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Sunday,
July 13, 2003, Chandigarh, India  
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N-row: Koreas agree to appropriate talks
Bush loses support
after Iraq |
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India holding SAARC hostage, accuses Pak
No preconditions for SAARC meet: Pak |
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Sharif eager
to return Surgeons tried talking twins out of operation Mother Teresa not Macedonia daughter, say Albanians UAE President to pay for child survivor’s treatment
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N-row: Koreas agree to appropriate talks Seoul, July 12 “South Korea and North Korea will resolve the nuclear issue peacefully through an appropriate way of dialogue,” said a statement issued after three days of ministerial talks in Seoul. “This is necessary to maintain peace and security on the Korean peninsula,” said the first clause of the six-point statement that also pledged reunions of divided families and new rounds of ministerial and economic talks in the coming months. The vague nuclear statement came after marathon overnight negotiations that failed to bridge the gap between Seoul and Pyongyang. Seoul wanted multilateral talks involving the Koreas, the USA, Japan and China, while Pyongyang insisted on direct one-to-one talks with the USA. Although the three-day talks, scheduled to concentrate on economic topics, failed to produce a clear solution to the nuclear impasse, Seoul officials appeared satisfied. “This is a step forward,” Kim Chong-ro, a Unification Ministry spokesman, said. “We can interpret the expression ‘appropriate talks’ as the possibility that North Korea is tilting toward the acceptance of multilateral talks,” he said. North Korea also said on Saturday that it was not opposed to multilateral talks, but it insisted bilateral talks with the USA first. The government’s Minju Chosun daily carried by the North Korea’s Central News Agency also accused the USA of keeping mum about its hostile policy toward North Korea and repeating its call for North Korea’s “dismantlement of its nuclear programme before dialogue.” “This can not but be an extremely unilateral and brigandish logic intended to attain its sinister aim. The same holds true for the issue of multilateral talks,” the Minju Chosun said. “The DPRK is not opposed to that format of talks,” it added. “The DPRK’s stand to hold the DPRK-US talks before the multilateral talks is quite just as it is prompted by its deep study of the essence and the nature of the issue and its analysis of them,” the Minju Chosun said. As the two sides unveiled their joint statement, foreign media reported detection of the first physical evidence that North Korea had begun making nuclear arms. Japan’s Kyodo news agency said a US government source had confirmed intelligence reports that Pyongyang had begun reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods at its Yongbyon facilities, saying that krypton 85, a reprocessing by-product, had been detected in air samples nearby. The new finding was almost certain to heighten US-North Korean tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons ambitions because reprocessing would enable it to make more nuclear arms. Seoul’s National Intelligence Service said on Wednesday that North Korea had recently reprocessed a small number of its estimated 8,000 spent rods and had tested devices used to trigger atomic explosions. The report prompted South Korean politicians of all parties to call on the government to cut off all cash aid to North Korea. The ministerial talks enabled the Koreas to make progress on other agenda items. They agreed to organise another reunion of families separated by the 1950-1953 Korean War, ahead of this year’s autumn Thanksgiving holidays. The meetings are to be held in the North Korea’s scenic Mount Kumgang region.
— Reuters |
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Bush loses support
after Iraq
Washington, July 12 Fiftytwo per cent of respondents to a Washington Post-ABC poll said the number of casualties was unacceptable, while 44 per cent found them acceptable and 3 per cent had no opinion. At least 32 US soldiers have been killed in guerrilla attacks in Iraq since May 1, when the USA declared an end to major combat operations. A resounding 74 per cent of poll respondents declared there would be additional US military casualties in Iraq. Nevertheless, a large number of persons support the US military presence in Iraq (74 per cent), think the war was worth fighting (57 per cent) and believe US military forces should remain until order is restored (72 per cent). Fiftynine per cent of respondents said they approved of Mr Bush’s overall handling of his job as President, while 38 per cent disapproved, the poll found. The numbers show a noticeable drop since the last Washington Post-ABC poll, conducted June 22, when 68 per cent approved of Mr Bush’s performance and 29 per cent disapproved. The last time Mr Bush’s approval rating dipped below 60 per cent was in January 2003, suggesting that Mr Bush’s wartime support is beginning to unravel. Fully 50 per cent of Americans who took part in the poll said they thought the Bush administration “intentionally exaggerated its evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.” Fortysix per cent thought it did not. — AFP |
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India holding SAARC hostage, accuses Pak Kathmandu, July 12 “If you look at the history of SAARC, India has been the only country that has prevented the holding of summits at least two or three times,” Pakistani foreign secretary Riaz H Khokhar said at a press conference held yesterday at the Pakistani embassy. Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal had refused to hold talks with his Pakistan counterpart on the sidelines of the SAARC standing committee meeting held here on Wednesday and Thursday. Mr Khokhar hinted that the slow progress on the South Asia Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) would be used by India as an “excuse” for demanding the postponement of the 12th summit. “We have seen some media reports that suggest the lack of progress on SAFTA may be used at a later stage as an excuse to postpone the summit once again,” he said. He also criticised India for not holding bilateral talks during the standing committee meeting. “I had come with a very open mind. But before I arrived here, we saw the Indian foreign minister’s statement ruling out such talks. Who is responsible?,” Mr Khokhar said. Indian Foreign Secretary had said unless Pakistan took credible steps to control the infiltration of the Islamic terrorists talks were not possible. The Pakistani Foreign Secretary once again said that the core issue of Jammu and Kashmir was the only problem between the two countries that needed to be resolved before any substantial improvement the relations. “We talk of Kashmir, they talk of other issues. We don’t know what those other issues are,” he said.
