US influence will not work: Pak
ISLAMABAD, May 24 — The Nawaz Sharif government has got rid of the US influence and will never accept its hegemony over Pakistan, a senior minister declared amid the growing rift between Islamabad and Washington.

Nine held for bid to kill Shevardnadze
TBLISI, May 24 — Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze today said nine people had been arrested on charges of trying to assassinate him and overthrow the government.

BBC searching for new chief
LONDON, May 24 — The knives are out, the back-stabbing has begun and the bookies are taking bets. Judging from the machiavellian manoeuvring, you’d think it was a political race — not the stately selection process for the head of one of Britain’s most venerable institutions.

US Cong support for airstrikes eroding

WASHINGTON, May 24 (AP) — An increasing number of NATO bombing blunders against embassies, hospitals, and ethnic Albanian refugees and fighters is eroding allied and US congressional support for air strikes after two months.

Germany is so worried the alliance might lose our moral ground that its Foreign Minister was heading here to talk with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about new diplomatic approaches to end the conflict.

Senate majority leader Trent Lott said yesterday the air war’s mistakes unfairly are blemishing the US military, which he said has been sent on a mission in Yugoslavia that air power alone cannot win.

From US President Bill Clinton’s perspective, NATO is more unified than when the bombing began on March 24, though not without differences, he wrote in yesterday’s New York Times.

While there may be differences in domestic circumstances, cultural ties to the Balkans and ideas on tactics, there is no question about our unity on goals and our will to prevail, he wrote.

Ms Albright, appearing on CBS television programme face the nation, said the air strikes eventually would force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to agree to NATO’s peace terms.

Still, allies clearly have become edgy in recent days as incidents causing civilian casualties through collateral damage or mistaken attacks piled up this month.

Mr Joschka Fischer, Germany’s Foreign Minister, suggested NATO re-evaluate its targeting strategy.

Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy warned that further foul-ups could stymie delicate negotiations for a diplomatic solution.

Premier Massimo D’Alema of Italy urged a three-day cease-fire once a draft UN resolution for a Kosovo peace deal is approved.

So far, 13 incidents have been claimed by Yugoslavia or admitted by NATO. Seven were in May, with three in the past three days. As many as 312 persons have died, including ethnic Albanian civilians and members of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.

After about 26,000 sorties, or flights, over Yugoslavia, and about 15,000 bombs or missiles, NATO estimates that its mistake rate is less than one per cent.

Mr Lott, appearing on television just after Ms Albright, said the bombing is hurting US prestige.

“Quite frankly, these little boo-boos, where you’re hitting a KLA headquarters, where you’re killing innocent citizens, I think is hurting the image of the military, which is unfair,” Mr Lott said.

BELGRADE (DPA): Yugoslav forces have shot down a NATO plane near Klina, West of the Kosovo capital Pristina, according to a news report on Monday.

The aircraft was an A-10 “Thunderbolt”, the official news agency Tanjug said. The fate of the crew was not mentioned.

In “southern Kosovo an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft had also been shot down and plunged into Macedonian territory, the report said.

NATO forces were continuing their air attacks on northern Serbia on Monday.

Allied forces attacked fuel depots near Sombor, targets around Sabac and water supply installations near Sremska Mitrovica, the local news agency Beta said.

Large parts of Serbia remained without power or water early today, state television said, following NATO air attacks on power plants and distribution facilities in Kostloac.

SYDNEY(AFP): Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev called today for a compromise to end the war in Kosovo arguing that NATO had already broken all its teeth trying to cripple Yugoslavia.

In his only face-to-face interview during a week-long “motivational” lecture tour of Australia, he told ABC radio here he was very pleased that Yugoslavia was beating the combined might of NATO.

He also questioned what NATO might be able to achieve against nuclear powers or larger countries when it had proved itself incapable of defeating Yugoslavia.

“Two-thirds of the world’s fire power — NATO’s firepower — cannot cope with Yugoslavia,” the Nobel Peace Prize winner said through an interpreter. “So what would they do with China, with India, with Russia or Indonesia or whatever other countries?”

He conceded NATO bombing could flatten Yugoslavia, but said morally and politically, NATO had been defeated.

