W O R L D

USA ‘averted’ Indo-Pak N-war in 1999
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 — The USA helped avert nuclear powers India and Pakistan from what might have been a possible catastrophic war in 1999, President Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser Samuel Berger has said.

Embassy bombings
US Sgt pleads involvement
NEW YORK, Oct 21 — A former US Army sergeant pleaded guilty to conspiring with Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden in the 1998 bombing of two US Embassies in Africa.

Al Gore, Clinton drift apart?
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 — Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, who owes his job to President Bill Clinton, is keeping distance from him, and until the recent Middle East crisis, the two had spoken only a handful of times, a leading US daily has reported.

UK Navy to recall hunter N-subs
LONDON, Oct 21 — Britain’s Royal Navy has said it is to take all 12 of its “hunter-killer” nuclear submarines out of service because of safety fears over their reactors.

Divers reach “Kursk” to retrieve bodies
MOSCOW, Oct 21 — Divers descended to Russia’s sunken nuclear submarine, Kursk, today to prepare to retrieve the bodies of its 118 crew members, the navy said.

Arab leaders accuse Israel of aggression
CAIRO, Oct 21 — Arab leaders meeting as fresh Israeli-Palestinian violence erupted today accused Israel of aggression and warned that West Asian peace was at stake.

Researchers ‘design’ couple’s baby
A Spanish couple has become the first to have children “designed” by researchers in the lab to prevent disease in a third, unborn generation.

Schindler’s other list — the million-dollar bill
FRANKFURT, Oct 21 — His typewritten list of 1,200 Jews he saved from the Holocaust made German businessman Oskar Schindler a household name, with a bit of help from Hollywood.

Palestinians face ‘massacre’
UN resolution condemns Israel

CAIRO, Oct 21 (AFP, PTI, Reuters) — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat today accused Israel of staging a “massacre” of the Palestinian people, during a speech at the opening of an emergency Arab summit.

“Our people are faced with a collective massacre,” Mr Arafat told a gathering here of leaders from the 22-member Arab League.

Mr Arafat also said that 193 Palestinians had died and 7,000 others had been wounded in clashes with Israel since violence erupted on September 28.

According to an AFP toll based on hospital sources, 123 persons have died in the violence, all but eight of them Palestinians or Israeli Arabs.

Earlier in the day, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak opened the emergency Arab summit rebuking a “reckless and belligerent” Israel for leading the peace process into an impasse.

“All sides must realise that the only choice which is offered to countries of the region is that of a just and balanced peace,” Mr Mubarak said in an opening speech to leaders of the Arab League.

“Peace must be fair and balanced and not imposed by force,” he said.

The two-day summit, the league’s first in four years, is aimed at supporting the Palestinians in their bloody clashes with Israel while still trying to save the peace process from total collapse.

KHAN YUNIS, (Gaza Strip): Israeli troops wounded at least 15 Palestinians as they fired rubber-coated bullets at a crowd of Palestinian youths who pelted their position with stones on Saturday, an AFP correspondent said.

The clash broke out as at least 300 youths began throwing stones at an Israeli position.

The confrontation followed calls by a group of Palestinian parties for street demonstrations in Khan Yunis and Gaza City, following a day of violence in the West Bank in which nine Palestinians were killed by the Israeli troops.

The demonstrations were expected to bring thousands of Palestinians onto the streets of the Gaza Strip, while further clashes were also feared in the West Bank during funerals for yesterday’s dead.

JERUSALEM: A US-brokered deal to end Israeli-Palestinian violence collapsed with fierce clashes in which 10 Palestinians were killed, and Israel blamed the Palestinians for failing to meet an agreed deadline.

Israeli government spokesman Nachman Shai told a news conference: “We can now officially state that the Palestinian authority hasn’t fulfilled its part of the understandings which were achieved at Sharm el-Sheikh.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said in a television interview, recorded before a deadline expired for ending the bloodshed, that the time-out would start after an Arab summit in Cairo this weekend.

