Opposition-led strike in B’desh: 60 hurt
DHAKA, Aug 22 — The opposition sponsored dawn-to-dusk strike in Bangladesh today left at least 60 hurt and disrupted normal life as government supporters clashed with protesters in the streets despite tight security arrangements, sources said today.

Taiwan President a rat: China
BEIJING, Aug 22 — China’s state media today heaped insults on Taiwan President Lee Teng-Hui in a bitter row over the island’s political future, with one newspaper calling him a ‘’rat’’ hated by everybody.

Di descendant of Shakespeare?
LONDON, Aug 22 — Is Britain’s Prince William descended from Shakespeare? A German academic claims to have found clues to a blood link between the Bard and Britain’s royal family, The Sunday Times reported.

Washington prays for rain
WASHINGTON, Aug 22 — Churches, mosques, temples and other places of worship are all praying for rain in the Greater Washington area, struck by unprecedented drought, even as Shata Chandi homam was conducted at Shri Shiva Vishnu Temple.

European hostages still captive

Focus shifts to fighting disease in Turkey

ISTANBUL, Aug 22 (AP) — With authorities scaling back survivor searches and concentrating on the immense difficulties facing earthquake survivors, more soldiers arrived today in devastated areas that were seething with anger at a perceived weak government response to one of the nation’s gravest tragedies.

The official death toll from Tuesday’s quake has surpassed 12,000 but some officials said as many of 40,000 dead are possible.

Much of the complaints have focussed on why Turkey’s military forces — one of the region’s largest with nearly 800,000 servicemen — appeared to hold off on a mass mobilisation to dig for survivors and tackle relief operations.

Even the increasing deployment of soldiers through the quake zone seemed more designed to maintain order than to provide help. Turkish media reported that soldiers had blocked some suspected looting — which has been very limited so far.

There was speculation in the Turkish media that the military response was complicated while it debated with political leaders on whether to declare martial law — a sensitive issue in a nation that has experienced three military coups in the past 20 years. The government decided such a decree was unnecessary, said the military Chief of Staff, Gen. Huseyin Kivrikoglu.

General Kivrikoglu also insisted that over 53,000 soldiers had been involved in efforts since hours after the quake struck and they had pulled out nearly 20,000 survivors from the rubble.

“We have the strength to overcome the damage of this earthquake very soon”, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said in a nationwide address. “We only need to trust the power of our nation and our state.”

With the chances of finding survivors slipping away, bulldozers and trucks moved into more sites to haul away rubble from the more than 115,000 destroyed buildings. Just seven people were rescued yesterday.

In the Golcuk area, about 180 km southeast of Istanbul, the disaster was compounded by surging waves and tides churned by the quake and aftershocks. Divers pulled more than 150 bodies from areas swallowed by the Sea of Marmara, Turkish state television reported today.

With the bodies piling up in makeshift morgues, health authorities grappled with ways to block possible epidemics such as typhoid fever, cholera or dysentery. Officials have sprayed disinfectants and distributed water purification tablets in some regions and started spreading purifying lime on rubble and roads.

Rains were forecast for tomorrow, which could complicate rescue efforts and pose increased health risks.

Meanwhile, officials slowly began acknowledging that the death tool could more than triple.

When asked if the numbers could rise as high as 40,000, Sergio Piazzi, Head of the European desk at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs,said it “is a possibility”.

Meanwhile, an earthquake measuring 4.3 on the Richter Scale today rocked eastern Turkey less than a week after Tuesday’s major quake.

Security officials in the regional capital, Diyarbakir, told Reuters that the epicentre of today’s quake was in the eastern province of Elazia.

“There were no casualties or damage to property”, an official at the provincial Governor’s office said.

The latest tremor struck at 11.13 a.m. (GMT) in an area far from the quake-stricken industrial hub of the country which was devastated by last week’s quake.

Russia enlists Islamic leaders

MOSCOW, Aug 22 (AFP) — Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has enlisted Islamic leaders in the battle for Dagestan as Russian warplanes pounded rebel-held mountain villages, where fighting entered its third week.

