• Lanka to show UN child-soldiers
• 50 hurt in B’desh clashes
  
  

UN envoy in Iran to defuse tension

DUBAI, Oct 4 (PTI) — A UN special envoy arrived in Iran today for three days of talks aimed at defusing mounting tension between Teheran and the Taliban over the killing of Iranian diplomats and alleged airspace violations.

Former Algerian Foreign Minister Lakhdar Brahimi was greeted at Teheran’s Mehrabad Airport by Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Asian Affairs, Mr Mohsen Aminzadeh.

Mr Brahimi told reporters that he opposed any military solution to the Afghan crisis. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan “believes there is no reason for a military conflict to start between Iran and the Taliban,” he said.

A UN spokesman said Mr Brahimi flew from Abu Dhabi where he had discussions with leaders of the United Arab Emirates, one of only three countries which recognise the Taliban as the legitimate government in Afghanistan.

His visit to the UAE coincided with that of a senior Taliban spokesman Wakil Ahmed but it was not clear whether they met.

The Taliban urged the UN and OIC to prevent a war with Iran, which had massed half of its 540,000-strong armed forces close to the border with Afghanistan.

Taliban, in a statement issued in Islamabad today, said its Foreign Minister Mulla Abdul Jalil, in a letter, to the UN chief has drawn the attention towards the alleged violation of Afghan air space by Iranian places thrice within a Span of 24 hours last Friday.

Mulla Jalil also issued a stern warning to Iran saying, if the Iranian armed forces “continues such provocative activities, the Afghan Islamic emirates will not be responsible for the dire consequences of its (Iran’s) provocative acts”.

The Talibans had alleged that 15 Iranian war planes and a similar number of helicopters had intruded into the western Afghan provinces of Nimroz and Herat, close to the Iranian border where Iranian revolutionary guards are conducting a massive military exercise.

The Iranian Embassy in Islamabad, however, rejected the Taliban allegations saying that it was just an attempt to divert the world attention from the student militia’s “crimes” in Mazar-e-Sharif and Bamiyan areas of Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has refused to accept the Taliban’s new ambassador to Pakistan amidst fears that the move may annoy the Saudi Government, which had recently broke off its diplomatic ties with Taliban expelling their envoy in Riyadh, media reports in Islamabad said.

The Taliban authorities had earlier designated Maulvi Shahabuddin Dilawar as the new ambassador to Pakistan but since Maubli Dilawar had earlier been expelled by the Saudi Government, Pakistan had refused to receive the new ambassador-designate, Wahdat, published from Peshawar said, quoting official sources.

DPA adds: Four members of the ultra-Islamic Taliban militia have been arrested in south-eastern Iran on charges of espionage and intention to commit acts of sabotage, the Teheran daily Assr Azadegan reported today.

Quoting unnamed local intelligence sources, the daily reported that the four were arrested in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchistan province.

G-7 backs US plan on emergency credit

WASHINGTON, Oct 4 (UNI) — In an apparent attempt to ward off a major threat to the global economy leading industrial nations last night virtually agreed to support US President Bill Clinton’s new initiative to provide emergency funding to countries facing the flight of investment capital.

After a six-hour-long deliberations of the Finance Ministers of the Group of Seven (G-7) on the eve of the World Bank-IMF annual meeting US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin told newsmen that they backed a US proposal that seeks to provide new loan guarantees and other emergency credits from the World Bank to the affected countries.

World bank President James Wolfensohn, who was present at the meeting, is understood to have supported the move.

The US proposal would not bring in new money in the IMF coffer. Instead, it would allow the IMF to design a mechanism to provide contingent finance out of its existing funds to help countries deal with financial contagion. Its details are yet to be worked out.

The Clinton Administration’s $18 billion contribution to the IMF has been held up by the Republican-controlled Congress.

The G-7 Finance Ministers and central bankers promised to cooperate in foreign exchange markets as appropriate and called on Japan to take “swift and effective” action to clean up its debt-ridden banking sector and boost its dormant economy.

Noting that inflation is conspicuously low, the group said lack of economic vitality in Asia and elsewhere poses increasing downside risks to economic activity. The ministers reaffirmed their commitment to create or sustain strong domestic-demand led growth and financial stability in their economies. “In this context we noted the importance of intensified cooperation among us at this juncture,” the group said.