— UNI |
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No preconditions for SAARC meet: Pak Islamabad, July 12 “Neither India nor Pakistan has the authority to set any preconditions for holding the meeting”, Kasuri told BBC Radio while reacting to India’s insistence on progress on trade and economic agenda to make “meaningful” the SAARC summit to be held in Islamabad in January this year. Mr Kasuri termed India’s acceptance to participate in the scheduled SAARC summit as “a welcoming development” and said Pakistan was committed to the SAARC process. On the progress on SAPTA and SAFTA, which formed the base for regional trade in the SAARC bloc, Mr Kasuri said so far four rounds of talks had been held on SAPTA by the member countries and if there was any major problem in SAFTA, it could be brought to the notice of the summit.
— PTI |
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Sharif eager
to return Islamabad, July 12 “I am very much eager to return to my homeland, but the delay is only because I do not want to give any chance of complaint to my hosts, who are true well-wishers of Pakistan,” the former Prime Minister said in an interview published in The Nation today. Touching upon a number of issues like politics, disloyalty of Muslim League leaders and the policies of President Pervez Musharraf, Mr Sharif clarified, “I did not come to Saudi Arabia under any deal, nor will I return under any deal. “I am not afraid of imprisonment. By the grace of God, I have faced all hardships of imprisonment for 14 months patiently,” he added.
— UNI |
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Surgeons tried talking twins out of operation
Washington, July 12 Dr Ben Carson yesterday said he never thought the operation had a reasonable chance of success. And he said members of the surgical team that operated on the women made “a great deal of effort” to try to talk them out of it beforehand. Ladan and Laleh died on Tuesday, 90 minutes apart, from a severe loss of blood as doctors were in the final stages of the marathon operation to separate them in Singapore. “They absolutely could not be dissuaded,” Dr Carson, director of paediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, said in the interview with ABC News’ “Nightline” programme. “I think even if one minute before surgery, they had said, `We’ve changed our minds,’ we all would have been extremely happy,” he said of the surgical team. The women had simply reiterated that their lives as conjoined twins “were worse than death,” Dr Carson said in the interview, a transcript of which was provided by ABC News ahead of the broadcast. Dr Carson, who has performed three successful surgeries of infant conjoined twins, was one of three leading surgeons who along with two dozen specialists and 100 assistants conducted the 52-hour operation at Singapore’s Raffles Hospital. — Reuters |
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Mother Teresa not Macedonia daughter, say Albanians
Tirana, July 12 In a letter sent to Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, Albanian writers and politicians accused Balkan neighbour Macedonia of using Mother Teresa’s geographical birthplace ‘’to usurp the figure and deeds of Mother Teresa’’. The battle over who has the right to call Mother Teresa compatriot centres around a Cyrillic inscription planned for a monument to be built near the centre of Rome. “Macedonia honours her daughter Gonxhe Bojaxhiu-Mother Teresa, Skopje 1910-Calcutta 1997,’’ was the inscription planned for the monument in Rome. Mother Teresa was born in 1910 to an ethnic Albanian family in Skopje, the capital of what is now called Macedonia, but what was then a part of the Ottoman Empire. She died in 1997 in Kolkata at the age of 87, a universal symbol of compassion and a 1979 Nobel Prize winner for her work with the poor in India. The ongoing fight over her national identity is a reminder of the enmity between a minority population of ethnic Albanians and their fellow Macedonian citizens.
— Reuters |
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UAE President to pay for child survivor’s treatment Dubai, July 12 Two-year-old Mohamed al-Fateh, who miraculously survived the crash, is being flown to the United Kingdom for injuries suffered in the crash, the official UAE news agency WAM said. Isa Abdullah Al Nuaimi, UAE Ambassador in Sudan, has informed the Sudanese authorities about Sheikh Zayed’s offer and visited al-Fateh at the hospital and listened to the doctors’ briefing on his health condition.
— PTI |
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