• Taliban massacre
  350 patients

Jaswant, Talbott may
meet on Sept 22
WASHINGTON, Sept 18 — Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s special envoy Jaswant Singh is likely to have another round of talks with US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott on September 22 to narrow down differences over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Air crash: clues lie in bits
HALIFAX, (Nova Scotia), Sept 18 — The quest to explain why Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the North Atlantic may hinge on small bits of high-tech debris scattered across the ocean floor, investigators have said.

S. Korea clears aid for North
SEOUL, Sept 18 —South Korea today said it had approved the delivery of one billion won ($ 726,000) worth of aid collected from civic groups to famine-stricken North Korea.

3 held for fraud in MiG deal
MOSCOW, Sept 18 — Two Russian industrialists and a banker have been arrested over the alleged embezzlement of $ 273 million worth of public funds in a deal involving sale of 10 MIG-29 fighters to India in 1995.

Iran-Taliban conflict: Pak to stay neutral

ISLAMABAD, Sept 18 (PTI) — Pakistan has said that it would remain neutral in any armed conflict between Iran and the Taliban amidst a tense stand-off between Teheran and Kabul over the killing of nine Iranian diplomats and a journalist by the Afghan militia. "If Iran will intervene militarily in Afghanistan. Pakistan will remain "neutral". Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz who returned after a day-long visit to Teheran yesterday, said as the possibility of an armed conflict seemed imminent."

Mr Aziz said Iranian leadership had refused to reduce its troops on the border to defuse the explosive situation on its border with Iran "unless its complaints are removed".

Teheran had also repeated its demand that the Taliban apologise for the killings, apprehend the killers and extradite them to Iran and repatriate all bodies of Iranians or face military action.

An enraged Iranian leadership refused to withdraw some 70,000 elite troops stationed on the Afghan border after the Taliban refused to hand over 11 Iranians taken captive by its forces after the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif.

The situation worsened after the Taliban said seven of them had been killed, with Teheran issuing an ultimatum to the Taliban to free all remaining prisoners and hand over the bodies of those killed or risk war.

UNITED NATIONS: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has convened a ministerial-level meeting of eight countries with interest in Afghanistan to discuss the deteriorating situation in the region on Monday next.

The US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Foreign Ministers of other seven nations would participate in the discussions.

Little is expected of the meeting except some platitudes and calls for restraint which often go unheeded, diplomats said, adding this could start a discussion process which may prove useful in the long run.

Participating in the meeting, besides the USA, will be Pakistan which backs Taliban, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan which oppose Taliban, Russia and China. However, no Afghan representative is included at present.

The Taliban, which control most of the territory, are not yet recognised by the UN. The world body recognises the Rabbani regime which controls little area and thus would have no influence on the events.

The urgency for convening the meeting resulted from Iran’s massing of its troops on the border which increased the tensions, raising fears of a bloody and prolonged regional conflict.

The trouble started after Taliban soldiers killed nine Iranian diplomats when they over-ran Mazar-e-Sharif and Iran promised to avenge their death. Another two Iranian diplomats and a journalist are still missing.

ISLAMABAD (AFP): Taliban authorities have agreed to release five Iranians detained in Afghanistan, a senior Foreign Ministry official said today.

The Iranians will be released from the Taliban’s jail on Saturday, Pakistani special envoy on Afghanistan, Iftikhar Murshid, said.

He said he could confirm it. "they will be coming via Islamabad," Murshid added.

Pakistan earlier negotiated the release of five Iranians, including three truck drivers arrested by the Taliban militia when it over-ran the opposition stronghold of Mazar-e-Sharif on August 8.

Taliban massacre 350 patients

DUBAI, Sept 18 (PTI) — Some 350 patients, mainly women and children, hospitalised in Bamian Hospital were reportedly massacred by Afghan Taliban militia, the official Iranian news agency (IRNA) said yesterday in a report from Almaty.

Almaty’s Karavan Radio here yesterday reported the Taliban jet fighters bombed the hospital which was marked by the Red Crescent sign, killing all hospitalised patients.

The Radio, quoting Afghan diplomats in Central Asia, added the Taliban arrested 2,500 youngsters and took them to an unspecified place when capturing the city on Sunday.