The Kremlin meanwhile cautioned that there was no quick solution to the conflict in the northern Caucasus.

Russian planes carried out 16 bombing raids in 24 hours to try to dislodge rebels holed up in mountain villages in the Botlikh district of Southwest Dagestan, the Russian Defence Ministry said.

While the air campaign gathered force in Dagestan, the new Russian Prime Minister yesterday won pledges of support from grand Mufti Sheikh Ravil Gainutdin, the spiritual leader of Russia’s 12 million Muslims.

The Dagestan Interior Ministry in Makhachkala said Russian forces had surrounded the village of Tando in Botlikh and taken control of a mountain pass which had served as an insurgents’ supply route from neighbouring Chechnya.

This could be a serious blow to the rebels who have been using the pass to evacuate wounded and obtain supplies of all kinds.

The Dagestan Interior Department also said Russian forces had killed 27 rebels and wounded 11 others yesterday, while three Dagestani volunteers had been wounded.

The death toll on the rebel side from two weeks of fighting has reached between 500 and 700, Col Vladimir Kulakov of the Russian Air Force was quoted by Itar-Tass as saying.

“Russia’s Islamic leaders will support Muslims in Dagestan who are fighting against the aggressors,” Gainutdin said following a meeting with Mr Putin at the government building in Moscow.

“The people who arrived in the republic bearing arms have nothing to do with defending the principles of Islam,” he said.

The Sheikh agreed to organise a meeting between Mr Putin and the council of muftis from Russia in the near future to help shore up grassroots opposition to the Muslim insurgents, who were members of the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect.

Mr Putin and he also agreed on the need to limit the spread of arms in Dagestan and to “prevent the civilian population from being dragged into the war,” said Gainutdin.

In a possible shift, Mr Putin said on Friday that the conflict with Islamic extremists in the northern Caucasus should be addressed by political means and the meeting with the grand mufti was a concrete step in that direction.

Russian forces backed by the Dagestani police are seeking to root out Muslim insurgents who crossed over from Chechnya on August 7 and seized mountain villages in southwest Dagestan as part of a drive to set up an Islamic state in the northern Caucasus.

Most of Dagestan’s 2.2 million inhabitants are moderate Muslims who do not support the Wahhabi fighters.

Moscow wants to prevent Muslims in Dagestan from being drawn to the fundamentalists in what could lead to a repeat of the devastating 1994-1996 Chechen war in which the local population sided with the rebels against Russian forces.

Cambodia’s Killing Fields
Fresh clues even after 20 years

PHNOM PENH, Aug 22 (Reuters) — More than 20 years after Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge Government were swept from power by a lightning Vietnamese invasion, researchers are still discovering fresh clues about who was responsible for the “Killing Fields’’.

Long forgotten files, bundles of papers and note books mouldering away in old cabinets and on dusty shelves are being found and they reveal fresh insights into about what happened under the Khmer Rouge.

“Material keeps coming in all the time,’’ Mr Craig Etcheson, a historian and Khmer Rouge expert working with the Documentation Centre of Cambodia told Reuters in a weekend interview.

“People bring us stuff and we continue searching new places that we haven’t looked yet. There are a lot of buildings in this city.’’

A UN team is due to arrive on Wednesday for talks with the government on a proposed trial for leaders of the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime during which some 1.7 million persons perished. The documentation centre’s findings are likely to prove crucial.

Most recently fresh information was unearthed about two top Khmer Rouge officials, Foreign Minister Ieng Sary and his wife, Ieng Thirith, both of them members of Pol Pot’s inner circle.

Bundles of old telegrams were discovered suggesting Ieng Sary, who insists he had no knowledge of the slaughter, knew full well about at least some of the killings.

“The evidence of guilty knowledge against Ieng Sary is now pretty damn good,’’ said Steve Heder, a Khmer Rouge scholar from London university’s School of Oriental and African studies, currently doing research at the documentation centre.

