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Monday,
June 9, 2003, Chandigarh, India  
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Saddam made no chemical weapons: Times
report
Motion on Indian Dalits in UK
House UN concern about Afghan
refugees Hillary memoir a love poem:
Time |
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Rocket takes supplies to space station Women control traffic in Dhaka
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Saddam made no chemical weapons: Times report London, June 8 “The laboratories were hidden in basements in houses around Baghdad with teams of just three or four persons,” a top Iraqi security official, who had procured supplies for the programme through an international network of front companies told The Sunday Times. “But it was all just theory. The aim was to keep us up to date and ready so that if the (United Nations) sanctions were lifted or we needed to produce chemical or biological weapons again, we could start up immediately.” The claims of the general, who spoke on the condition that he would not be identified, came as the 1,400-strong US-led Iraq survey team reached Baghdad to step up the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, amid allegations that British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W Bush may have exaggerated the weapons threat to justify going to war. The new team will broaden the search, looking for documents and interviewing factory workers and lorry drivers as well as scientists. The newspaper, in a report today, claimed that Downing Street, the Prime Minister’s Office-cum-Residence, scrapped a six-page dossier drawn up by intelligence officials in March last year because it failed to establish that Saddam posed a growing threat. mr Blair claimed six months later that Saddam was continuing to produce chemical and biological weapons. According to the report, Iraqi scientists are understood to have told British and US intelligence that production of poison gas and biological weapons had stopped before the 1991 Gulf war. The general insisted that search teams would find no weapons. “I challenge anyone in Iraq, from north to south, to find anything,” he said. According to the General the research programme was set up in 1996 with members of the Mukhabharat intelligence agency and the Special Security Organisation. “The orders came directly from Saddam, what we called a red order, and his words were we must keep the victory going,” he said.
PTI |
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Motion on Indian Dalits in UK House London, June 8 The motion raises questions on the way the earthquake aid was distributed in Gujarat and says that all development agreements with India should be reviewed on the basis of their “effect on Dalit communities”. Significantly, the motion has been moved a week ahead of Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani’s visit to the UK beginning on June 15 and is expected to come up in the House of Commons during his four-day stay. Seeking to put caste-based discrimination on the same footing as racism, the motion “strongly” recommends that India implement the measures suggested by the U N Committee for the elimination of racial discrimination. The motion also calls upon the Home Office to “monitor activities of the Right-wing Hindutva organisations operating in the UK to ensure that they are not promoting caste and descent-based discrimination and the practice of untouchability.” The signatories to the motion include mostly left-wing Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn, Tony Banks, Ann Cryer, John McDonnel and Bob Spink.
PTI |
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UN concern about Afghan refugees Kabul, June 8 “The UNHCR is concerned about the situation around the southern border with Pakistan, especially following the dramatic security operation last week where it basically sent a lot of messages to our Afghan refugees that things were not yet safe inside Afghanistan,” UNHCR spokeswoman Maki Shinohara told reporters at a press conference. “The dumping of some 20 bodies of alleged extremists at the Chaman waiting area amid the Afghan refugee settlement has heightened the sense of insecurity among the refugees. The elders at Chaman have expressed fears of returning to Afghanistan, saying that it is not yet safe,” she said. The Chaman waiting area, just inside Pakistan north-west of Quetta, is home to around 18,600 Afghan refugees since it was formed at the end of 2001 when the borders were closed. The Afghan authorities dumped the bodies in the area after a battle on Wednesday in south-east Kandahar province in which 40 suspected Taliban cadres were killed. The Afghans claimed the dead were Pakistanis, which Pakistan denied. The authorities later retrieved the bodies for burial. The dumping of the bodies comes after Kabul, Islamabad and the UNHCR last month finally agreed at a tripartite meeting to close the Chaman refugee site by July and relocate the refugees away from the border. AFP |
