikh Naim Qasm, one of the leading members of the organisation’s Beirut politburo, warned that the group would attack the Israeli army with suicide bombers. Although all five who died in Kfour were guerrillas, three civilians were also wounded – which constitutes a breach of the ceasefire rules. Yesterday’s Israeli raid, which killed only civilians, broke almost every rule laid down by the truce committee. Faced with a possible violent confrontation with the Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, the Israelis are therefore coming close to a second-front full-scale battle with the Hizbollah in southern Lebanon.. A woman and her two adult sons were shot to death in their home yesterday as Naples continued to be bloodied by turf warfare. The shootings in an apartment on the outskirts of the city raised to 99 the number of killings blamed this year on warfare involving the Camorra crime syndicate.
Italy’s government last month sent in hundreds of soldiers to try to quell the violence.

Yesterday’s murders, carried out apparently with silencer- equipped pistols only 50 yards away from a police station, fuelled calls for an even tougher crackdown AP – Naples. Rescuers looking for more survivors among the rubble of a landslide at an Australian ski resort unearthed two more bodies last night, bringing the confirmed death toll to 12. As cloudy, windy weather closed in on the village of Thredbo, in the Snowy Mountains south of Sydney, rescuers pulled another two dead men from the heap of broken concrete, twisted metal, rocks, dirt and timber Six people are still missing. On Saturday night, survivor Stuart Diver, a 27-year-old ski instructor, was rescued from the debris after being trapped for three freezing nights in a concrete tomb..

Of all the world’s statesmen, Nelson Mandela and President Suharto are the two whom one would least expect to have anything constructive to say to one another. Only a few hours earlier, the pro-Iranian guerrilla army had promised “a sharp and tough response that will make the enemy suffer” following Monday’s Israeli helicopter landing which left five guerrillas dead at Kfour in southern Lebanon.
Lebaia is in an area of the Bekaa in which the Hizbollah operate; it is from around the nearby town of Rashaya that they frequently launch raids against Israel’s occupation zone in southern Lebanon and its 1,500 occupation troops. But yesterday’s Israeli raid was,in both political and military terms, a disaster. The two dead farmers, who were picking sesame seeds when they were killed, were named as Mohamed Hazzim and Ali Akl, both Shiite Muslims.It now transpires that in Monday’s raid on the Hizbollah, one of the five guerrillas who were blown up by bombs left by the Israelis was Sheikh Thaissir Badran, the chief of Hizbollah’s operations in the Nabatea area of southern Lebanon. Not a single Hizbollah guerrilla was reported to have been injured in the raid around the tiny village of Lebaia. The crew must now manage on their existing oxygen supplies and oxygen canisters.Russian space officials play down the seriousness of the problem and stress that there is no immediate danger. It is only now revealed that the oxygen generators have been periodically breaking down throughout the past week..