No US air strike from S. Arabia: Fahd
RIYADH, Nov 4 — Saudi King Fahd has told visiting US Defence Secretary William Cohen that Saudi Arabia will not allow its territory to be used as a springboard for striking Iraq in the event that Washington decided to do so, a Saudi official source said.

Give commitments in writing: Netanyahu
JERUSALEM, Nov 4 — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said today that he would not convene his Cabinet to approve the Wye river land-for-security agreement until he received Palestinian commitments in writing.

Jefferson fathered son from slave?
WASHINGTON, Nov 4 — Genetic tests have established with near certainty that one of the founding fathers of the USA, Thomas Jefferson, a defender of slavery in those times, fathered a son by one of his slaves Sally Hemings, according to geneticist Eric S Lander and historian Joseph J Ellis in the journal, “Nature”.

Laden ‘not behind’ bomb attacks
KUWAIT, Nov 4 — Saudi Arabian Interior Minister Prince Nayef said in an interview published today that Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden did not mastermind bomb attacks in the kingdom which killed 24 US servicemen.

While Mr Charles Schumer threw out three-time Republican Senator Alfonse D’Amato in New York, Senator Lauch Faircloth lost to democrat John Edwards in North Carolina.

Besides, the all 435 seats of House of Representatives and 34 seats of the Senate, 36 governorships were also at stake in the elections, whose results were being closely monitored by Mr Clinton.

In Wisconsin, Democrat Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay non-incumbent to win election to the House of Representatives.

The surprises also included the election of wrestler Jesse “the body” Ventura as Governor of Minnesota defeating Democrat Hubert Humphrey, son of a former Republican Vice-President.

Two sons of former President George Bush, Jeb and George Jr., won gubernatorial races in Texas and Florida.

Preliminary results also showed stunning Democratic upsets in Senate races in New York and North Carolina, as well as in Governors’ contests in Alabama and South Carolina.

With the results pouring in, an upbeat mood swept the White House. Vice-President Al Gore hailed the results as “a great night for Democrats and a great night for the country” and suggested that the voters were sending a message that Republicans should put the Monica Lewinsky investigation behind them.

The ability of the Democrats to avoid the feared heavy losses in the elections is attributed mainly to Clinton’s consistent and emotional support to minorities on issues ranging from education to immigration and welfare payments and the general lack of sympathy for them among the Republicans with some exceptions.

Bush sons win 2 Governorships

WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (AP) — Texas Governor George W Bush easily won re-election yesterday, likely to fuel his Presidential aspirations and reflecting a Republican dominance in statehouse races. His brother, Jeb, also won in Florida, making them the first brothers to simultaneously run states since the Rockefellers.

At the same time, two southern Republican Governors, Mr David Beasley of South Carolina and Mr Fob James of Alabama, lost their bids for re-election. Acting Governor, Paul Cellucci of Massachusetts, another Republican incumbent, ran neck-and-neck with Democratic Attorney-General Scott Harshbarger.

Governor Parris Glendening of Maryland won in a closely fought rematch with Republican Ellen Sauerbrey, and Democratic incumbents won re-election in New Hampshire and Vermont. The party also was optimistic about retaining the office being vacated by Democratic Governor Zell Miller in Georgia.

Mr Jeb Bush beat Lt-Governor Buddy Mackay, avenging his loss to Democrat Governor Lawton Chiles four years ago. Two brothers haven’t held the Governor’s offices simultaneously since Nelson Rockefeller was Governor of New York (1958-73) and Winthrop Rockefeller was Governor of Arkansas (1967-71).

Mr Beasley, a party standard-bearer as chairman of the Republican Governors Association, lost his seat to former State House Minority leader Jim Hodges. He was defeated by Lt-Governor Don Siegelman, proponent of a popular plan to bolster Alabama schools with a state lottery.

