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India, China to discuss guiding principles during border
talks Osama tape asks Pakistanis to fight US
troops Saddam got
$21 b from UN oil programme:
Immolation bid outside White House |
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Two top CIA officials quit
Liver generation
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India, China to discuss guiding principles during Beijing, November 16 National Security Adviser J.N. Dixit will meet Chinese Executive Vice-Foreign Minister Dai Bingguo here for the Special Representatives’ talks on the India-China boundary issue from November 18-19, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said. During his recent visit to India, Chinese State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan, who oversees Chinese foreign policy issues, had discussed the boundary issue with the new Indian leadership. “The two sides gave positive appraisals to the three rounds of negotiations held between the two Special Representatives on the boundary issue. They expressed hopes to reach consensus as soon as possible on the guiding principles for resolving the boundary issue and arduously seek for a just and rational solution,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Tang’s visit to India in late October. During his stay in Beijing, Mr Dixit is expected to call on Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is likely to visit India early next year. The upcoming border talks between Dixit and Dai will be the second since the Congress-led UPA government assumed power in May. Dai had two meetings with Dixit’s predecessor Brajesh Mishra on the boundary issue. The third meeting of the Special Representatives was held in New Delhi on July 26-27, 2004. While remaining mum on the topics discussed, both sides had said the discussions were held in a “friendly, constructive and cooperative atmosphere.” India and China appointed Special Representatives to resolve the vexed boundary issue during former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s visit to Beijing in June last year. Meanwhile, China today welcomed India’s recent decision to cut troops in Jammu and Kashmir saying that Beijing welcomed any moves that led to increased mutual trust and relaxation in relations between New Delhi and Islamabad. “The Chinese side has always advocated that India and Pakistan should resolve their differences through peaceful means,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue told reporters here. “We welcome and support any moves by the two sides which will help the two sides increase mutual trust and relax their relations,” she said, when asked to comment on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s announcement to reduce deployment of troops in Jammu and Kashmir this winter. —
PTI |
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Osama tape asks Pakistanis to fight US troops
Cairo, November 16 The authenticity of the statement, which appeared today on a website known as a clearinghouse for militant Muslim comment, could not be verified. “We urge our Muslim brothers in Pakistan to use all their capabilities and whatever they possess to prevent the American crusader’s troops from invading Pakistan and Afghanistan,” said the statement, signed: “your brother in Islam, Osama bin Laden.” The statement also referred to deaths during an anti-US protest in the Pakistani city of Karachi. While violent protests have occurred elsewhere in Pakistan, there have been no reports of a demonstration in Karachi that resulted in fatal clashes. The Arabic station Al-Jazeera received and aired on October 29 the latest video of bin Laden, in which the Al-Qaida chief directly acknowledged for the first time that he ordered the September 11, 2001 attacks and criticized US President George Bush. US officials have said they believe that the video, which appeared days before a vote in which Bush was re-elected, was authentic. Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in a mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border area, having fled there after a US invasion toppled his Taliban hosts following the September 11 attacks. — AP |
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Saddam got $21 b from UN oil programme: US
panel
Washington, November 15 The money flowed between 1991 and 2003 through oil surcharges, kickbacks on civilian goods and smuggling directly to willing governments, Senate investigators said at a hearing. "How was the world so blind to this massive amount of influence-peddling?" asked Republican Senator Norm Coleman, head of the investigations sub-committee. Coleman made public more documents he said were the evidence of bigger kickbacks and payments than what was previously known, including 2003 data previously not reviewed. The new Senate figure is about double the amount estimated by the US Government Accountability Office, which had pegged it at $ 10.1 billion. Charles Duelfer, the Chief US Weapons Inspector in Iraq, had estimated about the same amount based on Iraqi documents, with $2 billion through the UN program and $ 8 billion in smuggling by road or sea or in direct illegal agreements with governments. The oil-for-food program began in December 1996 to alleviate the impact on ordinary Iraqis of sanctions, imposed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. The UN Security Council allowed Iraq to sell oil and buy food, medicine and other goods and let Baghdad draw up its own contracts. This left room for abuse in the $64 billion program, administered by the United Nations and monitored by a UN Security Council panel, including the USA, according to investigators. Oil smuggling alone netted Saddam's regime about $9.7 billion, with other funds flowing from switching substandard goods with top-grade ones, as well as exploiting food and medicine shipments to the Kurds in Iraq's north. Panel investigators also echoed the findings by Duelfer, head of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, that Saddam's regime gave lucrative contracts to buy Iraqi oil to high-ranking officials in Russia, France and other nations. On the list of 270 individuals, businesses and political parties was the head of the UN oil-for-food program, Benon Sevan, who has vigorously denied the charges. Other recipients include Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his Russian Liberal Democrat Party. The Senate panel released a document signed by Zhirinovsky in January 1999 that invited a US oil company to Moscow to negotiate to buy the oil voucher. The name of the US company was withheld because of pending investigations, the panel staff said. In press statements, Zhirinovsky has denied taking bribes from Saddam's regime, though he admitted meeting with the former Iraqi President during trips to Baghdad. Senior Iraqi officials like former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz were also personally involved in oil talks, the panel investigators said. In each case, Saddam's regime awarded a certificate that allowed the holder to sell the right to buy Iraqi oil at below-market prices. The certificate holder would charge a per-barrel commission to transfer the rights to an oil buyer. Per-barrel fees were usually less than $1 per barrel but racked up big dollar amounts because the allocations upward of 1 million barrels were routine. The United Nations has refused to hand over documents to a US congressional committee or allow Sevan to appear before a panel while its own investigation is under way, led by Paul Volcker, the former US Federal Reserve Chairman. UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said in New York that Secretary-General Kofi Annan had telephoned Coleman and Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, "to assure them we are not being obstructionist" following an angry letter last week from the two Senators.
