The first batch of 24 members of the federal Cabinet took oath of office on Monday.

President Pervez Musharraf, with a grim face, administered oath to the ministers in a ceremony at the presidency in a tense and sombre atmosphere. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani was also present on the occasion. For the first time in the history of the country nine ministers belonging to the Nawaz Sharif faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) wore black bands on their arms while taking oath.

“We conveyed a message to Mr Musharraf that we do not recognise him as legitimately elected President,” PML-N information secretary Ahsan Iqbal said after the ceremony. Iqbal was also sworn in as minister for education. Most of the ministers who took oath on Monday had suffered incarceration, political victimisation and public humiliation during past eight years under Musharraf. The PML-N ministers were joined by two ministers of the Awami National Party (ANP) in declining invitation to have refreshments with Musharraf. As in case of swearing-in ceremony of the Prime Minister last week, there were no traditional speeches.

All four components of the alliance have been given representation proportionate to their strength in the National Assembly. The Cabinet will be further expanded in two more tranches. The coalition has been named Pakistan Democratic Alliance (PDA). The Cabinet comprises 11 ministers from the PPP, nine from PML-N, two from ANP, one belonging to the JUI and one from the tribal areas.

The Cabinet:

PPP: Shah Mehmood Qureshi (foreign), Sherry Rehman (information), Syed Naveed Qamar (privatisation/port and shipping-additional), Raja Pervez Ashraf (water and power), Syed Khursheed Shah (labour, manpower and overseas Pakistanis), Qamar Zaman Kaira (Kashmir affairs), Senator Farooq Naek (law, justice and human rights), Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar (defence), Nazar Muhammad Gondal (narcotics), Najamuddin Khan (minister for states and frontier region), Mir Humayon Aziz Kurd (minister for population welfare)

PML-N: Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan (senior minister), Senator Ishaq Dar (finance, economic affairs and commerce), Ahsan Iqbal (education), Tehmina Daultana (women development), Sardar Mehtab Abbasi (railways), Khawaja Asif (petroleum and natural resources), Rana Tanveer Hussain (defense production), Shahid Khakhan Abbasi (trade) and Khawaja Saad Rafiq (youth affairs)

Dhaka, March 31
Thirtyseven years after they helped the emergence of an independent Bangladesh, visiting Indian war veterans endorsed a demand here for the trial of those who collaborated with the Pakistani authorities, committing atrocities on civilians.

"The trial of war criminals can be held under the country's existing law.The government can take initiatives of holding their (war criminals) trials as the country's people have already raised their voice for it," Lt-Gen J.F.R. Jacob 9retd), who had planned the military campaign in December, 1971, said after placing wreaths at the National Memorial at Savar.

Jacob was here as the head of an 11-member delegation of Indian war veterans, visiting the country at the invitation of Bangladesh Army Chief Gen Moin U. Ahmed.

His former colleague, Maj-Gen Laxman Singh(retd), said: "Being a fighter in the war of independence of Bangladesh, I must want trial of war criminals through a special tribunal." He recalled that the trial of German war criminals had taken place even 50 years after World War II. "So, I don't think there is any bar to holding trial against the war criminals after 37 years of the liberation war," Singh was quoted as saying by the New Age newspaper Monday.

A highly emotive issue in Bangladesh, it is currently being advocated by former soldiers and Mukti Bahini freedom fighters, besides many political parties who want to keep Islamist political parties, particularly the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), out of the country's elections. — IANS

London, March 31
High-profile Indian doctor Tonmoy Sharma has been banned from practising in Britain after he was found guilty of conducting unethical drug tests on mentally ill patients in the country.

The General Medical Council of Britain has decided to “suspend” Sharma, 42, from the medical register with immediate effect, a spokeswoman of the GMC said today.

The Fitness to Practise Panel of the GMC at its meeting yesterday determined that “it is necessary for the protection of members of the public that Sharma’s registration should be made subject to suspension with immediate effect,” she told PTI.