Benazir won’t return to Pak

LONDON, May 24 (PTI) — Former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has said she will not return to Pakistan to fight a conviction for corruption charges, saying her life was at risk.

Ms Bhutto said she would be thrown into prison as soon as she returned to Pakistan and believed her life would be at risk considering torture and alleged attacks on her husband Asif Ali Zardari.

“I plan to settle in Britain for some time,” said Ms Bhutto, who has moved back here after authorities in Dubai restrained her from launching any political campaign against Premier Nawaz Sharif from its soil.

This would be the second time Ms Bhutto would be making Britain her home in exile. She had spent almost three years here in exile during the regime of late Pakistan dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq.

“I was originally going back to answer the charges”, Ms Bhutto told Daily Telegraph adding, “but the courts are illegally refusing to suspend my sentence pending my appeal. I don’t know whether I would be allowed an appeal at all”.

She claimed that Mr Sharif was intent on creating a theocratic state in Pakistan modelled on Sudan, or the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, “where girls are not allowed to go to school and private militia dictates”.

Ms Bhutto claimed that she was now house hunting in England from where she planned to energise the opposition. “If I thought it would help the people I would go back. But after what has happened to my husband, I know I would perhaps be going to my death”.

IPS adds: For the second time, Ms Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister, is fighting for political survival from outside Pakistan, but the outcome is more unpredictable.

Ms Bhutto has been trying to clear their name, calling the investigations into reported amassing of wealth and a slew of murder charges a witchhunt by the government led by her rival Mr Nawaz Sharif, who each time has succeeded her as Prime Minister.

Last month, the former ruling couple were convicted by a high court in a corruption case and sentenced to five years in jail and excluded from holding political office for the period, which their lawyers have appealed against in the Supreme Court.

While Mr Zardari’s appeal petition has been accepted, Ms Bhutto’s lawyers were told that their client must be present in the country for the petition to be considered.

But Ms Bhutto has said her life and that of her family were in danger in Pakistan, which was strengthened by the injuries suffered by Mr Zardari this week, publicised in newspapers and TV.

She plans to go to Washington next week to persuade US officials that Mr Sharif was taking her country to “the dark days of dictatorship’’, as she stated in her letter to Mr Clinton, released to the Pakistani media by the PPP.

‘Honour killings’ abound in Pak

LAHORE, May 24 (Reuters) — When Samia Imran walked up the concrete staircase to her lawyer’s office, it was in the hope of finalising arrangements for a divorce.

When she came down, she was a corpse on a stretcher — shot through the head by a gunman who came with her own mother and uncle to the office.

Samia Imran’s killing has inflamed an impassioned social and political debate about “honour killings” — when families kill a female relative considered to have shamed the household — even though Samia’s family deny they ordered her death.

The debate turns on the way Pakistani women are treated by the family and the state in a patriarchal society where feudal power mixes with tribal customs and Islamic practice.

Samia’s lawyer, Hina Jilani, told Reuters in her tiny whitewashed office, where Samia was killed, that the 29-year-old had left her parents’ home and sought refuge at Dastak, a women’s shelter in Lahore. Pakistan’s second largest city.

Samia then agreed to meet her mother at Jilani’s office on April 6. It was a short meeting.

In front of Jilani’s desk, smeared along the wall, is a large brown stain where Samia collapsed after being shot at close range by Habibur Rahman — her parents’ former driver, who came into the office unannounced with her mother.

Witnesses say moments later Rahman was gunned down by Jilani’s security guards as he tried to leave. Samia’s mother and uncle left with her father, who was at a nearby hotel.

A formal investigation has yet to establish who was responsible for Samia’s death. The father, mother and uncle have all been granted a form of bail, but no charges have been laid.

Human rights activists estimate that at least 500 women were murdered in the name of family honour last year alone.

Honour killings are most frequent in rural Pakistan, where old feudal and tribal traditions exert strong influence on daily life. The reason can be anything seen as defiance of family wishes: a woman who rejects the husband, chosen for her or who seeks divorce, has an affair or behaves “immodestly”.

Sometimes relatives of the dead admit with pride to murder, citing “undue provocation”. Many cases never reach the courts. Even when they do, long jail sentences are rarely handed down.