In Minnesota, early returns showed reform party candidate Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler, winning over two major party candidates Democratic Attorney-General Hubert Skip Humphrey-III and Republican St Paul Mayor Norm Coleman. 

Heading into yesterday’s voting, the Republicans already hold the Governorship in 32 states. Both parties expected to trade some seats, with the Republicans predicting a gain of one of two when the counting ended.

The Democrats were aiming for the Governor’s suite in California, where Lt-Governor Gray Davis was leading Republican Attorney-General Dan Lungren. The Democrats hoped that winning the Governorship of America’s most populous state could help tilt the House of Representatives in their favour when Congressional districts are redrawn after the 2000 census.

Democrats were struggling in Hawaii, where Governor Ben Cayetano faced Maui Mayor Linda Lingle, a Republican. A loss by Mr Cayetano would turn over the Governor’s office to Republicans for the first time since 1962.

Late polls showed Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Bob Taft, favoured to win. Both parties were less confident in predicting the winners in Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Illinois and Iowa.

Besides George W Bush’s victory in Texas, wins by incumbent Republican Governors included Frank Keating in Oklahoma, Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin, John Engler in Michigan, Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania and George Pataki in New York sure to trigger speculation about them as Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidates in 2000.

Republican incumbents also won in Arkansas, Arizona, Connecticut, Kansas, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming. In another closely watched rematch, Rhode Island’s Republican Governor Lincoln Almond fended off a challenge from Democrat Myrth York. Senator Dirk Kempthorne won the race in Idaho, holding it for the Republicans.

All told, 36 governorships were up for election. The Republicans held 24, Democrats had 11 and Maine Governor Angus King Jr was the lone Independent on the ballot. He easily won re-election.

No US air strike from S. Arabia: Fahd

RIYADH, Nov 4 (DPA) — Saudi King Fahd has told visiting US Defence Secretary William Cohen that Saudi Arabia will not allow its territory to be used as a springboard for striking Iraq in the event that Washington decided to do so, a Saudi official source said.

Mr Cohen arrived in Saudi Arabia yesterday to discuss the latest stand-off between Iraq and the UN arms inspectors, the Saudi press agency reported.

“The Saudi leadership conveyed to Mr Cohen its total refusal to have Saudi territory used as a springboard for striking Iraq,” said the source yesterday on condition of anonymity.

LONDON (ANI): An Iraqi defector Abbas Al-Janabi has said that President Saddam Hussein has an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, so well-hidden that even his Foreign Minister is unaware of them.

Mr Abbas, who was Private Secretary to Saddam’s son, Uday, for 15 years, fled Baghdad in February and is now living at an undisclosed place.

He told the newspaper, The Guardian, that even Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz believed that the weapons were finished. “He (Tareq Aziz) is important outside Iraq but he is nothing in his own country,” he added.

The Guardian said diplomats regard Janabi as one of the best-informed Iraqis to have defected to the West in recent years.

TEHERAN (AP): Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said the USA is intent on “total domination” of Iran and that severing relations with it was in Iran’s interest.

“Today, on the surface it appears that the tone of American officials has changed. However, the reality is the same,” Ayatollah Khamenei said yesterday in comments broadcast by Iranian radio.

“America will not be happy with anything less than the total domination of this country’s political and economic resources,” said Ayatollah Khamenei, who represents the dominant hardline group in the ruling clergy.

His comments challenge the softer approach of moderate President Mohammad Khatami, who has suggested cultural exchanges between Iranians and the Americans.

Ayatollah Khamenei spoke on the Iranian national day, which coincides with the anniversary of the days when students, fired by the spirit of the 1979 Islamic revolution, took over the US Embassy in Teheran.

The revolution toppled the US-backed Shah’s regime and installed the clerical rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Khamenei’s predecessor.

Radical Muslim students stormed the US Embassy on November 4, 1979, and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The event led to the severing of US-Iran relations.

