July 21 2000

Falun Gong followers pressed their protest campaign against China's year-old
ban on the sect Friday, meditating and chanting slogans in Tiananmen Square
and drawing a swift, often rough response from police.
Amid throngs of school groups on summer holiday tours, one man stood in the
square shouting "Falun Gong is good." Police grabbed him and, when he
refused to climb into a van, they jerked his hair and shoved his body
inside.
In another police van packed with mostly middle-aged followers, a woman
shouted and officers closed the window blinds. From inside a slapping sound
could be heard. The curious crowd that had gathered outside winced at the
sound and turned their heads.

Two strong earthquakes rattled Tokyo on Friday, prompting an electric
utility to step up surveillance of a nuclear plant.
An earthquake measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale occurred at 3:39 a.m. (1839
GMT Thursday), followed by another measuring 5.5 at 2:16 p.m. (0516 GMT).
There were no reports of injuries or damage from either tremor, and neither
caused any tsunami tidal waves, Japan's Meteorological Agency said.
But Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc, the nation's largest power utility, said it
was investigating the cause of an increase in waste gas at a 1.1-gigawatt
nuclear power station following the early morning quake.
It said there was no radioactive leak, but it had stepped up surveillance of
the reactor while it determined the cause of the rise in waste gas.
The first tremor caused some train lines to halt operations, but most had
resumed regular services by mid-morning.

An earthquake measuring 5.9 on the open-ended Richter scale rocked central
Mexico early on Friday, but national emergency services said no one had been
injured and no serious damage had been reported.
"We confirm there's been no effect," a spokesman for the federal Civil
Protection said.
The earthquake, which struck at 1:14 a.m. (2:14 a.m. EDT/0614 GMT), measured
5.9 magnitude and its epicenter was on the border of the central-southern
states of Puebla and Guerrero about 100 miles (160 km) south of the capital,
said an official with the Seismological Service of Mexico City's National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
The epicenter was in a remote and sparsely populated area.
Officials said that no reports of casualties or damages had been received,
but government news agency Notimex, citing local Civil Protection officials,
said the roof and wall of a house in the town of Iguala, Guerrero state, had
fallen in.

Authorities in Sudan's eastern Kassala state have ordered a general
mobilization to confront an expected Eritrean offensive, a newspaper
reported on Thursday.
Eritrea said the move was groundless and there was no change in military
activity along the border.  "There has been an increase in the level of
Eritrean military buildup on the strip bordering Kassala state, stretching
for 380 km (240 miles)," the state-owned newspaper al-Anbaa said.
It accused Eritrea of planning to attack because it believed Sudan helped
Ethiopia in its two-year border war with Eritrea which was halted by a
cease-fire accord in June. Tens of thousands of Eritreans fled to Sudan
during the fighting.

In their first concerted demonstration against Zimbabwe's 5-month-old land
occupation, white farmers in a key cotton- and food-producing area shut down
operations Tuesday to protest the police's failure to curb a fresh wave of
violence and death threats by ruling party militants.
Silence fell over usually bustling fields in Glendale as thousands of cotton
pickers and farmhands stopped work. Irrigation sprays over lush wheat crops
were shut off. The only work that continued was the milking of dairy cows,
which could become sick if unattended to.
"We are making this a passive protest to try and get police to react and
restore law and order," said Dave Jenkins, a spokesman for 60 farmers in
this district,80 kilometers (50 miles) north of the capital, Harare.
Ruling party militants began occupying white-owned farms in February in what
President Robert Mugabe described as a justified demonstration against the
unfair distribution of land in a country where a few thousand whites own
one-third of the fertile farmland.
Mugabe has ordered police not to intervene to stop the occupations.

