Police in Zimbabwe told the country's High Court on Monday that they could
not remove thousands of veterans of the country's war of liberation from
occupied farms without risking plunging the country into a civil war.
Attorney General Patrick Chinamasa told the court that that "at the end of
the day any order issued by this court ordering the evictions will be
unenforceable. ... The country is degenerating into a war situation."
According to the attorney general, 1,000 mainly white-owned farms in the
country are being occupied by 60,000 veterans.
The figures were disputed by Jeremy Grant, deputy director of the Commercial
Farmers Union, which represents the country's 4,500, predominantly white,
commercial farmers. He said there were 7,000 people occupying 500 farms.
"I certainly believe it is within the (police) commissioner's power to sort
this thing out immediately, if he wishes to," he said outside the courtroom.
The farmer's union had gone to court seeking an instruction to the police to
carry out an earlier court order evicting the squatters.

After experts ruled that a major eruption was unlikely, 215 people evacuated
from villages near a volcano in northern Japan on Monday
checked on their homes and farms.
Scientists believe the volcanic activity on Mount Usu on the northernmost
main island of Hokkaido, has "stabilized," with water and magma mixing
underground and causing steam to flow from numerous craters, Meteorological
Agency official Akimichi Takagi said.
Some 13,000 people have been barred from their homes for more than a week
since the volcano showed signs of erupting, with around 5,000 staying in
government-run emergency shelters.
On Monday, residents from evacuated areas in the towns of Date and Sobetsu
returned home for supervised, seven-hour visits.
Since rumbling to life on March 31, Usu has been spewing clouds of ash and
rock. But residents who looked in on their homes saw that nothing had
changed not even a layer of ash.
Residents received handouts instructing them to stay within specified zones
and were accompanied by police and fire department officials as they drove
toward their houses.

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori dismissed opposition allegations of vote
fraud late Monday while announcing a new ballot count that put him within
reach of a first-round re-election victory.
With 55.9 percent of the votes counted, Fujimori said he had received 49.6
percent of the vote, while his closest challenger Alejandro Toledo had
received 40.6 percent. Several minor candidates split the remainder of the
ballots.
Fuijimori stopped well short of claiming victory. But he defended the
validity of the elections, the results of which have been questioned by
Toledo's camp and by international observers.
"I think that the will of the people must be respected and the international
community will know, sooner or later, that the process of the election ...
the counting result is fair," he said.
A delay in announcing the first results -- they came more than 12 hours
after they had been expected -- served to reinforce opposition charges that
the vote had been manipulated by Fujimori, who has been in power for 10
years. The national elections board had promised the
first results by Sunday night.

The Nasdaq composite index plummeted over 280 points Wednesday, its second
largest point loss ever, as investors continued to dump technology stocks
like Microsoft and Intel, after an influential analyst reduced Microsoft's
revenue outlook.
Late in the day the selling spilled over into the Dow Jones industrial
average, of which Microsoft is a component. Other technology members of the
blue chip index, like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Intel, also fell.
The losses mean that the Nasdaq has underperformed the Dow for the first
time in 2000. Year-to-date, the Nasdaq is down 6.7 percent, while the Dow is
off 3.2 percent.
The Nasdaq plunged 286.29 points, or more than 7 percent, to 3,769.61. The
tech-heavy indicator is down around 25 percent from the high of 5,048.62 set
March 10. Wednesday marked the  first time the Nasdaq closed below 4,000
since Jan. 31.
Analysts said the market still has some room to fall. "My sense is we'll
probably make a short-term low very soon, only because the rubber band is
stretched so tightly," said Joseph Barthel, chief investment strategist at
Fahnestock & Co.
The Nasdaq has now set three point-loss records within the past two weeks
falling 349 points on April 3, shedding 258 points on Monday and dropping
over 280 points Wednesday.
The Dow fell 161.95 points to 11,125.13, hurt by its technology components.
"It was only 4 out of the 30 issues that drove (the Dow) down," said Art
Hogan, chief market strategist at Jefferies & Co.
The broader S&P 500 index dropped 33.42 to 1,467.17.
Market breadth was mixed. Advancing issues outpaced declining ones 1,532 to
1,430 on the New York Stock Exchange, as volume reached over 1.1 billion
shares. But Nasdaq losers beat winners 3,334 to 1,011, as more than 1.8
billion shares changed hands.
The dollar rose against the euro but was weaker versus the yen. Treasury
securities fell.

