Miss America contest open to divorcees
ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey, Sept 15 — In a stunning departure from tradition, the Miss America pageant has decided to let women who have been married or had abortions compete, the Associated Press has learned.

UN authorises MNF for East Timor

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 15 (PTI, Reuters) — The UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution today authorising deployment of an Australian-led international force to restore peace in violence-torn East Timor and use “all necessary means” to implement its mandate.

Although the resolution did not specify the composition of the force, diplomats said the first batch of the 7,000-strong multinational (MNF) force could be in the former Indonesian territory by the weekend and a substantial number deployed within the next 48 hours.

The resolution was finalised last night by the 15-member all-powerful council after 12 rounds of intense negotiations and member nations were given time till today to get back to their governments for approval of the plan.

The final draft is on the lines of a resolution submitted by the UK and would allow an Australian-led force to use “all necessary means” to bring violence in Timor under control.

Meanwhile, parallel negotiations were on to decide on the rules of engagement for the peacekeepers and to work out a relationship with the Indonesian army which is likely to be in the territory for sometime at least. The force will have an initial mandate of four months.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has asked Australia to lead the force, although Indonesia has asked for it to comprise troops from mainly south-east Asian nations.

Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand have all offered to contribute to the operation.

Australian Defence Minister John Moore said today advance units of the force would land in East Timor by Monday the latest. He said a UN force would stay in East Timor for two to three years.

The troops are expected to be flown to East Timor aboard Australian C130 Hercules military aircraft now stationed in the northern Australian city of Darwin. They might also use several Blackhawk attack helicopters in their early deployment. Canberra also has a high-speed catamaran berthed in Darwin capable of carrying 500 fully equipped troops on the 10-hour sea trip to East Timor. There are six frigates and three destroyers, all equipped with guided missiles, also ready for deployment.

SYDNEY (DPA): Australia on Wednesday picked Vietnam veteran Major-Gen Peter Cosgrove as the commander of the multinational peacekeeping force expected to begin landing in East Timor at the weekend.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had asked Australia to lead the force, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said after a meeting in New York at which the Indonesian and Portuguese Foreign Ministers were also present.

Meanwhile, thousands of East Timorese may starve to death because Jakarta is withholding a guarantee that planes bringing in emergency food supplies won’t be attacked, the UN High Commissioner alleged today.

Indonesia, despite having 26,000 troops in the troubled territory, argues that it is unable to stop rag-tag pro-Jakarta militias firing on planes as they land in Dili, the East Timor capital.

“Minimum security guarantees have to be provided before you can land and we have not been able to get these,’’ said Christine Planas, the Australia country manager for the UNHCR.

The refusal stands despite the fact that Indonesian President B.J. Habibie had given his word to UN Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson early this week that permission would be given.

In the absence of a security guarantee, the UNHCR is preparing for air drops at the weekend. But aid workers say it’s unlikely that drops will be made until the airport in Dili has been secured by international peacekeepers. Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he hoped drops could start Thursday but could not give a guarantee.

DILI (AP): Tens of thousands of desperate refugees hiding in the sun-scorched East Timorese hills awaited the first airdrops of food from Australian and US stockpiles.

Indonesian soldiers and militias looted and destroyed $ 10 million worth of equipment and vehicles in the UN compound hours after staff and other refugees pulled out of East Timor.

In Washington, the US Defence Department said it was preparing to ship 300,000 packaged meals to Darwin — an hour’s flight from East Timor — for distribution to refugees.

The East Timor crisis has severely strained the Jakarta Government. In the latest sign of struggle, the Straits Times of Singapore said Indonesia’s armed forces chief, General Wiranto, would probably resign his post in October to prepare for a presidential campaign.

JAKARTA: The Indonesian police fired in the air and beat protesters campaigning for independence for East Timor near the UN headquarters in Jakarta on Wednesday, witnesses said.