July 22th

Clashes between Marxist rebels and Colombia's main right-wing paramilitary
force have killed up to 100 people this week in two remote areas of the
country's jagged Andes mountains, authorities said on Friday.
The fighting, confirmed by paramilitary warlord Carlos Castano and among the
bloodiest yet this year, included a battle for control of a region in
northern Bolivar Province long known as a stronghold of the Cuban-inspired
National Liberation Army (ELN).
"The idea is to force them out of the only sanctuary they have left,"
Castano told local television.
He was referring to what military sources have described as intense combat
since Wednesday around the San Lucas mountain range, where commanders of the
ELN, Colombia's second-largest guerrilla army, are thought to have their
main base camp.
Col. Jaime Martinez, a regional National Police chief, told reporters that
as many as 60 guerrillas and 15 members of Castano's outlawed United
Self-Defense Forces (AUC), an umbrella organization of ultra-right militias,
were thought to have been killed in the fighting.
But he said the death toll was unofficial and based only on accounts from
peasants fleeing the area.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe met with ruling party leaders for a
second day Saturday to analyze their biggest losses in June parliamentary
elections, officials said.
Mugabe said Friday the election results were a "shock and a punishment" for
his party's failure to pull together and revitalize support, the
state-controlled Herald newspaper reported Saturday.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change won 57 of the 120 elected
parliamentary seats in June 24-25 polls. A small opposition group captured
one seat.
Mugabe, who appoints 30 members to the 150-seat legislature, controlled all
but three seats in the outgoing parliament.
The opposition the largest contingent in the nation's history _ poses the
biggest challenge to Mugabe, who has ruled virtually unchallenged since he
led the former British colony of Rhodesia to independence as in 1980.
Calling for "self renewal" in the party, Mugabe said that many of the
party's structures were disorganized and did not recognize growing
discontent in urban areas where the opposition made sweeping gains.
"This amounted to a major political disaster that came our way as a party,"
he told party officials, The Herald quoted Mugabe as saying. "We went into
the elections riven by factions and bereft of meaningful structures, hence
our slender victory."
Mugabe repeated his frequent claim that the opposition was advantaged by
financial and diplomatic backing from Britain, the Nordic countries, the
United States and whites opposed to the government's program to seize
white-owned land for landless blacks.

The leader of the militant Islamic group Hamas urged Palestinians on
Thursday to reject any peace deal with Israel to emerge from a marathon
Middle East peace summit.
"It is not peace. It is surrender imposed by America and Israel. Our people
will not accept it," spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin told thousands at
a mass wedding the group helped organise for 130 couples in the
Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip.
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak
began the 10th day of a U.S.-brokered summit on Thursday to try to resolve
the most sensitive issues of the 52-year-old conflict.

Sunday 23th July

Algerian newspapers on Sunday reported another string of killings, which
left 18 people dead in the north African nation where attacks on civilians
and the army are carried out almost daily.
The new reports bring to 31 the number of people reported killed
Despite a peace drive by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who came to office
in April 1999, violence continues, claiming the lives of soldiers, civilians
and Islamic insurgents.
About 100,000 people have died since 1992, when the military-backed
authorities canceled elections that a now-banned Islamic party was set to
win, triggering an Islamic insurgency.
Some Islamic militants have rejected a partial amnesty offered by Bouteflika
to insurgents who were not guilty of rape, murder and bombings and who
handed in their weapons. The army has been cracking down on those militants
holding out in the country's mountainous regions.
The daily Liberte newspaper said Sunday that three soldiers were killed and
seven injured in an ambush near Azzaba, some 350 kilometers (217 miles) east
of the capital Algiers. The paper said the attack, on Friday, was carried
out by the Armed Islamic Group, a radical movement which refused the partial
amnesty.

Russian airstrikes have flushed bands of Chechen rebels from southern
mountain refuges into the flatlands held by Russian troops, the military
command said Sunday.
More than 1,500 independence fighters, broken up into small bands of 15-20
guerrillas, were reported to be in the lowland areas north of the mountains,
a spokesman for the command's press center said.
Russian estimates of rebel numbers have varied, and there is no way to
confirm them.
The spokesman said Russian Su-25 attack jets had flown 14 missions over the
past 24 hours and helicopter gunships flew more than 30 missions, attacking
suspected rebel bases in the Argun and Vedeno gorges, key rebel refuges and
supply routes in the southern mountains.

July 24th

More than 350,000 people in northern Burundi have been hit by a prolonged
drought that has ravaged most of east Africa, the United Nations said
Monday.
Already suffering the effects of a seven-year civil war, the people of
northern Burundi are now facing hunger after four years of poor harvests.
Around the town of Busoni, around 130 miles north of the capital in Kirundo
province, crowds of children with clear signs of malnutrition walk through
dried-up sorghum fields that haven't received a drop of rain for three
months.

