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Monday,
December 2, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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PML-Q man
is Baluchistan’s CM
Planes hit Iraqi oil facility; 4 die Osama
‘in Pak tribal border’ |
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47 die in B’desh stampede B’desh
may free 2 scribes India may
have most HIV victims by 2010 Troops
shoot Palestinian in Gaza US
Homeland Security — ‘A new American Gestapo’? Russian
institute opens doors for Indians PA team
visits India today
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PML-Q man is Baluchistan’s CM
Islamabad, December 1 Jam Muhammad Yousuf of the PML-Q bagged 47 votes in the 65-member Baluchistan Assembly in the election for the Chief Minister. In what appears to be a far reaching political deal between the PML-Q and the MMA with the reported understanding the tanding of not to rock the minority government of the Prime Minister, Mr Jamali, the MMA voted for Mr Yousuf in a four cornered contest. Though the Chief Minister’s slot has been given to the PML-Q, the pro-Taliban and anti-American MMA, which has already established its government in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), is expected to a wield a great deal of influence in both provinces, which bordered Afghanistan. The provincial MMA leaders are expected to get influential ministries in the Baluchistan government. The deal between the PML-Q and the MMA was also important for Mr Jamali because Baluchistan was his home province and he is also desperately trying to woo the MMA to support his minority government at the Centre. Mr Jamali, after holding talks with top MMA leaders Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Qazi Hussain Ahmad yesterday in Peshawar, said he had agreed to one of the alliance’s demand that Friday should be declared as a holiday. Allaying fears of the USA and the West that the MMA provincial governments would hamper the joint US-Pak crackdown on Taliban and Al-Qaida forces in Baluchistan and the NWFP, Mr Jamali said he did not foresee any problems in Pakistan remaining the frontline state to fight terrorism. He hoped that the MMA government in the NWFP would cooperate with the Centre. Mr Jamali said negotiations with MMA leadership for supporting his government at the Centre would be resumed after Id-ul-Fitr. However, MMA leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman said the alliance’s demand for curbing powers of General Musharraf stands.
PTI |
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Planes hit Iraqi oil facility; 4 die
Baghdad, December 1
The US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, said it had no information on the report. “We have nothing on it,” Lt- Col Martin Compton said. A spokesman for Britain’s Ministry of Defence said, “We are not aware of any such incident.” British and US warplanes police two no-fly zones in southern and northern Iraq. “US and British warplanes raided the Southern Oil Company in Basra. Four persons were martyred and several others wounded during the raid,” one resident, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters by telephone from the port city. The residents said company offices were hit. The company supervises Iraq’s oil exports under an oil-for-food deal with the United Nations via the Mina-al-Bakr terminal in southern Iraq. A second outlet is through the Turkish port of Ceyhan in the Mediterranean. The zones were set up after the 1991 Gulf war to protect a Kurdish enclave in the north and Shia Muslims in the south from attack by President Saddam Hussein’s military. Iraq does not recognise the zones and views them as “state terrorism and wanton aggression”, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri told the United Nations in a letter last week. US officials say continued firing at patrolling Western jets by Iraqi defences is a direct violation of a November 8 UN resolution, aimed at ridding Iraq of any nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Other members of the UN Security Council, including Britain, disagree with that view. Reuters  |
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Osama ‘in Pak tribal border’
Islamabad, December 1 The delivery in Islamabad on November 12 of an audio cassette carrying what is believed to be a recent recording of Bin Laden’s voice has revived speculation that the Al-Qaida chief has eluded a 13-month US-led manhunt by taking refuge in a remote pocket of the border region. “He knows the area very well,” said Mr Asad Afridi, a lawyer based in the Khyber border district. “It may be possible for two or three days a week he’s stationed in Afghanistan, then comes to the tribal areas for two or three days,” Mr Afridi said. The region is Bin Laden’s old home turf. He was based with some 400 Arab mujaheddin followers in Khyber village of Tira during the war against the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation, Mr Afridi said. “All these Arabs know the secret ways through the mountains, very well. They are moving,” he said. Lying less than 200 km from Pakistan’s capital, the area is home to Pashtun tribes, who share a common ethnicity with Afghanistan’s former Taliban rulers. It runs along a porous 1,250-km border. Isolated, conservative, underdeveloped, and operating under laws separate from the rest of Pakistan, religious leaders hold sway as the main providers of education through free Islamic colleges. Religious and ethnic sympathies for the Taliban run so deep that the graves of fleeing extremists killed in the area by Pakistani security forces have been turned into shrines.
