Colombo, October 16
At least 103 persons, including Sri Lankan navy sailors and civilians, were killed when an explosives-laden truck driven by a suspected Tamil Tiger rebel rammed into their convoy today, a military official said.

The attack near the town of Habarana, about 190 km northeast of the capital Colombo, was one of the worst suicide bombings in the troubled Indian Ocean island.

“One hundred and three people, including many sailors and some civilians, were killed and 150 were wounded. The toll might go up,” said a spokesman at the Media Centre for National Security here.

The navy gathers its men near Habarana before transporting them to the eastern naval base of Trincomalee.

“There were about 15 buses and 13 were damaged in the explosion,” a navy official in Colombo, who did not want to be identified, said.

The attack came as Yasushi Akashi, the peace envoy of the island’s chief financial donor, Japan, began talks with government leaders to push a four-year peace process that has been battered by mounting violence.

It also comes ahead of peace talks between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Geneva on October 28-29. — Reuters

London, October 16
University staff across Britain will be asked to spy on “Asian-looking” and Muslim students they suspect of involvement in Islamic extremism and supporting terrorist violence, media reports said.

A report in The Guardian claims university staff will be told to inform a special branch about such students because the government believes campuses have become “fertile recruiting grounds” for extremists.

Wakkas Khan, president of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, said: “It sounds to me to be potentially the widest infringement of the rights of Muslim students that there ever has been in this country.” — UNI

For most people, Sudan conjures images of ethnic cleansing in western Darfur province, stark poverty and hunger.

But in what will come as a rude shock to India, a Global Hunger Index developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) says the problem of malnutrition is more severe in India than in the African nation.

While the current hot spots of hunger and malnutrition are in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, India is ranked 24th and Sudan 25th on the list of countries with the highest levels of hunger.

In India, child malnutrition has been linked to the low status of women in society.

In South Asia, women, if they eat last in the family after all men have eaten, will end up being malnourished, giving birth to undernourished children, Ms Doris Wiesmann, the IFPRI researcher who developed the index, said.

Women having a say in families allocated more resources to children’s nutritional needs as men had other priorities.

Ms Wiesmann said there had been a great improvement in South Asia, largely due to the Green Revolution, but it was still a hot spot of malnutrition.

South Asia had higher levels of child undernutrition than sub-Saharan Africa, but sub-Saharan Africa had higher rates of child mortality, the study found.

She noted a lack of political will to combat hunger and said governments must focus on agriculture, education and healthcare policies.