‘Mitch’ toll soars to 9,000

TEGUCIGALPA, (Honduras), Nov 4 (AP) — The death toll in hurricane “Mitch” grew to an estimated 9,000 dead yesterday, counted in bodies drifting down rivers, in corpses rotting in drying mudslides, in hundreds of thousands left homeless.

Some 7,000 deaths occurred in Honduras, Col Rene Osorio of the country’s national emergency commission said late yesterday in a telephone interview.

The scope of the tragedy was likely to widen Col Osorio said 11,100 persons remained missing almost a week after ‘Mitch’ began lashing the country with heavy rain.

Natural disasters in the region seemed endless as a volcano in Nicaragua began erupting near the Casitas peak where massive mudslides killed as many as 1,950 persons last Friday. ‘Mitch’, one of the century’s most formidable storms, regrouped on Tuesday into a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico.

Floods and mudslides caused by ‘Mitch’ were blamed for deaths across a broad, 805-km corridor from Nicaragua into southern Mexico, from the hurricane-scoured Bay Islands off Honduras’ Atlantic coast to the Pacific.

‘Mitch’ was forecast to move toward Florida later this week, though the storm’s 72 kph winds were a shadow of the 180/290 kph monster of last week.

Weather forecasters said ‘Mitch’ could strike the Yucatan peninsula and then Florida later in the week with heavy rain but not with anything approaching hurricane-force winds.

Most of the deaths in Nicaragua occurred when the crater lake of the Casitas volcano collapsed, sending a wall of mud and debris onto several villages below.

Mayor Felicita Zeledon of nearby Posoltega said 1,950 bodies had been recovered by yesterday.

Battered human bodies were found on Tuesday half-buried in the mud and entangled in sugar cane stalks, rotting because villagers had no gasoline to burn them.

Give commitments in writing: Netanyahu

JERUSALEM, Nov 4 (AFP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said today that he would not convene his Cabinet to approve the Wye river land-for-security agreement until he received Palestinian commitments in writing.

Netanyahu’s aides said the Prime Minister was waiting for details about how and when Mr Yasser Arafat’s security forces planned to capture and imprison 30 Palestinians accused of involvement in killing Israelis.

The USA was expected to provide a written guarantee for the arrest of the 30 men in question today the Israel daily, “Yediot Aharonot”, said.

Reuters adds: The US-brokered Israeli-Palestinian interim peace deal has sparked a war of words between the Palestinian authority (PA) and Iran.

But analysts said an exchange of insults between Iran and the PA since the deal was signed had as much to do with the domestic politics of both sides as with their radically different approaches to peace moves with Israel.

Iran called Mr Arafat an Israeli “lackey”. The Palestinians warned Teheran to keep its nose out of their affairs. Iran says Israel has no right to exist. It condemns the Middle East peace process as a “sell-out” of Palestinian and Muslim rights.

Jefferson fathered son from slave?

WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (PTI) — Genetic tests have established with near certainty that one of the founding fathers of the USA, Thomas Jefferson, a defender of slavery in those times, fathered a son by one of his slaves Sally Hemings, according to geneticist Eric S Lander and historian Joseph J Ellis in the journal, “Nature”.

Democrats are said to be happy with the finding because Jefferson was a Republican and his defence that whatever happened between him and Hemings was a private affair was the same as that employed by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

The DNA analysis, with the help of families believed to be descendants of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, was conducted by British and Dutch geneticists at Oxford, Leicester and Leiden Universities.

The tests were carried out at the instance of retired pathologist Eugene A Foster.

Reports 200-odd years ago said Jefferson fathered many children by Hemings. The genetic testing confirmed he had at least one son by her.

The Jefferson-Hemings affair had long been rumoured and reported at the time. Jefferson allegedly paid a journalist $ 50 in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent him from publishing it. He insisted it was a private affair which he was required neither to confirm nor deny.

