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| Tuesday, November 14, 2000, Chandigarh, India   
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House votes for impeaching Estrada Senate trial for Filipino President soon MANILA, Nov 13 — Philippine President Joseph Estrada was impeached by the House of Representatives today paving the way for a Senate trial for alleged corruption, House Speaker Manuel Villar said.
Barak-Clinton talks a non-starter Stop Pak from helping Taliban: Rabbani |
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A punch card that can make or break Gore
Anti-Wahid agitators
wreck House complex
40 killed, 17 hurt in bus
collision
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House
votes for impeaching Estrada MANILA, Nov 13 (AFP, Reuters) —
Philippine President Joseph Estrada was impeached by the House of
Representatives today paving the way for a Senate trial for alleged
corruption, House Speaker Manuel Villar said. Mr Villar ordered the House Secretary-General to “transmit to the Senate” the articles of impeachment against Estrada, saying the impeachment motion had already received a minimum number of 73 votes or one third majority from the 218-member Lower House. A defiant Estrada, however, vowed to prove his accusers wrong in an unprecedented trial in the Senate. The 63-year-old former movie star will remain in office during the trial in the Senate, which could decide to oust him only after a two-thirds
majority. At least 15 votes in the 22-member Senate are needed to throw him out. The House of Representatives in a full sitting voted to elevate to the Senate an impeachment motion against Estrada based largely on accusations by his former friend, provincial Governor Luis Singson, that he took bribes from illegal gambling operators and kickbacks from tobacco excise taxes. Estrada, the first President in Philippine history to be impeached boldly, dared members of the 218-seat House to impeach him. “I have told the Lower House, especially my partymates, to speed up the process of impeachment and bring it up to the Senate so I can face the trial and end this whole thing,” Estrada told a local radio station hours before he was impeached. “My conscience is clear,” he added. Visiting the northern Ilocos region at the weekend, Estrada blasted his critics for questioning his allegedly excessive lifestyle which they claimed had compromised his integrity and dulled his sense of governance. “I will prove wrong those who have put their personal and political interests above the interests of our country by demanding my ouster and fomenting political and economic stability,” he said, vowing to remain in office until his six-year term ends in 2004. There are currently eight Opposition members in the Senate expected to vote against the President. Although four others who recently bolted from the ruling coalition may go either way, analysts said. They stressed, however, that the impeachment trial is in itself already an end-game for Estrada, who won the presidency in 1998 with the biggest margin in the country’s history by courting support of his massive movie-fan base. The tide has, however, turned against the former matinee idol in recent weeks, with anti-Estrada rallies having become an almost daily occurrence in Manila. Estrada’s repeated claims of innocence have also been drowned in the din of calls for his ouster led by the influential Roman Catholic church and Opposition figures led by Vice-President Gloria Arroyo and former Presidents Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos. Estrada, the country’s 13th President, effectively became a “lame duck” president when the Lower House brought the charges to the Senate, said Dr Malaya Ronas, a political science professor at the University of Philippines. Even if Estrada emerged victorious, he would be hard put to consolidate support. Several lawmakers shouted “Erap resign” and raised clenched fists. Erap is Estrada’s nickname from his days as a movie actor. The President has been accused of accepting bribes from illegal gambling syndicates. He has said he is innocent and will welcome the impeachment process to clear his name. |
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Barak-Clinton talks a non-starter JERUSALEM, Nov 13 (Reuters) — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and US President Bill Clinton gave no indication today that they had found a way to end nearly seven weeks of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. The two leaders held talks in the White House yesterday to try to find a way to halt weeks of bloodshed that had shattered the West Asia peace-making process. At least 206 persons, most of them Palestinians, have been killed in the clashes. Mr Barak said he and Mr Clinton had discussed the “importance of putting an end to the violence in the West Asia, stabilising the situation,” and implementing deals forged