Laden ‘planned’ to kill Clinton
NEW YORK, Aug 26 — Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, being described by the media here as America’s enemy number one, made plans twice to assassinate President Bill Clinton, reports said.

Pak can’t counter Cruise: Qadeer
LONDON, Aug 26 — The father of Pakistan nuclear bomb, Dr Qadeer Khan, who claims that Pakistan’s nuclear and missile technology is second only to that of the USA, has no capability to counter American Cruise missiles which hit targets in neighbouring Afghanistan last week.

Lockerbie bombing: Libya may not surrender suspects
LONDON, Aug 26 — Even as Britain and the USA have planned the trial of suspects in the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing at the Hague, a source close to the victims’ families said Libya would not surrender them for prosecution before the international jury.

Three die in firing on Indo-Bangla border
DINAJPUR (Bangladesh), Aug 26 — One guard from each side and a Bangladeshi boy were killed when Indian and Bangladeshi border guards exchanged fire last night, security officials claimed here today.

Girl trafficking: Nepal Dy PM’s call to protest at Parliament
KATHMANDU, Aug 26 — Shailja Acharya, a senior politician of Nepal, has some very unusual advice to give women campaigners to end a decades-old racket in the smuggling of Nepali women to India as sex workers.

King Fahd ‘readmitted’ to hospital

‘Hundreds’ die in Congo raids

HARARE, Aug 26 (ANI) — Hundreds of people, mostly civilians, have been killed in raids by Angolan and Zimbabwean warplanes, rebel forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo have claimed.

They said their positions were heavily attacked by Angolan and Zimbabwean warplanes and “the result was that hundreds of people were killed — mainly men, women and children living in surrounding villages.’’

A rebel spokesman said yesterday that fierce air raids by MIG fighter jets and low-lying helicopter gunships had resumed early yesterday on the rebel frontline, some 50 km southwest of the capital, Kinshasa.

Angola and Zimbabwe have both deployed troops to support Mr Laurent Kabila, who is facing a revolt led by ethnic Tutsis in his vast central African country. Mr Karaha, formerly Kabila’s Foreign Minister, defected to the rebels after the uprising broke out on August 2.

Meanwhile, Parks Mankahlana, a spokesman for South African President Nelson Mandela, said the search for a diplomatic solution to the Congo conflict was continuing.

“This is a very dangerous situation. It is still very volatile,’’ he said.

South African officials said they were unaware of a trip by President Bill Clinton’s special envoy for the region, Mr Howard Wolpe, who visited Luanda during the weekend.

Mr Wolpe said in Luanda he had urged Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos to support a ceasefire and the withdrawal of all foreign troops from the Congo.

ROME (AFP): At least 100 people were killed in massacres at a parish in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and nearby villages, a news agency for Italian missionaries said.

The Misna news agency reported yesterday that 37 people had been killed in a massacre at the parish in the volatile South Kivu province.

USA opposes hot pursuit in J&K

WASHINGTON, Aug 26 (PTI) — Reserving its right to hit terrorist bases anywhere in the world, the USA has asked India not to exercise a similar option in Kashmir which can “run the risk of setting off a wider conflict.”

“India, Kashmir and Pakistan present a very, very different case than many places around the world,” Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering told a press conference here yesterday and added that both sides should continue to hold talks over Kashmir.

“There are very large military forces poised on each side, forces which could be used in the event of attacks which might be misunderstood or in the event of circumstances getting out of hand,” he said.

“The USA”, he said, “of course, believes that all terrorist actions should cease.”

Asked whether the fact that the American attack killed Pakistanis belonging to terrorist organisations in Afghanistan had changed USA’s views on Pakistani support for terrorism in Kashmir, Mr Pickering said there was no change in “our views.”

Admitting that during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the USA, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and others worked closely and that there were certain people among those helped by the USA who later became part of the Taliban movement, Mr Pickering said. “It would be a serious mistake to conclude that the USA was either a sponsor or supporter of the Taliban movement, particularly given its religious views towards women and other important issues of human rights concern,”.