Three Russian soldiers were killed and 17 wounded Monday in a bold, daylight
ambush on a military convoy by Chechen rebels fighting to repel Russia's
aggressive attempt to stamp out their dogged insurgency.
A mine exploded beneath one truck in a three-vehicle convoy in the Chechen
capital, Grozny, according to the office of the Kremlin's Chechnya
spokesman, Sergei Yastrzhembsky. The rebels then attacked the soldiers with
automatic weapons and grenade launchers.
Rebel spokesman Mumadi Saidayev disputed the official Russian casualty
count, saying that 18 Russians died.

July 25th

Another oil pipeline fire has erupted in southeastern Nigeria, killing an
undetermined number of people in an area where similar blazes recently
killed hundreds, a state governor said.
The fire, near the village of Sapele and the oil port of Warri, came a week
after another pipeline blast in the region left dozens of fuel scavengers
dead and two weeks after 200 people were killed in yet another inferno.

Businesses and stores in a provincial town shut down Tuesday and at least
230 white farmers stopped work in the biggest action so far to protest a
breakdown in law and order, farm union officials said.
As the stoppage took hold in and around the town of Karoi, 200 kilometers
(125 miles) northwest of Harare, the Commercial Farmers Union said about 50
ruling party militants and veterans of the bush war that ended white rule in
1980 assaulted local farmer David Brand.
Brand was hospitalized with extensive injuries, including an apparent broken
jaw, after being beaten and kicked by the militants. Neighbors evacuated his
wife and baby and an elderly couple from a nearby farm cottage, said Chris
Shepherd, a union spokesman.

Rebels killed 50 civilians in eastern Burundi at the weekend, the government
news agency reported on Tuesday.
"At least 50 persons were massacred by the rebels last Saturday on the hills
at Nyamuyuga and Gikwiye in Butaganzwa in the province of Kuyigi in the east
of Burundi," the Burundi News Agency said, quoting local administration
officials.
It said the insurgents burnt and looted dozens of houses in the area, near
the border with Tanzania.
Intense fighting was earlier reported around the Burundi capital Bujumbura
on Tuesday as government troops clashed with rebels just 10 km (six miles)
from the town.
Burundi's main rebel group, the CNDD-FDD, said on Tuesday it rejected the
latest international peace plan to end a conflict that has killed more than
200,000 people since 1993.

The militant Islamic group Hamas called on Palestinian President Yasser
Arafat on Tuesday to return to the armed struggle against Israel after the
Camp David peace summit ended without an agreement.
"The solution now is that Mr Arafat and the negotiators declare the failure
and futility of the entire peace process and return to the path of
resistance and jihad (holy struggle)," senior Hamas official Abdel-Aziz
al-Rantissi said.
Hamas opposes the 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the
Palestinians and all subsequent agreements. It has tried to derail
peacemaking with a spate of bomb attacks that killed scores of Israelis.

July 26th

  Battles among heavily armed herders over cattle have left 95 people dead
in a remote corner of northeastern Uganda, the army said on Wednesday.
Army spokesman Major Phinehas Katirima said warriors from two rival groups
within the Karimojong tribe, the Jie and the Dodoth, fought over their
precious cattle during the weekend.
An army captain in the region told the state-owned New Vision newspaper that
rotting bodies littered the battlefield after the fighting.

U.N. Middle East envoy Terje Roed-Larsen hopes all Israeli violations of the
Lebanese border will be rectified shortly and that U.N. and Lebanese troops
will be able to deploy late Wednesday night or on Thursday, U.N. spokesman
Fred Eckhard said Wednesday.
He said Roed-Larsen, accompanied by the deputy commander of the U.N. Interim
Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), conducted a new air and ground inspection on
Wednesday of the line of withdrawal behind which Israeli troops were to have
pulled back when they ended a 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon on May
24.
The United Nations several times confirmed that the Israeli withdrawal had
been completed, but this was followed each time by complaints of new border
violations.
The most recent complaints, on Tuesday, delayed the scheduled deployment on
Wednesday of U.N. and Lebanese troops up to the Israeli border.