Sharma, who hails from Assam and is a former lecturer at the prestigious Institute of Psychiatry in London, will get 28 days to lodge an appeal, according to the order.

Sharma, a prominent psychiatrist who often appeared on the BBC and wrote books on mental illness, was served with the notification of the Panel’s direction today.

While the General Medical Council had sough the doctor’s immediate suspension “for the protection of members of the public, Sharma had said it was not necessary as patients are not at any risk.

In its order, the panel said the issues raised were of “serious concern” and that it was not satisfied that such misconduct would not be repeated.

The GMC which examined his research over 10 years found the doctor guilty of recruiting patients suffering from schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s in unsolicited telephone calls, conducting unauthorised tests and misleading drug companies about his methods. — PTI

Brussels, March 31
India is assisting European Union(EU) countries to meet their targets in reducing greenhouse gas emissions through the Energy Trading System (ETS), says India's former environment secretary.

"India has the world's largest portfolio of CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) projects. A major amount of the carbon credit that are coming to the EU market are from India,"

Prodipto Ghosh, former environment secretary, told EuAsiaNews in an interview here. "India is, in fact, very directly assisting in enabling the EU countries meet their Kyoto Protocol targets," noted Ghosh, now a distinguished fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in New Delhi and member of the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change.

The protocol was set up in 1997 to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the earth's atmosphere and leading to climate change.

The European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is the largest multinational emissions trading scheme in the world and is a major pillar of the EU climate policy.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol allowing industrialised countries with a greenhouse gas reduction commitment to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alternative to more expensive emission reductions in their own countries.

Ghosh said India welcomed the announcement by the EU that they would take steps to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 irrespective of what other parties do. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas.

"Developed countries historically are the highest polluters and even now the per capita emissions of greenhouse gases of India are only one- tenth of that of the EU and only one-twentieth of that of the US," he said.

"Everybody accepts that India is not a contributor to the climate change," stressed Ghosh who was here to speak to the climate change committee of EU.

Ghosh, who has held consultancy positions with various UN organisations, , also spoke on India's environmental challenges at the prestigious Brussels-based thinktank, the European Policy Centre.

He told EuAsiaNews that India had placed a large number of policies and regulations to address issues like energy efficiency and deployment of renewable energy sources. — IANS

London, March 31
The coroner at an inquest into the death of Britain’s Princess Diana in a car crash said on Monday there was no evidence that her former father-in-law, the Duke of Edinburgh, had “ordered Diana’s execution”.

Diana died in a crash in Paris in 1997 along with Dodi al-Fayed, whose father Mohamed al-Fayed has accused Queen Elizabeth’s husband Prince Philip of being behind her death. But after almost six months of listening to more than 250 witnesses, Lord Justice Scott Baker told the jury in his summing up: “There is no evidence that the Duke of Edinburgh ordered Diana’s execution and there is no evidence that the security intelligence services or any other government agency organised it.”

The inquest was delayed for 10 years because Britain had to wait for the French legal process and then a British police investigation to run their course before it could begin.

Both police inquiries decided it was a tragic accident because chauffeur Henri Paul was drunk and driving too fast.

But Mohamed al-Fayed has repeatedly alleged that Dodi and Diana were killed by British security services on the orders of Prince Philip because the royal family did not want the mother of the future king having a child with his son.

Summing up the case, Scott Baker set out the possible verdicts the jury could reach, but stressed: “It is not open to you to find that Diana and Dodi were unlawfully killed in a staged accident.”

He said possible verdicts included unlawful killing through gross negligence either by Henri Paul, by the paparazzi pursuing the princess’car, or by both.

Other possibilities were accidental death, or an open verdict if the 11-member jury felt there was insufficient evidence to support any substantive verdict. Scott Baker also told the jury that certain witnesses at the inquest had not told the truth.