“After the summit in Cairo we will take a time-out in order to reassess the peace process, and will also guide the army on the steps we need to take,” he said. In a separate interview Mr Barak implied that the time-out would depend on whether violence continued after the Arab summit.

“After what has happened it is impossible to continue with the peace process as if nothing has happened. We have to reassess, learn the lessons from what has happened,” Mr Barak said.

Mr Shai said that meant Israel would not resume peace talks within two weeks as had been discussed at a summit in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Tuesday.

BEIRUT: An Israeli helicopter gunship and tanks fired on suspected guerrillas overnight on the Lebanese-Israeli border, a Lebanese security source said on Saturday.

The source said the shooting, the first such incident since Hezbollah guerrillas captured three Israeli soldiers two weeks ago, took place in the village of al-Majidieh near the Israeli border.

TEL AVIV: The Palestinian territories returned to a tense calm on Saturday after the worst clashes in two weeks that left 10 Palestinians dead and 200 injured on Friday.

Last evening Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said on Friday, that he was planning to freeze the peace process for an indefinite time after the weekend’s Arab league meeting in Cairo.

SEOUL: Twentyfive Asian and European governments appealed to Israel and Palestine on Saturday to end recent violent clashes and redouble the efforts to reach a peace agreement.

“We solemnly asked and hoped that the protagonists, the two parties, the Israelis and Palestinians, make an effort to calm things down and resume dialogue,” French President Jacques Chirac told a news conference closing the third Asia-Europe meeting a biennial gathering of leaders from the two regions.

UNITED NATIONS: The UN General Assembly has termed as “Illegal and obstacle to peace” Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories including Jerusalem, and condemned with overwhelming majority the excessive use of force by Israel against Palestinians.

A resolution adopted by the 189-member House on Friday by 92 votes to six with 46 abstentions, also called for immediate cessation of hostilities between the two sides and resumption of peace talks.

India was among the member states that voted in favour of the Palestinian-drafted resolution which was opposed by the USA, Israel and four others.

The resolution condemned violence that took place At Al-Haram Al-Sharif and other holy places in Jerusalem as well as other areas of “occupied” Palestinian territories and held Israel responsible for the excessive use of force against Palestinian civilians.

The resolution, while stressing the need for implementation of understandings reached recently at the Sharm el-Shiekh summit, supported the establishment of US-led inquiry into the recent violence in the Palestinian territories that claimed over 100 lives, mostly of Arabs.

The vote was taken after an eight-hour special emergency session which began on Wednesday and was adjourned for two days.

The session was called at the request of the Palestinian observer to the UN Nasser al-Kidwa.

USA ‘averted’ Indo-Pak N-war in 1999

WASHINGTON, Oct 21 (PTI) — The USA helped avert nuclear powers India and Pakistan from what might have been a possible catastrophic war in 1999, President Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser Samuel Berger has said.

The USA “helped pull nuclear-armed India and Pakistan from the brink of what might have been a catastrophic war in 1999,” Mr Berger told Georgetown University students here yesterday in a major foreign policy address.

Stating that local conflicts could have global consequences, he said, the USA worked for peace in the Middle East, the Balkans, Northern Ireland and India and Pakistan because “We believe that the challenge of foreign policy in any age is to defuse conflicts before, not after, they escalate and harm our vital interests.”

Without identifying the countries which train or harbour terrorists, Mr Berger said that one of the questions before US foreign policy-makers was how to deal with both super-national and sub-national threats to the American security. “One super-national threat,” he said, “is the international network of terror groups active from South and Central Asia to southern Russia to the Middle East and Africa.”

Coordination among these groups, said Mr Berger, makes them a particularly pernicious threat. But because they are loosely connected, the threat cannot be extinguished with one stroke. The solution is to reduce the economic disparities on which they breed; to resolve the Middle East conflict on which they feed; and to strengthen counter-terrorism cooperation even further, without assaulting civil liberties in the process.

The subnational threat, he said, was the challenge to the nation state from the potential disintegration of ethnically diverse societies, whether Nigeria or Indonesia today, or Russia and China tomorrow.

