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Monday,
March 25, 2002, Chandigarh, India  
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Peres rates chance
of ceasefire fair
Will ‘Lagan’ hit bull’s eye? She pushed on despite being hated When cigar case saved Zahir Shah B'desh oppn protest averted |
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Rushdie among UK’s richest Asians 10 Maoists shot in Nepal NRIs raise Gujarat issue with Straw
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Peres rates chance of ceasefire fair Beijing, March 24 “I think there is still a fair chance and today may be the deciding day because of the meeting and I hope we shall reach an agreement,” he told reporters after arriving for an official visit to China. Little progress was made in talks on Friday to implement a US-brokered ceasefire plan. If a ceasefire is reached, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be allowed to attend a key Arab summit in Beirut from March 27-28, Peres said. Such a trip by Arafat would end three months of confinement in the West Bank city of Ramallah imposed by Israel after a wave of Palestinian attacks. “I think if today an agreement will be reached regarding a ceasefire, he can go to Beirut,” Peres said. Jerusalem: Palestinian gunmen shot dead a Jewish woman settler today as US envoy Anthony Zinni prepared to resume talks to try to clinch an Israeli-Palestinian truce ahead of a key Arab summit in Beirut later this week. Today’s talks with security officials on both sides were seen as crucial as agreement could allow Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to meet US Vice-President Dick Cheney before the summit, which will discuss a broad Saudi West Asia peace plan. In the latest violence, Palestinian gunmen killed the Jewish woman on her way to her job as a kindergarten teacher at a Jewish settlement when they ambushed the bus in which she was travelling in the northern West Bank. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group linked to Mr Arafat’s Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the attack, which followed Israel’s killing of five Palestinians in several separate outbreaks of violence yesterday. Prospects of a Cheney-Arafat meeting appeared to dim after US President George W. Bush said in Peru on Saturday that Arafat “is not doing all he can do to fight off terror”. Aides to Mr Arafat said he intended to go to the March 27-28 Beirut summit. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said Mr Arafat can attend the summit only if he implements the truce. But the talks are bogged down in disputes over a timetable for sealing the ceasefire and moving on to defuse mutual mistrust and resuscitate talks on a final peace settlement. Palestinian officials say Mr Arafat cannot rein in militants until Israeli forces withdraw to positions before the Palestinian revolt against occupation began in September, 2000. US officials are believed to be keen for Mr Arafat to go to Beirut to help give momentum to the Saudi plan as Washington seeks support in the region for a campaign against Iraq, which Arab leaders have said they would oppose.
Reuters |
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Will ‘Lagan’ hit bull’s eye? Los Angeles, March 24 “Amelie,” about a woman who sets out to improve life for those around her in small ways, is a world apart from “No Man’s Land,” in which a Bosian soldier and his Serbian enemy, both armed, are thrust into an abandoned trench to confront the wreckage and futility of that war. The other films nominated include India’s ‘Lagaan,’ a sprawling, three-hour extravaganza featuring a cast of more than 10,000 extras, and Norway’s ‘Elling,’ the sparer story of two men who leave institutional care for a life beyond in Oslo. The final nominee is Argentina’s ‘Son of the Bride,’ a love story about an older couple who decide to marry after the woman’s Alzheimer’s disease has confined her to a moment-by-moment existence. Audiences around the world loved ‘Amelie,’. The movie earned nearly $ 134 million worldwide and became the top-grossing French film ever in the USA. Despite widespread critical acclaim, ‘No Man’s Land,’ which won the Golden Globe for foreign film, has been a tougher sell to audiences, with just near $ 750,000 at the US box office. Despite some good-natured ribbing from the other nominated directors about the length of ‘Lagaan,’ director Ashutosh Gowariker said the period-piece starring Aamir Khan had resonated for Indian audiences at home and abroad. “One person in India has seen it 72 times,” he said. “In India when a child is born — which is often — parents whisper in its ear: “Your movies will be three hours long ... and there will be singing.” Meanwhile, Sidney Poitier was to receive an honorary Academy award today, in a year when his singular achievement as the only black recipient of a top acting Oscar is back in the spotlight. Poitier was the first black actor in the USA to win the best actor Oscar in 1963 for his role in “Lilies of the Field”, This year’s two black best actor nominees are Will Smith, for his role as charismatic boxer Muhammad Ali in the film “Ali,” and five-time nominee Denzel Washington, who played a rogue cop in “Training Day.” Actress Halle Berry rounds out the trio, making her the first black woman to be nominated for best actress since 1993, for her role in “Monster’s Ball”. Veteran actor Robert Redford’s was also to receive an honorary statuette today not only for his achievements as actor and director, but for his work fostering independent film through his Sundance Film Institute.
