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US wants to sell F-16 to India, Pak: paper
Allegations of sexual abuse by UN personnel
Chinese students root for English
Sikh girl to join US forces in Iraq
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Islamabad, March 13 The designated authorities in Azad Jammu and Kashmir will start issuing application forms for the Muzaffarabad-Srinagar bus service travel permits from Monday. The designated authority in Muzzafarabad, that is the Deputy Commissioner's office, will start issuing forms for the Muzaffarabad-Srinagar bus service from Monday, Foreign Office spokesman Jalil Abbas Jilani told Dawn on Saturday. Journalism award for Indian-American
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US wants to sell F-16 to India, Pak: paper
Islamabad, March 13 While New Delhi has not yet given its approval to purchase of the fighter planes, it has been for long opposing Islamabad's bid to acquire them from the USA. So, in an attempt not to anger either of them, the USA may put its offer to sell the planes to both of them, the official reportedly said. According to The Nation, during the next week's visit to India and Pakistan, the US Secretary of State will convey to New Delhi that Washington was willing to sell the planes (to India also) if it approved purchase of the fighter jets. India has traditionally bought most of its weaponry from Russia, and the Russian-made MiG-29M is one of the planes New Delhi is considering for the multi-role fighter deal. Other planes under consideration are Sweden's Saab Gripen and France's Dassault Mirage 2000-5, said the paper. Pakistan has been craving for modern F-16 fighters to bring its military strength at par with India, but so far the move has been successfully stalled by New Delhi. The paper further reported that New Delhi has proposed to buy only 18 planes directly from the manufacturer "Lockheed Martin", and get the remaining 108 by building them in India under license. Lockheed Martin Corp., which builds the F-16 in Fort Worth, Texas, had been given US State Department approval in November to provide India information on the plane. The US Congress had cancelled a sale of about two dozen F-16s to Pakistan in 1990 due to Islamabad's nuke programme. Thereafter, tight sanctions on selling arms to both Pakistan or India were triggered when both countries tested nuclear devices in 1998.
— ANI |
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Allegations of sexual abuse by UN personnel
United Nations, March 13 Jane Holl Lute, a senior UN peacekeeping official who heads a UN task force on sexual exploitation, told a congressional committee investigating allegations that UN personnel participated in rape, prostitution and pedophilia in Congo. The reports of sexual abuse have come from UN officials, internal UN documents, and local and international human rights organisations that have tracked the issue. Some UN officials and outside observers say there have been cases of abuse in almost every UN mission. Peacekeepers in several Liberian communities routinely engage in sex with girls, according to an internal UN letter obtained by The Washington Post. In the town of Gbarnga, peacekeepers were seen patronising a club called Little Lagos, ‘‘where girls as young as 12 years of age are engaged in prostitution, forced into sex acts and sometimes photographed by UN peacekeepers in exchange for $10 or food or other commodities,’’ according to the letter, which a representative of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) wrote on February 8 to the mission's second-ranking official. The letter also stated that community leaders in the town of Robertsport have accused Namibian peacekeepers there of ‘‘using administrative building premises and the surrounding bush to undertake sex acts with girls between the age of 12-17.’’ The UN also opened an investigation earlier this month into allegations of sexual abuse of minors by UN troops in the Central African country of Burundi. Pamela Shifman, a UNICEF expert on sexual exploitation of children, said abuses are pervasive among UN peacekeepers deployed in countries that have been afflicted by grinding poverty and years of conflict. But, she said, ‘‘It is not inevitable. That's a really important message - that we can address impunity. We can address accountability.’’ In Haiti, she said, soldiers from Chile, Brazil, Sri Lanka and Peru ‘‘lived in walled compounds with gates, and they are not able to go out at night; they are under strict curfew.’’ Still, two Pakistani police were removed from Haiti last month after a local woman accused them of raping her at a banana farm outside Gonaives, UN officials said. A UN investigation dismissed the rape charge but expelled the Pakistanis for hiring a prostitute. In September a Brazilian peacekeeper was accused of raping a minor in Port-au-Prince, Martin said. The United Nations concluded there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the peacekeeper, she said. A UN spokesman in Kosovo, Neeraj Singh, confirmed that a Pakistani staff member in the office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, Rashid Doon Khan, was arrested in Kosovo on January 28 pending a pretrial investigation that ‘‘relates to sexual and narcotics-related charges involving minors.’’ Singh declined to provide further details. An attorney for Khan, Tome Gashi, declined to comment on the charges. — By arrangement with the LA-Washington Post |
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Chinese students root for English
Beijing, March 13 The neglect of their mother tongue by young scholars in China will endanger the purity of the languages and the continuity of Chinese culture, Shen Dan of Beijing University warned on Friday. "Grammatical mistakes constantly occur in their essays as well as oral discourses, not to mention coarse wording and improper style," said Shen, who is also a deputy to the National People's Congress, China's top legislature. An expert on European and American literature, she pointed out that many Chinese universities and graduate schools neglected the role of Chinese languages and rarely included them in their curricula. "Young intellectuals have a leading role to play in carrying forward the Chinese culture and should be well grounded in their own mother tongue. After all, Chinese is one of the working languages of the UN," said Shen. She proposed that academic writing be made compulsory for all college students and all applicants to graduate schools take a Chinese language proficiency test. The world's most populous nation has become the largest market for English learning, driven by the desire to study abroad or find well paid jobs overseas.
— IANS |
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Sikh girl to join US forces in Iraq
Washington, March 13 Ranbir Kaur, 19, is a part-time college student from the obscure San Joaquin Valley town of Earlimart in California. By summer end, she expects to put her textbooks aside and serve as a supply clerk in Iraq. It was the limits of life in a comatose San Joaquin Valley farm town that spurred Kaur to join the California National Guard in late 2002, two days after her 17th birthday and more than a year before she graduated from Delano High. The $ 3,000 bonus she got for enlisting was yet another important factor. The daughter of Sikh grape farmer, Kaur emigrated at age seven from India to the USA. Ranbir Kaur, who works as a clerk in a doctor's office and studies at Bakersfield College while she waits to be deployed to Iraq, wasn't motivated solely by patriotism. "It's lead to a lot more opportunities in life," she told a California paper 'The Sacramento Bee'.
— PTI |
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Kashmir entry forms from today
Islamabad, March 13 The designated authority in Muzzafarabad, that is the Deputy Commissioner's office, will start issuing forms for the Muzaffarabad-Srinagar bus service from Monday, Foreign Office spokesman Jalil Abbas Jilani told Dawn on Saturday. The spokesman said that for the convenience of people in other areas the forms would also be issued from all other offices of Deputy Commissioners in the AJK. He, however, pointed out that the office of the Muzaffarabad deputy commissioner would be the main coordinating authority. The government's earlier plan to issue forms from this week could not materialise due to some hitches in inter-agency coordination, it is learnt. In Srinagar, the designated authorities have already started issuing forms. According to government officials no fee would be charged for either the forms or the permits to be issued. The prospective passengers would just have to pay for the bus ticket. However, the ticket fare has yet to be decided by relevant AJK authorities. The Muzaffarabad-Srinagar bus service, scheduled to be launched on April 7, would initially be run fortnightly and the travel permits issued would be valid for the same time period. |
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Journalism award for Indian-American
New York, March 13 Chanda is currently the editor at YaleGlobal Online and director of publications at the centre, located in New Haven. He received the award at a ceremony held earlier this week at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, which was presided over by Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Centre. The award is presented jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Forum for Asia Pacific Studies at Stanford University and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard.
— UNI |
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