But the murder of Samia Imran has attracted a storm of media attention and furious debates across the floor of the Senate.

One reason is the scene of the killing. Hina Jilani is known nationally and internationally as one of Pakistan’s foremost human rights campaigners and opponent of honour killings.

Secondly, Samia came from the upper echelons of Pakistan’s middle class. Her father, Ghulam Sawar Khan Mohmand, is a wealthy businessman and President of the Chamber of Commerce in the north west frontier city of Peshawar.

Pak making more N-bombs

ISLAMABAD, May 24 (Reuters) — The father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb says he has no regrets for making atomic weapons to “equal” India and that more are still being made.

“I never regretted (it). Because I believe that the bomb I made is for peaceful purposes. It has served the purpose. It has saved us from war,” Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer said in a weekend interview with Reuters television.

Pakistan has begun a week-long first anniversary celebration of its first nuclear tests, which sparked a global outcry and economic sanctions. The sanctions triggered an economic crisis from which the country is still reeling.

But Khan, 63, who also created the 2,000-km Ghauri missile that can carry nuclear warheads, said the price was worth paying, considering the security threat to Pakistan.

“You have to pay a price for your independence and sovereignty. So this was part of the game,” he said, referring to Pakistan’s economic crisis. “I think we have done a good job and it has been quite useful for the country.”

Khan said the six nuclear detonations — five on May 28 last year and one two days later — had not depleted Pakistan’s stockpile as some critics had suggested.

Asked whether his Khan Research Laboratories had made any more bombs after last year’s tests, he said: “Sure, because as long as you don’t sign the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) the process will be carried on”.

Khan said Pakistan was better off after the nuclear tests. “If you had not exploded the nuclear devices, the Indians would have called our bluff,” he said.

He said his organisation was constantly trying to improve the efficiency and its nuclear warheads and delivery missiles, and that the process would not be slowed even if Pakistan signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

US influence will not work: Pak

ISLAMABAD, May 24 (PTI) — The Nawaz Sharif government has got rid of the US influence and will never accept its hegemony over Pakistan, a senior minister declared amid the growing rift between Islamabad and Washington.

“We will no longer accept USA as our ruler”, Pakistani Labour Minister Sheikh Rashid said, addressing a public rally at Mianwali yesterday as part of the first anniversary of the country’s nuclear blasts.

Mr Rashid’s statement comes barely a couple of days after Premier Nawaz Sharif criticised the USA indirectly during a live address on the Pakistan television. Mr Sharif had said the 7th fleet never came to the rescue of Pakistan during 1965 and 1971 wars with India and that was why he ordered the nuclear tests last May to make Pakistan’s defence stronger.

Ethics panel backs embryo research

WASHINGTON, May 24 (PTI) — An ethics panel in the USA has decided to recommend that the Federal Government should begin funding research on human embryos, The Washington Post reported yesterday.

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission, headed by Mr Harold T. Shapiro, says the moral cost of destroying embryos in research is outweighed by the social good that could come from the work.

It cites recent evidence that some human embryo cells have the potential to grow into replacement tissues to treat a wide variety of chronic diseases.

The commission has concluded that it is essentially unfair to millions of patients for Congress to continue its broad, four-year-old funding ban on human embryo research.

Instead of a blanket ban, the panel recommends, federal rules should be so written as to ensure an appropriate measure of protection and respect for human embryos.

These rules would allow federally-financed researchers to conduct studies on leftover embryos from fertility clinics, if the embryos are no longer wanted by the parent who made them.

Mr Shapiro told the Post: “These are difficult judgements to make, but it is a balancing act. We have moral obligations to the future health and welfare of people, and we need to balance them with, at the very least, the symbolic moral obligation we have to the embryo.”

The Shapiro Commission’s recommendations go further than those recently proposed by the National Institute of Health. These call for federally-funded research on laboratory-grown embryo cells, but not on human embryos themselves.

The newspaper said that according to observers, the commission’s report was likely to escalate the long-standing tussle over the moral status of embryos and the wrenching national debate over abortion.