July 27th

Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change said Thursday it would
contest results in up to 40 of the 62 seats won by President Robert Mugabe's
ruling party in last month's election.
The MDC won 57 of the 120 parliamentary seats contested in the toughest
election that Mugabe's ZANU-PF party has fought since assuming power at
independence from Britain 20 years ago.
The final seat went to a small opposition party.
The MDC says it could have easily won the poll if ZANU-PF supporters and
independence war veterans had not waged a violent campaign that had claimed
31 lives before the June 24-25 elections.
"By (Wednesday) we had filed papers contesting the results in 37
constituencies, and our lawyers are looking at a couple of more cases. We
could end up with more than 40 appeals in the High Court," MDC spokesman
Learnmore Jongwe said.
Thursday was the last day to file election appeals.
"Our assessment is that we have a very strong case. Besides cases of
violence and intimidation, we have evidence of multiple voting and people
who are dead being recorded as having voted," said MDC legal secretary David
Coltart.
European Union election observers found evidence of widespread intimidation
of voters and the exclusion of others from electoral rolls. But they gave a
largely positive assessment of the way voting and counting were conducted.

  Eight people, including six separatist guerrillas, have been killed in
separate shootouts in India's restive Kashmir state since Wednesday night,
police said on Thursday.
They said Indian army soldiers shot dead three militants on Wednesday night
at Huzriyal, which lies near the border with Pakistan in the Valley's
Kupwara district some 87 km (54 miles) northwest of Srinagar, summer capital
of Jammu and Kashmir.
In another gunbattle, army soldiers shot dead two separatist militants near
Chak Nallah area on the Line of Control, which separates Indian and
Pakistani administered areas of Kashmir, police said.

Floods sweeping through Thailand's northern regions have aided the spread of
rat urine disease, which has killed at least 70 people this year, the
Ministry of Public Health said Thursday.
A ministry statement said 1,639 people were infected with leptospirosis,
which is transmitted by rat urine, during the first half of the year. The
number has increased because of recent heavy rainfalls and flooding.
The northeast provinces, the areas most inundated by flash floods, have the
highest infection rates, the statement release said.
Rats are rampant in many areas of rural Thailand. Patients with
leptospirosis develop high fever, headaches and muscle pains symptoms often
mistaken for the flu. If detected early, the illness is easily treated.
The disease killed 130 people nationwide last year, the highest number since
it was first identified in Thailand in 1985.

Police say an explosion in a crowded Dusseldorf train station Thursday that
seriously injured nine people was likely a fragmentation grenade or a
homemade bomb.
The blast sent shocked rail passengers running and screaming in panic after
it ripped through a pedestrian bridge leading to the main station in the
city center. The explosion occurred at 3:06 p.m., Dusseldorf Police
spokesman Lothar Sprick said.
A man and a pregnant woman in her 20s were in critical condition after the
blast, fire officials said. The woman miscarried and had lost a leg.
Most of the other victims five women and two men suffered head and stomach
injuries caused by shards of metal the blast sent flying through the air,
firefighters said.
Officials said several of the victims were non-Germans who had just come out
of a nearby German language class. They did not say if the victims were
visiting students or immigrants, and noted that it may have been a
coincidence that they were caught up in the blast.

July 29th

Zimbabwe's white farmers resolved Saturday to confront President Robert
Mugabe by joining a national strike next week against intimidation of
opposition supporters and the occupation of their farms.

Armed groups assassinated 17 people, including children and babies, in a
recent spree of violence, the Algerian media reported on Saturday.
In the industrial area of Tiaret, 350 kilometers (210 miles) west of the
capital Algiers, eight members of a nomadic clan including two babies, were
stabbed to death overnight Thursday, according to the daily El Watan
newspaper.
Le Matin newspaper reported that another three people were killed and two
girls aged 12 and 13 were kidnapped Wednesday by six armed Islamic militants
at El Hranfa, near Chlef, 210 kilometers (125 miles) west of Algiers. The
daily said the sister of one of the child victims was raped and seriously
injured but managed to survive.
Despite a peace drive by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the military
continues to battle Islamic insurgents who carry out daily attacks in the
North African nation.

