Missouri, December 12
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s farewell address criticised the administration of US President George W. Bush warning that America must not sacrifice its Democratic ideals while waging war against terrorism.

In remarks prepared for delivery yesterday at the Truman Presidential Museum and Library, Annan also said the Security Council should be expanded.

Annan, who leaves the United Nations on December 31 after 10 years as Secretary-General, has become an increasingly vocal critic of the war in Iraq.

He said, in the text, the US had a special responsibility to the world because it continues to have extraordinary power.

Annan summed up five principles he considered essential: collective responsibility, global solidarity, rule of law, mutual accountability and multilateralism.

“As President Truman said, ‘The responsibility of the great states is to serve and not dominate the peoples of the world,” Annan said.

The Secretary-General also offered a challenge to the current and future leaders of the United States to live up to the example set by president Harry Truman, one of the founders of the United Nations, and to follow his credo that great states have a responsibility to serve — and not dominate the people of the world.

“More than ever today Americans, like the rest of humanity, need a functioning global system through which the world’s peoples can face global challenges together,” he said. “And in order to function, the system still cries out for farsighted American leadership in the Truman tradition.”

When Americans remained aloof from global institutions, they could not accomplish much, he said. But when their country was fully engaged,“the sky’s the limit.”

Mr Annan said the first lesson he learned was that “the security of everyone of us is linked to that of everyone else,” adding that it is especially true in today’s era when threats such as terrorism or avian flu “can be carried across oceans, let alone national borders, in a matter of hours.”

He stressed that this included the shared “responsibility to protect” civilian populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

Talking about the second lesson he said: “We are also, in some measure, responsible for each other’s welfare,” pointing towards the importance of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the set of eight targets for ameliorating social and economic ills, all by 2015.

“It is not realistic to think that some people can go on deriving great benefits from globalization while billions of their fellow human beings are left in abject poverty, or even thrown into it.”

Adding another lesson, Mr Annan said that security and development ultimately depended on respect for human rights and the rule of law.

The United States has “historically been in the vanguard of the global human rights movement. But that lead can only be maintained if America remains true to its principles, including in the struggle against terrorism. When it appears to abandon its own ideals and objectives, its friends abroad are naturally troubled and confused.”

Turning to the fourth lesson, Mr Annan said “governments must be accountable for their actions in the international arena, as well as in the domestic one.”

He argued that the current system is highly skewed so that poor and weak states are easily held to account because they depended on foreign assistance, while large and powerful states “whose actions have the greatest impact on others, can be constrained only by their own people, working through their domestic institutions.”

The fifth lesson, the Secretary-General concluded, follows automatically from the other four, “We can only do all these things by working together through a multilateral system, and by making the best possible use of the unique instrument bequeathed to us by Harry Truman and his contemporaries — namely the United Nations.” — Agencies

Washington, December 12
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice lamented a speech by retiring UN chief Kofi Annan criticising US foreign policy as a “real missed opportunity”.

In an interview with AFP, Rice criticised Annan’s failure in the much-awaited speech to highlight the positive role she said Washington had played at the world body over the past two years.

“I would have hoped that it would have talked about the work that we’ve done together,” she said, recalling the joint launch of a global fund for AIDS, a recent resolution aimed at halting the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region and the UN ceasefire which ended the July-August war in Lebanon.

“That ceasefire would not have happened without the United States,” she said. “I can go on and on about the positive things we have achieved in this period of time, and so I’m sorry that those were not the focus of the speech,” she said.

“The speech is a real missed opportunity,” she said. — AFP

Houston, December 12
Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams moved to her new home over 350 km above the earth, as space shuttle Discovery docked with the International Space Station (ISS), after two days of orbital pursuit.

"Tally-ho on the new home," Sunita called out as Discovery prepared for docking onto the ISS as it moved 354 km above Bangladesh.

Sunita and six other astronauts, who arrived at the ISS, had a hard time moving around in weightlessness compared to their station counterparts. Some of them had to be held down for a group photo so that they did not drift away. Sunita replaced German astronaut Thomas Reiter on the ISS, who returns to earth after a five month sojourn in space.

The crew rotation became official when their custom-made seatliners were swapped out in the Soyuz spacecraft docked to the ISS.

The Discovery crew also brought with them the P5 integrated truss structure which will be installed at the space station in the three spacewalks. It would help reconfigure and redistribute power generated by the station's newest solar arrays.

After hugs, hand shakes and picture shots, the Discovery crew conducted an inspection of the shuttle wing and prepared for tomorrow's spacewalk.

The team had completed the first review of Sunday's inspection of the orbiter's heat shield and started the analysis of imagery of Discovery's underside, he said.

Baghdad, December 12
A suicide bomber detonated a pickup truck packed with explosives among a crowd of casual labourers in downtown Baghdad today, killing at least 57 persons and wounding 105, a security official said.

The powerful blast ripped through the traffic at 7 am (0930 IST) in the busy Tayaran Square in the Rusafa district of the city, in at least the fourth attack on mainly Shiite day labourers in the same spot this year.

In a tactic used before, the police said, the pickup truck pulled up to the group of labourers and offered daily work, immediately attracting a large crowd of people desperate for work in this economically depressed city.

“They came like bees to honey,” said the Interior Ministry official, and then the truck exploded.

In the hours afterwards, several more dull explosions could be heard around the city. — AFP