‘No time-frame for CTBT’
ISLAMABAD, Nov 2 — Pakistan’s military ruler General Pervez Musharraf has reaffirmed his country’s commitment to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but refused to give a definite timeframe within which Islamabad would sign the treaty.

Curry conquers British palates
LONDON, Nov 2 — The Indian curry in going to be more in demand in Britain in the next millennium than now, Ismail Merchant, award winning film director and cookery writer, has said.

Arafat, Barak prepare for 3-way summit

OSLO, Nov 2 (Reuters) — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat met here during the night in a warm-up session for peace moves planned alongside memorial ceremonies for assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Preparing for a three-way summit later today with US President Bill Clinton, they met for over an hour, ending just after midnight. The talks were their first for six weeks.

“The meeting was positive and warm but nobody wanted to discuss the substance because if they do, the atmosphere will change,” said a Palestinian official who attended the meeting.

The three leaders were in Oslo for a tribute today to Mr Rabin, Barak’s mentor, who launched secret peace moves with Mr Arafat in the Norwegian capital in 1993. (Rabin was murdered by a Right-wing Israel four years ago this week.)

Mr Clinton said he hoped his summit with Israeli and Palestinian leaders would produce a road map leading to a final peace within 10 months. The talks are due to begin in earnest in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

The Palestinian official said Mr Clinton had told Mr Arafat yesterday: “I’ll go anywhere and I won’t spare anything if that will help the process”.

Mr Barak and Mr Arafat last met on September 17 at a secret rendezvous near Tel Aviv in the dead of the night. Their previous meeting was held on September 5 when they signed an interim land-for-security peace deal in Egypt.

Mr Terje Roed-Larsen, a Norwegian who helped facilitate the 1993 negotiations, told newsmen: “The most important thing that’s being achieved in Oslo is that the confidence between the two leaders Arafat and Barak has been solidified.”

Now the UN Middle West Asia envoy, Mr Roed-Larsen said the two leaders met Mr Clinton and a handful of international figures for 45 minutes before a state dinner hosted by Norway’s King Harald at the Royal Palace.

A former army chief like Rabin, Mr Barak won election in May on a promise to accelerate peace moves with the Palestinians. He has since freed hundreds of prisoners, opened a safe passage for Palestinians across Israel linking the West Bank and Gaza and allowed work to begin on a Gaza Strip sea port.

Mr Larsen predicted the sides would hammer out a framework agreement about the middle of next year.

In separate talks with Mr Clinton yesterday, Mr Barak discussed the possibility of conducting talks on three levels — the top level, a front channel and a back channel — while Mr Arafat submitted detailed maps to back his demand Israel halt expansion of Jewish settlements, officials said.

DPA adds: US President Bill Clinton yesterday called on the Israelis and Palestinians to make “real progress” in final status talks, but conceded the summit in Norway was not likely to be the place for any big breakthrough.

“There is nothing I would not do if I thought it could help to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East, but we have to work together to move the process forward. There are hard decisions to be made. “There is no way in the world we could come here and agree on the big issues,” Mr Clinton said.

“The leaders of the middle east have demonstrated their commitment to peace. What we have to do is to work for real progress towards agreement on the modalities of the process,’’ he told reporters after meeting Norway’s Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik.

Mr Clinton met separately last night with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat at a downtown hotel. Both meetings lasted about one hour.

Mr Clinton said there were no definite plans to hold a “Camp David-style” summit later this year, but did not rule out the possibility.

“When you have a lot of implementation, it whets people’s appetites and builds expectations, but it also creates a certain resistance,” he remarked.

Signals from black box picked up

NEWPORT, Rhode Island, Nov 2 (AFP) — Officials have homed in on a signal thought to be from one of Egyptair Flight 990’s “black boxes” after giving up hope of finding survivors among the 217 persons on board.

