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Friday,
July 4, 2003, Chandigarh, India  
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Grey areas
in UN resolution: India Peace in Gaza after Israeli pullout
China,
India may face AIDS catastrophe
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Singapore
on hygiene blitz 3 space
shuttle managers replaced Benazir’s
daughter visits ailing father in Pak
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Grey areas in UN resolution: India Washington, July 3 The USA understands India is a democratic country and any decision taken by it must have a political consensus behind it, Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal told reporters here last night after extensive discussions with top US officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in the last two days. He said if it was a “straight” UN request for troops, India would have no difficulty at all in responding to the request, but the resolution had “unresolved ambiguities”. “Normally India has responded to UN mandates. If in this case too it was a clear UN resolution, India would have had no hesitation. But since there are grey areas, it is necessary for India to be very careful in what she does. Maintaining that whatever decision India took would not have any adverse effect on its bilateral relations with the USA, Mr Sibal said there were certain areas on which it was not easy to give clarifications because it was a fast-moving, uncertain and difficult situation. “All this is known to everybody. There is no road map. Unless a road map gets developed, it is difficult. Frankly, there are no deadlines imposed. There is no pressure,” he said. Asked whether the Americans had been able to convince him that India should send troops to Iraq, Mr Sibal said “that is not the right approach. They have proposed India to contribute to the stabilisation force a division of Indian troops. India is examining this.” A decision was taken in Delhi after the American request was received to evaluate the present situation in its entirety. In this connection, it was decided that the Indian Ambassador should return to Iraq and give New Delhi a report on the situation. He is currently in Iraq. A second decision that was taken was to have interaction with the coalition authority in order to get an assessment from them about the situation and that Indian officials should also talk to Iraqi leaders for their assessment of the situation. “Of course it was decided that India should also interact with the UN. It was decided to interact also with neighbouring countries of Iraq. That process is going on,” Mr Sibal said. Favouring a vibrant high-technology trade relationship with India, the USA was no longer asking New Delhi to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and was expected to liberalise its exports of dual use goods later this year, Mr Sibal said. “The USA is no longer asking India to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or Fullscope Safeguards,” Mr Sibal said after the conclusion of the two-day meeting of the Indo-US High Technology Cooperation Group (HTCG). He said more liberalisation of US exports of high-technology, dual use goods were expected by the next meeting of the HTCG in New Delhi, probably in November. US Under Secretary of Commerce Kenneth I Juster, who led the US side at the meeting, said “creating the conditions for a vibrant high-technology trade relationship is a key component of the Administration’s overall agenda for fundamentally transforming US-Indian relations.” “Both sides discussed changes in policy and regulation that can facilitate such trade and strengthen controls on the possible diversion of sensitive items,” he said, adding that the meeting was an important step in this process.
— PTI |
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Peace in Gaza after Israeli pullout Gaza Strip, July 3 Abdel-Karim Hashim, whose house was damaged in one of the frequent Israeli raids into the Rafah refugee camp on the Egyptian border, said Tuesday was the first time he had slept at home in several months. “We have lived in fear. We used to flee the house every night to escape death under the rubble,’’ the 50-year-old father of eight told Reuters. “Now, there is a relative calm and stability and my family sleeps in the house.’’ Three Palestinians, two of them pre-schoolers, were killed in the past year when Israeli troops blew up houses near their homes, which collapsed from the blasts. Palestinian officials say at least 750 houses have been destroyed and hundreds of others damaged in the 33 months since the start of the Palestinian uprising for independence. Israel says the buildings demolished either housed tunnels used to smuggle in weapons from Egypt or acted as shelter for militants launching attacks on Israeli troops. Israel has also razed homes of militants as a punitive measure. But there have been no raids since the withdrawal on Sunday and an Israeli security source said on Wednesday troops would stay out of Rafah if Palestinians took full control and dealt with the dozens of smuggling tunnels he said still remained. “If they take action against these tunnels then we will not need to do it ourselves,” the source said. ‘’But if they fail to expose these tunnels and destroy them ... we will no doubt continue to operate.” Hashim praised the US-mediated security deal that led to the Israeli withdrawal in north Gaza and restored general free movement for Palestinians in Gaza for the first time in two-and-a-half
