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KLMNO THE WORLD


Few details about raid on Sahara terrorists


MAURITANIAN FORCES POUNCE


France won’t comment on reports of rescue bid


by Edward Cody


paris — Mauritanian comman- dos backed by the French military carried out the raid in the dead of night, guns blazing as they pounced on a small terrorist campsite in a desolate stretch of the Sahara Desert. The troops killed six members


of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Ma- ghreb, Osama bin Laden’s loosely organized North African affiliate, but four militants escaped into the surrounding wastelands, Mauritanian Interior Minister Mohamed Ould Boilil said Friday. Details of the attack, mounted


early Thursday near the border of Mali and Mauritania, were tightly held by the governments con- cerned. But as reports filtered out, it seemed another inconclusive chapter in the little-noticed strug- gle by several North African na- tions to snuff out a tiny al-Qae- da-style movement hiding in the Sahara far from the headline- making events of Af- ghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. The


Hostage appealed to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.


French Defense Ministry said Fri- day that the Mauritanian military carried out the raid “with tech- nical and logistical support” from France, without further defining the support. In Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, Ould Boilil said the raid was designed to pre- vent a planned attack on a mili- tary base in Mauritania. French officials declined to comment on reports that the commandos and the French mili- tary had engaged in a joint opera- tion to free a French hostage, Mi- chel Germaneau, a retired engi- neer who was kidnapped April 22 in neighboring Niger. The terror- ist group threatened last week to execute Germaneau if several of its imprisoned members were not re-


“From the beginning, we have been fully


mobilized to get our fellow citizen liberated.”


— Bernard Valero, French Foreign Ministry spokesman


leased by Monday. In a video distributed by the group in May, Germaneau com- plained of poor health and asked French President Nicolas Sarkozy to find a solution to his abduc- tion. Six weeks later, the group published the execution threat. The Web site of El País, a Ma- drid newspaper, quoted diplo- matic sources as reporting that French special forces were direct- ly involved in the raid. El País said that the unspoken goal was to lib- erate Germaneau but that he was not at the campsite, contrary to electronic intelligence supplied by the United States. Bernard Val- ero, a French Foreign Ministry spokesman, declined to confirm or deny the El País report. “From the beginning, we have been fully mobilized to get our fellow citizen liberated,” he said. Operating in small groups be-


lieved to total no more than 500 combatants, al-Qaeda in the Is- lamic Maghreb has remained largely in the isolated desert re- gion where Mali, Mauritania, Ni- ger and Algeria come together. But terrorism specialists said some of its units have raised large amounts of money through ran- som and duties imposed on ciga- rette and drug smugglers passing through the remote desert. codyej@washpost.com


CANADA


Capt. Brian Bews parachutes to safety as his Canadian fighter jet plummets to the ground during a practice flight before a weekend air show scheduled in Lethbridge, Alberta.


KOSOVO


Central bank chief held in graft probe Kosovo’s central bank governor,


Hashim Rexhepi, was arrested Friday after his house and office were searched as part of Euro- pean Union investigations into corruption in the new Balkan state. Rexhepi is suspected of abuse


of office, bribe-taking, tax evasion and money laundering, said the E.U.-led police and justice mission in Kosovo.


Despite misgivings about the


government’s fiscal responsibility, the International Monetary Fund on Wednesday approved a financ- ing agreement for Kosovo worth $140 million over the next 18 months. Kosovo joined the IMF a little more than a year ago. Kosovo remains at least one vote short of acceptance into the European Bank for Reconstruc- tion and Development, another institution that could help unlock commercial lending and foreign


investment. In a landmark ruling Thursday,


the International Court of Justice said Kosovo’s secession from Ser- bia in 2008 was legal. —Financial Times


IRAN


Russia said to back U.S. ‘propaganda’


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday accused Russia’s president of turning against Tehran and joining the United States in spreading lies about its nuclear program. Ahmadinejad said President


Dmitry Medvedev took part in a U.S.-directed “propaganda dra- ma” when Medvedev remarked last week that Iran was getting closer to being able to develop nu- clear weapons. The Iranian president has had harsh words for Moscow since it became apparent that Russia would support new U.N. sanc- tions against Iran for its refusal to stop parts of its nuclear program. In the past, Iran depended on


Russia and China to block tough U.N. penalties.