  Seasonal rains have not yet come to Ethiopia, and officials there fear the
lack of rainfall means the failure of this year's harvest
and the Horn of Africa nation's fifth famine in the past 30 years.
Already Ethiopia has sent out an urgent plea for 800,000 tons of food to
feed 8 million people this year. But that number will rise, and the severity
of the hunger already plaguing the country will increase, if the harvest
doesn't come to bear in June. This year's lack of rainfall makes that
harvest unlikely.
"Our food reserve is down," said Berhane Gizaw of the Ethiopian government's
Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission. "We have managed so far,
and I think we will also manage in April. The question is beyond that ... In
June things are going to be very serious."
Reserves are down, Berhane said, because the West has not come through with
all its aid pledges.
"Nobody has fulfilled any pledge so far this year," he said. "Very little is
happening, only in the media."
The European Union and the United States have pledged to refill the
Ethiopian coffers later this year, but much of that reflects aid already
promised. The West has pledged but a quarter of the 800,000 tons of aid
requested for this year, Ethiopia said.

A protest leader has called for a stop to week long violent demonstrations
in Bolivia after Congress passed legislation revising a planned water hike.
Students clashed with police in La Paz earlier Tuesday, however, and
anti-government protests continued in other regions.
Hours after the clashes in La Paz, the leader of protests in Cochabamba --
the city where demonstrations broke out April 3 -- called on residents to
cease all protests.
The protests spread throughout the country, leaving six dead and prompting a
"state of siege" decree giving police and the military a freer rein to crack
down.
Protest leader's Oscar Olivera's call for calm came not long after Congress
approved legislation removing one clause that would have pegged water rates
to the U.S. dollar and another that would have forced peasants to pay for
using water from wells.
Under the agreement, the government canceled the contract granted to Aguas
del Tunari, an international water company pushing for the water price hike.
Cochabamba, 350 miles east of La Paz, had returned to normal. But earlier
Tuesday, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at rock-throwing students
in clashes that lasted for several hours in the center of La Paz, the
capital.

Zimbabwe's vice president on Thursday urged veterans occupying hundreds of
white-owned farms to leave after a court ordered police to remove them by
force.
Vice President Joseph Msika said a constitutional amendment passed last
week, which allows the government to seize land without compensation, had
cleared the way for the legal redistribution of white-owned land.
"There is no reason for the war veterans and the povo (people) to continue
demonstrating or occupying farms in a haphazard manner. We have passed the
Land Bill, which will allow us to resettle people in an orderly manner," he
said.
Earlier Thursday, High Court Judge Moses Chinhengo upheld an order for the
eviction of the squatters who have seized at least 500 of Zimbabwe's 4,500
white-owned farms. The government may appeal the matter to the country's
Supreme Court.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti. Attackers shot and hacked to death a local political
candidate in Haiti, then slashed his daughter with a machete, his party's
spokesman said Thursday.
The slaying of rural assembly candidate Merilus Deus on Monday night was the
latest of at least 10 killings amid tension over long-delayed elections in
the Caribbean country. Deus was a candidate in Savanette, a town of about
6,000 people some 55 kilometers (35 miles) northeast of Port-au-Prince.
Unidentified assailants killed him in his home, said Ernst Colon, spokesman
for the Christian Movement for a New Haiti.
Deus' daughter, Michou, was hospitalized in critical condition.
"On the eve of elections, we wonder whether they can be held under the
current government," Colon said.
After weeks of street violence, the provisional electoral council said
Tuesday that Haiti's legislative and local elections will be held May 21.
The elections have been postponed three times since November, and opposition
politicians have accused President Rene Preval of trying to derail the
voting.

A failed mortar attack on a village police station was reported Thursday,
hours before British troop levels in Northern Ireland were scaled down to
their lowest since 1970.
No one was reported injured.
Police on Thursday could not yet confirm a news report that a mortar shell
had exploded prematurely in a car at the Royal Ulster Constabulary base at
Rosslea in County Fermanagh, southwest of Belfast. But they said they had
cordoned off a car there shortly after midnight and efforts were still under
way to determine what had happened.
It would be the fourth failed attack on a security installation since
February 11, when Britain suspended Northern Ireland's new government to
avoid a walkout by the pro-British Ulster Unionist Party over the Irish
Republican Army's refusal to disarm.
Bombers have since attacked military bases in Londonderry and nearby
Ballykelly. Police also said they found a primed rocket launcher and stopped
an attack at a Dungannon military base.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the latest attempt, but
suspicion fell on the so-called Real IRA, the organization responsible for
the August 1998 bombing in Omagh that killed 29 people. The group is one of
several that emerged in opposition to the IRA's participation in the peace
process with pro-British Protestants.
Hours after the Rosslea incident, a British army battalion completed its
pullout of Northern Ireland as part of Britain's plans to scale down its
military presence in the province.