“One of the regrettable features of this case is the number of people who have told lies in the witness box or elsewhere,” he said. The judge specifically named Diana’s butler Paul Burrell, whose three days of testimony was described by lawyers as being “all over the place”, as one of those witnesses.

New York, March 31
A majority of women in the USA are now opting to become surrogate mothers as the acceptance of the practice increases, a media report says.

During its research, Newsweek found these women were military wives who had taken on surrogacy to supplement family while their husbands were serving overseas.

Military wives are largely young stay-at-home moms who've completed their own families before they hit 28, IVF clinics and surrogate agencies in Texas and California were quoted as saying by the magazine.

“In the military, we have that mentality of going to extremes, fighting for your country, risking your life”, the report says.

Several agencies reported a significant increase in the number of wives of soldiers and naval personnel applying to be surrogates since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it says.

Military wives, says the report, are attractive candidates because of their health insurance, Tricare, which is provided by three different companies Humana, TriWest and Health Net Federal Services and has some of the most comprehensive coverage for surrogates in the industry.

Fertility agencies, the report says, know this, and may offer a potential surrogate with this health plan an extra $5,000.

Last year, military officials asked for a provision in the 2008 defence authorisation bill to cut off coverage for any medical procedures related to surrogate pregnancy.

Tricare, it says, suggests that surrogate mothers who receive payment for their pregnancy should declare the amount they're receiving, which can then be deducted from their coverage.— PTI

London, March 31
Robotic technology is advancing apace.Now, European researchers have developed a new breed of cognitive robot which they claim is a lot like a puppy.

Combining two approaches to building robots that can think for themselves -- the classical rule-based artificial intelligence (AI) and the artificial neural networks (ANN) -- they have developed the robots.

In fact, the researchers from Linkping University in Sweden used ANN to handle the low-level functions based on the visual input their robots received and then employed classical AI on top of that in a supervisory function.

"In this way, we found it was possible for the robots to explore the world around them through direct interaction, create ways to act in it and then control their actions in accordance.”

"This combines the advantages of classical AI, which is superior when it comes to functions akin to human rationality and the advantages of ANN, which is superior at performing tasks for which humans would use their subconscious, things like basic motor skills and low-level cognitive tasks," said lead researcher Michael Felsberg.

The robot is able to learn by itself and can solve increasingly complex tasks with no additional programming.

"With previous systems, if something in the environment changed that the low-level system was not programmed to recognise, it would give random responses but the supervising AI process wouldn't realise anything's wrong.With our approach, the system realises something is different and if its actions do not result in success it tries something else," the 'ICT Results' quoted Felsberg as saying. — PTI

Colombo, March 31
In its bid to rein-in the dreaded suicide squads of LTTE, the Sri Lanka government is offering $93,000 and an overseas job to the rebel suicide bombers who surrender before the authorities.

Posters showing the offer were already pasted on walls around Colombo two weeks back, but confusion over it ended today with the government admitting to making the offer of 10 million Sri Lankan rupees for suicide bombers giving themselves up.

Defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said besides the money, the authorities would try to provide an overseas job to an LTTE suicide bomber giving up his mission and surrendering.

The posters exhort the suicide bombers not to die with pieces of their body scattered around.

“You also were born to live. Why should you carry bombs?” the posters said alongside a hazy black-and-white photograph of a suicide bomber’s damaged head.

In reply to query, Rambukwella quipped: “You don’t expect us to give the money immediately as soon as they agree to give up. There is a system which one follows.” “I feel these young people have a right to live in a peaceful manner. We have provided about 11 overseas jobs to LTTE fighters who have surrendered. We are providing 40 odd such people job-orientation programmes,” Rambukwella told reporters.

The Tamil Tigers have been responsible for more than 240 suicide attacks in their quest for an independent state for minority Tamils. Meanwhile, military spokesman Udaya Nanayakara said the death toll of LTTE militants in clashes during March this year stood at 678. — PTI