The G-7 said the USA, Canada and Britain should take “appropriate action” to sustain growth, and added it was important that European nations implement structural reforms and reduce their high unemployment rates.

Earlier in the day, President Bill Clinton telephoned British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac to lobby personally for his initiative. Mr Blair and Mr Chirac said they liked the US approach and other countries as well have had favourable reactions in discussions with economic officials, Presidential spokesman Joe Lockhari said. Later hearing Mr Rubin explain the suggestion for new IMF credit lines to countries threatened with investor flight, Japanese Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa told reporters “he asked me to support it, and I said I would.”

Boeing fined for data transfer

WASHINGTON, Oct 4 (PTI) The US aerospace giant Boeing, has agreed to pay a $10 million civil penalty for passing unauthorised information to Russian and Ukrainian engineers, the biggest ever fine paid under the Arms Act, state department sources told The Washington Post.

The engineers were involved in a joint project to launch communication satellites on missiles fired from an oil rig, the sources said after Bloomberg news service broke the story.

Officials said that the Justice Department continued to investigate Boeing to determine whether there were criminal violations of arms export laws in the information transfer.

The USA wants collaboration with Russia, China and other countries for space launches but it zealously protects the technological advantages it has against competitors while collaborating with them in certain areas for economic reasons or reasons of convenience.

Although State and Defence Department officials concluded that the materials passed to the Russians and Ukrainians did not endanger national security, the case was sent to the Justice Department to determine if prosecution was warranted.

In all, officials said, there were 207 documented violations by Boeing employees, most involving delivery of information, defence articles and services without first getting approval from State or Defence Department officials.

A Justice Department source told the newspaper that prosecution of Boeing was “doubtful,” in part because the company itself informed the State Department of the violations after an internal investigation.

Boeing is the second major US company involved in satellite launch business to be investigated by the Justice Department for possible export law violations.

Loral, a major US manufacturer of communication satellites, also turned over to the State Department an internal investigation of its employees’ possible unauthorised transfer of technical data in the 1996 post-accident report that triggered a New York federal grand jury inquiry.

The beneficiary of that technology transfer by Loral was China which had suffered several launch accidents before the transfer. After the transfer, its launches have been perfect.

A house committee organised last summer to investigate Clinton Administration’s handling of satellite export and launch policies with China and other countries met behind closed doors yesterday.

Sources told the newspaper that the panel’s investigators had recently focused their attention at overseas sales of supercomputers and other equipment that could help terrorist countries develop weapons of mass destruction.

Congress has already sent proposed legislation designed to cure “lax security practices” in satellite licensing procedures to the White House.

Star murders frighten Pak producers

ISLAMABAD, Oct 4 (UNI) — A spurt in the murders of new actresses in the past five years has cast a long shadow on the Pakistan film industry as producers have begun to shrink from investing crores of rupees on new faces.

Nargis, one of the most popular actresses, nowadays fears that a police-officer is after her life. Film-makers now avoid giving her a role.

An investigative report in Urdu daily ‘Jang’ says that most of the murders are the result of professional rivalries among the new actresses or an outcome of their extra-curricular activities. While some actresses employ criminals to teach a lesson to their rivals, others befriend police officers to ensure their security.

A senior Punjab police-officer recently revealed that 17 policemen in Lahore maintained illicit relations with film actresses and prostitutes. But what is surprising is that although so many top or mediocre actresses have either been killed or attacked, no arrests have been made so far.

The Jang report says that in the 1990s the film industry was flooded with new actresses who were neither competent nor willing to learn. However, they did feed the press with scandalous stuff about their rivals to downgrade them.

Lawyers stopped from meeting Anwar

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 4 (Reuters) — Lawyers representing sacked Cabinet Minister Anwar Ibrahim have been prevented from seeing him since last week to discuss his defence to corruption and sodomy charges, one member of his legal team said today.

Zainur Zakaria told Reuters the defence had not been allowed to see Anwar since his last court appearance on Wednesday, despite repeated requests to the police and the Attorney-General.

“We are not being told where he is, we are not informed, we don’t even get to see him,” he said. “He must be allowed access to his lawyers and so must his lawyers have access to him to discuss his defence.”

Anwar is expected to appear in court on Monday, when a trial date is expected to be set.

