Sindh Governor’s power restored
ISLAMABAD, Nov 15 — Pakistan’s federal government yesterday rescinded two notifications issued earlier in the week which had stripped the Governor of Sindh of his power regarding transfer and posting of officers in grade 20 and above.

Israel working on biological weapons
LONDON, Nov 15 — Israel is trying to identify genes carried only by Arabs that could be used to develop a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews, The Sunday Times reported.

Chernomyrdin hits out at Yeltsin
MOSCOW, Nov 15 — Former Russian Prime Minister and presidential hopeful Viktor Chernomyrdin publicly chastised President Boris Yeltsin for the first time in the two’s turbulent political relationship, NTV television has reported.

Space storm may disable satellites
WASHINGTON, Nov 15 — The most intense meteor shower in 33 years is threatening to sandblast America’s multi-billion dollar satellite fleet, including military spacecraft that provide vital support for the US military deployment in the Gulf.

Pak can launch satellite: Khan
ISLAMABAD, Nov 15 — Pakistan’s Kahuta Research Laboratories, which developed the nuclear bomb and the Ghauri missile, is capable of launching a satellite, a top nuclear scientist said in a report today.

Russian vow on Kurile isles

West must monitor talks: Pak

ISLAMABAD, Nov 15 (PTI) — Pakistan has asked the international community, particularly the major powers, to play “a supporting role” and “monitor the progress” in the Indo-Pak dialogue process, arguing it may lead to some positive outcome from next February talks after the “disappointing” results in the just-concluded dialogue.

The international community in general and the major powers in particular, “should take interest in these dialogue and should closely follow and monitor the progress” to see who is being reasonable, Pakistan Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz told reporters here last evening.

Stating that “we were disappointed” from the outcome of the just-concluded round of talks in Islamabad and New Delhi, he said “whatever progress we were expecting that also did take place” despite the fact that nobody was expecting a major breakthrough.

Asked whether Pakistan is asking for third party mediation, Mr Aziz said, “I am not talking about arbitration or mediation but playing a supporting role”.

“The next round (of talks) is due in February and we feel that all countries should carefully analyse the stand of both countries on all the issues.

The Pakistani delegation, after coming back from the New Delhi talks on Friday, had described the talks as a “barren round” and accused India of “lacking sincerity” and not being prepared to make any progress on all outstanding issues.

Mr Aziz added that Pakistan has already requested UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to send a special representative on the Kashmir issue as well as to the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), “who can closely follow the talks and place a report about what happened”.

Asked whether Pakistan was putting a condition of solving the Kashmir issue before making any progress on other issues, he said, “we are not saying solution of Kashmir problem but there should be parallel progress on it along with all the remaining issues”.

He, however, added that on certain humanitarian issues Pakistan has agreed to make some progress immediately. These include release of prisoners from both sides, facilitating travelling between the two countries by introducing a bus service and controlling firing across the line of control which affects the civilian population on both sides.

On the introduction of bus service, Mr Aziz said technical discussions on it will be held next week after which it is going to be finalised.

He said that on the nuclear restraint issue Pakistan also has given a six-point package to India during the talks in October to prevent a nuclear arms race in the region but New Delhi “is yet to respond” to that.

He indicated that Pakistan has made it clear to the USA during the talks on nuclear non-proliferation that the issues of nuclear deployment or even the fissile material production was linked with India’s stand on these issues.

“Nuclear weapons deployment is a bilateral issue and reciprocal with India”, Mr Aziz said, adding that, “naturally if India deploys against us then we will also deploy”.

Similarly on the fissile material production there is a symmetry with India since India has a much larger stockpile of fissile material than Pakistan’s and this issue has to be taken care of while negotiating on this item, he added.

Mr Aziz also ruled out the possibility of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announcing the signing of CTBT during his meeting with USA President Bill Clinton in Washington on December 2, but added that Pakistan has already declared it can sign the treaty anytime from now to September 1999.

Albright snubs govt, meets Anwar’s wife

KULALA LUMPUR, Nov 15 (AFP) US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright today met the wife of ousted Deputy Premier Anwar Ibrahim in a snub to the Malaysian authorities, after his supporters protested for the second day running.