with the Palestinians at a summit in Egypt last month. “Israel strives for peace but a peace that will be reached around the negotiating table rather than through imposing of the will of one side on the other or through international activities,” Mr Barak told reporters after the meeting. Mr Barak arrived in Chicago today to address the general assembly of the United Jewish Communities. Cabinet minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said today Israel was making every effort to end the violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas but that the Palestinians were not cooperating. “I want to tell you that from the beginning there weren’t many expectations,” he said of the talks in Washington. “We are trying (hard) so that this violence will be reduced and it may be possible in the future to sit and talk but it’s not working,” Mr Ben-Eliezer told Israel’s army radio. A
US official said the USA, the main mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, would stay in touch with the parties to try to stop the fighting. “We will continue to try to work with both sides right now, both to see that the violence comes to an end and also to find the best way to try to go back towards creating a political solution,” the official told reporters in Washington. Mr Hussein al-Sheikh, secretary of President Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Fatah movement in the West Bank, blamed Israel for the unrest, saying that the Palestinian leader had made every effort to reach peace. “I think we are in a war now,” he told Israel’s army radio. “The Palestinian side was not to blame for starting this “intifada” (uprising),” he added. Mr Clinton and Mr Barak met while violence raged in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, A Palestinian boy, identified as 16-year-old Mahmub Abu Najib, died after being shot by Israeli troops at Erez, the main crossing point between the Gaza Strip and Israel, hospital sources said. His death took the total since September 28 to 211, 90 per cent of them Palestinians. Another Palestinian accused of collaborating with Israel was shot dead — reportedly by Palestinian militia — in the West Bank late yesterday. Qasem Khelif was killed near an Israeli army checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. The Israeli army radio said the man was killed by members of the Tanzim militia of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, which had accused him of passing information to Israeli intelligence of the movements of Hussein Abeyat, a Fatah military chief killed on Thursday by the Israeli army. Palestinian sources said a group calling itself the “Husse in Abeyat brigade,” after the Fatah official, claimed responsibility for shooting Israeli vehicles, which the army said did not cause any casualties. The leader of Fatah in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouthi, called on Palestinians to widen the scope of their uprising and make an independent state a reality on the ground. The head of the Islamist movement Hamas, meanwhile, said Palestinians should expand the violence “in such a way to inflict losses on the enemy and force it to withdraw its forces from our territories.” In the flashpoint West Bank town of Hebron, un human rights chief Mary Robinson’s convoy came under fire but no one was injured. The Israelis and the Palestinians each pointed the finger at the other over who was to blame. As Mr Barak flew to Washington, Mr Leah Rabin, 72, widow of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin died of heart failure in hospital yesterday. A senior Israeli official said Mr Arafat, who expressed sorrow at her death after fighting cancer, had not yet asked to attend the funeral but that Israel would not object, if he did. |
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Stop Pak from helping Taliban: Rabbani DOHA, Nov 13 (UNI) — Afghanistan’s ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani has urged leaders at the ninth Islamic Sumit here to pressure Pakistan from interfering in the affairs of the strife-torn nation and help start a dialogue for a coalition government in the country. In an appeal to the leaders, Maulana Rabbani, who heads the Northern Alliance Resistance Group, accused Pakistan of assisting the Taliban administration seek control of Afghanistan. “The extremist Taliban group, as per the hegemonic ambition of Pakistan, is using Islam as a cover for a destructive war...and the aggressive military campaigns by this group are financed by revenue from opium and heroin trafficking,” he added. Mr Rabbani asked the summit to adopt a resolution asking Pakistan “to recall its armed Pakistani nationals from Afghanistan”. He also urged the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) to convince the Taliban to start a dialogue with the opposition “to set up a broad-based government with the help of the UN”. Mr Rabbani’s