Friday, August 7, 1998
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W O R L D | Friday, August 7, 1998 |
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Iraq suspends work with
UNSCOM |
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Zardari’s acquittal
plea rejected |
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US House votes to curb
action on ABM treaty |
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Iraq suspends work with UNSCOM DUBAI, Aug 6 (UNI) — Iraq today appeared headed for a new crisis with the United Nations after its decision to stop cooperating with arms inspectors from the world body until they were freed from direct US influence. “Iraq fully suspends its cooperation with UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) in its current status, as well as its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),” an Iraqi statement said in Baghdad yesterday. The statement was issued by the Iraqi Revolution Command Council and the Iraq Command of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party after a meeting chaired by President Saddam Hussein. Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz sent letters to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the head of the UN Security Council informing them of Baghdad’s decision. UNSCOM is charged with the task of dismantling Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction after the 1991 Gulf war. The UN will not lift the crippling economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after its August 1990 invasion of Kuwait until UNSCOM certifies that its task has been accomplished. UNSCOM inspectors feel they lack the evidence to say that Iraq has fully complied with UN resolutions calling for the scrapping of its nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic missile systems. Iraq demanded that the Security Council should restructure UNSCOM with a new executive office which would equally represent all members of the council. It said the UNSCOM centre in New York should be transferred to Geneva or Vienna to keep the commission away from direct U.S. influence. Iraq said as an expression of goodwill and to avoid misinterpretation of its decision, it would allow the UN to continue monitoring of limited weapons through surveillance cameras provided its sovereignty was not violated. The statement also called for an immediate lifting of the sanctions. Iraq has for long complained that UNSCOM is dominated by US personnel and accused them of deliberately delaying inspection procedures in order to prolong sanctions. The statement accused American members of UNSCOM of fabricating pretexts and creating crises in order to maintain the blockade, or spying on Iraq and threatening its national security and sovereignty. Earlier Iraq stopped a team of UN weapons inspectors from carrying out searches for banned weapons in Baghdad. The move came a day after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein froze cooperation with UN inspectors in protest against the eight years of economic sanctions against his country. Government officials did not accompany the UN team today, the official told AP. Without them, UN teams are not able to conduct their searches. The team was not allowed to conduct discussions with Iraqi authorities on arms or visits to sites or searches past weapons, the official said. The Iraqi Government, however, allowed the monitoring of other sites already inspected to continue. About 460 sites in Iraq have been inspected and are being monitored. “Ongoing monitoring continues,” a UN spokeswoman, Ms Janet Sullivan, told AP. However, a spokesman of
Iraq’s national department of monitoring denied that
it was blocking the work of UN inspection teams, adds
AFP. “This information is baseless. There are
currently no UNSCOM or International Atomic Energy Agency
inspection teams in Iraq for us to prevent them from
carrying out their work,” the spokesman, quoted by
the official INA news agency, said. |