“You may have heard earlier today that a ‘pinger’ had been detected which we believe may be associated with one of the flight recorders,” said Jim Hall, who heads the US agency overseeing the investigation.

“The navy is bringing resources...but it will be 36 to 48 hours before that equipment will be in position to see if we can locate the source of that ping,” added Hall, who leads the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

“We are dealing with water 75 meters deep and recovering and locating small objects like recorders is a daunting effort,” he warned from here, where the search is based.

He confirmed that Coast Guards had found a single piece of wreckage so big it would need a crane to recover it.

The flight data and cockpit voice recorders could yield invaluable information on what sent the Cairo-bound Boeing 767 hurtling into the Atlantic Ocean off the US east coast shortly after takeoff from New York’s John F Kennedy airport with 217 people aboard.

Around 1000 personnel were said to be participating in the recovery operations which are likely to become difficult as gale strength winds are expected to sweep the area shortly.

US Navy ship “Grapple”, which took part in the recovery effort of TWA flight 800 equipped with advanced sonar equipment to sweep the ocean floor, was on its way to the site, but is unlikely to arrive till tomorrow to join recovery operations.

USS Mohawk, equipped with a “pinger location system and a small remote controlled vehicle” is also expected tomorrow.

Tapes from the New York station show that the plane suddenly made a steep dive from 33,000 ft to 19,100 feet in 36 seconds and hit the Atlantic waters within two minutes.

But by analysing data from different stations, they hope to find out if the plane was intact when it hit the waters or broke up while diving.

The aircraft plummeted towards the Atlantic at a dizzying speed, of some 4,200 metres in 36 seconds.

Authorities have officially ruled nothing out but have yet to find evidence of foul play. Still, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it was sending bomb technicians as a matter of course.

CAIRO (DPA): Security sources said yesterday that 32 Egyptian army officers, including senior ranking personnel, had been aboard the Eygptair Flight 990.

AIDS India’s national calamity?

LONDON, Nov 2 (PTI) — India, currently accounting for 8.5 million AIDS cases, will face a national calamity unless “we come out of our smugness on the issue”, Indian High Commissioner to the UK Lalit Mansingh has warned.

Speaking at a special screening of Hindi film “Nidaan” (diagnosis), a powerful film on AIDS, he said in the early 80s when HIV or AIDS was endemic in the West, many in India thought it was because of the “permissive society” and it could never threaten India.

He said in 1986 there were hardly 500 HIV cases in India and according to the latest estimate, by mid-June this year there were about eight to nine million infections and these might reach 20 million next year.

Producer of the film R.V. Pandit said quoting data compiled by the World Health Organisation, at the current rate of growth HIV infections, India would soon have the world’s largest population of HIV/AIDS-infected persons.

Russia accepts OSCE observers

MOSCOW/OSLO, Nov 2 (DPA) — Russia today agreed to admit international observers to the battle zone in Chechnya, while government troops continued the offensive against Islamic rebels and warplanes pounded targets across the republic, news reports said.

Russia will allow the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to send an observer mission to the republic, Norwegian Foreign Minister Knut Vollebaek said after talks with Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov on the fringes of the West Asia summit conference in Oslo.

Vollebaek, whose country currently holds the OSCE presidency, said that a group of experts would be sent to Chechnya as soon as possible to gather information on the situation of the civilian population.

Shortly after his arrival in Oslo on Monday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had declared Moscow’s willingness to cooperate with the OSCE.

At the same time, he had strongly defended his country’s military actions in Chechnya as a campaign against terrorism.

About 50 rebels were killed in a strike on a column of vehicles near Chechen-Aul on the south-east edge of the city, officials claimed. There were no independent casualty reports.

In the west of the republic at the border with neighbouring Ingushetia, thousands of refugees were still waiting for exit points to be reopened.

Four elderly persons died there since yesterday waiting to cross to safety, Ingush President Ruslan Aushev told Interfax.