Doctors to examine ‘slave’ girl

PARIS, Sept 15 (AFP) — The Paris Prosecutor’s Office has appointed two medical experts to examine an Indian girl, sexually mutilated and hospitalised here, who says she was employed as a “slave” by an Indian diplomat posted in Paris, a judicial source said.

The experts, including a gynaecologist, were appointed yesterday to examine the girl to determine the precise nature of her wounds and to try and put a date to them.

No legal action has yet been taken by the prosecutor’s office which asked the police squad in charge of minors to carry out a preliminary investigation.

The young Indian woman, named by the Indian Embassy as Lalita Oraon, told the police yesterday that “she had been touched and wounded in the genitals while drowsing at her employer’s home, but without accusing anyone,” the judicial source said.

Professor Bernard Debre, Head, Urology Department at Paris’s Cochin Hospital who operated on the adolescent’s serious wounds in the genitals, told AFP he had “never seen anything like it “in his life.”

Meanwhile, India on Wednesday took exception to injuries caused to the girl while in custody of French authorities and asked French officials to hand her over to the Indian Embassy here without further delay.

Stung by a well-orchestrated media blitz against the diplomat for allegedly ill-treating his domestic assistant, an embassy release said. “There has been no maltreatment of Lalita Oraon by her employer” and expressed “serious concern over injuries she suffered in custody of French authorities.”

Indian officials also objected to “reprehensible innuendoes made in leading French newspapers and TV with regard to sexual injuries she has reportedly suffered.” The release requested “French media to cease its campaign of defamation against the diplomat.”

KGB ‘bugged’ even Kissinger’s phone

WASHINGTON, Sept 15 (PTI) —A defector from the Soviet Intelligence Service, KGB, has said Kremlin’s bugging operations in the USA in the early seventies and eighties supplied it with intelligence on everything, including top secret American weapons.

KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin in a book “The Mitrokhin Archive”, based on information supplied by him and due to be released today, has said that more than half the projects of the Soviet defence industry in 1979 were based on intelligence data gathered from the West, The Washington Times reports.

The KGB even bugged former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s phone conversation, Mr Mitrokhin citing instances where it tried to discredit leaders like Zbigneiew Brzeinski.

Obsessed with undermining the country it considered its “main adversary,” the Soviet Union after World War II set about infiltrating spies in to the USA with distinctly mixed success, according to the book authored by Christopher Anrew.

LONDON: Britain has revealed it had suspected “traitor granny” — Melita Norwood, of spying for the Soviet Union for half a century but had never interviewed her in order not to jeopardise other investigations.

Home Secretary Jack Straw, under pressure to reveal the facts about Norwood and a second Soviet spy unmasked by Moscow defector Vasili Mitrokhin, on Monday, said Norwood, an 87-year-old grandmother at the centre of a British spy scandal, had been given clearance in 1945 to do secret work despite doubts about her Communist associations. But four years later there were “new concerns” and she lost her access to secrets about the development of Britain’s atomic bomb in 1949.

In 1965 an investigation concluded that she had been a spy in the 1940s but came up with no usable evidence.

‘Gudiya’ has hope after 17 surgeries
From Viji Sundaram

SAN FRANCISCO: To her parents, Sukhmani Singh is like a ‘gudiya’ (doll), which is why they call her that.

People who know her well are also tempted to call her by that nickname. Yet, there was a time when the little girl would stare at her reflection in the mirror and ask her mother sadly: “Mama, why am I born like this?” Her mother, Meenakshi, has wondered about that herself.

Sukhmani, a bubbly, bright and charming seven-year-old, was born with severe craniofacial abnormalities. While the left side of her face was fine, she was born without a single bone on the right side, which sagged under its own weight. Her right eye was in the middle of her forehead, a gaping hole above it. She had a cleft lip and palate, her tongue was knotted. There were bits of tissue where her ears should have been, and a cluster of bones replaced a nose. But she could hear fairly well.

In fact, because she was not expected to live, doctors shipped the baby off to a nearby children’s hospital. Relatives of the couple suggested they leave the child to her fate and get on with their lives, her father Gurnam Singh said.

