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Indian Americans caught in the crossfire
US officials hold talks with Musharraf
Suspended Pak CJ greeted
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US leaves uniform issue to Pervez
Koirala to propose Nov 26 as poll
date
Computers back to normal: NASA
Atlantis cleared for re-entry N. Korea invites UN atomic inspectors
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Indian Americans caught in the crossfire
Washington, June 16 Obama's campaign staff circulated a three-page document criticising Mrs. Clinton, a tactic not unusual in American politics. She is leading Obama in most opinion polls. The document's title - "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)'s Personal Financial and Political Ties to India" - is a reference to a joke the former first lady used at a fundraiser hosted by Rajwant Singh, chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education, at his Potomac, Maryland, home last year. Standing amid a sea of turbans, Mrs. Clinton joked, "I can certainly run for the Senate seat in Punjab and win easily." Nearly $50,000 was raised at the event for Mrs. Clinton's re-election. "The Clintons have reaped significant financial rewards from their relationship with the Indian community, both in their personal finances and Hillary's campaign fundraising," the Obama campaign paper says. Obama is not averse to ties with the Indian American community. South Asians for Obama is a grassroots movement that seeks to mobilise the South Asian American community to help elect the senator as the next President of the USA. The Obama campaign notes that Mrs. Clinton, who is the founding co-chair of the Senate India Caucus, has been criticised by anti-offshoring groups for her vocal support of Indian business and unwillingness to protect American jobs. "Bill Clinton has invested tens of thousands of dollars in an Indian bill payment company, while Hillary Clinton has taken tens of thousands from companies that outsource jobs to India. Workers who have been laid off in upstate New York might not think that her recent joke that she could be elected to the Senate seat in Punjab is that funny," the paper says. It cites Mrs. Clinton's 2006 Financial Disclosure Report stating, according to this as part his ownership of WJC Investments, LP LLC, Mr. Clinton held between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of stock in Easy Bill Limited, an Indian company that works on electronic transactions and business services for Indians. It also noted that the former President had collected $300,000 from California-based Cisco Systems in 2006, which laid off American workers to hire Indian "techies." The paper also lists Mrs. Clinton's ties to Vinod "Vin" Gupta, the Nebraska-based millionaire founder of infoUSA. It played up Gupta's comments in support of outsourcing. Gupta himself is the subject of a lawsuit filed by shareholders upset by his close ties to the Clintons He confirmed that Mr. Clinton was associated with infoUSA even before the 2003 date cited in the lawsuit. The suit says Gupta provided his company's jet to fly the Clintons to a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, at a cost of $146,866. Gupta said he gets back many times over what is spent on Mr. Clinton. While Gupta's connections to the former president go back to the Clinton White House years, he said InfoUSA's political services are sold to both the parties and that the company also has hired former Bush administration officials.
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US officials hold talks with Musharraf
Islamabad, June 16 US assistant secretary of state Richard Boucher and deputy secretary John Negroponte met Musharraf in Rawalpindi near here. Islamabad has witnessed a flurry of visits by US officials this week starting with Boucher four days ago. He was joined by Negroponte yesterday besides the CENTCOM Chief Admiral William J. Fallon. Fallon also met Musharraf separately today and thanked him for “the excellent cooperation of the Pakistan armed forces with regard to operations against international terrorism,” according to a Pakistan army statement. Negroponte and Boucher met Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz here today. Officials said that the anti-terror operation against the Taliban and Al-Qaida as well as the situation in Afghanistan was on the agenda of the top US officials. But the meetings that the US officials had with the ruling and Opposition politicians including Aitezaz Ahesan, a PPP leader and the lead defence lawyer of suspended Chief Justice Iftikar M. Chaudhry, during the past few days triggered speculation that final touches were being given for Musharraf's re-election in uniform.
— PTI
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Suspended Pak CJ greeted
Islamabad, June 16 Heavy crowd, including members of lawyers’ organisations and opposition political parties, received him on the highway to Lahore. His previous travels had drawn heavy crowd sparking off a major political crisis for President Pervez Musharraf. Driven by his lawyer Atezaz Ahesan, who is also a senior parliamentarian of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Chaudhry’s convoy started with few dozen vehicles in Islamabad but as it neared Chakwal midway, the convoy grew by about 800 vehicles. Despite the restrictions, private TV channels showed glimpses of receptions being accorded to him while the reporters accompanying the judge’s convoy provided regular updates. The channels have stopped covering Chaudhry’s meetings live ever since the government took severe objections to the coverage of a seminar in the supreme court past month during which Musharraf and military came under severe criticism by the speakers. It sparked off a strong reaction from government which later issued an ordinance empowering officials to seal the premises of channels and confiscate equipment for any coverage of events against institutions like army and judiciary.
— PTI
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US leaves uniform issue to Pervez
Islamabad, June 16 The remarks by US deputy secretary John Negroponte came a day after assistant secretary of state Richard Boucher hinted that Washington had no problem with Musharraf’s re-election in uniform but its emphasis would be on the General holding free and fair elections due after November 15. Boucher and Negroponte held talks with Musharraf in Rawalpindi near here today apparently to discuss his “blue-print” for the Presidential poll and the general elections later this year. At a press conference after meeting Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, where he also announced $ 750 million additional funding for Pakistan to develop the volatile tribal areas where large number of al-Qaida and Taliban militants were holed up, Negroponte said Washington had left the decision on the issue of uniform to Musahrraf. “I think this is something that Gen Musharraf himself is going to decide,” he said.
— PTI
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Koirala to propose Nov 26 as poll
date
Nepal’s Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala today said he will propose November 26 as the new date for the Constituent Assembly (CA) Elections at the next cabinet meeting.
While meeting with Speaker of the Interim Parliament Subas Nembang, this morning at Prime Minister’s official residence, Koirala said the next meeting of the council of ministers would fix and announced the date for the CA
polls, a Baluwatar source said.
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Computers back to normal: NASA
Houston, June 16 The progress came yesterday after days of frustrating effort and, for the time being, removed a set of troubling options lying ahead for NASA and the Russian Space Agency if the computers continued to fail. “We feel like the computers are stable and back to normal,” said Mike Suffredini, space station program manager. Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov pulled off the feat by bypassing a power switch with a cable to get four out of six processors on two computers running. The computers began operating the cooling system in one of the space station’s Russian modules. But Suffredini said engineers would look at how the computers performed overnight before deciding whether they can start running other space station systems today. Suffredini said “We did not expect the two processors that currently were not working to come back online. They would be replaced.” “Engineers are still trying to determine what prompted the power switch to cause the computers to fail,” he added.
— AP
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Houston, June 16 The heat shield was cleared after mission specialist Danny Olivas repaired a protruding thermal blanket on one of Atlantis’ orbital manoeuvering system pods during a spacewalk. Atlantis is scheduled to leave the station on Tuesday and land on Thursday, the agency said. Russian cosmonauts began turning back on some crucial systems that had been shut down more than four days ago when a computer system on the Russian side of the ISS crashed. Yesterday, “Russian flight controllers and the station crew were able to power-up two lanes of the Russian central computer and two lanes of the terminal computer by using a jumper cable to bypass a faulty secondary power switch. “Flight controllers began sending commands overnight to restart some systems. The central computer is now communicating with the US command and control computer, and the terminal computer is communicating with US navigation computers. The plan calls for more system restarts today,” the space agency said. — PTI
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Sunita Williams creates history
Washington, June 16
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N. Korea invites UN atomic inspectors Seoul, June 16 The country’s atomic energy chief, Ri Je Son, wrote to the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, about procedures for verifying the shutdown, the state Korean Central News Agency reported.
— AFP
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