Reuters, AFP |
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She pushed on despite being hated London, March 24 Each of them ruined their own party. It was as though they were too successful in pushing through their own programmes. Asquith’s political legacy was the death of liberal England. Attlee’s great years of reform were followed by an inexorable 13 years of Tory rule. And now that she has quit the stage, it is possible to state with confidence that Margaret Thatcher’s political legacy was paradoxical: Thatcherite economics made Tony Blair a practical proposition. It was almost as though there was some kind of deal. In the ’80s the Social Democratic Party (SDP) split and kept Thatcher in power. In the ’90s, she was the enabling mechanism for the SDP’s reverse takeover of the Labour Party. For a long time she was proud of this achievement and viewed Blair as her protege. Thatcher’s was the most counter-intuitive achievement of those three great peacetime Prime Ministers. Asquith and Attlee expressed the spirit of the age. Not so Thatcher. She rowed upstream. You have to have lived through the ’70s to understand the sheer magnitude of her achievement, though many of the actors in that wretched period of modern British history still cannot bear to do so. Britain was close to becoming a third world state: the squalor, the moral complacency, the economic hopelessness, the talk of private armies amid a sense of rottenness and drift. Most important of all was the conviction among Britain’s social, cultural and economic elite that decline was inevitable and that nobody could or should attempt to stop it. This was the main reason why the British establishment — the civil service, the universities, the media, the Foreign Office, the bulk of the Conservative Party — hated her so much. The sheer vulgarity of the notion that this ghastly upstart woman from the provinces should set about putting things right was grossly offensive to their embedded, patrician pessimism. The fact that she used the lower middle class, throughout history the most despised section of British society, as her revolutionary vanguard made them hate her even more.
The Observer |
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When cigar case saved Zahir Shah London, March 24 “The Taliban are not defeated and I am convinced many of them are hiding in parts of Afghanistan,” he said in an interview with The Telegraph from Italy. “Afghanistan has a very peculiar topography and many, many hiding places where people can hide for years, then regroup. It is an impenetrable land. “Look at (Osama) Bin Laden, one of the world’s most famous faces, yet the world’s most powerful army (USA) cannot find him. In our mountains and valleys it is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he pointedout. Shah also issued a warning to British forces of close to 2,000 soldiers headed for Afghanistan. He said Britain, which heads the international peace-enforcing forces in Afghanistan, could be heading for another disaster in the country where so many thousands of British men were lost in three wars in the 19th century. “Our terrain is so difficult that this is what happened to the British before: they sent in conventional armies to fight Afghans who knew the land like the back of their hand; every rock and every stone,” he said. The former king himself faces reported threats from the Taliban, from Pakistan and from the Northern Alliance, which has opposed his return. “It’s impossible not to have some opposition, but I believe it is confined to a small group of people,” the 87-year-old Shah said. “I’ve been the target of an assassination attempt here in Rome and that didn’t weaken my resolve.” According to The Telegraph, in 1990, a Portuguese Muslim posing as a journalist carried out an entire interview with him then said “and now your Majesty I am afraid I will have to kill you” before stabbing him in the chest with a Kandahari dagger he had brought. Shah was saved by the cigar case in his breast pocket. He now plans to visit Kabul and then Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharief and Herat. “I want to be in close contact with my people again,” he said. “It’s something my heart tells me.”
IANS |
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B'desh oppn protest averted Dhaka, March 24 The police, tried to disperse a crowd of opposition activists, who retaliated by throwing pieces of bricks, a witness said. The police took control of the park after the government banned gatherings or protests, following the Parliament’s scrapping of a law requiring portraits of Sheikh Mujib to be displayed in public buildings. Opposition leader Sheikh Hasina Wajed, who is Sheikh Mujib’s daughter, said her supporters would stage a one-day hunger strike. The police arrested three opposition leaders, including former government ministers Motia Chowdhury and Saber Hossain Chowdhury.
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Rushdie among UK’s richest Asians London, March 24 Fiftyfour-year-old-Rushdie is ranked 166th among the 200 richest Asians in Britain. “His prolific output as a writer allied to his family fortune easily justifies the estimate that he is worth £ 10 million,” the report says. Lakshmi Mittal topped the list with £ 1,900 million followed by the Hindujas (£ 900 million), Mike Jatania (£ 450 million) and Jasminder Singh (£ 409 million). He has put a price of £ 7 million price on his diary of his fatwa years, according to Britain’s Richest Asians report 2002, brought out by Eastern Eye, a leading Asian weekly published from
here. PTI |
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10 Maoists shot in Nepal Kathmandu, March 24 Six Maoists were killed in the Belbara forest of Bardia district, two each in Lamjung district and Myagdi district of western Nepal,according to a press note issued by the ministry. The security forces also seized some weapons, ammunitions and explosives from the Maoists across the country, the release added. Emergency was declared in the Himalayan kingdom last November following the breakdown of the four month-long ceasefire by the
Maoists. UNI |
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NRIs raise Gujarat issue with Straw London, March 24 The meetings follow tensions within the large Gujarat community in Britain in the wake of widespread sectarian violence in Gujarat. The Gujarat violence and human rights abuses in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, where Hindus had been targeted, were discussed at the meeting. IANS |
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