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Immolation bid outside White House
Washington, November 16 Alan Etter, spokesman for the District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services, said the guards at the gate quickly extinguished the flames yesterday, and the man had second-and third-degree burns on 30 per cent of his body. The Washington Post reported today the man, a Yemeni federal informant on terrorism, was upset over how the FBI had managed his case. Mohamed Alanssi, who had recently discussed his work as an informant in interviews with The Washington Post, told the newspaper by faxed letter and telephone yesterday, he intended to ''burn my body at unexpected place,'' the newspaper reported. The man's name was being withheld pending notification of his family, the Park Police said. A spokesman for the FBI in Washington was not immediately available for comment on the Post report early today. In interviews with the newspaper, Alanssi, who is from Yemen and also uses the name Mohamed Alhadrami, expressed anguish over not being able to visit his family in Yemen. —
AP, Reuters |
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Staring at computers may cause
blindness Spending hours staring at a computer screen may raise the risk of glaucoma, a progressive eye disease that can lead to blindness, scientists believe.
The dramatic discovery contradict years of advice which suggested that gazing at computers did not damage the optic nerve. Researchers aim to replicate the study to confirm the findings. The results emerged from a study in Japan of 10,000 workers with an average age of 43. It found a statistical link between heavy computer use and eye problems that presage glaucoma. The problems were more common among staff with existing vision defects such as short-sight or long-sight. The team warned that there could be a dramatic rise in the number of glaucoma cases, or patients showing the early signs, if action was not taken to check people who spend long time in front of screens and have existing eye conditions. ‘‘Computer stress is reaching higher levels than have ever been experienced before,’’ the team from the Toho University School of Medicine in Tokyo said. ‘‘In the next decade, therefore, it might be important for public health professionals to show more concern about myopia [short-sightedness] and visual field abnormalities in heavy computer users.’’ Visual field abnormalities are distortions or gaps in the field of view. ‘‘Myopic workers with a history of long-term computer using might have an increased risk of visual field abnormalities, possibly related to glaucoma,’’ said Dr Masayuki Tatemichi, who led the team. The work was reported in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. Glaucoma is more common in old age, and happens when the optic nerve in the eye is damaged, possibly by high pressure inside the eye. The causes are unknown, but potential risk factors include smoking and high blood pressure. Opticians had discounted the possibility that computer use could be linked to glaucoma and several studies had suggested that there was no connection between intensive computer use and glaucoma. Although poor computer screens can cause eye strain, that was not believed to be a precursor to the problem. For male office workers, working on computer is a second alarm bell over glaucoma; last year a study had suggested wearing a tie too tightly could also lead to the disorder. The investigation by the Toho University researchers found that 522, or 5.1 per cent, of the workers had ‘visual field abnormalities’, which can be a precursor to the full-blown condition - which normally affects 0.74 per cent of the population. Further tests on the 522 subjects found that 165 (32 per cent) had suspected glaucoma. The researchers also found a significant statistical link with heavy computer use among short-sighted workers. They suggested that the optic nerve in short-sighted people might have a structural condition that renders it more susceptible to computer stress than non-myopic eyes. — By arrangement with The Independent, London |
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Two top CIA officials quit
Washington, November 16 Mr Stephen Kappes, deputy director for operations, and his deputy Michael Sulick submitted their resignations yesterday CIA Director Porter Goss said. The resignations came two months after Mr Goss took charge with a mandate to reform the spy agency which has been under fire for intelligence failures related to the September 11 attacks and flawed pre-war reports that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. —
Reuters |
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Liver generation
on computer chip
Cambridge, November 16 "Five-ten years from now, we can start eliminating animals from toxic experiments for new drugs and cosmetics," Lize King, Communications Manager at the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), a pioneering partnership between UK's Cambridge University and the US' Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said. —
PTI |
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No proof of Iran's N-plan: UN Mental illness
on rise in UK Cuban dancers
seeks US asylum |
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