AFP |
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47 die in B’desh stampede
Dhaka, December 1 Thirty three victims, including five children, died instantly in the stampede in Gaibandha town, 192 km north of the city, United News of Bangladesh and ATN Bangla television station reported. Another 14 persons died on way to hospital, the reports said. The reports said at least 200 persons were injured, many of them hospitalised. The stampede occurred after more than 10,000 persons, mostly women and children, gathered to collect clothes being distributed by a local businessman as part of a religious ceremony called Zakat’. The incident happened outside an abandoned jute mill, where the distribution was planned. As the gates of the mill were suddenly opened, there was a stampede among those standing at the beginning of the queue, which resulted in the death of 42 persons and more than 30 being injured. The police has arrested two persons, including the contractor, at whose house the clothes were being distributed when the mishap took place. The government has ordered a probe into the incident.
AP, PTI |
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B’desh may free 2 scribes
Dhaka, December 1 As the five-day remand of the duo, Briton Zaiba Naz Malik and Italian Led Poldo Brono Sorrentino who were arrested on sedition charges, expired today, media speculated about their possible release, but said their local associates, including journalists, were being watched closely by the authorities. With the Bangladesh police having failed to procure any new information about their alleged “anti-state activities” and diplomatic pressure to free them mounting, in all likelihood the scribes would be freed and deported to their respective countries, media reports said. The charge of sedition to portray Bangladesh as a fanatic state were being withdrawn, said vernacular Janakanta daily, adding that the “type” of their interrogation had also been changed.
PTI |
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India may have most HIV victims by 2010
Beijing, December 1 The campaigns were a sign that Asia may finally be ready to overcome social taboos on talking about sexual activities in public in many of the region’s countries where five out of eight of the world’s people live. Even so, experts say, efforts to educate people about how the disease is spread and to ease the deep social stigma it brands on sufferers may already be too late to head off a rapid spread. China, where numbers are little more than best guesses in a land where many local officials prefer to ignore the disease, already has at least one million carriers of the HIV virus that can lead to AIDS. India, the world’s second most populous nation, has at least four million. And nowhere is immune, not even way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In September, the tiny island nation of Vanuatu was so distraught by the confirmation of its first AIDS case that Prime Minister Edward Natapei made a national announcement of it. The projections are terrifying. The US Central Intelligence agency reckons that in a mere seven years, by 2010, India will have the most HIV victims in the world — somewhere between 20 and 25 million. China, it says, will have between 10 and 20 million. The United Nations says the whole of the Asia-Pacific region has, right now, about 7.2 million people with HIV. What is scaring the experts is that the disease is on the point of “breaking out’’ of the usually vulnerable social groups such as homosexuals and drug users who share needles and have high percentages of sufferers, into the general population.
