[bandula]

Short News - 2006.12.22

LTTE losing complete control of the East CONTROL:

The LTTE perhaps is running out of strategies to retain control over the Vakarai population which they forcibly kept under their control for the past one and half months.

The booby traps, indiscriminate firing and the mines no longer is a deterent to the people of Vakarai who have braved these obstacles in their bid to escape from the clutches of the LTTE and to reach the safe haven of the cleared areas.
The heavy influx of civilians from Vakarai and Kathirveli into cleared areas in Batticaloa is a clear sign that LTTE is losing control over almost the entire Eastern population whom it tried their to use in the most inhumane form never used in the history of the two-decade long North East conflict.
The LTTE used these inhumane methods as they very precisely understood that if they lose control over the population entrapped in Vakarai, the only population they had direct links in the East, it would be faced with losing its absolute control over the Eastern population.
Therefore, for the LTTE, losing Vakarai means losing the entire East as they already have lost control over the strategic locations in the East to the Security Forces in the recent battles.
More News Daily News > Lnk> http://www.dailynews.lk/








Harry Potter 7 title revealed
By Germain Lussier, Times Herald Record,December 21, 2006
There's still no release date. Still no word on who lives or who dies.
But as of today, thanks to a hangman game on www.jkrowling.com, the title of the seventh novel and final novel in the "Harry Potter" series has been revealed:
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"
Rumors are that the book will be released in 2007, but nothing has been confirmed. Rowling is currently still writing, as she said on her website.
“I’m now writing scenes that have been planned, in some cases, for a dozen years or even more,” she wrote. “I don’t think anyone who has not been in a similar situation can possibly know how this feels: I am alternately elated and overwrought. I both want, and don’t want, to finish this book (don’t worry, I will.)”



Italian man sparks euthanasia row

Piergiorgio Welby has muscular dystrophy and is paralysed
An Italian court has adjourned to decide whether to allow a terminally ill man to die, in a landmark case.
The man, Piergiorgio Welby, has muscular dystrophy and is paralysed. He wants doctors to be allowed to turn off his artificial respirator.
The high-profile case has sparked fierce debate in mostly-Roman Catholic Italy, where euthanasia is illegal and the Church forbids it.
News from BBC >more >Link>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6174603.stm



'Illegal' MP3 site defends itself
By Mark Savage
Entertainment reporter, BBC News

'Illegal' MP3 site defends itself

The website offers more than 300,000 tracks
Russian music download website allofmp3.com has defended itself against accusations of piracy.
In a statement, the site's owners said they operate "in full compliance with all Russian laws".
However, the British Phonographic Industry trade group insisted that the site is "illegal" and "categorically in breach of copyright laws".
The BPI plans to sue allofmp3.com in the UK courts, but says individual users will not be prosecuted.
The Russian website accounts for 14% of downloads in the UK, a survey has said. It sells albums for as little as £1.
News from BBC >more>link>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5061610.stm



Death threats fail to block 'Kabul Express'

Bollywood broke new ground this weekend with the release of the first international movie filmed in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
"Kabul Express," a tale of two Indian journalists out of their depth on the trail of Taliban, is set among the country's spectacularly scarred landscape of gutted buildings and pitted flatlands.
Starring two of Bollywood's most marketable men, model-turned-screen star John Abraham and comedian Arshad Warsi, as well as American, Afghan and Pakistani actors, with a million-pound production budget, "Kabul Express" has been screened at high-profile film festivals in Toronto and Dubai.

Shot over 45 days in and around Kabul, the Mumbai film crew arrived in September last year during the resurgence of Taliban violence that saw three suicide bombings and the beheading of an Indian construction engineer.
Although Hindi movies are very popular in Afghanistan, Bollywood's joie de vivre did not appeal to the Taliban's austere moral code and the Islamic government banned the films.
The film's director and writer, Kabir Khan says that it took just two weeks before the Taliban sent death threats to the movie set.

"I was told by the Indian ambassador in Kabul that there was a five-man death squad sent by the Taliban. Everybody was pretty nervous. The Taliban wanted to send a message that you cannot have a normal life here. But the Afghan Government really helped. They gave us 60 armed commandos and we used to roll around in 35 SUVs. In fact we looked like a militia."
Khan, a documentary filmmaker from Delhi who first visited Afghanistan in 1996 and has been back half a dozen times since, said "Kabul Express" was a departure for Bollywood. Not only is it just one and a half hours long, but the film also contains no song-and-dance sequences.
"Mumbai studios are looking for new stories and new ways to tell them. This is a movie shot in Afghanistan, about Afghanistan. You know Hindi cinema goes to New York or London but [the plot] is not concerned with issues relating to America or London. ('Kabul Express') is as much about the Afghan people."

Although "Kabul Express" has been much hyped in India and the movie's director says it got a warm reception in foreign film festivals, some western critics have panned it.
"Treating the ongoing struggles in Afghanistan with crude indecision and larky silliness, 'Kabul Express' at once lamely revives buddy road pics and trivializes global politics," said Daily Variety, the bible of the US film industry.
Whatever the west thinks, Bollywood still reigns supreme in Afghanistan. Hanif Hum Ghum, the Afghan actor who plays the journalists' guide, told Indian reporters it was his childhood dream to act in "Hindi cinema" and Afghanistan's favourite actor is Bollywood's leading man Shah Rukh Khan.

Since the Taliban were ousted there has been a cinematic renaissance. The local film industry got a big fillip when the movie Osama won the Golden Globe Award in 2003 for best foreign film.

[nukisl]

thnx

[bandula]

Originally Posted by nukisl

thnx

Oya thami meka balapu eakama ekkena, Lot of Thanx

[gazaly]

tx...

[malkavi]

Thank you bandula. Good work......

[Nishantha Withanage]

Thnx for the News