TRIPOLI: Libyan interim government forces said on Monday they had raised the country’s new flag over Bani Walid, one of the last bastions of pro-Muammar Gaddafi loyalists, but it was not yet clear if the town had been completely captured.

Along with Gaddafi’s hometown Sirte, Bani Walid has been one of only two towns in Libya where there is still armed resistance to the rule of the National Transitional Council (NTC).

”We have reached the city centre (of Bani Walid) and have raised the flag,” Colonel Abdullah Naker, head of the Tripoli Revolutionist Council, told Reuters on Sunday.

Fighters taking part in the assault on Bani Walid also told Reuters they had entered the town which is nestled into rocky hills some 150 km south of Tripoli.

Bani Walid is an ancestral home to the Warfalla, Libya’s biggest and one of its most politically-influential tribes. They number about a million out of the country’s six million population and were traditional supporters of Gaddafi.

Bani Walid has been under siege for weeks, with hundreds of Gaddafi loyalists dug into its steep valleys and hills resisting advancing interim government forces.

As well as the military assault, NTC officials have been negotiating with tribal leaders inside Bani Walid for its surrender.

A group claiming to represent the people of the town issued an offer of a truce to Libya’s new government on Monday. In return for pledging loyalty to the NTC, the tribal groups said they would take over the town, but demanded in return the NTC should withdraw its forces from the area and lift the siege.

It was not immediately clear what the government response would be to the offer, or whether the town had already been completely captured by NTC forces.

Meanwhile in Sirte, where Gaddafi loyalists have been under siege for weeks, there was little or no sign of NTC forces making any progress on Monday.

NTC fighters maintained their bombardment of a small area where they have boxed in the remaining Gaddafi loyalist in the centre of Sirte. Libya’s new leaders say they will only begin the transition to democracy after they capture Sirte.

Some fighters on the ground have expressed irritation that their commanders had not ordered an advance.

A doctor for the medical aid charity Medecins Sans Frontieres in Sirte has estimated 10,000 people remain trapped in the city of 75,000 residents. Many are women and children, some are sick or injured.

The often chaotic struggle for Sirte has killed scores of people, left thousands homeless and laid waste to much of what was once a showpiece Mediterranean city where Gaddafi entertained foreign leaders. (UNI)

Melbourne: Australia will end the monopoly enjoyed by International English Language Testing System (IELTS) from Nov 5.

Other English language test providers have now been allowed to gain entry to the Australian international education market.

“It’s a positive step in the right direction,” says Jag Khairra, a Melbourne-based education and immigration consultant.

Once the IELTS monopoly ceases, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) case officers would start accepting results from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), Pearson’s PTE Academic test and the Cambridge English Advanced test.

Currently, the student visa applicants from the “high-risk” countries such as India and China are required to provide IELTS test score as evidence of English proficiency. IELTS, which is jointly owned by Australia’s IDP and British Council, is also used as a standard for all the work and skilled migration related visas. (IANS)

Mexico City: At least 89 people have been killed and some 350,000 affected as a week of devastating torrential rain continued in Central America.

Days of non-stop rains provoked a wave of mudslides in the region. Presidents of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have called a state of emergency, reported Xinhua.

El Salvador President Mauricio Funes put the death toll at 32, adding that more than 20,000 people had been evacuated to shelters.

Honduras President Porfirio Lobo appealed for “solidarity” among all Hondurans to extend a helping hand to those suffering.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom said: “We have decided to declare a state of public calamity for the entire country before the magnitude of the disaster happens.”

Latest figures showed the toll in Guatemala rose to 28 after five more bodies were retrieved from mudslides.

Meanwhile, according to the Universal paper, the toll in Mexico rose to nine. Three more deaths in Honduras took the death toll there to 13, while Nicaragua’s death toll remained unchanged at seven.

Official figures show at least 350,000 people have been affected across the region, including 132,700 in Mexico, 65,000 in El Salvador, 30,000 in Honduras, 12,000 in Nicaragua, 10,000 in Costa Rica and 800 in Panama.

According to weather forecasts, intense rain is expected to continue for at least a day across southern Mexico and Central America and could extend to as far as Cuba, Jamaica and nearby islands in the Caribbean. (IANS)