years. — Reuters |
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Ultras
to resume attacks
Gaza City, July 3 |
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China, India may face AIDS catastrophe Singapore, July 3 “In some countries, for example, Cambodia, or in what we believe in China and India, the public health measures have yet to take hold and the epidemic really is in that phase of scaling up very, very quickly,’’ said its director, Julie Gerberding. “It looks like Africa did a decade or so ago,’’ she told a briefing in Singapore. China, the world’s most populous nation, estimates that around million of its people suffer from HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, a figure the United Nations says could soar to 10 million by the end of the decade. India, with the world’s second-biggest population, has at least 4 million
sufferers. In Cambodia, an estimated 158,000 people, or 2.6 percent of adults in the war-scarred nation, are HIV positive. “If we don’t intervene in those environments we will have a catastrophe of a very, very profound increase in the number of cases,’’ said Gerberding of the CDC, a federal health agency overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services. United Nations agency UNAIDS says 42 million people are infected with HIV worldwide — 29.4 million of them in Africa. It has killed 25 million worldwide. The United Nations forecasts that by 2010, 45 million more will be infected if the pandemic continues at its current pace and 70 million will have died by 2020.
— Reuters |
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Singapore on hygiene blitz Singapore, July 3 Seconds later, the Singapore authorities swooped on the smartly dressed 20-year-old. Spitting has long been a fineable offence in the tightly-controlled island state. But in the era of SARS, it is an even greater social evil. Desperate to ward off the deadly respiratory virus, undercover police have nabbed more than 80 persons for spitting since May when the government began a nationwide “Singapore is OK” campaign to improve public hygiene. Sulaiman, who drives jeeps and other vehicles in the Singapore army, was fined $290. Others have been publicly shamed in addition to fines, their photographs splashed on the front page of the government-linked Straits Times national newspaper. “What is done cannot be undone,” Sulaiman sighed after pleading guilty and paying his fine at a downtown courthouse. Enforced by undercover officers, the crackdown is part of a massive cleaning of one of Asia’s most meticulously kept cities to prevent the sort of relapse of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) seen in Toronto in May. The WHO took Singapore off its list of SARS-affected regions on May 31, ending a devastating three-month epidemic that killed 32 out of 206 sufferers in the island republic of 4 million.
— Reuters |
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3 space shuttle managers replaced Washington, July 3 Linda Ham, who headed the mission management team during the February tragedy, and Ralph R. Roe Jr, Manager, Vehicle Engineering Office, both posted at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, were yesterday replaced by Shuttle Programme Manager William Parsons, who assumed his own post only last month. Ham and Roe were key players in decisions that have been criticised by investigators. These included a “too-easy” acceptance of a flawed analysis of what is now believed to have been a lethal debris impact during Columbia’s launch, the ‘Washington Post’ said. They also failed to obtain images of the orbiting Space Shuttle to check for the possible damage, the daily said. Lambert Austin, a third engineer involved in the decisions, is also being replaced. Roe is heading to Hampton, Virginia, where he will serve as Special Assistant to the Director of the NASA’s Langley Research Center, a civilian aeronautics laboratory with only a supporting role in the space exploration program. The decision to reshuffle the shuttle programme’s senior personnel signals a new aggressiveness in NASA’s attention to management issues as it anticipates the investigators’ final report into the disaster.
— PTI |
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Benazir’s daughter
visits ailing father in Pak Islamabad, July 3 The youngest of Mrs Bhutto’s three children, Asifa Zardari, returned to Pakistan this week from the United Arab Emirates where she lives with her mother, spokesman Farhatullah Babar said. Mrs Bhutto has refused to return because of outstanding corruption charges and warnings from the authorities that she will be arrested upon her arrival. The girl visited her father in a state-run hospital in Islamabad, where he is receiving treatment for a chronic back problem. She will be allowed to stay in the hospital with her father.
— AP |
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