A few blamed the child’s appearance on the eclipse the occurred while Meenakshi was pregnant. To them, “a normal female child was itself not welcome, let alone a deformed female child”, Gurnam Singh told the California newspaper India-West.

By the time Sukhmani was three years old, doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi had done five operations on her, the first when she was only five months old hoping to bring some normalcy to her face. Then they suggested that she be taken to the USA for more reconstructive surgery. In 1996, over the objections of their relatives, the couple who by then had an 18-month-old son as well, brought their daughter to the USA.

To finance the move, Gurnam Singh sold his tyre business and his home in Delhi. The Delhi-based charitable organisation, Nishkam, raised another $ 40,000 for their trip, and then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao arranged free passage on Air-India. Sadly, while the US Immigration and Naturalisation service provided temporary visas for Sukhmani and her parents, it refused to provide one for her brother, Amrit Pal, who had to be left behind with relatives.

Since coming to the USA, Sukhmani has had nearly a dozen surgeries, the doctors using bone from her ribs and hip to rebuild her face.

Joseph G. McCarthy, Director of the Institute of Reconstructive Surgery at New York University Medical Centre, describes his young patient as “a bright and dynamic little girl”. He is working on Sukhmani pro bono. The girl has elicited a promise from him to make her beautiful, Gurnam Singh said.

On a scale of one to five, with one being the least severe, Sukhmani’s abnormality level is five, McCarthy says. But he believes that she will be near normal after he has done 30 more operations on her. Sukhmani will have to go under the knife until the age of 18 because the reconstruction does not grow with her. — IANS

Miss America contest open to divorcees

ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey, Sept 15 (AP) — In a stunning departure from tradition, the Miss America pageant has decided to let women who have been married or had abortions compete, the Associated Press has learned.

The board of the Miss America Organisation voted last month to drop the 49-year-old requirement that contestants be women who have never been married and never been pregnant. The change takes effect next year.

Fear of violating New Jersey’s discrimination laws spurred the change, according to court documents obtained yesterday.

Since 1950, contestants have had to swear they had never been married and never been pregnant in order to vie for the rhinestone crown and thousands of dollars in scholarship money.

Murdoch sued
LOS ANGELES: TV producer Steven Bochco has filed a $ 61.6 million suit against Mr Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox Film Corp, claiming the studio cheated him out of profits from his popular “NYPD Blue” show by licensing it at below market value to a New Fox cable network. — Reuters

Suicide man lives
PARIS: Dead in Saturday’s edition, revived in Monday’s — a Frenchman who phoned in his own obituary notice but botched his suicide attempt lived to read the denial of his death printed in the local newspaper. The man, a 33-year-old ambulance driver from the Atlantic port of La Rochelle, had prepared everything — the obituary, three tapes explaining his decision, instructions for his funeral and suggestions for where his family should dine afterwards. — Reuters

Fatal crush
PONTIAC (Michigan): A former guest of an internationally syndicated television talkshow was sentenced to at least 25 years in prison for killing a homosexual man who appeared on the show to disclose that he had a crush on the man, a court announced on Tuesday. Jonathan Schmitz, 29, was found guilty of killing acquaintance Scott Amedure, 32, after he made public his crush on Schmitz on the nationally broadcast Jenny Jones show. — DPA

John Lennon’s guitar
LONDON: The guitar John Lennon was purportedly playing on the day he met Paul McCartney was sold for £ 1,40,000 ($ 2,25,100), auctioneers Sotheby’s said on Tuesday. An unnamed telephone bidder paid £ 40,000 more than had been expected for the guitar. — Reuters

Blow against pollution
KATHMANDU: Nepal’s government is striking its first blow against pollution, which has been blamed for a decline in tourism in the Himalayan kingdom. Pressured by environmentalists and the tourism industry, officials have ordered noisy, diesel-powered, three-wheel taxis off the roads of the capital, Kathmandu, beginning September 18. — AP