UNI |
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Troops shoot Palestinian
in Gaza Gaza City, December 1 Mahmud Saleh Al Wazani, 32, was fatally shot as Israeli forces cleared the area before taking total control. Residents reported machine-gun fire and firing from helicopters, while the sources added that at least 25 tanks and troop transport vehicles had fanned out across the area, backed up by two helicopter gun ships. The Israeli army confirmed that an operation was underway and that there had been an exchange of fire between Israeli forces and armed Palestinian elements. The sources said the Israeli troops also dynamited two houses, including the home of a member of the hardline Hamas movement, Jihad el Masri, who died during an anti-Israeli attack several months ago. House demolitions have been increasingly used by the Israeli army as a deterrent against or revenge for anti-Israeli attacks. Human rights groups have denounced this policy as “collective punishment” as it hits entire families. Earlier, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by Israeli gunfire in Gaza City, yesterday Palestinian medical sources said. Three other Palestinians were lightly wounded by Israeli fire in the town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
AFP |
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US Homeland Security — ‘A new American Gestapo’? In American official parlance, it is known as the Department of Homeland Security. It is intended to analyse intelligence information on terror threats collected by various security agencies and match this intelligence against the nation’s vulnerabilities, focus its efforts on cyber-terrorism “and the even worse danger of nuclear, chemical and biological terrorism.” But critics of the new department—they are growing in number—describe it variously as “a monstrous bureaucracy”, “a massive e-snoop”, “the most sweeping threat to civil liberties” and “Washington’s bizarre strategy for defending the motherland.” “Welcome to the American Gestapo,” wrote columnist Doug Thompson, founder-publisher of Capitol Hill Blue, a media website. “Be careful about what you say and do. They are watching and they will be watching from now on.” On November 25, President Bush signed into law the newly enacted legislation establishing a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. The new department will combine 22 existing federal agencies and employ 1,70,000 workers, the most sweeping federal reorganisation since the Defence Department’s birth in 1947 under the Truman presidency. In signing the legislation passed recently by the lame duck session of the Congress, Mr Bush promised that the new agency “will focus the full resources of the American government on the safety of the American people.” The man whom President Bush has named to take charge of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme is Vice-Admiral John Poindexter, former national security adviser to President Reagan. What has irked and angered many American analysts is that President Bush has chosen a man who was found guilty in 1990 of five felonies like destroying documents and lying to the Congress as a result of his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. The verdict was rejected by an appeals court not because Poindexter was innocent, but because the Congress had given him immunity in return for his testimony. President Bush’s response to critics of Poindexter’s record is that he “has served our nation very well.” Not merely Democrats, even some Republicans, have attacked sections of the Homeland Security legislation that authorise the collection of public and private data into the Pentagon’s “centralised grand database” The New York Times says that if Poindexter’s plans come to fruition, “all transactions of everyday life—credit card purchases, travel and telephone records, even internet
traffic like e-mail— would be grist for the electronic mill.” New York Times columnist William Safire, calls the project “a sweeping theft of privacy rights.” Commentators have called on the common American citizens “not to obediently shut their mouths out of fear, trusting that father knows best.” Their apprehensions are best summed up in the comment of Christopher Deliso:”Simply put, the future cannot be left up to those who would generate paranoia and ignorance in order to destroy the civil liberties upon which America was founded. Otherwise, there will not be much of a homeland left to secure.” In essence, the critics of the new Department of Homeland Security feel the post-September 11 security fears “have forced America to abandon its principles and create a police state.” |
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Russian
institute opens doors for Indians Moscow, December 1 The United Nuclear Research Institute (UNRI) situated in the town of Dubna, near here, closed so far for Indian scientists has decided to grant Indians the status of an “associated member”, its Director Vladimir Kadyshevsky told reporters yesterday. Closer cooperation in tapping the energy of atom will be one of the key issues during summit meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee beginning Tuesday in New Delhi. An Indian delegation is arriving here shortly to discuss modalities for India’s participation in advanced nuclear research in the UNRI. The UNRI was established in 1956 as a joint nuclear research institute for Eastern Bloc countries and China, which was also its member till 1965. Currently 18 countries, including some former Soviet allies in east and central Europe, are its members. However, India did not have access to its research facilities, as New Delhi is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).
PTI |
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PA team visits
India today Colombo, December 1 According to PA sources, the delegation is likely to comprise former Speaker Anura
Bandaranaike, Mangala Samaraweera and Sarath Amunugama. UNI |
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Beijing, December 1
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