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Friday,
July 18, 2003, Chandigarh, India   |
Blix attacks Danish minister for false report CIA chief quizzed on Iraq uranium claim Vikram Seth bags £1.3 m for memoir |
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Norway takes Lankan offer to Tigers No sign of sexual abuse
by ex-Marine
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India, Pakistan ‘not’ rigid on Kashmir Zardari
to be indicted in murder case Douglases seek
$1 m in damages
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Blix attacks Danish minister for false report Copenhagen, July 17 The former UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Mr Hans Blix, accused Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller of presenting an erroneous account to parliament on March 19 about the state of Iraq’s biological weapons capability. The Danish Government was one of the USA’s staunch allies in the Iraq war, but in justifying this position it wrongly interpreted the reports of the UN weapons inspectors, Mr Blix said. Mr Moeller told parliament the inspectors had established that Iraq had produced 19,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 8,400 litres of anthrax and 2,000 litres of aflatoxin. He also said the storage conditions of these supposed toxins had worsened in recent years. Mr Blix said there was no proof for such assertions. He said the Iraqi authorities “maintained that they had destroyed these arms in 1991. They said they used to have them, but insisted absolutely that they did not have them any more, and the disarmament inspectors were unable to find any trace of them.” It was the second time this week that Mr Blix had questioned Mr Moeller’s interpretation of the facts. On Tuesday, he said in an interview with Politiken that the USA, Britain and Denmark had all drawn hasty, broad and undocumented conclusions in order to justify the war on Iraq. Singling out Mr Moeller for criticism, Mr Blix said the three countries jumped to the conclusion that “because these weapons have not been accounted for, then they exist”. —
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CIA chief quizzed on Iraq uranium claim Washington, July 17 Tenet’s latest ‘mea culpa’ came in a closed-door hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee after he publicly accepted responsibility last week for the inclusion of a sentence referring to the faulty intelligence in Bush’s State of the Union address. “The Director was very contrite. He was very candid. He was very forthcoming. And he accepted full responsibility,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican yesterday. Asked whether Tenet should resign, Roberts replied: “I think he is doing a good job in the war against terrorism. This is one error that he has admitted in terms of his responsibility. In my personal view, I will say no.” After the hearing, Tenet said, “It was an uplifting experience.” Republicans had questioned why the CIA Director, who had not read the speech before Bush delivered it in January, was no more involved in preventing the mistake. Democrats had blamed the White House and questioned whether someone there had knowingly included the dubious intelligence to hype Bush’s case for action in Iraq. Presidential candidate Senator John Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat, said Bush should take the responsibility. “The responsibility is not the CIA’s, it is not anyone else’s, it is the President’s responsibility,” he said. Senator John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the committee, said, “I think that responsibility has to be taken by a lot more than George Tenet.” Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said the White House political staff ‘’was trying to do verbal somersaults here to find every possible way to get this included in the speech, and they prevailed.” —
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Vikram Seth bags £1.3 m for memoir London, July 17 The amount is believed to be the largest ever payment for a work of non-fiction. Time Warner has agreed to pay the sum for “Two Lives”, having outbid the other publishers “substantially”, according to Seth’s Edinburgh-based agent Giles Gordon, who secured the deal after five short-listed publishers bid for the work on the basis of a proposal and a presentation by the author himself. The book is not due to be published before Autumn of 2005. Time Warner’s imprint Little, Brown outbid Orion, publisher of “A Suitable Boy” and Penguin, the under-bidder, which was reported to have offered £ 1 million. Richard
Beswick, Little, Brown’s publishing editor said it was not unusual to bid for a work without seeing a draft manuscript. “Not for a writer of Vikram Seth’s stature. He brings warmth, vitality and a profound enriching humanity to all his writing.” The latest deal has put Seth, in financial terms, into the ranks of contemporary literature’s very elite. He has beaten even Martin Amis’s controversial £ 500,000 for “The Information”. “Two Lives” is the story of the marriage between Seth’s great uncle Shanti and aunt
Henny, a German Jew, who met in pre-war Germany as Hitler came to power and had escaped to England where Seth lived with them during his adolescence. The story covers the Raj, the Third Reich, the Holocaust and British post-war society. —