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Japan decries India, Pak N-tests TOKYO, Aug 6 (PTI) — Japan today deplored India and Pakistan’s nuclear tests and urged both countries to immediately stop nuclear tests and unconditionally conclude the comprehensive test-ban treaty (CTBT) as Hiroshima stood in silence for one minute to mark the 53rd anniversary of US bombing of the city. At the ceremony, Japanese Premier Keizo Obuchi said the tests were “extremely deplorable,” adding Japan would press “the two countries to stop the development of nuclear weapons and missiles.” To drive the point home, Indian and Pakistani ambassadors were shown around Hiroshima more as representatives of two countries that “dashed” the hopes of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki “Hibakushas,” survivors of the atom bombs. Indian Ambassador Siddharth Singh was given a conducted tour of a museum of the atom bomb atrocities. The museum, however, carefully excludes the scenes related to the cause of the war that led to the atom bombing or Japan’s invasion of Asia of the Japanese war-time barbarities in Asian countries. Prime Minister Obuchi flew to Hiroshima to deliver a message at the anti-nuke international peace rally in which he made sweeping demands on India and Pakistan. “Our government strongly urges the Indian and Pakistani governments to immediately stop nuclear tests and unconditionally conclude the comprehensive test-ban treaty, to stop the development of nuclear weapons and its delivery systems (missiles) and to unconditionally conclude the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.” Indian Ambassador Siddharth Singh and his Pakistani counterpart were specially invited to the rally to listen to these accusations. The Hiroshima statements as well as editorials were extremely soft and indirect on the established nuclear powers. The Mayor was also silent on the fact that the ambassadors of the five recognised nuclear powers declined his invitation to today’s Hiroshima peace events. The ambassadors, according to the report, said they would convey the Prime Minister’s message to their governments. The Pakistani Ambassador informed the Prime Minister that Islamabad was now willing to participate in the Geneva negotiations on fissile material production cut-off treaty. Ceremonies marking the anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima began with the offering of flowers at its peace park, followed by a moment of silent prayer at 8:15 am local time, the exact moment the bomb exploded above the city on August 6, 1945. WASHINGTON: Former President Jimmy Carter and a diverse group of former world leaders are calling for negotiations to reduce and eliminate all nuclear weapon stockpiles. Among those joining Mr
Carter were Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the
Soviet Union, former US senators Mark Hatfield and Alan
Cranston and Nobel Peace Prize winners Oscar Arias and
Joseph Rotblat. |
Zardari’s acquittal plea rejected LAHORE, Aug 6 (ANI) — A Pakistani court has tossed out an appeal by the husband of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to acquit him in a bribery case. The Accountability Bench of the Lahore High Court has dismissed an application by detained Senator Asif Zardari to acquit him of government charges that while his wife was in power during 1993-96, he took bribes to approve lucrative contracts in Pakistan Steel Mills. The court had on Tuesday reserved judgement on the application filed by Babar Awan, counsel of Mr Zardari. Mr Awan had contended that
his client was implicated in the bribery case with a mala
fide intention of victimising him and that, as alleged,
he had not received bribe from Mr Sajjad Hussain, former
chairman of Pakistan Steel Mills. |
US House votes to curb action on ABM treaty WASHINGTON, Aug 6 (Reuters) — The US House has voted to block the Clinton administration from participating in the consulting body with Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus on the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defence treaty. Republicans, who passed the amendment by 240-188 yesterday said it was needed to prevent the administration from changing the treaty without Senate ratification. But Democrats decried the amendment as an attempt to force the USA to break the agreement to control nuclear weapons. “This amendment says if you are going to revise the treaty, come to the Senate and see if what you are doing has any logic whatsoever,” Louisiana Republican Representative Bob Livingston said. Republicans have complained that the treaty could bar the USA from developing missile defence systems that they say are necessary because of the number of rogue nations with sophisticated weapon technologies. “This amendment does
not abrogate the ABM treaty, but it stops the
administration from imposing amendments to the ABM treaty
without the advice and consent of the Senate.”