“The new tranche of evidence includes a whole bunch of telegrams from the provinces which not only describe the killing of Vietnamese prisoners of war and civilians but also purges in the countryside that I think Ieng Sary can no longer plausibly deny knowledge of,’’ Mr Heder said.

The Director of the Documentation Centre, Mr Youk Chhang, is at times reluctant to reveal the precise location that new information was found but says most of it has been gathering dust in old government offices.

Fresh clues are also being gleaned from the mountains of Khmer Rouge documents — some 400,000 pages in all — that the centre already has.

Evidence that Ieng Thirith, Khmer Rouge Minister of Social Action, knew of the killings was found in an old notebook, previously thought to contain only mundane medical notes.

“In the proverbial haystack there will continue to be needles and needles make the case,’’ Mr Heder said.

Opposition-led strike in B’desh: 60 hurt

DHAKA, Aug 22 (PTI) — The opposition sponsored dawn-to-dusk strike in Bangladesh today left at least 60 hurt and disrupted normal life as government supporters clashed with protesters in the streets despite tight security arrangements, sources said today.

In Dhaka, 15 people were injured in clashes between the supporters of the ruling Awami League and the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) as the strike began at 6 a.m. witnesses said. Another ten persons sustained injuries when a bomb went off inside a private bus at Tikatoli in central Dhaka.

Earlier, 35 people were hurt in the overnight violence involving the BNP and the Awami League workers in Munshiganj and Gazipur district headquarters town adjoining Dhaka, reports said.

Offices and schools were mostly closed, vehicular traffic remained off the roads, although buses of the state-owned Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation and private buses were seen operating on selected routes, witnesses said.

The BNP-led four-party opposition called for the weekend strike to protest the death of a BNP worker during an anti-government march against a plan to allow trans-shipment facilities to India. Sunday is a working day in Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, the police said at least 20 persons were injured in the overnight clashes between the main Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the ruling Awami League supporters at Munshiganj district headquarters town, 25 km from here.

Another 15 persons were injured in intra-party clashes between rival groups of the BNP while organising a torch procession last night at Handana Chowrasta area in sadar thana of Gajipur district.

Taiwan President a rat: China

BEIJING, Aug 22 (Reuters) — China’s state media today heaped insults on Taiwan President Lee Teng-Hui in a bitter row over the island’s political future, with one newspaper calling him a ‘’rat’’ hated by everybody.

Mr “Lee Teng-Hui, a rat running across the street with everybody shouting ‘smack it’,’’ the Liberation Army daily said in a commentary.

Beijing and Taipei have been locked in a war of words and military posturing since Mr lee declared last month that bilateral ties should be on a ‘’special state-to-state’’ basis to try to break Taiwan out of diplomatic isolation.

China, which has threatened to invade if Taiwan declares independence, saw Mr Lee’s declaration as a lurch towards statehood.

The mouthpiece of the People’s Liberation Army said Mr Lee was now ‘’known to every household in China, but his name stank’’.

It called him a ‘’fake President’’ and a ‘’traitor’’ and warned him not to play with fire.

On Friday, the Liberation Army daily called Mr Lee ‘’the number one scum of the nation’’.

Last week, the official Xinhua news agency said Mr Lee was a ‘’deformed test tube baby cultivated in the political laboratory of hostile anti-China forces’’.

Di descendant of Shakespeare?

LONDON, Aug 22 (Reuters) — Is Britain’s Prince William descended from Shakespeare? A German academic claims to have found clues to a blood link between the Bard and Britain’s royal family, The Sunday Times reported.

A new book points to evidence hidden in paintings to argue that Shakespeare had an illegitimate daughter Penelope who grew up to marry the second Baron Spencer — from whom Prince William’s mother the late Princess Diana was directly descended.

The book by Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel of Mainz University will be published next month as “The Secrets of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady,’’ The Sunday Times said.

It said the book names the woman with whom Shakespeare had the affair as Elizabeth Vernon, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth I.

A portrait of her known as “the Persian Lady in Hampton Court Palace bears a sonnet claimed to be by Shakespeare, the paper said. A portrait in another collection was said to carry a miniature image of the playwright’s face.

