Disease ravages Centam states
Toll may hit 10,000
TEGUCIGALPA (Honduras), Nov 6 — Better information from Honduras’ ravaged countryside enabled officials to lower the confirmed death toll from Hurricane Mitch from 7,000 to about 6,100 yesterday, but leaders insisted the need for help was growing.

CHARLOTTESVILLE : Nobel Peace Laureates attending the Nobel Peace Laureates Conference at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., pose for a group photo in front of the Rotunda at the university on Thursday. (Front row, from left are) : Bobby Muller, of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines; Rigoberta Menchu Tum, of Guatemala; Bishop Desmond Tutu, of South Africa; and Betty Williams, of Northern Ireland. (Back row) : Harm Yawnghwe, representing Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma; Jose Ramos-Horta, of East Timor; Jody Williams, of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines; His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, of Tibet; and Oscar Arias Sanchez, of Costa Rica. AP/PTI

China ratifies mines convention
BEIJING, Nov 6 — China has ratified international conventions that restrict the use of landmines and blinding laser weapons amid reports that it was developing anti-satellite laser technology. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said the ratification documents were deposited with the United Nations this week.

UN tells Iraq to allow inspections
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 6 — The UN Security Council has unanimously demanded that Iraq immediately resume cooperation with UN weapons inspectors, which Baghdad has already refused to do.

UK could have ‘done more’ to stop Jews’ massacre
THERE would have been as many Nazi collaborators and quislings in Britain as occupied Europe if the country had been invaded in the Second World War, according to a study on the Holocaust published on Tuesday.

Alert in B’desh

Teenaged Pentagon hackers ‘sentenced’

Blast threatens to derail Wye accord
Three die in bomb blast in Jerusalem

JERUSALEM, Nov 6 (AFP) — The Israeli Government has suspended its debate on the Wye river land-for-security accord following a car-bomb attack in a Jerusalem market in which three people were killed, the Isreali Public Radio said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had submitted the accord to the Cabinet yesterday, which held 11 hours of debate before suspending its discussions for the night.

The agreement, signed in Washington on October 23, calls for Israel to withdraw from a further 13 per cent of the West Bank in return for a Palestinian crackdown on anti-Israeli militants.

Earlier, a car bomb exploded in the morning in the crowded Mahane Yehuda Market, and police said there were three dead and over 17 injured.

The car, a red Fiat, blew up at the entrance of the outdoor market, which was packed with weekend shoppers. The car was on fire, with black smoke covering the area.

The police tried to keep crowds away, fearing there might be a second explosion.

The blast went off shortly before 10 a.m. (1.30 p.m. IST) at the entrance to the outdoor market near Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station.

Israel’s Cabinet, which was meeting at the time of the blast to debate the peace agreement with the Palestinians, dispersed after hearing news of the explosion.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

A Reuters correspondent at the scene said a car stood burning on the street corner by the market and that a body, charred and with blood streaming from the head, lay nearby. It was not clear whether the person was dead.

A red car drove fast and crashed into one of the stalls. There was an explosion and then a second blast 90 seconds later, one witness said.

Disease ravages Centam states
Toll may hit 10,000

TEGUCIGALPA (Honduras), Nov 6 (AP) — Better information from Honduras’ ravaged countryside enabled officials to lower the confirmed death toll from Hurricane Mitch from 7,000 to about 6,100 yesterday, but leaders insisted the need for help was growing.

President Carlos Flores declared Hurricane Mitch had set back Honduras’ development by 50 years. He urged the more than 1.5 million Hondurans affected by the storm to help with the recovery effort.

“The country is semi-destroyed and awaits the maximum effort and most fervent and constant work of every one of its children,” he said.

In the capital, Tegucigalpa, Mexican rescue teams began searching for avalanche victims. Honduran doctors dispensed vaccinations to prevent disease outbreaks in shelters crammed with refugees.

As of yesterday, Mitch had killed 6,076 persons in Honduras — down from officials’ earlier estimate of 7,000. The numbers of missing dropped from an estimated 11,000 to 4,621, government minister Delmer Urbizo said.

“We have more access to places affected by the storm,” Mr Urbizo explained. “Until now, we have had a short amount of time and few resources to get reliable information,” he added.