emissary Masood Khalili (Ambassador to India), is here to lobby among the member-countries not to recognise the Taliban regime Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the only states which recognise the group. Mr Khalili held meeting with various delegates and delivered Mr Rabbani’s message to the OIC Secretariat. Speaking to newspersons, Mr Khalili said that peace in Afghanistan had been shattered by Pakistan’s interference, whose ISI had been helping the Taliban for the past four years. Mr Khalili said that terrorism originating from Afghanistan was threatening the world, especially the Central and South Asian regions. Giving details of Maulana Rabbani’s letter to the Islamic leaders, he said the President had also asked the Islamic leaders not to grant the Taliban regime, a seat in the OIC. Afghanistan’s OIC seat has been vacant since the Taliban ousted the Rabbani Government from Kabul more than four years ago. Meanwhile, the Taliban have received a major diplomatic victory as the OIC allowed its delegation to attend the current summit. Taliban Foreign Minister Abdul Wakil Muttawakil is here to meet the Islamic leaders and press them to allot the vacant seat to his government. |
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A punch card that can make or break Gore For the many tipsy revellers making their way from one Palm Beach nightclub to another, it was a bewildering sight. A huge throng of journalists and television cameramen were lined up outside an office building, staring for hours on end at the scene within. On the other side of the plate glass window, there were no movie stars or national leaders, just a tableau of exhausted bureaucrats slumped in their chairs holding manila rectangles of cardboard up to the fluorescent light, like connoisseurs comparing notes. As far as the mostly oblivious Saturday night partygoers were concerned, it could have been a regular meeting of the cardboard collectors’ club, but the reality was far stranger. Somewhere in those flimsy yellow rectangles lay the coded fate of the USA and perhaps the world, and this sleep-deprived group of local civic leaders from this affluent seaside resort had been entrusted with the task of deciphering it. The more you peered into that coldly lit room, the odder it seemed. The panel inside the fishtank were poring over the cardboard in search of something called “chad”, which in the past 48 hours has become to the US electoral process what the “quark” is to physics — a tiny and obscure particle on which absolutely everything may hinge. This is what is known so far about “chad”: It can be both singular and plural, it comes in a variety of forms including “hanging chad”, “swing-door chad”, “tri-chad” and even “pregnant chad”, and it can be more visible to the naked human eye than it is to machines. Chad occurs when voters are asked to express their preferences with
punch cards dotted with very small perforated rectangles. On the Palm Beach ballot, there were 228 of such little perforations. The voter is supposed to use a pointed instrument to knock out the tiny rectangles alongside his or her choice of candidate. What “alongside” means precisely is a point of bitter debate, but more of that later. If the perforated rectangle is punched but manages to cling on by one or more of the cardboard slivers connecting it to the card, it becomes “chad” and a threat to democracy. It is a menace because when the voter’s card is fed through an automatic vote-counting machine, the “chad” is often smoothed back into the hole, in effect nullifying the vote. It does not happen often, but with the margin between Governor George W Bush and Vice-President Al Gore in the decisive state of Florida a mere 327 votes out of some 9m cast across the state, it could be decisive. Palm Beach county had opted to use something called a “butterfly ballot”, on which the names of candidates were arranged on both sides of a central strip of punch-holes, which, in a few thousand cases, appears to have caused confusion as to which candidate was alongside which hole. According to the automated count, more than 29,000 votes — an unusually high number — were recorded as spoilt because they had been punched too many times, or not at all. A manual recount was ordered in Palm Beach and three other counties which had problems of their own. In Palm Beach among the hotels and nightclubs, the task fell to the three-member canvassing board, consisting of Theresa LePore, the elections supervisor who had designed the butterfly ballot, Charles Burton, a county judge, and Carol Roberts, a county commissioner. But for the sake of (literal) transparency, they were to be watched by the world’s media and accompanied by assorted political observers. The count, of a sample 1 per cent of the county’s votes, started at 2pm on Saturday with a solemn invocation from Ms LePore: “Never touch the chad”. At the outset the