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Norway takes Lankan offer to Tigers Colombo, July 17 Special envoy Jon Westborg travelled to rebel-held Wanni region today to formally handover the set of proposals finalised by the government to grant more powers to the Tiger rebels. The government’s chief peace negotiator, Mr G.L. Peiris, said a set of proposals for the setting up of a “provisional administrative structure” was given to the Tamil Tiger rebels through Westborg. “We do not expect a quick response from the LTTE,” Mr Peiris said. He said the Tigers were expected to consult with their experts before coming up with a reply. However, Mr Peiris, who is also the government’s Constitutional Affairs Minister, said he believed that the new proposals could form the basis for resuming direct talks. The peace process is deadlocked since the Tigers announced suspending talks on April 21 after accusing the government of failing to deliver on promises made at six rounds of talks since September. Mr Peiris declined to give details of the government’s latest proposals. But said they could be further modified based on a Tigers’ reaction. —
PTI |
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No sign of sexual abuse
by ex-Marine Frankfurt, July 17 A spokeswoman for the state prosecutor’s office also told journalists that Toby Studabaker was being questioned by the British police in Frankfurt and was scheduled to face a magistrate later today. He was arrested in Frankfurt yesterday. “There are no indications that Studabaker committed a sex crime in Germany,” said Hildegard Becker-Toussant, spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s
office. Studabaker (31), was detained in Frankfurt, bringing to an end a four-day international manhunt involving detectives in Britain, France, Germany, Ireland and the USA. The police in Britain said the two had made contact through the Internet. The case rekindled concerns about so-called grooming by adults, who contacted children through the Internet. —
Reuters
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India, Pakistan ‘not’ rigid on Kashmir London, July 17 “There were signs that India and Pakistan were beginning to move from their entrenched positions on Kashmir. Recent developments are somewhat promising. It appears that India has become more amenable to third-party facilitation, rather than third-party intervention,” Zafar Khan, head of the JKLF Diplomatic Mission in the UK, told mediapersons here yesterday. He said, “The British and the Americans welcome this shift in inflection, and certainly our interaction with the (UK) Foreign Office suggests that they are quite happy India has shown this shift.” Khan said the JKLF had launched a ‘Roadmap for Peace and Prosperity in South Asia’ to resolve the Kashmir issue. The roadmap envisages the setting up of an International Kashmir Committee (IKC), that would supervise a phased process to “reunite the divided Jammu and Kashmir state, making it a fully independent country, with a democratic, federal and secular system of government,” he said. “While in the first phase, the IKC will convince India, Pakistan and Kashmiri leaders that the proposed solution of the Kashmir issue is in the best interests of all of them and persuade them to co-operate in its implementation, in the second phase the proposed state will be demilitarised,” Zafar Khan said. In the third phase, all civilians and militants would be disarmed, allowing exiled Kashmiris to return home, he said. He said the contemplated fourth phase would see the reopening of roads across the dividing lines while the fifth and final stage envisaged holding of a referendum under the UN auspices in 15 years.” —
PTI |
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Zardari to be indicted in murder case Islamabad, July 17 Additional District and Sessions Judge, Abrar Memon, fixed July 26 for formally indicting Zardari and a co-accused in the case. Former Pakistan Steel chief Sajjad Hussain was shot dead on September 11, 1998 while on his way home. The police had initially registered a case against unknown assailants, media reports said. The prosecution had earlier submitted an interim chargesheet in the case and sought time for the submission of a final chargesheet. The Judge ordered that the interim chargesheet be treated as a final one, media reports said. According to the interim chargesheet, the SHO arrested Salim Uddin, alias Salloo, and Sohail Ahmed, alias Panga, on September 3, 1999. The two suspects, during interrogation, disclosed that Dr Zulfiqar Mirza had telephoned them in September, 1998 and asked them to kill Hussain as he was going to make a statement against Zardari in a corruption case, daily ‘Dawn’ reported today. —
PTI |
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Douglases seek
$1 m in damages London, July 17 In April the American actor and his Welsh actress wife won a partial victory, following the publication of the “stolen” photos, when Justice Lindsay, also presiding over this week’s damages hearing, ruled that Hello! had breached their rights of confidence.The couple have asked for £ 500,000 in damages plus £ 50,000 each for personal distress they suffered after the paparazzi invaded their wedding, their lawyer told the High Court judge. —
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London, July 17