The benefits of embryo research, experts said, were no longer theoretical. Fetal stem cells — cell types discovered last year — had the potential to grow into many kinds of tissues. Researchers envisioned cultivating the cells into replacement neurons for patients with Parkinson’s disease, insulin-secreting cells for diabetics, and heart muscle cells for victims of heart attacks, among other uses.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the professional organisation that oversees fertility clinics, supported the commission’s recommendations, said Mr Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the organisation in Washington.

Nine held for bid to kill Shevardnadze

TBLISI, May 24 (AFP) — Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze today said nine people had been arrested on charges of trying to assassinate him and overthrow the government.

“I do not exclude that both our external and internal enemies will increase their activity in the run-up to the elections,” (due in summer 2000), Shevardnadze said. “But the government has the strength to stop this,” he said.

Officials said one of the arrested men was Gudzhar Kurashvili, the former head of Georgia’s army. Georgian Foreign Minister Irakliy Menagarshvili said: “It is possible that the terrorist act was being organised by officials from the Power Ministries.”

BBC searching for new chief

LONDON, May 24 (Reuters) — The knives are out, the back-stabbing has begun and the bookies are taking bets.

Judging from the machiavellian manoeuvring, you’d think it was a political race — not the stately selection process for the head of one of Britain’s most venerable institutions.

The BBC is searching for a new boss, and this time round the race has become highly politicised as contenders jockey to succeed Director-General John Birt next year as head of one of the world’s most prestigious broadcasters.

The BBC’s Board of Governors is expected to announce its pick late next month.

In the meantime, the perceived frontrunner, Pearson TV boss Greg Dyke, has been hit by reports of his donations to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ruling Labour Party.

Plane crash
KUALA LUMPUR: A Royal Malaysian Air Force plane crashed on Monday in the eastern state of Sarawak, killing all five persons on board, the official Bernama news agency reported. It quoted an Air Force spokesman as saying the Canadian-made Caribou aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from the international airport in Sarawak’s capital, Kuching. — AFP

30 killed in clash
LAGOS: Thirty persons were killed in a community clash in northern Nigeria during the weekend, a report said on Monday. The incident occurred at Kafanchan, in Kaduna state, when Hausa and Ninzam-speaking youths clashed in a dispute over the emirship of Jema’a, a report in the state-owned Daily Times said. — AFP

Serial killings
ADELAIDE: The Australian police said on Monday that it had recovered nine bodies from plastic drums and garbage bags, full of decomposed human remains, in a disused bank vault and a suburban backyard, making the murders the nation’s worst serial killings. “This is one of the most challenging (murder cases) in our history,” South Australian acting Police Commissioner Neil Mckenzie told a press conference. — Reuters

Confucian classic
BEIJING: Chinese scholars have identified a collection of dilapidated bamboo slips as the earliest edition of the Confucian analects, a report said on Monday. The bamboo version, found in a 2,000-year-old tomb in North China’s Hebei province, is more than 2,000 years old and is the earliest edition of a Confucian work ever found, the official Xinhua news agency said. — PTI

Swallows drugs, dies
KUWAIT CITY: A Pakistani drug smuggler died here after packets of heroin he had swallowed ruptured in his stomach, newspapers reported on Sunday. The man died immediately after admitting himself to hospital with stomach pains, five days after he had consumed the packets. — AFP

Journalist dead
NEW YORK: Raghavendra Chakrapani (77), UN correspondent of The Hindu, died here on Sunday after a brief illness. Chakrapani is survived by his wife and two daughters. He suffered a stroke three months ago and was admitted to a hospital, but he never recovered. — PTI

South Korea’s FM
SEOUL: Reformist Kang Bong-Kyun took the helm of South Korea’s economy on Monday in a Cabinet reshuffle aimed at tightening the reins on corporate restructuring. Mr Kang, a senior advisor to President Kim Dae-Jung, replaced Mr Lee Kyu-Sung as Finance Minister at the head of the government’s economic team. — AFP

70 hurt in blast
TEHERAN: An explosion ripped through a gas pipeline in south-western Iran injuring 70 workers, 30 of them seriously, but causing no major damage, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported on Monday. The blast occurred on Sunday while workers were repairing the pipeline in Ahvaz. — Reuters