‘No time-frame for CTBT’

ISLAMABAD, Nov 2 (PTI) — Pakistan’s military ruler General Pervez Musharraf has reaffirmed his country’s commitment to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), but refused to give a definite timeframe within which Islamabad would sign the treaty.

“As far as the CTBT and other international treaties are concerned, we stand committed to them. We will take rational steps on international accords, especially the CTBT, in accordance with the aspirations of the people of Pakistan,” Gen Musharraf said replying to queries during a press conference here at the PTV Headquarters yesterday.

Musharraf, who deposed Premier Nawaz Sharif on October 12, said his country would maintain a deterrent nuclear policy in keeping with the security environment in South Asia.

“We will continue maintaining minimum unconventional and conventional deterrence level,” he said.

Curry conquers British palates

LONDON, Nov 2 (PTI) — The Indian curry in going to be more in demand in Britain in the next millennium than now, Ismail Merchant, award winning film director and cookery writer, has said.

Launching a book, “Curry in the Crown”, the story of Britain’s favourite dishes last night, Merchant said the range of Indian dishes was huge and the “demand for Indian food in Britain is going to be much more stronger in future.”

Shrabani Basu, the author, said a 1997 gallup poll of British tastes in food showed that curry was beyond doubt the nation’s favourite food with over a quarter of Britons eating it at least once a week. She said in 1946 there were only three Indian restaurants in Britain, employing 50,000 people, more than that employed in steels and mines.

“Indian food today is trendy, it is popular and it is part of British life,” she said. “Whether it is Posh Spice and Becks declaring that their favourite TV dinner is an Indian takeaway or cricketer Ian Botham ordering 500 curries during his charity walk or Tom Cruise flying his favourite dishes to Venice, there’s no doubt that curry remains king,” she added.

Describing the book, which traces the history of the spicy colonisation of Britain from the time of the East India Company as “fascinating”, he said it should be a bestseller in England, USA and France.

He also offered to get the book by translated into French.

The launch was followed by a lively discussion on “Curry for the Millennium” in which Peter Grove, Editor, Real Curry Restaurant Guide, G.K.Noon of Noon Products, A.H.Mahmood Ali, High Commissioner of Bangladesh to Britain and Kirit Pathak, Chairman of Pathak Products, participated.

In his introductory remarks, Prof Indranath Chaudhury, Director of the Nehru Centre said while the Raj legacy left India with English institutions such as cricket, railways, bureaucracy and parliamentary democracy, the one thing which travelled back from India in a big way was the curry.

He said leading departmental chain Marks and Spencers planned to send their staff to India this month for conducting research on curry at the ground level.

Pathak said 60 per cent of the people in Britain ate Indian food regularly.

Hippo kills man
BORDEAUX ( FRANCE): A hippopotamus trampled a French zoo director to death on Monday after breaking out of its enclosure and charging the man as he rode past on a bicycle, a rescue services spokesman said. Jean Ducuing had trained the animal, called Komir, to perform several tricks. One of them involved the 62-year-old director placing his head inside the hippo’s gaping jaws. Zoo officials said they did not understand why Komir had attacked Ducuing. — Reuters

Pak holiday
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’ new military leadership has declared November 9, the birth anniversary of national poet Mohammad Iqbal, a public holiday throughout the country. The birth anniversary of this great philosopher-poet will be celebrated throughout the country in a befitting manner, a government statement issued here on Monday said. The national flag would be flown on all important government buildings and radio and television will air special programmes on the life, ideas and achievements of Iqbal. — PTI

Bush hurt in fall
AUSTIN: George W. Bush, the leading contender for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, was hurt on Monday in a jogging fall. Mr Bush, the Governor of Texas, was injured when he tried to make way for a lorry. A security official, who followed him on a bicycle, also fell and was taken to a hospital. A spokeswoman for Mr Bush said there was no indication that the lorry driver wanted to hit Mr Bush. — DPA