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Calls for halt to incursion United Nations, October 6 The USA has vetoed an Arab-sponsored resolution calling for an immediate halt to all Israeli military operations in northern Gaza and withdrawal of forces, saying it was “lopsided and unbalanced” and “encouraged terrorists.”
Two die in Afghan blast
Accidental blast sparked
Russian school killings
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3 top US officials face
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India, Pak to deploy troops
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US vetoes resolution on Israel
United Nations, October 6 Eleven of the 15 members voted in favour of the resolution with Britain, Germany and Romania abstaining. The American veto yesterday came after efforts by Britain, the current President of the Council, and Germany to find an acceptable language failed and they abstained. The USA maintains that any resolution calling for ending Israeli actions should also condemn suicide attacks by Palestinian militants. Arabs said they wanted a quick vote because the
Israeli incursions had killed about 70 Palestinians. The incursion was in response to a rocket attack in which two pre-school children were killed. Speaking prior to the vote, American Ambassador John C Danforth called the proposed text “lopsided and unbalanced” for containing many “material omissions” and said it deserved a no vote. He said it would not only encourage terrorists, but would not do anything to prevent the predictable Israeli response. “Ultimately,a resolution like this emboldens terrorists, encourages counter-attacks and contributes to the ultimate terrorist goal of derailing the peace process,” he said. “The Security Council should reverse the incessant stream of one anti-Israel resolution after the other and apply pressure even-handedly, on both
desks, to side turn to the road of peace.”
— PTI |
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Two die in Afghan blast
Kabul, October 6 Mr Karzai’s candidate for first Vice-President, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was not injured in the attack at Faizabad, the capital of the Badakhshan province, Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal said. “Ahmad Zia Massoud is sound and safe,” the spokesman said. No one had been arrested so far. “The investigation is going on. It is the work of the enemies of peace and the elements who want to derail the election process,” he said. Massoud is the brother of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the assassinated hero of the fight against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and of the later struggle against the hardline Islamic Taliban regime. The blast was the latest in a series of attacks in the run-up to Afghanistan’s first presidential election this Saturday.
— AFP |
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Cheney outshines Edwards in tough poll
debate
Republicans, despondent after President George W Bush's poor showing in last week's presidential debate, found a reason to smile on Tuesday night as Vice-President Dick Cheney outmanoeuvred his Democratic opponent in the first and only vice-presidential debate in Campaign 2004.
Debating in Cleveland, Ohio, Mr Cheney and Senator John Edwards clashed, predictably, on the Bush Administration's handling of the war in Iraq, its aftermath and terrorism. Mr Cheney opened the debate defending the Bush Administration's Iraq policy. "If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the same course of action. The world is far safer today because Saddam Hussein is in jail, his government is no longer in power. And we did exactly the right thing." A former trial lawyer, Mr Edwards shot back: "Mr Vice-President, you are still not being straight with the American people." Mr Cheney, in turn, faulted Mr Edwards for not being "credible on Iraq because of the enormous inconsistencies that Mr Kerry and you have cited time after time after time during the course of the campaign." "Whatever the political pressures of the moment requires, that's where you're at. But you've not been consistent and there's no indication at all that Mr Kerry has the conviction to successfully carry through on the war on terror," he added. Calling Mr Cheney's remarks a "complete distortion," Mr Edwards said, "The American people saw Mr Kerry on Thursday night (during the first presidential debate). They don't need the Vice-President or the President to tell them what they saw." Referring to Halliburton, Mr Edwards said, "The facts are, the Vice-President's company, that he was CEO of, that did business with sworn enemies of the USA, paid millions of dollars in fines for providing false financial information." Halliburton, he added, ended up with a $ 7.5 billion no-bid contract for work in Iraq. Mr Cheney brushed aside these attacks calling them "an effort that they made repeatedly to try to confuse the voters and to raise questions. But there's no substance of the charges. The reason they keep trying to attack Halliburton is because they want to obscure their own record." Taking a swipe at Mr Edwards' running mate Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry, Mr Cheney added: "A little tough talk in the midst of a campaign or as part of a presidential debate cannot obscure a record of 30 years of being on the wrong side of defence issues." An ABC flash poll minutes after the vice-presidential debate gave Mr. Cheney the win, 43 per cent to 35 per cent, with 19 per cent undecided. |
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Accidental blast sparked
Russian school killings
The bloody denouement of the Beslan hostage crisis in which more than 150 children died was triggered by a bomb going off accidentally in the school, provoking frenzied killings by the hostage-takers.