On Middle East peace Mr Berger said both Israel and Palestine must rigorously implement the immediate steps they pledged at the summit to end the violence.

“I do not believe a viable Palestinian state can be created out of the barrel of a gun. And I do not believe that Israel can gain real security at an acceptable cot without a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. I hope that happens sooner rather than later, for as time goes on, the parties must come back to confront the same set of issues, the same geography, the same demographics,” he said.

America today is by any measure the world’s unchallenged military and economic power, Mr Berger said adding that “We should not apologise for being a hyperpower. But to remain strong, the USA must be a hyperpower that friends and allies can depend on. “We must remember there is a difference between power and authority. If we use power in a way that antagonises our friends and dishonours our commitments, we will lose our authority—and our power will mean very little”.

Embassy bombings
US Sgt pleads involvement

NEW YORK, Oct 21 (Reuters) — A former US Army sergeant pleaded guilty to conspiring with Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden in the 1998 bombing of two US Embassies in Africa.

Ali Mohamed, a 48-year-old native of Egypt who came to the USA in 1985, was among the 17 persons indicted for the bombings of US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 220 persons. He was the first of those indicted to plead guilty yesterday.

Appearing in Manhattan Federal court in leg shackles before Judge Leonard Sand, Mohamed admitted to conspiring with Bin Laden to plan the bombings and to working with the Islamic ‘jehad’ with the goal of attacking any western target.

‘‘Among the targets I did surveillance for was the American Embassy in Nairobi ... Because of its involvement in Somalia,’’ said Mohamed, who will be sentenced in July and faces a possible life sentence plus substantial fines. Court sources said Mohamed was believed to be cooperating with the Federal authorities on the case.

‘‘I took pictures and drew up a report for Bin Laden,’’ the Saudi-born millionaire who has been indicted for allegedly masterminding the embassy bombings that killed 12 Americans. One of the FBI’s most wanted men, he is living in Afghanistan as a guest of the ruling Taliban movement.

Mohamed, who had a visa to enter the USA in 1985 and became an American citizen before enlisting in one of the army’s elite units at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, also said his grand jury testimony in New York after the 1998 bomb attacks was false. ‘‘I told some lies,’’ he said.

‘‘I was involved in the Islamic ‘jehad’ organisation,’’ the Palestinian militant group that has carried out attacks against Israel in an attempt to derail peace deals.

‘‘The object was to attack any Western target’’ in a conspiracy that included killing US nationals, he said.

Mohamed served in the special forces for three years at Fort Bragg where he trained US soldiers being deployed in the West Asia about Islamic culture and other issues. He was honourably discharged in 1989.

But according to testimony at the 1995 trial of Islamic militants charged with plotting to blow up New York city landmarks, he travelled to New York extensively during those years to provide military training and instruction to Muslims preparing to fight in Afghanistan.

Al Gore, Clinton drift apart?

WASHINGTON, Oct 21 (PTI) — Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, who owes his job to President Bill Clinton, is keeping distance from him, and until the recent Middle East crisis, the two had spoken only a handful of times, a leading US daily has reported.

“After eight years together here is the state of relationship between Mr Clinton and Mr Gore: Mr Gore won’t pick up the phone. He doesn’t call, and Mr Clinton doesn’t know why”, The New York Times reported yesterday.

“Mr Clinton is both hurt by the personal rebuff and bewildered as to why his political heir won’t come to him for the advice he is itching to give — advice the President feels the candidate needs, according to two friends who have discussed this with Mr Clinton recently,” the paper said.

After Mr Gore’s second debate with Republican candidate Texas Governor George Bush, the President was irate.

He told one friend that Mr Gore was getting bad advice from consultants, especially Mr Carter Eskew and Mr Robert Shrum, who seemed to Mr Clinton to have coached all fight out of Mr Gore. Former Clinton aides told the paper that one big reason Mr Clinton chose Mr Gore as his running mate was that he had a lot in common with his wife, Ms Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Paul Begala, a former aide, recalled Mr Clinton said when he picked Mr Gore: “He reminds me of Hillary in that when he gets hold of something, he never lets loose.”

