[Max Lane spoke to Avelino Coelho, general secretary of the Socialist Party of Timor (PST) about East Timor's presidential election, the second round of which was held on May 9.]

Dili – Timor Leste President Xanana Gusmao expressed the gratitude of the nation s authorities and people Tuesday, for Cuba s medical and educational cooperation.

Political clashes and street fights between machete-wielding rival gangs in East Timor have left one person dead and injured more than 20 people less than a week after a presidential run-off, officials said on Wednesday.

Tony Iltis – The second round of East Timor's presidential elections, held on May 9, resulted in the victory of Prime Minister Jose Ramos Horta. Ramos Horta, running as an independent, had won 73% of the vote with 90% of ballots counted. He won a majority in 10 out of 13 districts.

Fugitive army rebel Alfredo Reinado says he is ready to give himself up to East Timor authorities after deciding he could get a fair trial.

Last August, Reinado and 50 other inmates escaped from a prison where he was being held on charges of involvement in a wave of violence that killed 37 people and drove 150,000 from their homes last year.

Dili – Incoming East Timor president Jose Ramos-Horta's chances of achieving major reform in the troubled tiny state hinge on the outcome of next month's parliamentary elections, according to analysts.

Really encouraging news from East Timor is hard to come by, but the election of Jose Ramos Horta as its new president should be widely welcomed, and not only by his own citizens, some 70 per cent of whom voted for him in the second round run-off, but in the region and the wider community of nations.

Peter Charlton – What did Prime Minister Gough Whitlam know about the deaths of the so-called Balibo Five in East Timor in October 1975?

This has been the question exercising the Glebe Coroner's Court in Sydney this week as the inquest into the death of one of the five, cameraman Brian Peters, resumed.

Lindsay Murdoch, Dili – Nobel laureate Jose Ramos Horta has secured a stunning victory in a run-off presidential election, official vote-counting shows. Poll commission spokeswoman Maria Sarmento said Mr Ramos Horta had won about 73 per cent of votes with almost 90 per cent counted.

Jakarta – Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda said Indonesia was hoping Timor Leste's new government will continue the policies of its predecessor, including that on the Indonesia-Timor Leste Joint Commission of Truth and Friendship to settle their common residual problems

Sebastian Berger, Dili – Her belly swollen with her seventh child, Fernanda Sarmento paced the corridors of Dili's National Hospital as she waited to give birth.

"It's good if I have a lot of children," said the 38-year-old, adding that she wanted another girl to add to her two existing daughters.

Hopes look dim – if not totally diminished – that victims of violence during the East Timor mayhem in 1999 will find the truth about the events before and after the referendum which saw the then Indonesian province vote for independence.

Former prime minister Gough Whitlam has always prided himself on his grasp of history. But on one subject, the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, and specifically the deaths of five Australian journalists at Balibo on October 16, 1975, his recall of detail has been elusive.

Janet Fife-Yeomans, Sydney – The former head of Australia's spy network has revealed he never had any doubt Indonesian forces deliberately killed five young Australian newsmen in a "cover-up".

Mario de Queiroz, Lisbon – In the late 1970s, diplomats at United Nations headquarters in New York got used to seeing a discreet young man plying the hallways and conference rooms, trying to drum up support for what seemed a lost cause in a tiny country that few had even heard about.

Paul Barber – Two apparently unrelated events that together raise important questions about the West's responsibility for conflicts in the world's poorest countries are being held in London today.

Jakarta – The surprising silent protest by East Timorese members of the joint Indonesia-Timor Leste commission at its recent hearing is expected to be the first and the last because such action could hamper commission activities.

Belinda Tasker, Paul Mulvey, Sydney – Gough Whitlam's defence minister admits he concealed secret details from the prime minister about the deaths of five Australian newsmen in East Timor in 1975.

P.P. McGuinness – The coronial inquiry into the 1975 deaths of the five journalists in Balibo, East Timor, is an interesting exercise in raking over old controversies – or should be. So far it seems to be yet another of the many politicised attacks on Indonesia which have characterised this issue from the start.

Hamish McDonald – The former Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, today denied having any advanced knowledge of the Indonesian attack in East Timor in which five Australian newsmen were killed in 1975.

Mr Whitlam also revealed he had twice warned the Channel Seven journalist, Greg Shackleton, not to go to East Timor.

Lindsay Murdoch, Dili – United Nations police and civilian staff are openly violating what the UN promised would be a zero-tolerance policy towards sexual abuse and misconduct in deeply religious East Timor.

Stephen Fitzpatrick, Dili – The huge white UN choppers, with their gruffly spoken Russian crews, have delivered hundreds of thousands of ballot papers and sealed boxes across the country; tiny pack ponies are standing by, ready to carry vital electoral materials across rocky streams in the most remote of locations.

Bhimanto Suwastoyo, Dili – Two radically different candidates are set to contest Wednesday's East Timor presidential election, with a globe-trotting polyglot pitted against a shy, former guerrilla for the post.

Dili – East Timor's ruling party Sunday accused foreign peacekeeping troops of a deliberate campaign to upset its chances of winning this week's presidential election.

The Fretilin party claimed several thousand Australian-led troops were intimidating its supporters and trying to disrupt its rallies during canvassing ahead of Wednesday's poll.

Dili – Pius Soares sits idly under a tree in a refugee camp with his friends. Like thousands of East Timorese waiting to return home after last year's deadly violence, he has time on his hands.