Health authorities in El Salvador have declared an epidemic of dengue fever
in five of the nation's 14 provinces and put the rest of the tiny country on
red alert for the mosquito-borne disease.
The disease has killed six children under the age of 10 since January and
spread to 595 people, including 102 with the more severe hemorrhagic strain,
a Health Ministry spokesmen said on Saturday.
Health Minister Jose Lopez Beltran has warned that if it is not brought
under control, dengue may kill up to 25 people by year's end, the spokesmen
said.
The five provinces declared to have epidemic levels are San Salvador, La Paz
and La Libertad in the center of the country and Sonsonate and Ahuachapan in
the west.
Dengue fever, for which there is no vaccine, causes unbearable muscle and
joint pains, high fevers and severe headaches. Its most potent form,
hemorrhagic  dengue, it can cause internal bleeding and death.

July 30th

A white farmers group in Zimbabwe and the main opposition party have thrown
their support behind a three-day national strike beginning Wednesday to
protest violence by government supporters.
Since February, more than 1,600 white-owned farms have been occupied by
ruling party-backed militants in this southern African nation. Labor leaders
of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade
Unions called the strike to protest the government's lack of action against
violence on white-owned farms.
The Commercial Farmers Union that represents white farmers and the
opposition party Movement for Democratic Change said Saturday they would
join with labor in the protest.

Heavy rain in Niger has made more than 1,000 people homeless but raised
hopes of a good harvest in the usually arid West African nation, officials
said on Sunday.
The rains, unusually heavy for the June-to-September rainy season, had
caused hundreds of homes to collapse in the southern Dosso region to the
east of the capital Niamey, the officials added.
Elsewhere, in the Tera region west of the capital flood waters had swept
away a bridge, they said.
Drought often leaves Niger with a grain shortfall.

Government security forces struggled on Sunday to deploy reinforcements to a
mountain town where leftist rebels were attacking the local police station,
reportedly killing about two dozen officers.
The attack could be the bloodiest since the United States approved $1.3
billion in aid to battle leftist rebels and other armed groups who are
involved in narcotics production.

The NATO-led peacekeeping force said on Sunday it was stepping up security
along Kosovo's eastern boundary with Serbia to prevent an armed ethnic
Albanian group operating in the area.
"Increased violent activities in the Presevo Valley prompted KFOR to act,"
it said in a statement, referring to an area of southern Serbia near Kosovo
with a large ethnic Albanian population.

July 31st

The government of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe made a surprise
announcement on Monday that it planned to seize up to 3,000 more white-owned
properties by the end of the year.
The country's white farmers, already reeling from the occupation of more
than 1,600 farms and accompanying political violence in the country, said
they were "shocked" at the announcement and repeated demands for a meeting
with the president.
Mugabe's government has already said it would seize about 800 farms this
year for distribution to landless black Zimbabweans without compensation for
the farmers.

Uniformed men killed 53 men, women and children in a village in the central
African nation of Burundi when they refused to go to a government
regroupment camp, an Italian-based missionary news service said Monday.
The MISNA news service cited unidentified "humanitarian contacts" as its
sources on the alleged July 22 massacre of civilians at Butaganzwa in
southern Burundi.
The uniformed men used firearms and knives to kill the villagers, MISNA
said.
The MISNA report said the burial site of the victims had been identified,
and gave its name, Nyamyiaga.
Burundi's army denied the massacre claim, saying the victims had been caught
in cross-fire between soldiers and rebels, according to MISNA.

July 32 rd

A government minister said Tuesday that the Zimbabwe army will be called in
to help move 500,000 landless black families onto lands confiscated from
white land owners.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe's main labor movement on Tuesday reduced a proposed
three-day strike to a one-day action on Wednesday, saying it would act as a
warning shot against President Robert Mugabe's government.
The strike has been backed by labor, some businesses, farmers and the new
opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), making it the most broadly
based challenge to Mugabe's authority since the former Rhodesia won
independence from Britain in 1980.

