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In the Maldives a British tourist died of a heart attack when tidal waves struck the island paradise, flooding the capital, Male, and shutting the airport.

The unidentified tourist collapsed as the waves crashed into his resort, sweeping away 50 water cabanas built on stilts, an official said.

The Maldivian Government said in a statement there were several casualties, but gave no details. The situation of tens of thousands of tourists was not immediately known.

Two-thirds of Male, home to about a third of the country’s 330,000 population, was under about 1.2m of water.

“From about 9am (local time), the capital, Male, and other parts of the country have been flooded by the tsunami caused by the earthquakes in the eastern Indian Ocean,” the government statement said.

Maldives is a cluster of 1192 coral islands scattered 800km across the Equator and is vulnerable to any rise in sea levels.

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Per 1 januari 2005 geldt in Nederland een algemene identificatieplicht. Elke burger moet zich voortaan legitimeren zodra een politieambtenaar daar om vraagt. Daar moet zo’n politieambtenaar dan wel een goede reden voor hebben, maar ‘het handhaven van de openbare orde’ is, volgens de nieuwe wet, reden genoeg. En dat is een erg ruim begrip.

De politie is niet altijd je beste vriend. In landen waar al langer een algemene identificatieplicht geldt, worden mensen met een kleurtje en ‘alternatieve’ jongeren opvallend vaak staande gehouden. Het is hinderlijk en vernederend als je telkens je papieren moet tonen, alleen maar omdat je uit een ander deel van de wereld komt of er een andere levensstijl op nahoudt.

We moeten voorkomen dat ook in Nederland ‘overijverige’ dienders misbruik gaan maken van hun nieuwe bevoegdheden. De nieuwe wet kunnen we voorlopig niet ongedaan maken, maar we kunnen wel iets anders doen.

Ook politiemensen zijn wettelijk verplicht zich te legitimeren… als jij daar om vraagt.

Dat recht heb je.

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Following inquiries by ABC News, the Pentagon has dropped plans to force a severely wounded U.S. soldier to repay his enlistment bonus after injuries had forced him out of the service.

Army Spc. Tyson Johnson III of Mobile, Ala., who lost a kidney in a mortar attack last year in Iraq, was still recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center when he received notice from the Pentagon’s own collection agency that he owed more than $2,700 because he could not fulfill his full 36-month tour of duty.

Johnson said the Pentagon listed the bonus on his credit report as an unpaid government loan, making it impossible for him to rent an apartment or obtain credit cards.

“Oh man, I felt betrayed,” Johnson said. “I felt, like, oh, my heart dropped.”

Pentagon officials said they were unaware of the case until it was brought to their attention by ABC News. “Some faceless bureaucrat” was responsible for Johnson’s predicament, said Gen. Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, a three-star general and the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel.

“It’s absolutely unacceptable. It’s intolerable,” said Hagenbeck. “I mean, I’m incredulous when I hear those kinds of things. I just can’t believe that we allow that to happen. And we’re not going to let it happen.”

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“Guys I’ve met, talking to people, they’d be better off financially for their families if they had died as opposed to coming back maimed,” said Staff Sgt. Ryan Kelly, who served as a civil affairs specialist for the Army while in Iraq.

On July 14, 2003, the Abilene, Texas, native had been on his way to a meeting about rebuilding schools in Iraq when his unarmored Humvee was blown up. A piece of shrapnel the size of a TV remote took his right leg off, below the knee, almost completely, Kelly said.

Kelly attests to receiving excellent medical care at Ward 57, the amputee section of Walter Reed, but said he quickly realized that the military had no real plan for the injured soldiers. Many had to borrow money or depend on charities just to have relatives visit at Walter Reed, Kelly said.

“It’s not what I expected to see when I got here,” he said. “These guys having to, you know, basically panhandle for money to afford things.”

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French journalists held hostage for four months in Iraq said their militant captors told them they wanted President Bush to win re-election.

In a four-page account of their ordeal, one of the reporters, Georges Malbrunot, also wrote that they saw several other hostages who were later decapitated. The journalists said their captors viewed foreign businessmen working in Iraq as their enemies.

One of the captors from the group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq said Bush’s re-election would boost their cause, Malbrunot wrote in Friday’s edition of Le Figaro, the French daily he works for.

“We want Bush because with him the American troops will stay in Iraq and that way we will be able to develop,” Malbrunot cited the captor as saying.

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When the Argentine economy collapsed in December 2001, doomsday predictions abounded. Unless it adopted orthodox economic policies and quickly cut a deal with its foreign creditors, hyperinflation would surely follow, the peso would become worthless, investment and foreign reserves would vanish and any prospect of growth would be strangled.

