Kirchner fires broadside at Britain over Falklands

Argentine President Cristina Kirchner has launched a fiery Twitter attack deriding Britain's claim to the Falkland Islands, saying even three-year-old children would know London has no case, AFP reports. After Argentina renewed its call for a negotiated solution at a UN meeting, Kirchner boasted that fellow Latin American nations "support our claims without reservations for historic, documented, geographic reasons and the most basic logic." "An English territory more than 12,000 kilometers away? The question wouldn't even stand in a kindergarten of three-year-olds," she wrote to her almost 1.8 million followers late Wednesday, noting the distance between Britain and the windswept South Atlantic archipelago. Her tweets followed a referendum held in the Falklands this month in which 99.8 percent of islanders voted in favor of remaining British. Argentina, which lost a brief war over the islands in 1982, has called the vote illegal. Argentina's call for negotiations over the islands, which it calls the Malvinas, were backed Tuesday by three different organizations of Latin American nations during talks between Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. "Full multilateralism and anti-colonialism. Very good," she said, writing the last three words in English. "See how I love speaking English?" "I regret not listening to my mother Ofelia when she told me to learn it. That's how things were back then, what can you do..." After the UN meeting, Britain's UN ambassador Mark Lyall Grant said it was "untenable" for Argentina to reject the referendum overwhelmingly in favor of British rule. "It is disappointing that Mr Timerman and his colleagues spent so little time talking about the Falkland islanders and the wishes of the Falkland islanders," he said.