Mrs Wan Azizah was seen arriving at Ms Albright’s hotel in a US Embassy car, accompanied by her eldest daughter, 17-year-old Nurul Izzah.

“I am very happy with the meeting. We had a lot of support from Secretary of State Albright,” Anwar’s wife, who has taken up his pro-reform cause, told reporters afterwards.

The meeting came after Ms Albright voiced support for Anwar, at a press conference and traded barbs with a Malaysian minister over his imprisonment.

“The USA has made clear a number of times that Anwar Ibrahim is a highly respected leader,” Ms Albright said, adding “he is entitled to due process and a fair trial”.

Despite cutting short her stay to rush back to Washington as a showdown loomed with Iraq, Ms Albright managed to squeeze in the meeting with Azizah in her packed 24-hour stay.

Referring to the meeting, she said: “I am sure that Malaysia would be a good host and agree with what we are doing”.

Malaysian Trade Minister Refidah Aziz offered her assurances that Anwar would get a fair trial and then went on to say: “Maybe when I go to the USA, I will meet Kenneth Starr.”

Sindh Governor’s power restored

ISLAMABAD, Nov 15 (ANI) — Pakistan’s federal government yesterday rescinded two notifications issued earlier in the week which had stripped the Governor of Sindh of his power regarding transfer and posting of officers in grade 20 and above.

It was third shift in federal government’s position regarding the powers of Sindh Governor about transfer and posting of officers of his choice in the last three days.

On November 12, the federal government had stripped the Sindh Governor from making transfer and posting of officers. The order passed under Article 232(2)) was again amended and the Governor was made responsible for consultations with the establishment division.

The order passed on Saturday stated that the Prime Minister was of the view that federal consultation through the establishment division would be time consuming and might unduly delay the finalisation of the proposals for placement of officers in key positions.

The Prime Minister ordered that consultations with the establishment for the transfer and posting of officers should be dispensed with and the Governor should continue to choose his team. The order, however, stated that the Governor was still required to consult the Prime Minister on transfer and posting of officers but in an informal manner.

Meanwhile, Sindh Governor Moinuddin Haider has called upon the federal government either to give him full powers to restore peace in the province or appoint someone else in his place.

The Prime Minister is holding a special meeting in Lahore to discuss the Karachi situation, with special reference to the issue of the Sindh Governor’s powers. The meeting would also consider the option of replacing Lt-Gen Haider with a political figure.

LAHORE: Sindh Governor Moinuddin Haider said that no army operation was needed in Karachi and that peace will be restored in the port city in three to six months.

Talking to reporters here yesterday, he said the police would not be allowed to harass the law-abiding citizens and development works would be given top priority.

Interior Minister Chaudhry Shujaat Husain, who also addressed newsmen, said Governor Haider had been given sufficient powers and he was competent to take any decision in the interest of the province.

He said he believed that peace would return to Karachi even without the kind of operation launched when Gen Naseerullah Babar was Interior Minister.

The previous government, he alleged, had killed many innocent people. But Governor Moinuddin would not follow suit. The minister said the law-abiding people should not worry as the government had no intention to harass them.

The army chief, Gen Pervaiz Musharraf, said the army’s involvement was not required in the port city now. However, he could not say whether the civil administration would be able to control the law and order situation in Karachi.

Tiger ‘bases’ in SA worry Lanka

JOHANNESBURG, Nov 15 (PTI) — Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar has arrived here for urgent talks with the Mandela government amidst reports that the Tamil Tigers are setting up bases in South Africa.

The Sri Lankan Government has charged that the LTTE was taking advantage of the presence of the large Indian Tamil community in South Africa and has opened a number of military training camps in that country.

It also said that the extremist organisation is planning to shift its international headquarters from London to Pretoria, in view of the new anti-terrorism legislation brought in by the British Government.

According to Colombo, there are several Tamil Eelam supporters movements in Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town and other cities and all of them are vociferously concerned about the “genocide” of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka.

Tamil Eelam support movements here, on the other hand, have said that they have always supported the struggles for liberation in South Africa and now they should be allowed to support the struggles for justice in Sri Lanka.

Chairman of the South African Tamil Eelam Support Movement, Dr Kisten Chinappan, told PTI that they had no fears about voicing their concerns about human rights violations in Sri Lanka.