The news agency said several mass graves had been identified in Sultan Razieh Girls’ School in Mazar-I Sharif and Heyratan plain in northern Afghanistan near the Uzbek border where the Taliban have buried thousands of people.

In an interview with BBC on August 13 a Taliban leader confirmed thousands of bodies had been buried in these graves, IRNA added.

Jaswant, Talbott may meet on Sept 22

WASHINGTON, Sept 18 (PTI) Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s special envoy Jaswant Singh is likely to have another round of talks with US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott on September 22 to narrow down differences over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

The fifth round of talks will probably be in the “quarter final or semi-final” stage, Indian Ambassador to the USA Naresh Chandra said yesterday.

Mr Chandra made the statement at a lunch hosted by a former US Ambassador to India, Sen Daniel P. Moynihan, in honour of visiting Indian Power Minister P.R. Kumaramangalam, according to an Indian Embassy press release.

Mr Jaswant Singh said in New Delhi yesterday that differences persisted over the CTBT and efforts would be made to bridge the gap.

“We will try to narrow the gap of perception when Talbott and I meet in Washington next week,” Mr Jaswant Singh told the economic editors’ conference.

He, however, refused to give details of the talks he had with Mr Talbott on the issue saying “confidentiality has been agreed between Strobe (Talbott) and me and it would not be fair to disclose anything at this stage.”

Burton holds back anti-India move

WASHINGTON, Sept 18 (UNI) — Apparently, in the face of stiff opposition by fellow lawmakers, Republican Congressman Dan Burton last night beat a hasty retreat, deciding against moving in the House of Representatives his amendment which sought to deny US “humanitarian” aid of $ 36.8 million to India in fiscal 1999.

Mr Burton, who has been introducing such an anti-India measure in the name of human rights violations for the last several years, again gave notice of the amendment on the eve of the debate in the House on the Foreign Operations Bill scheduled for yesterday.

Though the Congressman was present throughout the debate on the Bill, he did not move the amendment. Last year, his similar amendment was defeated by a margin of 260 votes. A record number of 342 Congressmen had voted against it. Only 82 voted in favour, this lack of support might have weighed with him this time in deciding not to introduce the measure, according to observers.

Some of the activists of the Congressional Caucus in India and Indian-Americans, a bipartisan group of some 80 lawmakers, had actively lobbied against the Burton move.

Caucus co-chairman Frank Pallone and seven others issued a “dear colleagues” letter urging other Congressmen to oppose the Burton move in the overall interest of US-India relations, more especially in the economic field. The proposed amendment “unfairly” singled out India for punishment “without any justification,” they felt.

They drew attention to India’s democratic traditions, its growing trade with the US which crossed the annual mark of $ 10 billion last year, and improvement in its human rights record in the trouble-torn Kashmir and Punjab states.

They said the adoption of the amendment would have serious consequences for the massive US investment in India since 1991.

It said that the proposed amendment had referred to the situation in Punjab, ignoring the fact that the Akali Dal government had set up an independent human rights commission to investigate human rights abuses.

India’s Ambassador to the US, Mr Naresh Chandra, also wrote a letter to Congressmen giving an “accurate appreciation of the present phase of Indo-US relations.”

He recalled the strains that India’s nuclear tests in May had caused to the bilateral relations and said, “Recent negotiations between the two governments provide hope that the situation will improve in the very near future.”

Clinton tapes to be released

WASHINGTON, Sept 18 (PTI) — In a major setback to US President Bill Clinton, the judiciary committee in the Republican-Majority House of Representatives today gave the green signal for release of his videotaped grand jury testimony and 2,800 pages of evidence in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

We are going to release nearly 2,800 pages of this material in volumes one through seven of the appendices. We have also voted to release the videotape of the President. As a part of that, Congressman Bill McCollum, a member of the committee, told reporters soon after the committee meeting. The videotape of the august 17 testimony of Mr Clinton will be released on Monday, CNN reported.

Earlier, the House Judiciary Committee unexpectedly delayed a decision on the release of US President Bill Clinton’s videotaped grand jury testimony while Republicans demanded an FBI inquiry into an alleged systematic attempt to “intimidate” the panel’s chairman and others yesterday.

There was no immediate explanation for the delay, which was announced by a committee spokesman at the end of several hours of closed-door discussions.