Mr Alexander Torshin, Chairman of a parliamentary inquiry, who has interviewed 600 persons since President Vladimir Putin agreed to set up the inquiry last month, said yesterday: "It (the explosion) was unexpected, both to the terrorists and to the people outside." Conflicting versions had circulated about the exact circumstances of the end of the hostage drama in southern Russia, which left a total of 331 persons dead and traumatised the world as it unfolded live on television. The building was stormed at a time when the guerrillas who were calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya were reported to have been ready to negotiate. Mr Torshin admitted that the Russian security forces, who have been criticised for failing to keep the distraught and armed townspeople at a safe distance from the school building during the three-day hostage-taking, had "nothing to be proud of". He added, "If people failed professionally they will have to answer for that." He said the explosion on the third day was "the result of a blunder", when a bomb strung up in basketball hoops fell out. "People were not focusing on that area when something dropped. Nobody needed that at that time. It was impossible to hold back the parents who broke through the security cordon searching for their children. We didn't want a battle between the parents and the soldiers." Mr Torshin, Deputy Chairman of Russia's Upper House of Parliament, also confirmed that on the first day, some terrorists objected to taking children hostage. President's Adviser on the north Caucasus Aslambek Aslakhanov said another member of the gang who objected to the hostage-taking was shot. Mr Torchin confirmed that 32 hostage-takers had been accounted for - one captured alive, 30 dead and one blown apart - but said "as of today", 24 had not been identified. He said that "up to 500" unanswered questions remained for his committee of inquiry, comprising 10 Russian Deputies and 10 Senators from the Upper House under his chairmanship. President Putin, who initially opposed such an inquiry, has called for an "objective" account. Mr Torshin, who left Beslan on Monday, said his team aimed to establish the reasons for the
attack. — By arrangement with The Independent, London |
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3 top US officials face
probe in tanker deal
Washington, October 6 Last week, former Air Force arms buyer Darleen Druyun was sentenced to nine months in jail after she admitted giving Chicago-based Boeing a rival's secret data and inflating weapons deals to ingratiate herself with her future
employer. Druyun's admissions have redoubled the efforts of federal prosecutors to get to the bottom of a scandal that has already cost two top Boeing officials their jobs and cast fresh doubt on what critics call a sweetheart deal for Boeing. White House officials last month asked the Justice Department to probe any conflict of interest involving Air Force Secretary James Roche and Robin Cleveland, Associate Director at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Pentagon Inspector-General Joseph Schmitz then said 113 e-mails from Air Force Assistant Secretary for Acquisitions Marvin Sambur were also being reviewed by federal prosecutors. Republican Senator John McCain yesterday said Congress should review all the contracts Druyun admitted steering toward Boeing and urged the Pentagon to take responsibility. "What kind of system do they have at the Pentagon where one person can rip off the taxpayers of billions of dollars and nobody else is responsible?" the Arizona Senator said. "Either more people are involved or there is something terribly wrong with their system of accountability." The Air Force had insisted this was a case of one "individual who engaged in misconduct," but said it was trying to improve oversight by eliminating Druyun's job and giving her boss,
Sambur, more authority to review major weapons deals. Pentagon officials had no immediate response to McCain.
— Reuters |
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India, Pak to deploy troops
in Congo
United Nations, October 6 Since the resolution's unanimous adoption, the UN said arrangements had been made for an emergency deployment of two battalions of about 850 soldiers each, one each from India and Pakistan. India will also provide four attack helicopters. The Council had decided to increase the number of peacekeepers by 5,900 to take the total strength to 16,700.
— PTI |
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Two Israelis, American share chemistry Nobel Prize
Stockholm, October 6 Ciechanover (57), Hershko (67), and Irwin Rose (78), were honoured by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work in the 1980s that discovered one of the cells’ most important cyclical processes, regulated protein degradation. The marked proteins are then chopped to pieces. When such degradation fails to work correctly, the result can be diseases like cervical cancer and cystic fibrosis. So research in this area may lead to new drugs for those diseases and others, the academy said. “Thanks to the work of the three laureates it is now possible to understand at the molecular level how the cell controls a number of central processes by breaking down certain proteins and not others,” the academy said in its citation. “Examples of processes governed by ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation are cell division, DNA repair, quality control of newly produced proteins, and important parts of the immune defence.” Ciechanover is the director of the Rappaport Family Institute for Research in Medical Sciences at the Technion, in Haifa, Israel, while Hershko, originally from Hungary, is a professor there. Rose is a specialist at the department of physiology and biophysics at the college of medicine at University of California-Irvine. All three will share the 10 million kronor ($ 1.3 million) cash prize. This year’s award announcements began on Monday with the Nobel Prize in medicine going to Americans Richard Axel and Linda B Buck. Axel and Buck were selected by a committee at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute for their work on the sense of smell. They clarified the intricate biological pathway from the nose to the brain that lets people sense smells. Yesterday, Americans David J Gross, H David Politzer and Frank Wilczek won the physics prize for their explanation of the force that binds particles inside the atomic nucleus. Their work has helped science get closer to “a theory for everything,” the academy said in awarding the prize. The winner of the literature prize will be announced tomorrow. The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel will be announced October 11. The winner of the coveted peace prize — the only one not awarded in Sweden — will be announced on Friday in Oslo, Norway. The prizes, which include a 10 million kronor ($ 1.3 million) check, a gold medal and a diploma, are presented on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.
— AP |
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