In a related development Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga has said she was ready for talks with the LTTE without a prior agreement on ceasefire, if the rebels settled for a stipulated time-frame for negotiations, the state-owned Sunday Observer reported today.

“We are prepared to talk to them (LTTE) within a stipulated time-frame and decide on the ceasefire depending on the progress of the talks,” Ms Chandrika told a delegation of the leaders of the moderate Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF).

Clinton cancels Asia visit

WASHINGTON, Nov 15 (AFP) — US President Bill Clinton has cancelled his trip to Asia for an economic summit, the White House said. He will remain in Washington to evaluate “next steps” on the Iraqi crisis.

Vice-President Al Gore will substitute for Clinton at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum at Kuala Lumpur, White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said yesterday.Lockhart, reading a brief statement by the White House and declining to elaborate, said: “The President has decided to remain in Washington to evaluate appropriate next steps.”He said Clinton still hoped to complete the Japan, South Korea and Guam stages of his planned Asia trip.

Hillary comes clean in Whitewater case

WASHINGTON, Nov 15 (AP) — After years of investigating Hillary Rodham Clinton, Whitewater prosecutors laid out their case in an indictment that does not charge her with wrongdoing but accuses her former law partner of 15 felonies.

Weaved through independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s latest case, however, is a story line that places the US President Bill Clinton’s wife right in the middle of efforts that enabled friend Webster Hubbell’s father-in-law, businessman Seth Ward, to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Savings and Loan (S and L) that was headed for collapse.

Mrs Clinton, who is referred to three dozen times in the 40-page indictment of Hubbell, has said she remembers almost nothing about her work in the mid-1980s relating to a failed real estate project called Castle Grande, run by her Whitewater business partner James McDougal.

The 15-count indictment, issued on Friday, said Hubbell concealed his and Mrs Clinton’s roles in the transactions starting in 1989 and ending on December 27, 1995. That was nine days before the First Lady’s long-sought billing records, revealing her work on ward’s behalf, were turned over belatedly to Mr Starr, who subpoenaed them two years earlier.

Never identified by name in the indictment, Mrs Clinton is referred to as the billing partner.’’

“It is conceivable that Hubbell could be guilty of a cover-up and that the ‘billing partner’ would not have knowledge of the wrongdoing,’’ Rothstein said. But there is considerable risk that in the course of prosecuting this case, something might be uncovered that points directly to the ‘billing partner’.’’

The First Lady has steadfastly denied any wrongdoing in her former work as a private lawyer in Arkansas.

But even a frequent Starr critic said focusing on Mrs Clinton may be justified even though she is not charged in the Hubbell indictment.

According to regulators, Ward was a straw buyer of part of Castle Grande, a development south of Little Rock. Financed by McDougal’s financial institution, Castle Grande was rife with “insider dealing, fictitious sales and land flips” and eventually cost taxpayers almost $4 million, regulators concluded.

Hubbell faces up to 110 years in prison and $ 4 million in fines if convicted on all the charges, which consist of fraud, false statements, perjury and corruptly impeding the functions of two federal regulatory agencies.

Israel working on biological weapons

LONDON, Nov 15 (AP) — Israel is trying to identify genes carried only by Arabs that could be used to develop a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews, The Sunday Times reported.

The newspaper attributed its report to unidentified Israeli military and western intelligence sources. It said Israeli scientists were working to create a genetically modified bacterium or virus that only attacked people who carried certain genes.

The paper said the weapon was seen as Israel’s response to the threat of chemical and biological warfare from Iraq and could be spread by air or through the water supply.

The newspaper said the programme was based at the Biological Institute in Nes Tziyona, which it described as the main research facility for Israel’s chemical and biological weapons. According to the report, researchers have pinpointed “a characteristic in the genetic profile of certain Arab communities, particularly the Iraqi people.”

The idea of such research had provoked controversy in Israel because of parallels with the genetic experiments at Auschwitz by Nazi scientist Josef Mengele during World War II, the paper said.