“No final decisions have been made as far as what materials to release,” said spokesman Paul McNulty, adding that it was unlikely any material would be released until sometime after today.

Democrats on the panel had favoured a delay in the release of the tape, which many Republicans had hoped to make available to the public today. But after a closed-door session that stretched into the dinner hour, Mr McNulty announced the committee was finished for the day and would reconvene today.

“It was a productive debate,” the panel’s chairman, Republican Henry Hyde, told reporters. “It’s not a frivolous debate. We are accomplishing a lot. The discussion became passionate at times,” he added.

It was not clear to what extent the tape was discussed in the daylong session. Officials said lawmakers had spent hours discussing how to edit sexually explicit material in the records that independent counsel Kenneth Starr submitted to the Congress, in part to avoid embarrassing any innocent individual.

Senior Republican aides had confidently been making preparations for the release of the tape as early as today.

Apart from the tape, judiciary committee members were debating how much of an additional 2,000 pages of evidence to release to the public.

Mr Starr submitted 18 boxes of evidence to the Congress earlier this month, and said he had found evidence of potentially impeachable offences in 11 separate instances.

“In order to judge whether he is telling the truth it’s crucial that we see the video,” said Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican.

The grand jury testimony remains secret in court proceedings but Mr Clinton’s testimony and the rest of the grand jury evidence could be made public because the Congress now controlled that information.

“We find it somewhat puzzling that the House doesn’t believe the public has a right to see the debate about what the public has the right to see,” White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said.

NEW YORK: Four news organisations said they would carry live “webcasts’’ of the videotaped testimony Mr Clinton gave in the Monica Lewinsky case.

Spokesmen for CNN Interactive, MSNBccom, ABCnews.com and Foxnews.com also said they would archive the video and highlight the key sections.

BEIJING: China has banned the public dissemination of the lurid Starr report detailing US President Bill Clinton’s sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, a leading Hong Kong newspaper reported today.

“Circulars have been sent to publishing houses ordering them not to put out Chinese versions of the report. Those which violate the rule will be given heavy punishment”, the South China Morning Post reported.

Law knocked at her door after 16 years

TALLAHASSEE (Florida), Sept 18 (AP) — Loretta Randley never tried to hide.

Convicted of killing her boyfriend in 1981, she went back home to Deerfield beach while she appealed.

The years went by. She lost the appeal. But there was no knock at the door. She kept her name and her life. "She waited for the police to pick her up, but it never came," Ms Randley’s mother, Ms Dorothy Edwards, said recently.

Finally she said, "Mama, I’d better get my own place so I can take care of my grandchildren." Alone and impoverished, Ms Randley did just that, raising her five children and their five kids with little financial help. She went to church on Sundays, baby-sat for other children and enjoyed sitting on her front porch watching time pass.

Ms Randley, now 58, was in contact with law enforcement agencies. Her daughter worked as a dispatcher for the local police. She once went in to the Sheriff’s office to sign up for "Toys for tots". Her minister was a Miami-Dade police officer.

Then a tip led a Broward county Sheriff’s deputy to her door in May 1997, more than 16 years after she was lost in a bureaucratic shuffle. She has been behind bars since.

Ms Randley’s attorney, Ms Stacey Dougan, argued before top state officials yesterday her client’s unusual circumstances forgotten by law enforcement and living a law-abiding life for so long warrant releasing her now, 13 months before she is scheduled to get out of prison.

Ms Dougan also argued that Ms Randley, a devoutly religious woman with 25 grandchildren in all, should be freed because she was sexually abused by her boyfriend, evidence that never surfaced at her trial.

Board members took the case under advisement.

Air crash: clues lie in bits

HALIFAX, (Nova Scotia), Sept 18 (AP) — The quest to explain why Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the North Atlantic may hinge on small bits of high-tech debris scattered across the ocean floor, investigators have said.

The chief crash investigator, Mr Vic Gerden, confirmed yesterday that searchers no longer believed there were large, mostly intact sections of the fuselage on the seabed.

He also said investigators doubt they can solve the mystery of the September 2 crash solely through information from the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders as both stopped six minutes before the plane smashed into the ocean, killing all 229 people on board.

Two of the plane’s three engines have also been sighted, he said, and may provide additional clues to the apparent power failure aboard the plane.