Meanwhile, AFP reports from Boston: US President Bill Clinton strongly denied reports that a rift has developed between him and Vice-President Al Gore. Questioned on the state of relations with his top lieutenant and would-be successor, Mr Clinton asserted that he was prepared to do everything in his power to see Mr Gore elected President.

Meanwhile, Vice-President Al Gore continues to hold a cash advantage over presidential rival Mr George W. Bush, the Washington Post reported in its today’s edition.

According to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission, Mr Gore enters the final stretch of the campaign with $ 41.2 million in the bank, $ 6.2 million more than Republican nominee Bush ahead of the November 7 election.

UK Navy to recall hunter N-subs

LONDON, Oct 21 (AFP) — Britain’s Royal Navy has said it is to take all 12 of its “hunter-killer” nuclear submarines out of service because of safety fears over their reactors.

Navy spokesman Lieutenant Commander Jim Jenkin stressed the vessels were being recalled temporarily, but he admitted the move would leave a gap in Britain’s defence capabilities.

He said yesterday Britain’s nuclear deterrent would not be affected as the four submarines armed with Trident strategic ballistic missiles did not have the reactor fault and would remain in service.

The role of the hunter-killer vessels is to target enemy submarines and escort the Trident submarines when they are setting out on patrol.

Some of them are armed with Tomahawk land-attack Cruise missiles, and saw action during the conflict in Kosovo when they were used to launch attacks on Serbia.

The problem with the reactors first came to light when HMS Tireless put in for repairs in Gibraltar in May after reporting a rector fault, said Commander Jenkin.

Navy chiefs fear that the problem with Tireless may affect the whole fleet of hunter-killer submarines and decided to recall the fleet as a “precaution,” Commander Jenkin told AFP.

“Temporarily they are being recovered to the UK for a precautionary inspection to see if they exhibit any of the characteristics of the problem with Tireless,” he said. 

Divers reach “Kursk” to retrieve bodies

MOSCOW, Oct 21 (Reuters) — Divers descended to Russia’s sunken nuclear submarine, Kursk, today to prepare to retrieve the bodies of its 118 crew members, the navy said.

A mini-sub has explored the 154-metre (505-foot)-long Kursk and found no radiation leaks.

Arab leaders accuse Israel of aggression

CAIRO, Oct 21 (Reuters) — Arab leaders meeting as fresh Israeli-Palestinian violence erupted today accused Israel of aggression and warned that West Asian peace was at stake.

Mr Mubarak denounced Israel for its “belligerent attitude” to the Palestinians, warned it not to underestimate the Arab power and urged it to make a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.

Researchers ‘design’ couple’s baby
From James Meek in London

A Spanish couple has become the first to have children “designed” by researchers in the lab to prevent disease in a third, unborn generation.

The father of the children, who were born in May, suffers from the disease haemophilia, which prevents blood clotting.

Haemophilia is an inherited illness, tied to a defective gene. Males do not pass the disease on to their children, but if they have a daughter, the daughter becomes a carrier, and can pass haemophilia on to her sons.

In a successful attempt to forestall that, doctors from the Universitat Autonoma de Darcelona and researchers from the Cafer Institute of Reproduction made sure the embryos to be implanted in the mother’s womb would only grow into boys.

What makes the case unusual is that, had the mother given birth to girls, they would have been perfectly healthy — only the hypothetical future grandchildren were at risk.

The case was complicated by the fact that the father had been infected with the HIV virus and hepatitis-C from a blood transfusion 18 years ago. Scientists were able to “wash” his sperm to clear it of the virus.

In cases where a mother is a haemophilia carrier, couples undergoing test-tube baby treatment, or IVF, can already have their embryos genetically tested before they are implanted in the mother’s womb to pick out any with haemophilia.

The Barcelona case is the first to have been written up publicly, in the journal Prenatal Diagnosis.