In Nicaragua, as many as 2,000 persons were killed, most of those swept away when a volcano crater lake collapsed a week ago. El Salvador reported 239 dead. Guatemala said 194 of its people had been killed. Six persons died in southern Mexico and seven in Costa Rica.

Aid groups and governments have called for other countries to send medicine, water, canned food, roofing materials and equipment to help deliver supplies.

In Washington yesterday, President Bill Clinton ordered $ 30 million in Defence Department equipment and services and $ 36 million in food, fuel and other aid to be sent to Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.

The White House also said Mr Clinton was dispatching Mr Tipper Gore, wife of Vice-President Al Gore, to Central America on a mission to show US commitment to providing humanitarian relief.

Mrs Hillary Rodham Clinton also will travel to the region, visiting Nicaragua and Honduras on November 16. She later will stop in El Salvador and Guatemala before continuing on to Haiti and the Dominican Republic for a visit that had been cancelled due to Hurricane Georges, which struck the Caribbean in October.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters): The death toll from Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua had risen to more than 3,800 dead from the 1,452 previously, President Arnoldo Aleman has said.

“We have counted for the moment more than 3,800 victims ... these are deaths that have been counted, touched and buried,” Mr Aleman told Mexican broadcaster Televisa in an interview on Thursday.

Adding in the new figure, the total number of dead in Central America would be more than 11,000.

‘Check human rights violation’ in Kosovo

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 6 (AP) — UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for an expanded international human rights presence in Kosovo, where conflict between the Serb security forces and ethnic Albanians has left about 700 persons dead.

Despite the October 12 peace agreement for Kosovo, brokered by US envoy Richard Holbrooke, Mr Annan said the human rights situation in the region continued to be a grave cause for concern.

In a report on the human rights situation in Kosovo, the Secretary-General cited examples of massacres and abductions, and noted reports of arbitrary arrests, torture, deaths in police custody and violent searches of the houses of political activists.

He said Mr Holbrooke’s agreement with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic provided the basis for increasing the international community’s monitoring capability in the region.

The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) announced that the first 46 members of a 2,000-strong international mission of unarmed observers would arrive in Kosovo next week to start the long-term verification of the October 12 accord.

But Mr Annan noted that the OSCE mission does not have an explicit human rights mandate. He said the organisation was consulting the UN High Commissioner for Refugees on ways to cooperate on human rights.

In the report, the Secretary-General said some 700 persons were believed to have lost their lives since hostilities began in the spring, while more than 2,40,000 persons were estimated to be internally displaced in Kosovo and other parts of Yugoslavia.”

Another 14,000 persons fled across the border to Albania, he said.

According to a UN inter-agency update on Kosovo released yesterday, thousands of displaced persons have returned to their villages since the Serb military withdrawal on October 27.

Several returnees were killed by anti-personnel landmines or booby-traps laid around houses and other buildings or wells, it said.

China ratifies mines convention

BEIJING, Nov 6 (PTI) — China has ratified international conventions that restrict the use of landmines and blinding laser weapons amid reports that it was developing anti-satellite laser technology.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said the ratification documents were deposited with the United Nations this week.

Mr Zhu told newsmen that China stands for proper and appropriate control over the use of landmines and supported efforts to curb the maiming and killing of innocent civilians by landmines.

The international convention will come into force in 1999.

A white paper on China’s national defence points out that as a country with long land borders, China has to reserve the right to use anti-personnel landmines (APLs) till an alternative solution is found out and its requirements in security and defence capability are catered for.

Defending the decision, it also points out that China’s use of APLs under legitimate circumstances is entirely aimed at preventing foreign military interference and aggression.

Mr Zhu said China had also donated $ 100,000 to a UN trust fund for mine clearance in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

UN tells Iraq to allow inspections

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 6 (AP) — The UN Security Council has unanimously demanded that Iraq immediately resume cooperation with UN weapons inspectors, which Baghdad has already refused to do.

The legally binding resolution adopted by the council did not include a time-table for lifting the crippling economic sanctions, which Iraq had demanded as the price for reversing its decision to cut all dealings with the inspectors.