board tried to gauge how much light was showing through the little holes, bringing shouts of “There is light through there”, and “that’s just a micron of light”. It was soon clear that this was not going to work. No one, least of all the Republican and Democratic observers, was going to agree on what constituted enough light. So the board reverted to a 1990 rule, which stipulated that if any of the slivers holding the perforated rectangle to the voting card had been broken, it would count as a vote. Three slivers was known as a “tri-chad”, two slivers would be a “swing-door chad”, one sliver was a “hanging chad”. If the rectangle had been pressed so it protruded without any of its slivers being broken, it was a “pregnant chad”, or sometimes a “dimple chad”, and it did not count as a vote. As Judge Burton pointed out on more than one occasion: “You can’t be a little bit pregnant”. The board examined 4,695 ballots and it took them 11 hours, deep into the early hours of yesterday (Sunday) morning. “It was amazing”, said the Green party’s excited observer, Medea Benjamin, as she emerged into the warm night air. “The fate of the most powerful country in the world hangs in the balance with those stacks of cards.” After the recount, Mr Gore’s vote total was up 33, and Mr Bush’s by 14, a net gain for Mr Gore of 19. If that was just 1 per cent of the Palm Beach vote, the Democrats argued, then a total manual recount over the whole county could swing the election in Florida in the vice-president’s favour. Carol Roberts, a Democrat, insisted that the board vote on the spot on whether to hold a recount. Judge Burton, a less committed Democrat, said the board should wait until Monday to ask for advice. It was left to Theresa LePore to decide. She is also a Democrat, who has reportedly cried every day since it was discovered that her ballot design could have cost the party the presidency. — The Guardian, London. |
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Charred bodies found KAPRUN, Nov 13 (DPA) — Salvage teams working non-stop to recover the victims of Saturday’s mountain train disaster have found charred bodies in a wide area, Salzburg police chief Major Franz Lang said today. Bodies were everywhere. The remains of the victims were scattered in front, on the side, and behind the burnt-out train in the Kitzsteinhorn tunnel above Kaprun. Earlier Salzburg Governor Franz Schausberger had said some of the victims were even found under the train. Identifying the bodies would only be possible by DNA analysis. Today the teams pressed ahead with the salvage operation. About 80 men were working in shifts as the job was “extremely difficult”, said officials. With the smoke cleared, it was also now extremely cold in the tunnel. Psychologists were on hand to help the salvage men emerging from the top of the tunnel to cope with the harrowing scenes they had just witnessed. The bodies were being taken to a service tunnel. From there they would be flown to Salzburg city for forensic examination, said a spokesman of the town of Kaprun. |
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Anti-Wahid agitators
wreck House complex JAKARTA, Nov 13 (Reuters) — Thousands of angry protesters demanding President Abdurrahman Wahid’s resignation trashed part of Indonesia’s Parliament today. Wearing white headbands, the demonstrators smashed lamps and chairs in the lobby of the parliamentary complex. Outnumbered police stood by and the violence only stopped when protest leaders brought the situation under control. Chanting “Gus Dur resign! the people will prosper!”, referring to Wahid’s nickname, protesters also accused the frail, half-blind Muslim cleric of being a womaniser. |
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Hijacked plane
back in Moscow MOSCOW, Nov 13 (AFP) — Two planes, one carrying the passengers released from a hijacked Dagestani Airlines plane and the other with the detained hijacking suspect aboard, have landed in Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, news agencies reported today. The Dagestani Airlines plane itself, hijacked late Saturday while en route to Moscow and forced to fly to Israel, landed in Moscow’s Vnukovo airport minutes earlier with its crew on board, airline officials told Interfax. Israeli and Russian officials described the hijacker, in his late 20s, as mentally unstable. 40 killed, 17 hurt in bus collision ISLAMABAD, Nov 13 (PTI) — Forty persons, including four women and four children, were killed and at least 17 others injured when two buses collided in the Pakistani city of Multan in Punjab province today, police said. Hospital sources said that 13 of the injured were in serious condition. The accident occurred
when a 72-seater bus belonging to the private Alhamara service and a 30-seat coach collided head-on near the town of Jehanian, some 35 km from
Multan. |
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