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Thursday,
January 31, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Back up
charge with proof, Iran to Bush Zimbabwe to go ahead with media Bill
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92 die as
jet crashes into volcano
Hunt on
for US scribe, 12 held |
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Asylum
seekers end protest
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Back up
charge with proof, Iran to Bush
Tehran, January 30 “Bush intends to divert public opinion from the Middle East issue and to prepare the domestic grounds for continuing his support of Israel in its brutal oppression of the Palestinian nation,” state radio quoted Mr Kamal Kharrazi as saying. Bush said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday that Iran, Iraq and North Korea were attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction. He said the USA would not permit those countries to threaten it with such weapons. He singled out the three countries as an “axis of evil”. “The world will not accept US hegemony,” Mr Kharrazi said. “The American President had better back up his assertions with evidence instead of repeating old and unfounded claims.” Meanwhile, a leading Iraqi parliamentarian blasted as “baseless” on Wednesday comments by President Bush that Iraq was part of an “axis of evil” developing weapons of mass destruction. “Little Bush’s accusation against Iraq is baseless,” Salim al-Qubaisi, head of the Iraqi Parliament’s Foreign and Arab Relations Committee, told Reuters. Mr Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, top adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also referred to Bush’s remarks as “baseless”. “It is amazing that Bush, officially and in a combative tone, describes...Iran, Iraq and North Korea as terrorists,” Rafsanjani told a gathering of journalists from several Muslim countries. “It is possible that Americans will cheer Bush as the Congressmen did, but we will not be threatened by such aggressive language,” state television quoted Mr Rafsanjani as saying. The USA was Iran’s chief ally until the 1979 Islamic revolution toppled the late Shah. The two countries broke ties in 1980 after revolutionaries seized the US Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The Iraqi politician used the expression to differentiate the US leader from his father, former US President George Bush, who led the multinational alliance which ended Iraq’s seven-month occupation of oil-rich neighbour Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War. “The American administration led by Bush has been threatening Iraq from time to time to prepare world public opinion for a new aggression against Iraq,” said Qubaisi, also a senior ruling Baath Party official. “But such threats do not scare us, as the Iraqi people are well prepared to repel any aggression or foolishness by the American-Zionist administration,” he added. Some US officials have urged Bush to make Iraq the next target, after Afghanistan, in the US war on terrorism. Mr Bush has repeatedly warned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein he will face consequences if he refuses to allow the return of United Nations arms inspectors to Baghdad. The inspectors left Iraq in 1998 complaining they were being prevented from performing their duties. They had been sent to determine whether Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons. “Iraq has said clearly that it no longer possesses any weapons of mass destruction and no longer has the ability to develop them,” Qubaisi said. SEOUL:
North Korea angrily called for the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea today but made no immediate reaction to President Bush’s threat of US action against its weapons programme. A commentary in the ruling party’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper said changes being made to US bases in the South were “moves to perpetuate us military presence in South Korea and round off the preparations to provoke another Korean War.” It added that the “loud-mouthed” US warnings over the North Korea threat were simply to justify the presence of the 37,000 troops in South Korea and “persistently pursue the policy of aggression” against the North. The USA has had troops in the South since the Korean War was halted in 1953 with an armistice. The two Koreas have never signed an official peace treaty.
Reuters, AFP |
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Zimbabwe
to go ahead with media Bill
Harare, January 30 Critics say the measure aims to suppress criticism of President Robert Mugabe in the run-up to March elections in which he faces the strongest threat to his 22-year rule. The draft legislation has drawn widespread international condemnation, including an EU sanctions threat. In a notice broadcast on state television and radio, Mugabe’s ZANU-PF said a party caucus would convene on Wednesday before a parliamentary session starting later. ZANU-PF chief whip Joram Gumbo was unavailable for comment, but official sources said the government would press members to close ranks and ensure the bill’s passage. Britain has said it will recommend that Zimbabwe be suspended from the Commonwealth. A Commonwealth meeting in London was expected to address the issue. On Tuesday parliament’s legal committee, which is dominated by ZANU-PF, slammed the media bill as a threat to free speech and said it gave the government “frightening powers” to control the press ahead of the March 9-10 polls. The proposed Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Bill would restrict access for foreign reporters and impose tight controls on local media. Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa was due to meet the legal committee later to seek a compromise. Mr Chinamasa told Parliament on Tuesday that he would go to the meeting with “an open mind”, but later told reporters the government would not yield on banning foreign ownership of local media and restrictions on foreign correspondents. “Foreign journalists...don’t come to work here. Employment here is for Zimbabweans, not for foreigners,” he added. ZANU-PF controls 93 of the 150 seats in parliament and has used its majority to pass two controversial measures — a security and order Bill and amendments to electoral rules — despite fierce criticism at home and abroad. The assembly’s legal committee said in a highly critical report that the draft media law violated the constitution despite amendments aimed at appeasing opponents. Meanwhile, in London, eight ministers from the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG), the organisation’s democracy watchdog, were due to consider suspending Zimbabwe at a meeting on Wednesday. CMAG has the power to suspend Zimbabwe immediately from the Commonwealth’s main decision-making bodies, but diplomats said it might be hard to reach a consensus at the meeting. Instead the ministers may seek a clear recommendation for action at the March 2-5 Commonwealth summit in Australia. Zimbabwean political analysts said suspension from the Commonwealth would deepen the Mugabe Government’s international isolation.