The recent missile attack on Afghanistan, Mr Pickering said, was not an attack on Afghans or on the Government of Afghanistan or the people in authority. “It was an attack on the individual and organisation of Osama bin Laden that was supporting terrorist activities.”

5 scribes among 16 get death penalty

FREETOWN (Sierra Leone), Aug 26 (AP) — A jammed courtroom listened in hushed silence as 16 civilians, including five journalists, were condemned to death by hanging for collaborating with Sierra Leone’s ousted military regime.

High court Judge Edmond Cowan allowed the defendants yesterday 21 days to appeal the sentences, which he handed down after lawyers for the condemned made last-ditch appeals for leniency. One defendant had just given birth in prison.

One of the convicts, former newspaper Editor Ibrahim Ben Kargbo, told the courtroom he had been prepared for the execution order, although he believed it was unfair.

“We know that we are going to die. But this is a pointer to all decent citizens that they too could be here (sentenced to death) one day,” Kargbo said.

The 16 were taken by the police and West African Intervention Force soldiers to Freetown’s maximum security prison.

The ruling came just a day after a 12-member jury found the 16 guilty of helping the country’s former military junta take power in an armed coup d’etat last May.

The junta troops led by Lt Col Johnny Paul Koroma were unseated in February by Nigerian-led West African troops, paving the way for a return to power by President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah’s elected government.

Along with Kargbo, the convicted journalists are former British Broadcasting Corporation announcer Hilton Fyle, Sierra Leone state radio executive Gipu Felix George and radio journalists Dennis Smith and Olivia Mensah, who recently gave birth in prison to a baby boy.

Former junta spokesman Alieu Kamara was also among those convicted. The others include Sierra Leonean businessmen and government bureaucrats. Two persons were found not guilty and have been freed from custody.

The convictions are the first under Kabbah’s restored government, which has pursued treason cases against at least 40 other civilians. Another 38 soldiers are being court martialled.

Laden ‘planned’ to kill Clinton

NEW YORK, Aug 26 (PTI) — Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, being described by the media here as America’s enemy number one, made plans twice to assassinate President Bill Clinton, reports said.

The first attempt was planned during Mr Clinton’s visit to the Philippines on November 20, 1994 and second in February this year when he was due to visit Pakistan.

ABC Television network said one of the key suspects in the recent US Embassy bombings, Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, told the investigators that Osama had ordered the assassination of Mr Clinton in February when he was due to visit Pakistan. But the visit was cancelled and that foiled the plan.

The report said Wali Khan Amin Shah, a former aide of Osama who was convicted in a separate plot to blow up the US airliners, told FBI investigators that he and Ramzi Yousef were dispatched to Manila by Osama to plan and carry out the assassination of Mr Clinton.

A grand jury in the Manhattan US district court secretly indicted Osama on June 10. The charges include financing terrorism and soliciting the murder of Americans.

Pak can’t counter Cruise: Qadeer

LONDON, Aug 26 (PTI) — The father of Pakistan nuclear bomb, Dr Qadeer Khan, who claims that Pakistan’s nuclear and missile technology is second only to that of the USA, has no capability to counter American Cruise missiles which hit targets in neighbouring Afghanistan last week.

“There is not much we can do, if these missiles come over Pakistan,” Dr Qadeer was quoted by the media here as saying when approached about opinion if Pakistan could counter Cruise missiles.

“If these missiles come into open spaces, then our Hamze missile can attack them. But if they fly so low, they are not detected on radar,” the Pakistani nuclear scientist said.

Otherwise, Dr Qadeer said, Pakistan Air Force planes, which have in their armoury state-of-art F-16 fighting falcons, Mirages and Chinese-made MIG derivates and out anti-aircraft guns, can shoot them down.

He conceded that Tomahawks were very accurate and hit their target 99 per cent of the time.

Lockerbie bombing: Libya may not
surrender suspects

LONDON, Aug 26 (ANI) — Even as Britain and the USA have planned the trial of suspects in the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing at the Hague, a source close to the victims’ families said Libya would not surrender them for prosecution before the international jury.

“I think there’s no prospect of a trial taking place. The Libyans will never surrender the suspects,’’ the source said.