Pennsylvania Republican representative Curt Weldon said. |
Sartaj Aziz to be Pak Foreign Minister ISLAMABAD, Aug 6 (ANI) — Pakistan’s Prime Minister Mohammad Nawaz Sharif has decided to appoint Mr Sartaj Aziz, Finance Minister, as Foreign Minister, a source told ANI yesterday. The notification for the appointment of Mr Sartaj Aziz as the Foreign Minister would be issued later in the night. The fate of the present Foreign Minister, Mr Gohar Ayub, has not yet been decided. Mr Gohar Ayub, the son of former President Ayub Khan, had requested Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif four months ago to change his portfolio since he was unable to spare time for his constituency. Mr Gohar Ayub could not be assigned a new portfolio because the regional situation changed following the nuclear tests. The current Deputy
Chairman of the Planning Commission, Dr Hafiz A. Pasha,
an economist, is being tipped as Adviser on Economic
Affairs to the Prime Minister. |
‘True lies’ galore on
Internet THIS month, media around the world picked up on the story that a teenage couple in the USA were preparing to lose their virginity live on the Internet. A special website had even been established to broadcast this moment of tendresse. Millions promptly pointed their browsers at www.myfirsttime. com to find a still photograph of a winsome couple named Mark and Diane, tastefully clothed, their faces obscured. It looked like being the hottest Internet event of all time. But within a day, the breathless media reported, there had been a hitch. The couple suddenly needed $ 75,000 to rent equipment necessary for the web broadcast. To recoup the costs, it emerged, web surfers would be charged $ 5 to tune in. Nevertheless, insisted the couple’s lawyer, they remained determined to share their special moment with the world. At this, alarm bells ought to have been ringing in every newsroom in the world. It was left to the St Louis Post Dispatch, which unlike much of the British press declined to take this story at face value, to reveal that none of this was as billed. Tellingly, too, web broadcasting facilities were to have been provided by a Seattle-based company named IEG. According to the Post Dispatch, after collecting possibly millions from hopeful voyeurs, Mark and Diane may have been planning, live on the Net, to announce they had changed their minds, and would not have intercourse after all. The whole thing was a stunt, and those who treat the Internet as a source of information should start sitting up and taking notice. Because it is not the only time we have been fooled. But strip away the hype and the Internet is a network in danger of imploding on its own conceit, with or without the 2000 bug. The cybernetic parish pump is ceaselessly pumping drivel into an ocean of sludge, much of it made in the USA. The Internet is a web of lies. Not everything on the Internet is false, of course—but separating the mendacious from the veracious is rapidly becoming impossible. There is no comprehensive indexing or cataloguing, nor even an agreed mechanism for introducing one. The difficulty in distinguishing between lies and truth on the Internet has provoked the launch of www.cnet.com, a website devoted to the computer industry, to build an online Internet lie detector test. The lie detector reveals the extent to which Internet-relayed information is often uncommonly difficult to distinguish from reality: Larry Walters soared three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair tethered to helium weather balloons (true). Patterns in the eye’s iris, analysed through the technique of iridology, provides accurate information about the health of the body (false). There is nothing wrong per se with fiction on the Internet. Much of it is weird and some rather wonderful.But the struggle to introduce a reality check to the Internet is unequal. Anyone with a modicum of technological knowledge can broadcast to perhaps 500 million people around the world. The problem is the sheer
quantity of information. The thousands of hits produced
by search engines offer an illusion of authority which is
utterly undeserved. Tools to sift out the good
information are crude at best. |
Taliban ‘harassing’ Afghani women WASHINGTON, Aug 6 (PTI) — The Taliban have inflicted widespread physical and psychological suffering on Afghani women, says a new report by a US-based doctors’ group. Released yesterday, the unprecedented study of 160 Afghani women by the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) says 71 per cent report a decline in their physical health in the past two years. The PHR says participants
also reported high levels of stress and depression, with
81 per cent saying that their mental condition had
declined in two years since the Taliban seized Kabul. |
NASA wonder plane WASHINGTON, Aug 6 (PTI) — The NASA has built a unique auto-driven, solar-powered aircraft that can fly to places where no pilot dare go and take better pictures than a satellite. The plane,
christened “Pathfinder”, is pilotless, has no
fuel tank, can fly at 71,000 feet above ground and stay
aloft indefinitely, according to a CBS-TV report. Zhivkov dead SOFIA, Aug 6 (AP) — Bulgaria’s former Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov has died in a hospital here at the age of 86, doctors said on Thursday. Zhivkov ruled Bulgaria
from 1954 until he was ousted in a bloodless coup by
fellow party members in 1989. Ex-Army officers plead not guilty DHAKA, Aug 6 (DPA) —
Former Bangladesh Army officers facing trial for the
assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman 23 years ago have
pleaded not guilty to murder, the state prosecutor’s
office said in Dhaka today. |
| Global monitor Activate UN observers: Pak Killer mum Former PM’s
leg NRI tragedy 6 killed in Nepal China floods |
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