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92 die as jet crashes into volcano Cumbal (Colombia), January 30 TAME airlines Flight 120, which took off from Ecuador’s capital Quito on Monday morning, broke off radio contact as it flew into Colombian territory to avoid the treacherous mountains during the 30-minute flight to Tulcan. “The remains of the plane have been found on the highest point of the Cumbal volcano,” army Col Henry Salcedo told reporters yesterday. “There aren’t any survivors. The passengers were all burnt up,” said Mr Alvaro Emilio Bucheli, the mayor of the nearby town of Cumbal. Two infants and five older children were among the 92 persons on board. The passengers included two Spaniards, two Italians, a French, a German, a Mexican and a Cuban, said a TAME spokeswoman in Ecuador Toa Quirola. Rescue workers described a macabre scene of destruction and death on the 15,626-foot volcano’s icy slopes. “There were parts of charred bodies scattered all around. The plane is completely scattered over around about a kilometre (600 yards),” Mr Yoli Henriquez, a local official, told Caracol radio from the top of the volcano. Peasants, who had heard a loud explosion on Monday, said they climbed up to the crash site. Some showed local television passports, keys and even parts of fuselage which they said they had recovered from the mountainside. People living near the volcano also reported hearing a loud noise that could have been the plane going down. “We heard a roaring sound. It was like the noise of a shaking metal sheet and then everything became silent,” a local resident Virgilio Daza told RCN television. The plane went down on Monday morning but its wreckage was not found for a full day because of fog and rugged terrain even though emergency crews had immediately focused their search on the Cumbal volcano.
Reuters |
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Hunt on for US scribe, 12 held Karachi, January 30 Those detained were all relatives of a religious leader who had met Pearl before his disappearance in Karachi last Wednesday, and who is also thought to have links with the shadowy Al-Qaeda network of fugitive militant Osama bin Laden, the police said. “We are still unable to trace the reporter...but agencies are interrogating the relatives of a religious leader in Rawalpindi,’’ a police official in Karachi said. “The detained persons, all linked to a senior leader of Jamaat al-Fuqra, may provide us with some clues,’’ he said. The US State Department says Jamaat al-Fuqra is a sect that seeks to purify Islam through violence and has cells active in Pakistan, the USA and the Caribbean. The police official said the people had been taken into custody on Monday during a raid on the religious leader’s house in Rawalpindi, near Islamabad. The leader was not at home and has not been traced since, the police official said. Pearl, 38, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), was working on a story about alleged shoe-bomber Richard Reid.
Reuters |
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Asylum seekers end protest Woomera (Australia), January 30 “We’ve had a real breakthrough. The Afghan hunger strikers are no longer on hunger strike,” said Ray Funnell, a member of the panel sent to negotiate with the more than 200 mainly Afghan asylum seekers at the isolated Woomera detention centre. “We have entered into a process we hope will end in a fair and just result for everyone,” he told reporters at Woomera. Funnell also said the 11 teenagers who had sworn a suicide pact at the weekend had abandoned a 5 p.m. (6.30 a.m. GMT) Wednesday deadline to be taken out of the camp. Afghan and West Asian detainees at Woomera have refused food and water for 16 days, tried to hang themselves, drunk disinfectant and sewn up their lips to protest at the months, and sometimes years, it takes to process asylum claims. They also demanded to be moved to a less isolated site than Woomera. While accepting a large number of formal refugees resettled by the United Nations, Australia is adamant it will not tolerate illegal immigration, a position that has strong public backing. Negotiators said they convinced the Afghan hunger-strikers their claims for refugee status would be resubmitted. The disturbances spread to four of Australia’s six detention centres for illegal immigrants, pressuring the conservative government to review its hard line on asylum seekers. Funnell said the teenagers in the suicide pact had been satisfied by promises from the committee to listen to their complaints and were no longer threatening suicide. But refugee lawyer Rob McDonald told newsmen earlier that the children, aged 14 to 17, had extended their deadline for a week. “We still think they are deadly serious,” he said. Howard won overwhelming public support late August when he toughened his immigration policy, starting to divert up to 5,000 Afghan, Middle Eastern and Sri Lankan asylum seekers arriving illegally by boat every year to Pacific nations.
Reuters |
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1,100 still missing in Nigeria Lagos, January 30 Workers pulled more than 600 bodies from two canals near a weapons dump that burst into flames on Sunday, a death toll that pictures and witness accounts suggested could soar even higher as pressure grew on authorities to explain the disaster. “We registered a total of 4,000 people reported missing between Sunday and yesterday”, Red Cross spokesman Patrick Bawa said. “Out of this we found 2,825 as of last night”. Bawa said most of the missing were children aged between four and 11. The Red Cross was also looking after 15 children separated from their parents after exploding bombs triggered a mass stampede in chaotic Lagos, Africa’s biggest city. As the scale of the tragedy became apparent yesterday, a national day of mourning was declared, President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government faced a storm of outrage.
Reuters |
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BUSH'S NIECE HELD FOR GETTING DRUG