The research team cleared the procedure with the Spanish national commission on assisted reproduction techniques although it has no regulatory powers.

One member of the team, Joseph Santalo, said they would not have accepted genetically testing the foetus once it was already growing in the womb, since this could have meant aborting a healthy daughter simply because of what she might pass on to her children.

“The idea was to stop the transmission of abnormalities to descendants — not to sons, but to grandsons,” he said.

“We don’t think it is an ethical problem, because we are just selecting the sex. We are dealing with embryos, which are not real human beings, only potential human beings. — The Guardian, London

Schindler’s other list — the million-dollar bill

FRANKFURT, Oct 21 (Reuters) — His typewritten list of 1,200 Jews he saved from the Holocaust made German businessman Oskar Schindler a household name, with a bit of help from Hollywood.

Now a second Schindler’s list — a bill of reckoning for the fortune it cost him in food, medicine and bribes — has been published by a biographer who says it shows an even more selfless hero than his movie image.

The newly-unearthed list of accounts, drawn up by Schindler in 1945 for an American Jewish organisation, tallies at 2.64 million German reichsmarks — $ 1 million at the pre-war exchange rate. That is what Schindler said he had spent on keeping Jewish workers at his Polish crockery factory out of the gas chambers.

‘‘This greatly changes our picture of Oskar Schindler from that given by Steven Spielberg,’’ biographer Erika Rosenberg told Reuters in an interview at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Her annotated collection of letters, found a year ago in a long-forgotten suitcase 25 years after Schindler’s death, was published yesterday by the German publishing house Herbig under the title ‘‘Ich, Oskar Schindler’’ (I, Oskar Schindler).

Spielberg’s 1994 oscar-winning movie ‘‘Schindler’s list’’, she felt, portrayed an ambiguous hero.

‘‘He made a film for Americans so he turned Schindler into a sort of speculator, maybe because it was difficult for people to believe there could be a good German,’’ said Rosenberg, an Argentinian writer whose Jewish parents fled Germany in 1936.

‘‘Probably at first he did try to make some profit but afterwards he sacrificed his entire wealth to save his Jews...He was a brave man and the bottom line is he saved people’s lives.’’

Rosenberg, who has written on Schindler over the past 10 years since meeting his widow Emilie in Argentina, said she had no doubt of his selfless generosity.

His single-spaced typed reckoning, apparently sent to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, was not a request for reimbursement she said, although Jews in Argentina had tried to help the near-penniless Schindlers after they emigrated.

Schindler, who died in poverty in Germany in 1974 at the age of 66, said he spent 375,000 reichsmarks on ‘‘bribes, donations, gifts and blackmail’’ to corrupt Nazis between 1942 and 1944 as he fought to keep Jews, many of them too ill to work, at his plant in Krakow rather than see them shipped to death camps.

A further 1.56 million went on housing and feeding the Jews.

As the Red army advanced, forcing the Germans to pull out of Poland, killing many Jewish slaves as they did so, Schindler drew up his now famous list of some 1,200 men and women he said he needed to take with him to set up a new factory further west. That cost him 725,000 reichsmarks, he said.

The book shows an original typed list of names drawn up in April, 1945.

In his letters, Schindler comes over as a laconic raconteur, deeply respectful of the heroism of his Jewish friends but also with no mean opinion of his own achievements and abilities.

He recounts showering gifts of black market cigars, wine and schnaps on the ss and Gestapo men who toyed with the lives of Jews — and himself. But he also stood up to the bullies and even threw one drunken ss officer down a flight of stairs.

The original Schindler archive, discovered last year in the attic of a house belonging to a couple who befriended him, is now at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Israel.

Rosenberg, the publishers and Emilie Schindler are involved in a legal dispute with the German newspaper, the Stuttgart Zeitung, which first published material from the suitcase last year and are seeking compensation for the use of the letters.

Emilie Schindler, who turns 93 on Sunday, receives only a small pension from Israel and the German government which is not enough to live on in Argentina, Rosenberg said, so any profits from the book would be most welcome.

