Cuban President Fidel Castro (r) and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez pose with their medallions, a gift from medical graduates, at Havana's Karl Marx theater, August 20. (Reuters Photo)

HAVANA, Aug. 21--The presidents of Cuba and Venezuela have called for solidarity in the face of the United States as they met here to strengthen their special relationship that has the US government increasingly suspicious, AFP reported.
Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez took part late Saturday in a graduation ceremony at a local medical college, whose class of 2005 included more than 1,600 young doctors from 28 countries.
Also present was Panamanian President Martin Torrijos, whose country reestablished diplomatic ties with Cuba earlier Saturday, putting to rest a year-long dispute stemming from Panama’s decision to pardon four Cubans convicted in a plot to assassinate Castro in 2000.
Castro urged Latin American countries to unite to facilitate their development and improve the well-being of their citizens.
“It is solidarity that makes us truly independent,“ the Cuban leader declared at the ceremony that took place at the Karl Marx Theater in downtown Havana.
“Solidarity makes us free,“ he continued. “It eliminates the need to beg the powerful empire that will not be satisfied until it takes it all.“
Castro brushed off US charges that Cuba and Venezuela exercised a destabilizing influence in Latin America, pointing to the example of Cuban doctors who work in many countries of the region.
Chavez said he wanted to created a medical university for Latin America in Venezuela and emulate Cuba’s example of dispatching doctors around the world as part of a humanitarian assistance program.
He said the two schools in Cuba and Venezuela would be able to produce about 100,000 doctors over the next 10 years.
“Unity and integration in the political, economic and social spheres as well as the energy sector are the only path to salvation for our peoples,“ argued the Venezuelan president.
He called for the launching of what he called a “Bolivarian alternative“ to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a US-backed initiative that seeks to removed trade barriers and promote democracy and accountability in the Western Hemisphere.
“It is the only way to save our peoples,“ Chavez assured.
Chavez, who declared himself a socialist in January, has said socialism was on the rebound, 14 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc--with the sole exception of Cuba.

AMMAN, Jordan, Aug. 21--Jordan has detained scores of Arab suspects as part of the investigation into a rocket attack on US warships in the Red Sea port of Aqaba, security officials said on Sunday.
Most of the suspects were arrested in the Shalala quarter of the Red Sea port that overlooks the port during house-to-house searches following Friday’s attack, the officials told Reuters.
Interior Minister Awni Yarfas said security forces were making headway in the probe into the firing of three Katyusha rockets that missed their targets but hit Jordanian facilities in the city, killing one soldier and injuring another.
“The authorities have made advanced progress in their work,“ Yarfas told Reuters, without giving any details.
The Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet said one missile narrowly missed the USS Ashland, an amphibious ship designed to transport marines and launch assault landing craft and helicopters.
Security sources said several Iraqis, a Syrian and scores of Egyptians and Jordanians were among those detained in the poor Shalala area, known as a hotbed of crime and a hideout for smugglers and cross border drug trading.
Police sources said a number of unused Katyushas were also found in the warehouse in the industrial area near the city centre from where investigators say the rockets were launched.
The authorities had earlier said the warehouse was leased a few days before the Friday attack by Iraqis and Egyptians.
One Jordanian security official told Reuters that while they have not conclusively established who ultimately sponsored the attacks several new leads point to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network. He did not elaborate.
The militant network has been blamed in recent years for several plots to attack Western targets and government installations in Jordan.
The source said they had in recent months received several warnings that Aqaba port, a logistics hub and a main supply facility for US forces in Iraq, was a prime target for a planned Al-Qaeda attack.

TOKYO, Aug. 21--Japan will give up its bid to secure a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for the time being after it failed to win enough international support, AFP quoted a daily as saying.
Japan, the second largest UN donor after the United States, has been jointly lobbying for permanent council membership with Brazil, Germany and India as part of the so-called Group of Four or G4.
The G4 proposal calls for increasing council membership from 15 to 25, with six new permanent seats without veto power--one each for Brazil, Germany, India and Japan and two for the African region, and four non-permanent seats.
A two-thirds majority or 128 votes is needed in the 191-member General Assembly for adoption. But the Sankei Shimbun daily said only 90 nations, including Britain and France, supported the G4 blueprint.
The United States, Japan’s closest ally, has said it supports Japan’s bid but not that of the three others. The G4 proposal is also opposed by China, Japan’s regional rival, and the 53-member African Union.
Any of the five current permanent members--Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States--could veto the proposals being considered by the UN General Assembly to expand the council.
While Japan will give up its bid for now, the government still sees a permanent UN seat as a major diplomatic goal and plans to expand its UN work through foreign aid and peacekeeping operations, the paper said.

TAIPEI, Taiwan,
Aug. 21--Taiwan is in talks with US companies to purchase dozens of attack and transport helicopters and upgrade the AH-1W Super Cobra attack fleet serving the army, AFP quoted Jane’s defense weekly as saying.
“Taiwan and Bell Helicopter-Textron have launched talks on co-manufacturing UH-1Y Huey light utility and AH-1Z King Cobra attack helicopters to fulfill Taipei’s requirement for 35 and 30, respectively, of the aircraft,“ the London-based publication said in an article to be published on August 24.
If the deals go ahead, the UH-1Y would replace part of the army’s fleet of Bell UH-1hs, which are nearing the end of their service life after 32 years, it said.
Bell is also proposing Taiwan’s army upgrade its 63 Bell AH-1W Super Cobras, acquired in the 1990s, to AH-1Z configuration, the weekly said.
US-based Sikorsky is competing with Bell for the deals.
The weekly said Sikorsky was proposing its UH-60 Black Hawk to replace Taiwan’s UH-1H fleet. Sikorsky also has a track record in Taiwan, whose navy operates two squadrons of Sikorsky S-70C anti-submarine warfare helicopters acquired in the 1990s.
A third competitor is Boeing, which is proposing the AH-64D Apache Longbow to fulfill the attack helicopter requirement.
“However, the company is still suffering political fallout after closing the door of its Seattle plant to Taiwanese Vice President Annette Lu in August 2003,“ it said.
Lu had planned to visit the 747-400 production line following a 2002 order by China Airlines for 10 aircraft.
Boeing was keeping a low profile in Taiwan, a source involved in the Apache negotiations told the weekly, and was “terrified of losing the China market“.
The company’s Taipei representative refused an interview request.
China has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan should the island declare formal independence, prompting Taiwan to seek advanced weaponry.