As for whether Shakespeare’s genes could reassert themselves in 17-year-old Prince William, the son of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, the times noted that so far he had excelled as a sportsman but was also thought to be a good English student.

Washington prays for rain

WASHINGTON, Aug 22 (PTI) — Churches, mosques, temples and other places of worship are all praying for rain in the Greater Washington area, struck by unprecedented drought, even as Shata Chandi homam was conducted at Shri Shiva Vishnu Temple.

The Washington Times yesterday carried pictures of the priests and the leaping flame which, the photograph clearly showed, formed the outlines of Goddess Chandi including her face, head-gear and uplifted hands as seen in the traditional representations of the goddess.

While the head priest, Shri Sambamurthi Sivachariar, who came from Chennai for the occasion, modestly took no credit, the Post noted that it had rained thrice during the 10-day ceremony.

“The heavens opened three times during a 10-day prayer marathon for rain at Shri Shiva Vishnu Temple in Lanham, twice in brief but torrential downpours,” it noted.

European hostages still captive

TEHERAN, Aug 22 (DPA) — Four European hostages and their Iranian guide being held by drug Traffickers in south-eastern Iran have not been freed yet as the kidnappers’ new demand also calls for a protection letter from the police, the Teheran daily Entekhab reported today.

Scholar released
BEIJING: An Australian researcher detained in the remote Chinese province of Qinghai has been released and is travelling back home, according to an Australian embassy spokesman. Scholar Gabriel Lafitte and Daja Mizu Meston, a Tibetan linguist from the USA were detained in Qinghai while they were conducting research in an area targeted for a controversial World Bank aid project. Following protests by the Australian Government, Mr Lafitte was on his way to Beijing en route to Australia, the spokesman said on Saturday on condition of anonymity. — AP

Envoy kidnapped
SANAA: The commercial attaché at the French embassy in Sanaa and his wife were kidnapped by tribesmen in Yemen, the police said on Saturday. The couple were seized in the Sirwaj region, 140 km east of Sanaa, by members of the Al-Jabar tribe. — AFP

‘Yes sir’ law
NEW ORLEANS (USA): Students who fail to address their teachers with courtesy titles will be disciplined under a state law taking effect when classes resume this year — but many school officials have yet to decide just how to mete out the punishment. Believed to be the first in the USA mandating respectful conversation, the law requires students in kindergarten through fifth grade to address teachers and other school employees as “ma’am” or “sir,” or to use appropriate titles, like Mr or Ms. — AP

Dubious honour
MINNEAPOLIS (USA): Minnesota Governor and best-selling author Jesse Ventura is having a room named after him at a brothel in Nevada that he admits having visited decades ago, according to a published report. The Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune said the moonlight bunny ranch in Carson city, where prostitution is legal, is remodelling its top-of-the-line “Monica’s oral office” into the “Jesse (the body) Ventura suite.” — DPA

Giant beetle
TOKYO: A 36-year-old President of a Japanese firm has bought a giant stag beetle measuring 80 milimeters for a record $ 90,000 from a store here specialising in insects. Store representatives said they had set the price and were surprised when someone came forward and bought the item. — ANI

Scaffolder gets relief
LONDON: A scaffolder who finds it difficult to kiss his wife after suffering serious injuries in a fall was awarded damages of nearly $ 500,000 by a judge in Scotland, according to a report. The accident transformed William Wilson (48) from a confident man who was regarded as one of the best at his business into a withdrawn individual with a permanent fear of heights, The Daily Telegraph reported on Saturday. He landed on concrete after falling 7 metres when a scaffolding board cracked at a dockyard. — DPA

Motorised toilet
LONDON: A motorised toilet set off from the southwest tip of England on a slow-motion charity drive the length of Britain. The electric motor-powered chemical portable potty eased on its way on Saturday at just 4 mph hour away from land’s end in Cornwall at the start of the 874-mile route to John O’Groats at the northeast tip of Scotland. — DPA