Schindler, whose infidelities were well known, was estranged from his wife after he abandoned her in Argentina 16 years before his death and Emilie has complained in the past that her role in the dramatic tale has been overlooked. But Rosenberg said: ‘‘‘She still loves him.’’

WORLD BRIEFS

Two get award for best e-book
FRANKFURT: The first-ever prize for the best electronic book, or e-book, has been awarded to two authors at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where e-books have been the talk of the event. David Maraniss won in the best non-fiction category for “When Pride Still Mattered”, while E. M. Schorb’s “Paradise Square” was the best fiction work, from more than 100 works submitted for competition. The two winners will share the $ 100,000 prize money furnished by us software giant Microsoft. — AFP

Fire in disco claims 19 lives
MEXICO CITY: A fire ripped through one of Mexico City’s largest nightclubs killing at least 19 persons. The city Attorney-General’s office said 19 bodies had been recovered from the Lobohombo nightclub and at least 24 people were injured. The fire broke out on Friday morning. The police said a short circuit in the sound booth may have caused the fire. — AP

Russians had captured Wallenberg
MOSCOW: A Swedish diplomat who saved 100,000 Hungarian Jews from Nazi death camps was captured by the Russians because he had a strangely shaped army mess tin, according to the man who says he handed Raoul Wallenberg over to Soviet intelligence. Russia’s independent NTV television reported on Saturday that it had tracked down a former Soviet partisan living in Ukraine who has for the first time admitted he arrested Wallenberg. Bogdan Tarnavsky, speaking in Ukrainian with a shaky voice, told the television station that he had arrested Wallenberg some 60 to 80 km outside the Hungarian capital Budapest in 1945. — Reuters

Carters cut off ties with Baptists
WASHINGTON: Former us president Jimmy Carter and his wife Roselynn, both Southern Baptists, have cut ties with the right-wing and fundamentalist denomination, Cox News Service reports. Mr Carter, who has been a southern Baptist schoolteacher on Sundays since he was 18 years old, said that they are doing so after years of feeling “increasingly uncomfortable and somewhat excluded” from the Southern Baptist Convention. — PTI

Surgery turns four sisters into brothers
LAHORE: Four sisters have become boys after a major operation at the local hospital. Mohammed Rasheed, 50, is a government employee. His wife is dead and has nine girls and out of them he has succeeded in turning four of them into boys after operation. They were natural born boys but had no symptoms of male organs at the time of birth. Reaching the age of 14 or 15, these boys observed unusual changes in the body which led to consultation with doctors and finally surgery to expose their sexual organs pressed in the pelvis area. — ANI

Spice Girl’s memoirs fetch record sum
FRANKFURT: Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has sold the rights to her autobiography in a deal which could be worth more than $ 1.45 million — a record for the memoirs of a British celebrity. “We are publishing Victoria’s autobiography for an undisclosed substantial sum”, Sophie Brewer of Penguin books said at Frankfurt Book Fair, which has attracted almost 7,000 publishers from 107 countries. — Reuters

Japan proposes undersea tunnel
SEOUL: Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori has proposed building the world’s longest undersea tunnel at a cost of $ 80 billion to extend the Trans-Seberian railway to Japan, officials said. The 180-km long railway tunnel would link Japan’s main western island of Kyushu with the southern edge of the Korean peninsula under the Sea of Japan. “The construction is technically possible, but the problem is money”, Mr More said during a lunch meeting of leaders at the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) here on Saturday. — AFP

Frenchman admits abduction, rape
PARIS: A Frenchman on trial in a landmark court case broke down on Friday and told a girl that he is accused of raping during a “sex holiday” in Thailand the he had abducted her in her childhood. Amnon Chemouil a 47-year-old public transport worker from Paris, addressed his words to the girl, now 17, in a final statement before the jury to consider its verdict. The Unicef, a civil plaintiff in the case, tracked down the Thai girl and paid her trip to Paris for the trial. — Reuters