TOKYO, Aug. 21--A US satellite has detected signs that North Korea recently restarted a reactor that could be used for the extraction of material to make nuclear warheads, Reuters quoted a Japanese newspaper as saying on Sunday.
The surveillance satellite detected steam coming out of a boiler connected to a building housing the five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, Asahi Shimbun said, quoting unnamed sources related to six-way nuclear crisis talks, including a senior US official.
The sources said the steam had been detected before the resumption of the six-way talks in late July that aimed to entice the North to give up its nuclear weapons and bomb-making programs in exchange for economic aid and security guarantees.
“It is hard to think that the boiler would operate by itself while the nuclear reactor is stopped. It can only be concluded that North Korea has put in new nuclear fuel rods and has restarted the nuclear reactor,“ Asahi quoted a US government source as saying.
South Korea said in April the reactor’s operations had been suspended and the following month, North Korea said it had completed extracting 8,000 fuel rods from the 5 megawatt reactor.
Rods from old-style graphite reactors can be processed to extract plutonium, a key component in nuclear bombs. Restarting the reactor could mean the North aims to extract more plutonium from the new rods. North Korea said in February that it possessed nuclear weapons.
North Korea has also spread gravel over a road near a separate unfinished 50-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon.
Construction was halted in the 1990s under a previous, and now defunct, nuclear agreement with the United States.
Repairing the road could be a sign the North is preparing to resume building work, Asahi said.

RAMPARA, India, Aug. 21--Indian and Bangladeshi border officials on Sunday resolved a dispute over river bank construction along their frontier that led to heavy fighting, Reuters quoted an Indian official as saying.
Fighting began early on Friday after Indian troops fired on hundreds of Bangladeshi workers and soldiers to stop the construction of a river embankment close to the zero line.
The firing stopped around noon on Saturday.
“Things have been amicably settled and issues resolved.
There is no tension now,“ said O.P. Gaur, chief of India’s Border Security Force (BSF) at the end of a meeting between officials from both sides at Rampara border post.
“We will continue with the (construction) job we are doing but they will not. We will coordinate with them (Bangladesh) so that there is no misunderstanding.“
The Bangladeshi delegation was led by Reza Sarvar, sector commander of the Bangladesh Rifles border force.
Friday’s fighting began as Indian troops opened fire after Bangladesh ignored a request to stop disputed construction work on their side of the border, along a river that flows into Bangladeshi territory from India.
Heavy fighting resumed on Saturday morning, but both sides stopped firing after border authorities spoke over the telephone to fix a meeting.
The firefight took place at a border post about 350 km north of Kolkata, earlier known as Calcutta, capital of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.
There was no official word on casualties on either side, but Indian witnesses said at least three children had been wounded.
Indian officials said they had earlier turned down a request from Bangladeshi border authorities to allow the building of a river embankment because the issue was still being discussed by an India-Bangladesh panel on border rivers.
But Bangladesh Rifles officials deny this, saying they were trying to strengthen their river banks in line with a recent agreement between the two countries.
The fighting came a day after New Delhi offered to help Dhaka hunt for Islamist militants who set off hundreds of crude bombs across Bangladesh, killing two people and wounding more than 100.

Aceh separatist rebel prisoners look angrily from behind bars following a disagreement with police over being photographed in Indonesia, August 17. (AFP File Photo)

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 21--Indonesia will this week announce an amnesty for some 2,000 detained Aceh rebels as part of a peace pact signed to end 29 years of separatist conflict in the resource-rich province, AFP quoted a report as saying.
Justice and Human Rights Minister Hamid Awaluddin, who also signed the August 15 accord with the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in Helsinki, was quoted by the Kompas newspaper as saying the amnesty would be announced on Wednesday.
“The number of those to receive an amnesty will be around 2,000 people. Some 500 in Java and some 1,500 in Aceh and Bengkulu (provinces),“ he said.
Speaking after visiting 25 GAM activists detained at a state jail in Porong, East Java, on Saturday, Awaluddin said the announcement would be made after a consultation meeting with parliament scheduled for Wednesday.
However, he said the amnesty would be granted as scheduled regardless of the outcome of the consultation.
“If you read the constitution, it does not say ’after obtaining the approval’ of the parliament but ’after listening to the considerations’, “Awaluddin said.
He also said all GAM activists detained in jails in Java island would be taken to Jakarta and then returned to Aceh before the end of the month.
The minister also dismissed worries that most of the people detained for alleged links to the GAM would not receive the amnesty.
Most have been held on petty criminal charges as prosecutors had difficulties finding evidence to hold them on political accusations.
Awaluddin said the government would study all cases to see whether the criminal charges against GAM members or supporters were justified or had been made for political reasons.
Meanwhile, Aceh Military Chief Major General Supiadin said 15 rebels, with five firearms, had surrendered to the authorities since the peace pact was signed.