—Associated Press VENEZUELA


Army cites readiness for Colombian attack Aday after Venezuela cut diplo-


matic ties, the army warned neighboring Colombia on Friday that it is ready to repel any at- tacks. President Hugo Chávez severed


relations over Colombia’s allega- tions that Venezuela is harboring leftist Colombian guerrillas. The move ratcheted up tensions be- tween Venezuela, a major suppli- er of oil to the United States, and Colombia, an important U.S. ally in the region. Venezuelan leaders heaped in-


vective on outgoing Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, calling him a “warmonger,” but Ven- ezuelan Vice President Elias Jaua said, “The situation on the fron- tier is normal.”


—Reuters


Italian church criticizes actively gay priests: The Catholic Church in Italy urged gay priests who are leading a double life to come out of the closet and leave the priest- hood. The Diocese of Rome issued a strongly worded statement after the conservative Panorama news- weekly said in a cover story and accompanying video that it had interviewed three gay priests in Rome and had accompanied them to gay clubs and bars and to sexual encounters with strangers.


No damage in Philippines after powerful quake: An undersea earthquake hit the southern Phil- ippines on Saturday morning, but it was too deep to cause any dam- age, officials said. The quake hit the Moro Gulf off Mindanao Is- land, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The USGS reported a prelim- inary magnitude of 7.4, but the Philippine Institute of Volcanol- ogy and Seismology later report- ed a magnitude of 6.9.


Scottish official to skip U.S. Lock- erbie hearing: The Scottish offi- cial who authorized the release of


the Lockerbie bomber last year said he will not appear at a U.S. Senate hearing on the case be- cause he has no new information to offer. Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill has been invited to ad- dress the Foreign Relations Com- mittee, which is investigating whether oil giant BP lobbied Scot- land to release Libyan Abdel Bas- set Ali al-Megrahi to facilitate an oil exploration deal with Libya.


Floods put pressure on China’s Three Gorges Dam: Record-high water levels at China’s Three Gorges Dam have called into question Beijing’s assertion that the project could withstand a 10,000-year flood. On Friday, the water level reached 522 feet, 52 feet short of the reservoir’s maxi- mum capacity.


Bodies found dumped in north- ern Mexico: The remains of 18 people have been found near Monterrey, in Nuevo Leon state, at what authorities suspect is a site that drug gangs use to dump bodies.


—From news services IAN MARTENS/ASSOCIATED PRESS


In Vietnam, the test of their young lives High demand and few colleges to meet it have turned admission exam season into a bottleneck


by Chico Harlan


ho chi minh city, vietnam — To take the most important test of her life, Le Thi Hoai Thu- ong, 18, traveled 38 hours by bus with her father, a rice and corn farmer who doesn’t want his daughter to become a rice and corn farmer. To fund the journey, the family sold a cow for $730. During the ride, with the air conditioning broken, Thuong’s father fanned her with a rolled-up newspaper. When they arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, Thuong saw for the first time the place where she hoped to go to college. She also got a glimpse of the ob- stacles facing the growing num- ber of Vietnamese students with aspirations like hers. This month, 1.9million high school seniors in Vietnam took a college admission test. Reflecting the country’s rapid moderniza- tion — the government seeks to reach worldwide averages by 2020 — a generation of teenagers now views college education as a fundamental requirement. The problem is, the college education system hasn’t grown, or im- proved, at a rate commensurate with demand. Vietnam, with 89 million people, has fewer than 400 colleges and universities. The United States, with 310 million people, has more than 4,400. Even below-average schools in


Vietnam have Ivy League-like ac- ceptance rates. Although Vietnam has transformed since the war, re- ducing its deep poverty with a booming export economy, a po- tential roadblock looms for efforts to develop skilled labor, cater to foreign investors and keep pace with the region. Vietnam’s pro- portion of college students is half that of Thailand and a third that of South Korea. According to Viet- nam’s leaders and development organizations, the country faces a choice: Either the education sys- tem improves, or the improve- ment here stalls. A 2009 government report on


None of the mothers had told their children about the news. “I’m not nervous,” Thuong said.