An Associate Professor at the New York School of Law, Ms Annette Gordon-Reed, had said in a book on the Jefferson-Hemings affair in 1997 that oral histories of Blacks were being pushed aside to protect Jefferson’s reputation.

It was Jefferson who drafted the Declaration of American Independence in 1776 which proclaimed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. But he defended slavery and he owned slaves, one of whom was Hemings.

“I feel vindicated”, said Ms Julia Westerinen (64) of Staten Island, New York, Eston Hemings’ great great granddaughter.

Many historians had believed Thomas Woodson, the first son of Sally Hemings, was fathered by Jefferson.

John Taylor King, a Woodson descendant and retired president of Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas, said his family, which had a reunion at Monticello in 1992, stands by oral histories that have been passed down from generation to generation.

“We contend Jefferson was not a philanderer. He was 33 when his wife died and he fell in love with Martha’s (his wife’s) half-sister (Sally Hemings) and they were together for 36 years. That’s part of our family history and we stand by it”, he said.

Laden ‘not behind’ bomb attacks

KUWAIT, Nov 4 (Reuters) — Saudi Arabian Interior Minister Prince Nayef said in an interview published today that Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden did not mastermind bomb attacks in the kingdom which killed 24 US servicemen.

But he did not rule out in the interview with Al-Seyassah daily the possibility that people adopting Bin Laden’s Muslim extremist ideology might have carried out the 1995 and 1996 attacks in Riyadh and Khobar, respectively.

“It has been reported that the two explosions in Riyadh and Khobar (Eastern Saudi Arabia) were planned by Bin Laden. This is not true. But maybe there are people who adopt his ideas. That is possible”, Prince Nayef said.

Saudi Arabia beheaded four Saudis for the Riyadh bombing which killed five American servicemen and two Indians. The four Saudis had said they were influenced by Bin Laden and other Saudi dissidents.

No-trust vote
ATHENS: The Greek Government late on Wednesday night survived a vote of no-confidence in Parliament when 163 of the country’s 299 deputies backed the Cabinet of Prime Minister Kostas Smitis. No one abstained. Mr Smitis’ socialist government not only secured the votes of all socialist deputies, but also those of three Independents who were formerly members of the ruling Panchellenic socialist movement, Pasok. The vote concluded a three-day debate, which ended with an appeal by Mr Smitis that legislators hold firm to the country’s current course aimed at strengthening the country’s economy so that it could join the European Monetary Union. — DPA

European court
BRUSSELS: The Council of Europe inaugurated a streamlined European court of human rights in Strasbourg, France, that it hopes will deal faster with citizens complaints. ‘Nearly 800 million Europeans will have access to this court’, Daniel Tarschys, the secretary-general of the Council of Europe, said at the inauguration ceremony on Tuesday. With 40 judges and a jurisdiction spanning from Nuuk in Greenland to Petropavlovsk, in Kamchatka (in the Russian far east) ... this will be the largest permanent court in the world,” Tarschys said. — AP

Imperial list
TOKYO: Two Indians are among 34 foreigners on the Japanese imperial list announced on Tuesday. They are Mr A.M.M. Arunachalam, former Japanese counsellor in Madras, and Mr Dilip Kumar Chaudhury, formerly with the Japanese Embassy in London. — PTI

Film on Mandela
LONDON: Following up the success of his new film “Elizabeth”, Indian director Shekhar Kapur is due to begin shooting a film on Dr Nelson Mandela. Kapur has won the much sought after rights to the filming of Dr Mandela’s autobiography. The film is being made with Dr Mandela’s support and blessing. Kapur has already had two meetings with the South African President and plans for the filming are being worked out.— IANS

South Asia Chair
WASHINGTON: A prestigious US think tank with enormous resources has established an exclusive South Asia Chair and appointed one of the USA’s foremost experts on the subcontinent to occupy it. Mr Stephen Cohen, Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign, and director of the university’s programme in arms control, disarmament and international security, will direct the South Asia programme. — IANS