The council put into international law its statement on Saturday that condemned Iraq’s decision to halt cooperation with inspectors as a flagrant violation’’ of UN resolutions.

While the council stands united in its condemnation and demands that Iraq reverse its decision to halt cooperation with the inspectors, it remains divided on what to do if Baghdad refuses.

The Security Council resolution makes no explicit threats to use force if Baghdad does not comply.

But the United States and Britain say they already have authorisation to take military action against Iraq from previous council resolutions a view rejected by other council members.

UK could have ‘done more’ to stop
Jews’ massacre
from Richard Norton-Taylor in London

THERE would have been as many Nazi collaborators and quislings in Britain as occupied Europe if the country had been invaded in the Second World War, according to a study on the Holocaust published on Tuesday.

David Cesarani, a widely respected historian, also says Britain could have helped to save thousands of Jews by bombing railway lines from Hungary to the Auschwitz concentration camp and dropping supplies to the “death marches” in 1944. On Monday, he described the failure to help the Jews as a “stain on the allies’ war record”.

He bases his argument on the claim that in the Channel Islands — the only part of Britain occupied — “cooperation and fraternisation with the Germans was the rule. There were almost no protests against the application of Nazi race laws”.

He recognises that it would have been difficult for Jersey and Guernsey to resist but notes that a post-war government inquiry which detected widespread, unforced, collaboration among the islanders was suppressed for 40 years because it disturbed the image of the British people heroically resisting the Germans to the last breath.

“What happened in the Channel Islands can be seen as an indicator as to how the British would have responded in the event of a successful German invasion”, he says.

“Sadly, the evidence suggests that there would have been as many collaborators and quislings as in occupied Europe. The Jews would have faced the usual forms of persecution and would have received little help”.

Documents released three years ago at the Public Record Office showed that Winston Churchill learned about the scale of massacres of Jews as early as summer 1941 from decoded messages from SS and German police units in Russia. But there was little Britain could do then and a public acknowledgement might have alerted the Germans to the fact that Britain was breaking their codes, Cesarani concedes in his study, “Britain and the Holocaust”.

Independent confirmation of the plan to annihilate the Jews came in 1942 from Gerhard Riegner, a Jewish official in Geneva, and Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish underground.

But in London Jewish leaders’ lobbying for action was met with resistance from civil servants. They “viewed the protests as Zionist attempts to win sympathy for increased immigration into Palestine”, Cesarani says.

In mid-1944 when the Germans occupied Hungary and the Allies were on their way to winning the war, the government resisted any attempt to prevent Jews being deported to Auschwitz though the deportations were known about in London virtually as they were taking place.

— The Guardian, London

Alert in B’desh

DHAKA, Nov 6 (PTI) — A security alert has been sounded in Bangladesh amid fears of attempts to disrupt the delivery of the upcoming verdict in the trial of alleged murderers of Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on November 8, media reports today said.

An intelligence agency here has alerted the government of a plot by some absconding prime suspects of 1975 killings, to destabilise the government in the country, the reports said.

Quoting an intelligence report, the leading Bengali daily Sangbad claimed that the alleged absconding killers — former Lt-Col Shariful Haq Dalim, former Colonel Abdur Rashid and ex-Major Noor Chowdhury — had sent money amounting to 60 crore taka to some top Bangladeshi opposition leaders through a Middle East country in a bid to disrupt the delivery of the verdict and destabilise the Awami League government.

The daily said the money which had already been “shared” by some top-level leaders of a major opposition party and fundamentalist opposition parties was already being utilised to hand over illegal arms and other explosives to the cadres in a bid to create a situation to destabilise the Awami League government.

Teenaged Pentagon hackers ‘sentenced’

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 6 (Reuters) — Two California teenagers who mounted one of the most systematic hack attacks ever on US military computers have received their official sentence from a federal judge: no more computers.

US District Judge Maxine Chesney ordered the two, aged 16 and 17, to keep their cybernoses clean during their three-year probation, the US Attorney’s Office said yesterday.

“The defendants will attend school and make their grades,” the office said, reporting the conditions of probation imposed during Wednesday’s closed sentencing session.

