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NEW YORK: Leon `Lee' Falk, the creator of the comic strips Mandrake The Magician and The Phantom, has died at the age of 87. Falk, who lived in Manhattan, died on Saturday following congestive heart failure, said Ted Hannah, a spokesman for King Features Syndicate. Falk was a college student when he conceived Mandrake The Magician, about a hypnotist who used his powers to fight crime. The strip, which has been drawn by artist Fred Fredericks since 1965, is still syndicated in 125 newspapers. In 1936, Falk developed The Phantom, which follows the exploits of a costumed superhero.
NAIROBI: Rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have destroyed a Zimbabwean battalion, killing 80 soldiers, a regional military source said on Tuesday. The source said rebel forces also killed the battalion commander in Monday's fighting north of the town of Kabinda. Zimbabwean soldiers had attacked rebel forces around 60 km north of Kabinda, a key staging post on the route to the diamond city of Mbuji-Mayi, which rebels aretargeting. Congo rebels started last August a campaign to overthrow President Laurent Kabila. The rebels are supported militarily by Uganda and Rwanda while Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Chad have all deployed troops in support of Kabila.
PARIS: Western powers heaved a sigh of relief as Kosovo Albanians agreed to a peace deal aiming to end the violence in the province but the Serbs showed no sign of accepting the presence of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) troops in the region. Officials said they would give Belgrade few days to accept the plan or face NATO air strikes. But ``Serbia will never give up Kosovo voluntarily. It's only by force that can be taken. If NATO entered Serbia without invitation, it will be met as an aggressor, as an enemy,'' Ratko Markovic, leader of the Serbian delegation, said while accepting to the proposal of more autonomy to Kosovo.
JERUSALEM: Israel said on Tuesday it regarded as ``null and void'' a 1947 UN resolution that called for the internationalisation ofJerusalem. In remarks to foreign ambassadors in Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon said: ``Resolution 181 which speaks about Jerusalem not being part of Israel is null and void and... we have a very wide national consensus about this issue.'' The hawkish Sharon reaffirmed Israel's hold over all of the holy city against the backdrop of a diplomatic dispute with the European entity from Israel. ``It's very hard to imagine after all those years we again have to struggle for Jerusalem,'' Sharon said, recalling that he had fought for Jerusalem as a platoon commander in the 1948 Middle East war. ``The government led by Netanyahu will never agree that Jerusalem will be divided any more and Jerusalem will stay forever the capital of the Jewish people and the capital of the state of Israel,'' he said.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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