Mr Gerden revealed new information yesterday from the Cockpit Voice Recorder that the pilots spoke to each other about detecting an abnormal smell in the cockpit three minutes before their first distress call to air traffic controllers.

S. Korea clears aid for North

SEOUL, Sept 18 (Reuters) —South Korea today said it had approved the delivery of one billion won ($ 726,000) worth of aid collected from civic groups to famine-stricken North Korea.

The Unification Ministry said the aid, including 2,510 tons of corn, four tons of sugar and 200 milking cows, would be shipped to North Korea between September 21 and October 15.

“The government approved the delivery of the civilian groups’ aid to North Korea,” said the ministry in a statement.

The ministry said the aid programmes, from purchases to transportation and to distribution monitoring, would be handled by civilian groups in cooperation with South Korea’s Red Cross.

During April and May, the Red Cross delivered 13 billion won worth of aid including 16,434 tons of corn and 13,500 tons of flour.In June, South Korean business tycoon Chung Ju-Yung delivered 50 truckloads of cattle to the north as part of aid programmes, the ministry said.

3 held for fraud in MiG deal

MOSCOW, Sept 18 (AFP) — Two Russian industrialists and a banker have been arrested over the alleged embezzlement of $ 273 million worth of public funds in a deal involving sale of 10 MIG-29 fighters to India in 1995.

Mr Maxim Tkachev, former Finance Director for the plane manufacturer Mapo-MIG, and Mr Dmitri Baranov, head of the Kredit Soyuz Bank, are being held in prison, Itar Tass news agency quoted the Prosecutor-General’s office as saying yesterday.

Former Mapo-MIG Managing Director Alexander Bezrukov is also in prison, according to an unofficial source.

The three bosses transferred federal funds for the delivery of the fighter jets to India into foreign-based private bank accounts, the report said.

They face between five and 10 years in prison and a confiscation of their assets if found guilty, the agency added.

Judges punished
BEIJING: China has initiated an ambitious programme to clean up country’s judicial system by punishing nearly 5,000 judges and prosecutors in the first eight months of this year, official reports said. Courts have also discovered 14,993 wrong judgements in respect to the application to the law and have corrected 8,110 wrong verdicts during the same period. — PTI

Bond’s car
LONDON: A Lotus Esprit Si automobile fetched $ 49,000 at a Christie’s auction. Never mind that it didn’t have a motor: it just happened to be the prop car featured in the 1977 James Bond movie, “The Spy Who Loved Me”. The sleek automobile, which Roger Moore’s version of agent 007 piloted on land and sea in the film, was among the most recognisable of the 250-plus lots peddled at the auction of Bond memorabilia on Thursday.— AP

Chinese dissidents
BEIJING: Despite a plea by the UN human rights chief, China has said it has no plans to release dissidents jailed from the 1989 democracy movement or loosen conditions on talks with the Dalai Lama. UN Human Rights High Commissioner Mary Robinson, who ended a visit to China on Tuesday, urged Chinese leaders to re-examine some dissident cases and open talks with the Dalai Lama. The government has long asserted that the cases of all imprisoned democracy activists have been handled properly under the law. — AP

Sophia Loren
ROME: Film legend Sophia Loren (63) must rest for a month, doctors said after treating her in a New York hospital for irregular heartbeat, Italian newspapers have reported. Loren has been discharged from hospital after being rushed there in mid-August when she was taken ill on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. — DPA

Dog’s DNA
SEATTLE: Two men have been convicted of murder in what is believed to be the country’s first criminal trial in which DNA from a dog was used to prove that the men were present at the time of shooting. Defence attorneys vowed to appeal, calling the DNA evidence a “joke”. Kenneth John Leuluaialii and George Tuilefano, both 24, were accused of killing a young couple after kicking in the front door of their home in 1996, shooting the couple’s dog and demanding marijuana, cocaine or cash. — AP

Kids say no to sex
ATLANTA: For the first time this decade, more than half of America’s high school students are saying no to sex. And high schoolers who are sexually active are using condoms at the highest rate on record in the 1990s, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday. Dr. Lloyd Kolbe, director of the centre’s division of adolescent and school health, said the findings gave further evidence that teaching teenagers about safe sex hadn’t resulted in more promiscuity. — AP