Colombian President Alvaro Uribe on Friday announced the creation of a demilitarized "meeting zone" and US$100 million in rewards to spur talks on a hostage-swap with Marxist FARC rebels.
The announcement reversed Uribe's opposition to setting up such a zone, one of the rebels' key demands, and comes after a news agency close to the rebels praised moves by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to win the hostages' release.
"The Catholic Church proposed to set up this meeting zone and the government has shown its willingness to accept it," Uribe said at a police ceremony in the capital, Bogota.
The "meeting zone" would spread over 150km2 and should be unpopulated or only sparsely populated, Uribe said. International observers will be present to oversee the humanitarian exchange, he said.
Uribe also announced that his government had set aside US$100 million to pay rewards to guerrillas who hand over their hostages.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's largest insurgent group, has been seeking to swap some 45 high-profile "political" hostages they are holding for 500 of their imprisoned comrades.
The hostages include French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, captured in February 2002, and three US contractors captured one year later when their plane was shot down as they carried out drug surveillance.
Sarkozy on Wednesday directly called on insurgent leader Manuel Marulanda to release Betancourt and the other hostages.
Betancourt, seized when she was campaigning for Colombia's presidency in 2002, was seen for the first time in years last week when videos and letters captured from the rebels were released to the press.
The video, dating from October, showed Betancourt looking thin and dispirited. Friends and family however hailed the proof that she was still alive, and the video helped revitalize the campaign to win her freedom.
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez had initially mediated in the efforts to achieve a prisoner swap, but Uribe angrily dropped him from that role last month, saying Chavez ignored his demand not to speak directly with Colombian generals about the hostages.
Piedad Cordoba, an opposition Colombian senator who helped facilitate Chavez's original mediating role, said on Friday that the Venezuelan president was willing to forget the past if he could help.
Chavez told her "that if in any moment his presence was required by president Uribe, to help with the humanitarian exchange, he would forget the things that have happened and would be ready to contribute," Cordoba told reporters.
Betancourt's mother Yolanda Pulecio said that Uribe's announcement was "positive," especially because it would be the FARC that would choose the site.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home