COLOMBO: Sri Lankan forces attacked a rebel-held village in the north with heavy machine gun fire early Monday, just hours after rejecting the Tamil Tigers' call for a truce as a ploy to avoid certain destruction, a rebel-linked Web site reported.The military attacked the small, coastal village of Mullivaikal from the north, south and west about 3:45 a.m. Monday, Tamil Netreported. The village is in a no-fire zone the government demarcated inside rebel territory as a civilian refuge. The Web site said the area was densely populated with tens of thousands of civilians.``Confrontations are taking place,'' military spokesman Brig.Udaya Nanayakkara said. ``We are moving forward.'' The assault came amid growing diplomatic pressure for a cease-fire to allow tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the war zone to escape to safety.The top U.N. humanitarian official, John Holmes, met Sri Lanka's foreign minister Monday to express concern for the estimated 50,000 trapped civilians before flying to a village south of the war zone to inspect displacement camps overwhelmed by the massive influx of war refugees in recent days. The foreign secretaries of Britain, France and Sweden were to travel here Wednesday to try to mediate the conflict.
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in...
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