It should come as no surprise that Australian Prime Minister John Howard's presence in Dili on the day of Timor Leste's Independence on May 20, 2002 was also to sign the new Timor Sea Treaty (TST).

Timor Leste's government, on Independence Day, and its people never had the opportunity to fully debate and consider the implications of the TST.

Lindsay Murdoch, Same – East Timorese MP Leandro Isaac has a blunt message for Australian troops who hunted him in East Timor's rugged mountains for two months. "You are stupid," he said yesterday.

"You never bothered to find out about us... you don't know who we are or what we believe in."

East Timor's ruling party Fretilin has accused the favourite in next week's presidential elections, Jose Ramos Horta, of buying votes.

Campaigning for the second round of the poll is becoming increasingly acrimonious. And as SBS correspondent Brian Thomson reports, the Australian-led International Security Force is in Fretilin's sights.

Ahmad Pathoni, Jakarta – Charges that Indonesian troops committed gross rights violation during East Timor's 1999 vote for independence were "senseless and crazy", the country's military chief at the time told a truth commission on Saturday.

Karen Michelmore, Jakarta – The former head of Indonesia's armed forces has conceded that "one or two" of his men may have been involved in the bloodshed that swept East Timor in 1999.

Reporters Without Borders today hailed the resumption this week of an inquest into the murders of cameraman Brian Peters and four other journalists 32 years ago in East Timor, saying it hoped every aspect of their deaths would be clarified and insisting that it was not too late for those responsible to be punished.

New York – The Indonesian government should do everything in its power to compel former military commander and minister of information Yunus Yosfiah to testify in an Australian inquest into the 1975 deaths of five Australian television journalists, The Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Alvin Darlanika Soedarjo, Jakarta – An observer with the Asian Network for Free and Fair Elections (Anfrel), which monitored the East Timor independence vote in 1999, testified Wednesday that the referendum was "fair".

Havana – Cuban doctors serving in East Timor have already made more than one million patient consultations, reported Dr. Alberto Rignak Vaz, coordinator of Cuba's international medical brigade in East Timor. Dr. Rignak noted that the Cuban physicians have carried out 1,720 operations, have assisted some 8,100 women during childbirth and have rehabilitated nearly 6,300 patients.

Sydney – A former telephone operator has told an inquest she overheard details about the fatal shooting of five Australian-based newsmen in East Timor in 1975.

Vicky Burchill-Hunt told the inquest into the death of Brian Peters, one of the five men killed at Balibo, that she listened in to a phone call from Dili to a reporter in Melbourne 32 years ago.

Belinda Tasker, Sydney – The Balibo Five were shot by Indonesian military chiefs after trying to surrender, and had their blood smeared on a painting of an Australian flag, a coronial inquest has heard.

Hamish McDonald – They have been conspicuously absent so far, but two of Indonesia's generals yesterday spoke to the Sydney inquest into the deaths of five Australian-based newsmen at Balibo in 1975. Unfortunately, it was far from a live appearance.

Jakarta – A former East Timor police chief cried as he told a commission on Wednesday that he was powerless to prevent deadly violence from raging in the country during its 1999 vote for independence.

Dili – Foreign troops securing East Timor found a gun, other weapons and cash in a convoy of cars carrying ruling Fretilin party officials Wednesday, presidential candidate Jose Ramos-Horta claimed.

Aboeprijadi Santoso, Amsterdam – The horrendous crimes committed in East Timor in 1999 continue to haunt Indonesia.

Jill Jolliffe – The high level of instability afflicting East Timor since independence in May 2002 has its international partners wondering whether the new nation is suffering more than post-independence growing pains. Perhaps, they speculate, it is time to declare it a basket case.

Dili – East Timor interim premier Estanislau Da Silva has accused prime minister and presidential candidate Jose Ramos Horta of having shown contempt for the country's institutions when he unilaterally called off the hunt for renegade general Alfredo Reinado.

Dili – Timor Leste's President Xanana Gusmao was elected the chairman of a controversial new political party on Monday.

Gusmao was the sole candidate for the chairmanship of the new organisation, the National Congress of Reconstruction of Timor (CNRT), which has already drawn criticism from a rival party.

Mark Dodd – A damaging rift has opened between East Timor's two rival presidential candidates over the treatment of a group of army mutineers whose demands for military reform a year ago brought the country to the brink of civil war.

Jose Ramos-Horta has won the backing of a key powerbroker ahead of next month's presidential vote in East Timor by agreeing to call off a manhunt for a fugitive rebel soldier wanted by Australian troops, party officials have said.

Sandy George, Film writer – It has taken four years to work out how to turn the story of the Balibo Five, the TV newsmen killed in East Timor on October 16, 1975, into a feature film. But director Robert Connolly (The Bank, Three Dollars) is confident filming can begin.

Keiji Hirano, Tokyo – Human right groups in Japan and East Timor have launched a campaign to donate history teaching materials to the newly independent nation that focus on the struggles of women who were forced to provide sex to Japanese soldiers during World War II.

Ahmad Pathoni, Dili – Portuguese is one of the two official languages in East Timor, but you can hardly hear it spoken in the streets of the young nation.

The tiny country was a Portuguese colony for more than three centuries, but only an estimated 5 percent of its one million people now speak the European language.

Richard Baker – A former senior Australian Government negotiator has criticised a controversial new treaty between Australia and East Timor that fails to permanently establish a maritime boundary between the two countries.

Tito Belo, Dili – East Timor Prime Minister Jose Ramos-Horta met with a rebel representative on Thursday to discuss an end to a military operation against a fugitive army renegade.