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Hillary memoir a love poem: Time New York, June 8 Excerpts from her memoir ‘Living History’, made public yesterday, reveal the various ups and downs in the couple’s relationship, especially during the impeachment of the former President by the House of Representatives and his narrow acquittal by the Senate. “All I know is that no one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does. Even after all these years, he is still the most interesting, energising and fully alive person I have ever met,” she says. “Bill Clinton and I started a conversation in the spring of 1971, and more than 30 years later, we’re still talking,” she says. “What can I say to explain a love that has persisted for decades and has grown through our shared experiences of parenting a daughter, burying our parents and tending our extended families, a lifetime worth of friends, a common faith and an abiding commitment to our country,” she asks. Hillary however admits she was “dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged” and wanted to “wring Bill’s neck” after he admitted his affair with Lewinsky in August 1998. The memoir, descibed by Time Magazine as “a love poem, a policy paper, a travelogue and a campaign memo”, decribes how she and Clinton first met, her adjustments to living in the White House, the trials of healthcare, Whitewater, impeachment and finally, how she and her marriage survived the most public and painful of indiscretions. On her marriage with Clinton, the memoir says she was one among the “goals” set by him to achieve. “Bill Clinton is nothing if not persistent. He sets goals, and I was one of them. He asked me to marry him again and again, and I always said no.” Eventually he said: “Well, I’am not going to ask you to marry me anymore, and if you ever decide you want to marry me then you have to tell me.” Regarding, the Whitewater scandal, she says they failed to recognise its political significance when it reappeared. “Bill and I failed to recognise the political significance of Whitewater’s sudden reappearence, which may have contributed to some public relations mistakes in how we handled the growing controversy. But I could never have predicted how far our adversaries would take it,” she says. Hillary goes emotional on Clinton’s admission of the Lewinsky affair and his subsequent confession to the nation. “Early in the morning of August 15, Bill woke me up just as he had done earlier. He told me for the first time that the situation was much more serious than he had previously acknowledged. He now realised he would have to testify there had been an inapproprite intimacy. He told me what happened between them had been brief and sporadic...,” she writes. “I couldn’t believe he would do anything to endanger our marriage and our family. I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I’d believed him at all.” By the end of August, there was “ditente”, if not peace, in the household. “Although I was heartbroken and disappointed with Bill, my long hours alone made me admit to myself that I loved him,” she adds.
PTI |
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Rocket takes supplies to space station
Baikonur (Kazakhstan), June 8 The future of the ISS has been in doubt since February’s Columbia disaster grounded the shuttle fleet of the USA, leaving the 16-nation station to struggle without extra deliveries of fuel, supplies and science equipment usually ferried aboard the shuttle. Russia’s Progress cargo vessel and its manned Soyuz are the only remaining ties to the $ 95 billion station. Any hitch with either craft would be crippling for the ISS. The Progress M1-10, due to dock with the ISS on Wednesday, will carry some 2,400 kg worth of supplies to the station, including 340 kg water. It will also carry soul food — recordings of music and Earth sounds like rain — for astronaut Edward Lu of the USA and Russia’s Yuri Malenchenko, on board since April. The station is usually staffed by three astronauts, but crews have been cut back to save on fuel and water. Spacewalks and trips by visiting crews have also been put on hold. Malenchenko and Lu are due to return to the Earth in October. The next Progress to make the three-day flight to the ISS is scheduled to blast off in August. It was, initially, scheduled to be the last Russian cargo flight this year, but since the breakup of the Columbia shuttle while landing in February, which killed all seven astronauts on board, an extra launch has been planned for November. The Progress was designed specifically by Soviet engineers to supply astronauts with food, fuel and water during long stays in orbit.
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Women control traffic in Dhaka Dhaka, June 6 “It is very good and I am very happy,” one of the 40 new women traffic officers, constable Jannatul said as she kept a watchful eye on passing vehicles in the capital’s Kakrail area during her first day on the job. Ms Jannatul said she had served in police administration for two years and had been given several months’ training in traffic control. “Today is just the start of a journey as more women will be deployed to control traffic,” said Ansaruddin Khan Pathan, a senior Dhaka traffic officer. He said the women traffic police constables were inducted from the regular police force, where they had worked since the 1980s, as a step to move them to “the jobs where they are needed.”
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New York, June 8
