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Monday,
October
6, 2003,
Chandigarh, India  
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Former Iraqi soldiers clash with UK troops
Weapons report puts Bush, Tenet under fire |
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Mary King wins Jamnalal Bajaj Award Immigrants’ rally demands law change Jindal first in primary
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Former Iraqi soldiers clash with UK troops Basra (Iraq), October 5 The protesters gathered early this morning after a British soldier shot dead an armed Iraqi man in Basra the previous day during clashes with former soldiers who had gathered to collect redundancy payments for being laid off from the Iraqi army. Former soldiers also rioted in Baghdad and the town of Hilla yesterday at payment centres where they are given their $ 40 as compensation for losing their jobs. The US-led administration in Iraq said supporters of Saddam fuelled the unrest by spreading rumours there was not enough money to pay everyone. Locals in Basra said five persons had been wounded today by rubber bullets. Iraqi police arrived to help quell violence and fired into the air, but fled to a nearby university building after running out of bullets and chased by the crowd. Mohammed Jasim Abboud, one of the protesters, said former soldiers needed jobs and money. ‘’We’ve had no wages for a while now,’’ he said. ‘’We want our rights like everyone else.’’ The US-led administration in Iraq disbanded the country’s army in May, sparking several demonstrations by soldiers who said they faced destitution in a country whose economy had been battered by war and years of dictatorship and sanctions. The administration later agreed to make a one-off payment of $ 40 to around 440,000 former soldiers, and thousands have been queuing daily at payment centres around Iraq to get their cash. Washington is setting up a smaller military force to take the place of Saddam’s bloated army. Yesterday, the first recruits in the New Iraqi Army graduated from basic training. Facing a guerrilla insurgency and mounting financial costs, Washington is trying to agree a new United Nations resolution giving the world body a broader mandate in Iraq in an effort to coax reluctant countries to provide troops and funds. At least 85 US soldiers have been killed in action in Iraq since Washington declared major combat over on May 1. Security Council members France and Russia say they are unhappy with the draft US resolution. The two countries, which opposed the war in Iraq, want a faster handover of power to Iraqis as a condition for their support. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said the world body could not play a proper political role in Iraq under the terms wanted by the USA. The USA says the draft resolution may be revised but it says the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis cannot be rushed and that a constitution must be drawn up first — something Iraqi officials say could take more than a year. —
Reuters |
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Weapons report puts Bush, Tenet under fire Washington, October 5 It is now known that it was not Mr Tenet who asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak, but lawyers in the CIA General Counsel’s office, media reports said. “The focus on Mr Tenet has sharpened in the last week,” The Washington Post said. The controversy over the leak comes as the CIA under Mr Tenet is increasingly on the defensive over the intelligence used by the US Administration to make the case for invading Iraq, it said. Weapons inspector David Kay said he had not been able to find any weapons. President Bush and his supporters say that Mr Kay has found — and has said so — that Saddam had the infrastructure to build these. Mr Kay’s interim report strongly suggests that “important parts of the case made by President Bush and his aides before the war were wrong,” the Post said in an editorial. —
PTI |
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Mary King wins Jamnalal Bajaj Award London, October 5 The award will be presented at a special function in Mumbai on November 4 this year. Previous winners of the Award included Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Prof Sir Joseph Rotblat of the United Kingdom and Professor Johan Galtung of Norway. In January 2004, King will also become Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. “I am delighted that Mary has won this important Award,” Martin Lees, the Rector of UPEACE said. “She has made an enormous contribution to education for peace programmes in many parts of the world, particularly Africa,” Lees said, according to a release by the University of Peace. Mary King is a prize-winning author, political scientist, and a well-known civil rights leader in the USA. As a student, she was one of the few white staff who worked alongside the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. in the crusade for racial justice. She won a 1988 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award for her book “Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement”, an account of her four years working in the US civil rights movement. During the Carter Administration, Mary King had worldwide responsibility for the Peace Corps, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and other national volunteer service programmes. —
PTI |
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Immigrants’ rally demands law change New York, October 5 Organisers estimated that 100,000 people across the US attended the huge rally yesterday demanding better working and living conditions for the undocumented aliens who are tied to low paid jobs and live in perpetual fear of being deported. Hence they are vulnerable to harassment and do not complain, organisers said. Hispanics, Spanish-speaking people from Latin America, constituted an overwhelming majority of the demonstrators. Several immigrants related stories of how they have been separated for years from their families back home, and family members there have not seen their children born in the USA. —
PTI |
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Jindal first in primary Washington, October 5 With 71 per cent of the votes counted, Jindal, who finished first had 33 per cent, while the second spot was being closely contested by Lt Governor Kathleen Blanco and Attorney General Richard Ieyoub both at 17 per cent. Turnout was projected at 65 per cent and long queues were also reported at many polling stations yesterday. If none of the 17 candidates contesting for the post get more than 50 per cent of the votes in the primary, the top two would go to the November 15 runoff. The winner would become the next Governor. Political pundits who had earlier said that Jindal running as a conservative Republican candidate, had no chance of being elected the first Indian-American Governor as he isn’t white, were in for a surprise. Jindal has promised to introduce education reforms and abolish several state business taxes which he says have made the state of Louisiana unattractive to industry. Besides sporting an impressive resume — Rhodes scholar, federal jobs at a young age of 32, Jindal also is a protege of the state’s most prominent Republican Mike Foster who has served two terms. Bobby Jindal is the son of Indian immigrants who ran Louisiana’s biggest university system as well its largest Cabinet-level department, all by the time he was 30. “He has amazed us in getting as far as he has,” said T Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University, “he has captured that biggest bloc of southern and Lousiana voters, rural social conservatives, and he seemed like the most likely person to do that.” Jindal quickly fashioned a strategically savvy campaign of his own, blending his formidable track record as a technocrat with tough radio advertisements attacking abortion, gun control, gay marriage and Hollywood, the ‘Washington Post’ said. |
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