CHICO HARLAN/THE WASHINGTON POST


A Vietnamese teenager sneaks in a few more minutes of study time before taking the college admission test in Ho Chi Minh City.


higher education bemoaned a sys- tem that “fails to keep pace with the socioeconomic development of the country.” According to the World Bank, which last month ap- proved a $456.5 million loan aimed at improving Vietnam’s higher education system, the per- centage of professors with doctor- ates has declined in the past dec- ade. Universities have a 30-to-1 ra- tio of students to faculty, high by international standards. Within the past few years, the push for college acceptance has turned exam season in July into a bottleneck. Rural students such as Thuong, who’d never been more than 125 miles from home before the exam, flock to the big-city test- ing centers. Hotels offer dis- counts. The nationwide train sys-


tem reduces fares by 10 percent.


Academic steppingstone Last week, Thuong arrived at the District 9 testing center with 700 others for back-to-back 180- minute tests. She viewed the mo- ment as pivotal — for her and maybe, she said, for her future children. Nervous parents waited out- side. One father held a pouch of emergency supplies — digestive pills, medicated oil and Band- Aids. An hour into the exam, test- center volunteers reported that a student had fainted. A few moth- ers discussed a newspaper report from Quang Ngai province about an 18-year-old who had killed himself because he feared he had performed poorly on the exam.


DIGEST


“Going to college will help me with a better job, a better career. . . . I’ve seen from my parents and grandparents, farming is really hard.” Going back as far as records and memory would allow, every previous generation in her family had worked on a farm. Nobody, her two older siblings included, had attended college. Le Van Do, her father, never thought a child of his would even try. Thuong, his youngest, was un- planned. When he found out about his wife’s pregnancy, Do worried about losing Communist Party membership on account of its strict two-child policy. He talked with his wife about abor- tion. They decided, instead, to re- port Thuong’s birth with a letter of self-recrimination. The party accepted the apology. But when Thuong was 7 or 8, her father told her about the reluctance that had attended her birth. He still thinks this shaped her determined per- sonality. “There’s so much pressure on a third child in Vietnam,” Do said. “She’s not so smart, but she’s hard- working.” Thuong’s siblings, older by 14 and 16 years, dropped out after ninth grade. Thuong’s father at- tended school until eighth grade, and at 18, he went to war. He fought for the Communist North against the United States and its South Vietnamese allies, even- tually joining a special operations team.


With his battalion, he arrived for the first time in Ho Chi Minh City — then Saigon — in 1975, about an hour after its capture by the North Vietnamese army. The next time he visited the city was this month, when he checked into a dorm room with his daughter for a three-day stay, paying a dis- counted rate of $2.63. “I’m just thinking about how this country has moved forward,” Do said. “More motorbikes and many more people and more sky-


scrapers. When I was here in 1975, the tallest building was 17 stories.” Now, the tallest building is four times that high.


‘It’s important to push’ Several students taking the test


— Thuong included — hoped for acceptance into the Ho Chi Minh City Industry and Trade College, a de facto community college. Ac- ceptance rates vary based on in- tended major, but last year, the school accepted 7.1 percent of business administration candi- dates and 6.2 percent of its fi- nance and banking candidates. This year, Harvard accepted 6.9 percent of its applicants, the most selective rate in its history. About 70 percent of Vietnam- ese college applicants, according to government data, take cram classes. And many high school teachers offer night classes at their homes to students willing to pay. In Thuong’s senior year, she biked 45 minutes every day to school, attended classes, stayed two more hours — sometimes four — for cram sessions and then biked home. When last week’s test ended, Thuong said she thought she did well. She wouldn’t get re- sults until the end of the month, but if she failed, she said, she’d spend the next year working, earning money and studying to take the test again. “It’s important to push and see how far you can go,” she said. Minutes after the test, she met


her father outside the testing cen- ter. They planned to head to the bus terminal for the two-night trip back to Thanh Hoa province, near the north-central coast. Two bus tickets home cost $33.50. Do said that he’d be “a little sad” if his daughter left for college but that he’d also be proud. If Thuong gets into college, he said, he plans to take out a loan and raise several extra pigs.


“She will stop the tradition of being a farmer,” he said.


harlanc@washpost.com


Special correspondent Luan Nguyen contributed to this report.


SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010


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