At least 13 policemen and four civilians were killed in a bombing attack by
leftist guerrillas that reduced several buildings in this mountain town to
rubble, police said.
Twelve other officers were missing after the assault on Arboleda, which
witnesses said began on Saturday and was carried out by hundreds of heavily
armed rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), said Gen.
Duran Quintanilla, a spokesman for Colombia's national police.

Aug 2rd

Shops and factories were closed and streets deserted in Zimbabwe's capital
Harare on Wednesday as workers began a general strike to demand an end to
political violence and the occupation of white-owned farms.
Farmers, industrial workers, businesses and the political opposition backed
the one-day stoppage called by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU),
making it the most broadly based challenge yet to President Robert Mugabe's
20-year rule.
Groups of police armed with automatic rifles patrolled some bus stations and
stood on street corners in Harare, but there was no sign of a major police
or military intervention.

Royal Dutch/Shell said on Wednesday it had opened talks with communities in
southern Nigeria to free 165 oil workers held hostage by local militants on
two of its rigs in the Niger Delta.
A Shell spokesman told Reuters in Lagos that the captives, including 14
expatriates, were unharmed after spending two nights on two separate
drilling rigs northwest of the oil city of Port Harcourt.

The Congolese government and its allies have launched a new wave of attacks
against rebels and their Rwandan backers all along their vast frontline,
Rwandan officials said on Wednesday.
The news comes on the second anniversary of the start of the civil war in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo and underlines that a peace accord
signed last year has all but collapsed.

Mudslides triggered by five days of torrential rains in Brazil's northeast
have killed at least 47 people and forced 120,000 to abandon their homes in
the region's worst flooding in 25 years, officials said on Wednesday.
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso flew on an impromptu visit to the
poverty-stricken northeastern states of Pernambuco and Alagoas to assess
damage and oversee rescue efforts as frightened residents braced for more
rain.
"We're in a truly critical state," said Liara Nogueira, a spokeswoman for
the Alagoas state government.

Aug 3rd

Authorities in Xinjiang in north-west China are preparing to try and put out
a massive underground coal fire that has been burning there for more than 20
years.
For decades, the blaze has been pumping sulphurous gas into the air causing
serious pollution in and around the city of Urumqi.
Until now such fires have been considered all but impossible to extinguish.
But firefighters in Xinjiang using newly-developed techniques say they are
confident of success, even if it will take them several more years to
achieve.

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe thumbed his nose at world opinion on
Thursday, vowing to extend the seizure of white farms and telling donors to
keep their money.
Reverting to a hard line after having seemed on Wednesday to be ready to
compromise, Mugabe told the black Zimbabwe Farmers' Union he would not bow
to international pressure to end the occupation of nearly 1,000 white-owned
farms by veterans of the 1970s liberation war in the former Rhodesia.
"We are now in the process of settling people and have identified the
slightly more than 3,000 farms we shall gazette and acquire. The war vets
will stay on all the farms until we resettle them," he said.
Mugabe's government announced on Monday it would add 2,237 farms to the list
of 804 it planned to take without compensation and give to blacks.

India opened offensives on two fronts in Kashmir on Thursday, launching a
major military attack around Jammu while beginning peace talks with a
powerful Islamic group in Srinagar.
The twin moves follow the massacres of more than 100 people, many of them
Hindu pilgrims, over two days in the region.
No group claimed responsibility for the killings. Indian officials, however,
said Muslim insurgents fighting for an independent Kashmir committed the
attacks. An umbrella organization for several Muslim militant groups denied
any responsibility.
Leaders of the Hizbul Mujahedeen, one of the largest and best armed of the
Islamic groups fighting for Kashmiri independence, declared a
cease-fire on July 24 but threatened to resume fighting if the Indian
government did not move quickly to begin joint talks with Pakistan over the
disputed Himalayan region.

An agreement between Shell Oil and the armed group holding about 165 workers
hostage aboard two oil rigs in Nigeria's Bayelsa State mangrove swamps is to
result in the hostages being released Thursday, officials say.
All the hostages are reported to be in good condition. They have been held
since Monday.
The workers employees of two service contractors and not Shell itself were
taken hostage Monday by ethnic Ijaw militants demanding jobs for local
youths.
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