US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook on Monday proposed the two men be tried before three Scottish judges at the Hague. The two were suspected to be involved in planting the bomb which blew up a Pan Am airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people.

“The trial just isn’t going to happen,’’ he said. “The chances of success are slim. Libyan leader Maummar Gaddafi is unlikely to agree to anything that could provoke a blood feud or lose so much face in an affair which has for a year cost his country dear,’’ a local English paper said.

Meanwhile, Scotland’s chief law officer said a trial could start early in 1999, if all went well according to the plan.

Three die in firing on Indo-Bangla border

DINAJPUR (Bangladesh), Aug 26 (Reuters) — One guard from each side and a Bangladeshi boy were killed when Indian and Bangladeshi border guards exchanged fire last night, security officials claimed here today.

At least 10 Bangladeshis, including four guards, were injured last night, they said.

(A BSF spokesman in Calcutta last night said one BSF jawan and a civilian were injured in intermittent firing by Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) on the Indo-Bangla border at Hilli in South Dinajpur district of West Bengal.)

Members of the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) were rebuilding a brick wall demolished by smugglers at the border security post of hilly when Indian Border Security Force (BSF) personnel opened fire on them, a BDR commander claimed.

Hilli, about 80 km from the northern Bangladesh town of Dinajpur, is a known passage for smugglers from both countries, the police said.

Girl trafficking: Nepal Dy PM’s call to
protest at Parliament

KATHMANDU, Aug 26 (IPS) — Shailja Acharya, a senior politician of Nepal, has some very unusual advice to give women campaigners to end a decades-old racket in the smuggling of Nepali women to India as sex workers.

“The time to hold seminars and make statements is long over,” Acharya, Nepal’s first woman Deputy Prime Minister, told a group of Nepali activists recently. She added for good measure: “This won’t solve the problem. Go to Parliament, break some windows, make a noise.”

Every year thousands of young women — some barely in their teens — are smuggled out of their remote and impoverished village homes in the mountains of Nepal to the plains of India, where they are forced to work as prostitutes.

Many end up contracting HIV/AIDS. Some live out their lives in the squalid red light districts of Indian metropolises such as Mumbai, Calcutta and Delhi. A few are rescued and returned to their homes in the Himalayan kingdom — women such as Suntali.

It was four years ago that Suntali, driven by poverty, left her village of Khotang and walked across the mountains for a week to reach the Nepali capital in search of work. Now she plans to return, so that she can warn others about what happened to her.

For in those four years Suntali was sold to a brothel in Mumbai made to work as a virtual sex slave and contracted HIV before being rescued by police and returned to a shelter in Nepal.

After her rescue, Suntali and some others were placed in a Mumbai shelter for sex workers. There she lived in a limbo — the Nepali government didn’t make any moves to take the girls back and they had nowhere to go in India. Finally, six Nepali charity organisations got together to fly home 128 girls, among them Suntali.

Nepali welfare agencies say there are about 200,000 such Nepali girls at any given time in Indian cities. About 20 per cent of them are younger than 16 and surveys in a Mumbai red light area last year showed that nearly half had contracted HIV. Another survey showed that 5,000 Nepali girls are taken to India every year from Nepal, many sold by their desperately poor husbands, relatives and — in some cases — parents.

Most girls have to work for a year or two without pay, because brothel-owners need to recover the price paid for them. When they fall sick or become ‘too old’, many do find their way home. But they also take the virus back to their villages where awareness of HIV/AIDS is low.

Many experts hold that Nepal faces a serious AIDS crisis. According to estimates by American epidemiologist Jim Chin, Nepal will have 44,000 HIV-positive people by 1999, nearly 9,000 of them with AIDS.

“It is a massive problem,” says Kalyan Raj Pandey of Nepal’s Department of Health. “We are going to be swamped by AIDS in a few years.”

Outrage at the trafficking of Nepali girls is growing — Deputy Prime Minister Shailja Acharya’s forthright remarks were an obvious reference to the apathy of legislators representing those districts where trafficking is most common.