But three years after Argentina declared a record debt default of more than $100 billion, the largest in history, the apocalypse has not arrived. Instead, the economy has grown by 8 percent for two consecutive years, exports have zoomed, the currency is stable, investors are gradually returning and unemployment has eased from record highs – all without a debt settlement or the standard measures required by the International Monetary Fund for its approval.

Argentina’s recovery has been undeniable, and it has been achieved at least in part by ignoring and even defying economic and political orthodoxy. Rather than moving to immediately satisfy bondholders, private banks and the I.M.F., as other developing countries have done in less severe crises, the Peronist-led government chose to stimulate internal consumption first and told creditors to get in line with everyone else.

“This is a remarkable historical event, one that challenges 25 years of failed policies,” said Mark Weisbrot, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research group in Washington. “While other countries are just limping along, Argentina is experiencing very healthy growth with no sign that it is unsustainable, and they’ve done it without having to make any concessions to get foreign capital inflows.”

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“The return to these encouraging numbers has been helped a lot by a fiscal discipline that is almost unprecedented by Argentine standards,” said John Dodsworth, the senior I.M.F. representative here. “We’ve had a primary surplus which has increased steadily over these past few years at both the central and provincial levels, and that has been the main anchor on the economic side.”

But some of that record budget surplus has come from a pair of levies on exports and financial transactions that orthodox economists at the I.M.F. and elsewhere want to see repealed. About a third of government revenues are now raised by those taxes, which have surged.

“The I.M.F. wants these taxes to be eliminated, but on the other hand they also want Argentina to improve its offer to creditors and also pay back the fund so it can reduce its own exposure here,” said Alan Cibils, an Argentine economist associated with the independent Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Public Policy here. “In other words, they are saying, ‘You have to pay out more and take in less,’ which is a sure prescription for another crisis.”

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The US is contemplating incursions into Syrian territory in an attempt to kill or capture Iraqi Ba’athists who, it believes, are directing at least part of the attacks against US targets in Iraq, a senior administration official told The Jerusalem Post.

The official said that fresh sanctions are likely to be implemented, but added that the US needs to be more “aggressive” after Tuesday’s deadly attack on a US base in Mosul. The comment suggested that the US believes the attack on the mess tent, in which 22 people were killed, may have been coordinated from inside Syrian territory.

A view from a helicopter of the damage caused by a tsunami in Phuket

People walk through debris of their houses destroyed in tidal waves on the coastal areas in Colombo, Sri Lanka

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An 8.5-magnitude earthquake that may rank among the 10 strongest in the past century struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra, unleashing tsunami waves that killed hundreds of people across India and Southeast Asia.

Six aftershocks measuring between 5.8 and 6.1 struck in the Bay of Bengal between Thailand and India, the U.S. Geological Survey reported on its Web site. Tsunami waves killed at least 214 people in Sri Lanka and left more than 10 people dead and 200 injured around the popular Thai resort of Phuket, Agence France- Presse said.

`’My mother was in the sea when the giant wave came and she escaped with only a minor bruises, thanks to help from other people,” said Francois Goret, a French resident of Phuket whose house is on Karon beach. ”On Karon, water came at least 50 meters inland. Chairs on the beach were washed away.”

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Huge tidal waves struck southern Thailand’s popular resort island of Phuket, sweeping at least four foreign tourists out to sea, sinking boats and forcing the evacuation of hotels, officials said on state radio.

“As of now there are four foreign tourists missing and we are conducting a search,” deputy Phuket governor Pongpao Ketthong said.

Phuket’s major beach town, Patong, was flooded and extensive damage had been reported from a series of two-metre (6.5-foot) high waves that slammed the tropical island’s west coast at about 8:30 am (0130 GMT), a rescue worker said.

“Many tourists were swept into the sea” but exact numbers were not known, the rescue worker, Mongkol Ketsunthorn, said on the radio.

You do business with the buzzwords you have, not the buzzwords you’d like to have..

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Plans to air a television game show in which an adopted woman picks out her father from a panel of impostors have thousands of people deluging Fox TV with letters and e-mails to get the show shelved.

The “Who’s Your Daddy?” show, in which a young woman given up for adoption as a child gets a $100,000 prize for picking out her biological father from a line-up, is the latest in America’s obsession with reality TV programming.

News of the show sparked both a grass-roots campaign among adoptive parents and protests from national adoption organizations who called the idea offensive, voyeuristic and exploitative. Six episodes have been filmed but so far only one has been scheduled for broadcast, on Jan. 3.

So that’s why I don’t bother with TV any more…