The judge forbade the hackers from possessing or using a computer modem, from acting as computer consultants, or having any contact with computers out of sight of “a school teacher, librarian, an employer, or other person approved by the probation officer.”

Mr Chris Andrian, a lawyer for one of the boys, said yesterday the judge had been wise to pull the plug.

“That is the punishment aspect. It is like taking their toy away from them,” Mr Andrian said. “But I think (the order) should stick. They have been sufficiently frightened and humiliated that they don’t want to run back into the arms of the law”, he added.

The two hackers, who have not been officially identified, pleaded guilty in July to charges of juvenile delinquency.

After an intensive investigation by the FBI, the Defence Department and NASA, all alarmed over hacker assaults on sensitive military and institutional computers, the boys were cornered on February 25, when FBI agents descended on Cloverdale, about 120 km north of San Francisco, searched their homes and seized computers software and printers.

Although officials said no classified networks were penetrated, the ease with which the hackers accessed computers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the US Air Force and other organisations clearly demonstrated how vulnerable the US computer system had become.

Deputy Defence Secretary John Hamre told reporters the barrage was “the most organised and systematic attack the Pentagon has seen to date,” and officials said later the boys’ activities “had the potential to disrupt military communications throughout the world.”

The teenagers, who went by the codenames “Makaveli” and “Tooshort”, pleaded guilty to illegally accessing restricted computers, using “sniffer” programmes to intercept computer passwords and reprogramming computers to allow complete access to all of their files.

They also pleaded guilty to inserting “backdoor” programmes in the computers to allow themselves to re-enter at will.

Beginning with a local Internet service provider, which eventually realised the alarm over possible intrusion, the boys leapfrogged into other systems, including the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, national laboratories, numerous military computers and two sites in Mexico.

Batman creator dead
LOS ANGELES: Cartoonist Bob Kane, who as a young man in his 20s gave up drawing silly animals to create “Batman”, one of the world’s most enduring superheroes, has died at the age 83, his publisher said. DC Comics, which still published a wide range of Batman comic books said on Thursday at his home here. Friends said Kane died of natural causes. The New York-city born artist, who had changed his family name Kahn to Kane, created the world’s first human superhero. Superman, which began a year before Batman, was born on the dying planet Krypton and sent to earth to save his life. Batman was different. — Reuters

US sanctions
WASHINGTON: The US government extended sweeping economic sanctions against the government of Sudan for one more year, the State Department has announced. The sanctions bar all trade with Sudan with the single exception of gum arabic, a product used in manufacturing and which is not found in other countries. State Department spokesman James Rubin said on Thursday that there was no specific new action by Sudan that brought about the continued sanctions. — DPA

Jack Nicholson
BEVERLY HILLS (California): Oscar-winning actor Jack Nicholson will receive the 1999 Cecil B Demille Award for Lifetime Achievement in the entertainment field, the Hollywood Foreign Press association has said. Nicholson, winner of three Academy awards and five Golden Globes during his four-decade career in film, will be given the award at the 56th annual Golden Globe awards in Beverly Hills in January. The star of “Chinatown,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest” and “The Shining” won the best-actor Oscar last year for “As Good As It Gets”. — Reuters

Child soldiers
UNITED NATIONS: The UN special representative for children in armed conflict has appealed to factions in Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone to honour promises banning child soldiers. Despite a commitment in May, the LTTE had continued to recruit and use children in their struggle against the Sri Lankan government, Special Representative Olara Otunnu said. Otunnu made a similar appeal to Sierra Leone, saying that civil defence forces, as well as rebels were continuing to recruit children. — AFP

Death sentence
BEIJING: A former senior tax official and three businessmen were sentenced to death in China’s largest tax fraud case involving 6.31 billion yuan ($ 760 m), The China Daily reported on Thursday. Yang Shangrong, former director of the Jinhua Tax Bureau inspection team, Hu Yingfeng, Wu Yuedong and Lu Huaming from Jinhua country in eastern Zhejiang province were sentenced to death by the Jinhua intermediate people’s court. The four were among 89 people including senior officials arrested in the case, the report said. — AFP

Noor Jehan on dialysis
KARACHI: Noor Jehan, the melody queen, was put on dialysis on Thursday night. However, according to sources at the hospital, she is stable. — ANI