News reports said Anwar underwent medical checks on behalf of the prosecution team yesterday at Kuala Lumpur’s university hospital. The police guarding the hospital said he was still there today and was apparently there overnight.

The checks followed Anwar’s allegations that he was beaten while in police custody.

A doctor who examined him last week backed his claim that he was assaulted in custody.

CTBT ‘likely’ to fall apart in a decade

MOSCOW, Oct 4 (PTI) — The Comprehensive (nuclear) Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) may collapse within a decade of its coming into force, if no steps are taken towards total elimination of nuclear weapons, a top Russian defence expert says.

Professor of the Russian Military Sciences Academy, Major Gen (retd) Vladimir Belous did not rule out that “one or other” recognised nuclear weapon states (NWS) may walk out of CTBT in the name of “supreme national interests,” after 8 to 10 years of its coming into force and will set an “example” for others to follow suit.

Belous believes that by that time the permitted sub-critical tests and other procedures under CTBT permitting the verification of existing stockpiles and “vertical proliferation” would become obsolete.

In its latest issue “Voyennoye Obozrenie” (military review), a weekly supplement of “Nezavisimaya Gazeta” daily, Belous wrote that the recent demonstrative nuclear tests by India and Pakistan have shown that there were no “unsurpassable” obstacles in the way of horizontal proliferation of the nuclear weapons in the world.

“This in turn influences the possibility of `vertical proliferation’ of nuclear weapons.

He further says the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan show that if the process of the elimination of nuclear weapons is slowed and if NWS would continue to base their security primarily on nuclear weapons, they would retain in their stockpiles even longer.

This would lead to a situation when all the means to verify the integrity of the stockpiled nuclear weapons (sub-critical blasts and computer simulation) would be exhausted and then in the name of “supreme national interests” one or other nuclear club members may abandon the test ban, Belous substantiating his arguments in the article said.

Lanka to show UN child-soldiers

COLOMBO, Oct 4 (PTI) — Sri Lankan government, which has been campaigning against the LTTE using children to further its armed conflict against the Army, would present the 26 LTTE ‘child-soldiers’ captured recently near northern Mankulam as evidence to a special U.N monitoring body.Reacting to local media reports, officials of the Foreign Ministry here said today that a special report compiled by the government on the age and confessions of all the 26 boys and girls would be submitted to the U.N committee set up after the visit of U.N Special Commissioner on Children, Mr Olara Otunnu to Colombo and LTTE areas in June this year.

50 hurt in B’desh clashes

DHAKA, Oct 4 (DPA) — Fierce clashes broke out here in central Dhaka today as riot police stopped a protest march by militant Muslim clerics demanding the trial of feminist writer Taslima Nasreen accused of blasphemy under Islamic laws.

Witnesses said about 50 people were injured in the latest street violence in the metropolis city triggered by protests over Nasreen’s reported return to Bangladesh last month after a four-year long exile.

Silkworm diet
BEIJING: China, home to 85 per cent of the world’s silkworm resources, has launched the worms as a nutritious food product which will improve people’s immune systems. “Eating silkworms could help prevent tumours, postpone ageing and improve people’s immune systems,” said Wei Jiang, president of the American Symking Food Corporation. — PTI

Internet wedding
SINGAPORE: At least 14 Singapore couples have signed up for a state-run programme to broadcast their wedding solemnisation ceremonies over the Internet, a news report has said. The civil ceremonies — which are usually held in a small government office — are to be aired live on the worldwide computer network on Monday. Those who watch on the Internet can sign “electronic guest books” and send digital cards to congratulate the couples. — DPA

Elephantine probe
BANGKOK: Authorities are investigating the sudden deaths of eight elephants and illness of three others in an area in northern Thailand popular with tourists, a conservationist has said. Local villagers suspect the deaths of at least two of the elephants resulted from a dispute between rival groups of ethnic Karen elephant trainers fighting to attract tourists to their trekking services, said Saengduen Chailert, director of the Elephant Nature Park, a conservation center in Chiang Mai province on Saturday.
— AP

McDowall dead
LOS ANGELES: Roddy Mcdowall, the British-born actor who starred in “Planet of the Apes” and “How Green was my Valley”, died at his studio city home, Hollywood’s honorary mayor said. McDowall (70) who died on Saturday was diagnosed in April with terminal brain cancer. — AFP