Sahana Pradhan, president of one of the factions of the Communist Party of Nepal, says that in addition to poverty, the low status of women is a reason for the trafficking. “As long as women do not have economic control over their lives, they will be sold to fulfil the family’s material needs,” she says. “A lot of trafficking would stop if daughters had the same right to parental property as sons.”

Fahd ‘readmitted’ to hospital

DUBAI, Aug 26 (Reuters) —Diplomats in Saudi Arabia have said that they had reliable reports that King Fahd had been readmitted to hospital, less than a week after he was discharged following surgery to remove his gall bladder.

“We have taken it as a fact. He went to the hospital in the small hours of Friday. He had some sort of retention of fluid after the operation which I understand is quite normal after that sort of operation,” a diplomat said.

There was no official confirmation.

Annan to attend NAM summit
UNITED NATIONS: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is to visit South Africa next week to attend the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Durban, his spokesman said. Mr Annan, who is currently vacationing in his native Ghana, is to meet with eminent South Africans in Johannesburg on September one to discuss government and poverty issues, spokesman Fred Eckhard told a news briefing here on Tuesday. — AFP

Juppe suspect
PARIS: A judge has placed former French Prime Minister Alain Juppe under formal investigation — a step short of being charged — for an alleged role in a fake employment scandal while he served at Paris’ City Hall, judicial sources said. Judge Patrick Desmure is investigating a system under which workers on the city hall payroll were actually working for the Conservative rally for the Republic Party, which President Jacques Chirac founded and to which Mr Juppe belonged. Mr Juppe resigned as Prime Minister in 1997. — AP

Retaliation
CAPE TOWN: A radical Muslim group claimed responsibility for a bomb that killed a woman in Cape Town’s popular Planet Hollywood Restaurant saying that it was in retaliation for US attacks in Sudan and Afghanistan. Western Cape Police Commissioner Leon Wessels said at the scene on Wednesday that 25 persons were injured in the US-franchise restaurant by the blast at around 5.20 p.m. — Reuters

Minors rape girl
WILMINGTON: Delaware brothers aged eight and nine have been arrested for the rape of a nine-year-old girl, the police said on Wednesday. Another nine-year-old girl, who allegedly helped the boys hold the victim down was arrested last week. All three have been charged with rape and kidnapping the police described it as the only sexual assault case on record to involve suspects so young. — Reuters

Trees under fire
LONDON: Ten per cent of the world’s tree species face extinction through felling, forest fires and poor forest management, conservationists said in a report on Wednesday. “With 77 species already extinct, this report has now confirmed our worst nightmare, — said Dr Steve Howard of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The world list of threatened trees details over 8,753 of the world’s 80,000 to 100,000 tree species as being in danger of extinction. — Reuters

No to talks
BANGKOK: Myanmar’s military government has told foreign military attaches it will neither allow the Opposition to form a Parliament nor talk to Opposition Leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Yangon-based diplomat said on Wednesday. The ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) argued that Suu Kyi general secretary of the National League for Democracy (NLD) and Tin Oo, the party’s vice-chairman, had been officially stripped of their posts in 1990 the diplomat said. — Reuters

Taiwan’s satellite
TAIPEI: Taiwan’s first satellite blasted into orbit from French Guiana on Wednesday aboard a European Airiane-44P rocket in a joint venture with Singapore Telecom (Singtel), officials said. The ST-1 telecommunications craft will go through two months of testing and adjustment before it is handed over to its owners. — AFP

Lennon’s half sister
LONDON: A woman claiming to be the lost half sister of John Lennon has come forward 18 years after the pop legend was gunned down on a New York Street, the Sun newspaper reported on Monday. Victoria Elizabeth Lennon — born of an unknown father — was given away for adoption by John’s mother Julia in Liverpool 53 years ago. — DPA

Net users
WASHINGTON: More than one-third of Americans over 16 use the Internet, an increase of more than 18 million people in nine months, according to a new survey. The study by Nielsen Media Research and Commercenet estimates 70.2 million adult Americans use the Internet, with the largest increases among blacks and American Indians and among young adults and women over 50 in the nine months through June, 1998. — AP