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Sri Lanka Should Hold Referendum on Merging North, East Regions
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have been fighting for two decades for a separate homeland in the north and east in a conflict that has killed more than 60,000 people. Peace talks to try to end an escalation of violence in Sri Lanka since February collapsed last week in Geneva with the government and LTTE unable to agree on a date for new discussions. A peace accord is crucial for the growth of Sri Lanka's tea- and textile-exporting economy, which has expanded every quarter since a cease-fire was signed in 2002. The northern and eastern provinces were merged in 1988 as a temporary measure before a referendum was scheduled to be held in 1989, the Defense Ministry said in a statement on its Web site. A vote has been ``continuously postponed for the last 18 years,'' it said.
Time to ride off into the red sunset?
It took me an hour to turn the clocks back an hour, coordinating all watches and digital alarm clocks and oven clock and kitchen clock and car clocks to Central Standard Time, during which a man starts to question the entire concept of promptitude, meetings, appointments, etc., which leads to thoughts of retirement, the End of the Trail, Old Paint, the part of your life when it doesn't matter so much if it's 9:30 or 10:05, or even if it's Tuesday or Saturday, when you drift along as most mammals do, eating when hungry, sleeping when sleepy and meeting whomever you meet whenever you meet them. People my age are retiring one after the other, which scares the bejeebers out of me. It's like when I sat in Toni McNaron's Milton class wrestling with the first question of the final exam, which was about Lycidas, which I had not actually read, so it was difficult for me to discuss how the form of the poem was integral to its meaning -- difficult, but not impossible, by any means -- and suddenly two women stood up and walked to the front of the room and turned in their tests.
MP Pohanka says he would back any stable solution -- press
Deputies]. I am not and I've never wanted to be the king maker tipping the scales. In my opinion an agreement must be reached. An agreement can never be based on one or two deputies," Pohanka says in Pravo. The ODS-led right-wingers have 100 seats in the 200-seat Chamber, as does the leftist camp comprising the CSSD and the Communists (KSCM). Pohanka says he has left the CSSD in protest against its "presumption of guilt" principle. CSSD leader Jiri Paroubek says the party would apply the presumption of guilt principle to any of its members suspected of crime, even before his/her guilt is proved by court. Pohanka's name was recently mentioned by Ladislav Peta, mayor of Budisov, south Moravia, suspected of machinations with EU subsidies. On a video that TV Nova shot with a hidden camera, Peta labels Pohanka, former director of St Ann hospital in Brno and a deputy health minister, as "a player" he counts on.
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