Chernomyrdin hits out at Yeltsin

MOSCOW, Nov 15 (AFP) — Former Russian Prime Minister and presidential hopeful Viktor Chernomyrdin publicly chastised President Boris Yeltsin for the first time in the two’s turbulent political relationship, NTV television has reported.

At a meeting of the leadership of ‘Our Home is Russia’ (NDR) political faction, which Mr Chernomyrdin heads, he criticised the President for indecision and ineffectiveness.

He accused Mr Yeltsin of “avoiding difficult decisions” and turning a blind eye to the country’s most pressing problems.

“The President more and more often exhibits an inability to comprehend and appraise the situation, to make well thought-out decisions, to strive to put them into practice,” he said yesterday.

Mr Chernomyrdin lead the government under Mr Yeltsin from 1992 until earlier this year when he was sacked as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by the short-lived term of Sergei Kiriyenko.

Rather than disappear from the political arena, he has since expressed an unwavering desire to run for the presidency in year 2000.

Space storm may disable satellites

WASHINGTON, Nov 15 (AP) — The most intense meteor shower in 33 years is threatening to sandblast America’s multi-billion dollar satellite fleet, including military spacecraft that provide vital support for the US military deployment in the Gulf.

On Tuesday, the earth will pass through the Leonid meteor storm, a cloud originating from the dusty passage earlier this year of comet Tempel-Tuttle.

A blizzard of meteor particles, some the size of sand, but mostly smaller, will rain down on the planet for about 10 hours. The most intense part of the storm peaking at about 1.15 p.m. (IST).

But in the vacuum of space, where America’s satellite fleet orbits the Earth, particles from the Leonid meteor storm will flash past vulnerable spacecraft at more than 250,000 kph. At that speed, a small grain can have the destructive force of a .22-calibre bullet.

The most likely damage could be electrical. The high speed impact of a tiny meteor creates a sudden electrical discharge that can mause the satellite to short out. If the electrical charge is big enough, it could permanently disable the craft.

Actual collisions are expected to be rare, but operators of some 300 US military, commercial and scientific satellites are crossing their fingers.

“We rate the possibility of anything catastrophic as being minimal, but we can’t rule it out,’’ said Air Force Major Perry L. Nouis of the US Space Command at the Peterson Air Force base, Colorado, the mission control centre for the nation’s 150 or so military satellites.

He said military experts estimated that one or two of the world’s 600-plus satellites will be destroyed by a meteor during the Leonid storm.

Major Nouis said that all the US military satellites will continue to operate through the meteor storm. The satellites facilitate communication, navigation, surveillance and missile warning worldwide.

NASA is most concerned about two satellites that are stationed 1.6 million km from the earth toward the sun, said Phil Liebrecht, chief of the satellite control office at the Goddard Spaceflight Center. Both craft are designed to study the sun and were placed where they get the best view. Now they will be in the most intense part of the Leonid meteor storm, he said.

“It looks like there is about a one per cent chance that they will get hit and have something go wrong,’’ said Mr Liebrecht.

Pak can launch satellite: Khan

ISLAMABAD, Nov 15 (AFP) — Pakistan’s Kahuta Research Laboratories (KRL), which developed the nuclear bomb and the Ghauri missile, is capable of launching a satellite, a top nuclear scientist said in a report today.

"If the government asks us for putting a satellite in the space, we can do it," the official news agency APP quoted Abdul Qadeer Khan as saying.

Khan described the KRL, which is headed by him, as "one of the best modern scientific institutions in the world".

"We can perform any task assigned to us," he said in an address to a seminar here yesterday.

Khan said the Ghauri missile, tested in April, and the six nuclear weapons tests in May were the fruit of technologies developed "indigenously" at the laboratories.

The missile can carry a warhead of more than 700 kg up to 1,500 km with "99.94 per cent accuracy," Khan said.

Pakistan’s missile technology is "far superior" to that of India, he claimed.

Russian vow on Kurile isles

MOSCOW, Nov 15 (AP) — Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi’s trip to Moscow produced a Russian promise to work toward speedy settlement of a 53-year-old territorial dispute and a Japanese promise to give Russia nearly $ one billion in aid and loans. Mr Obuchi and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed an agreement released on Friday in which they pledged to resolve their differences over the Kurile islands by the end of next year. A settlement would pave the way for the two countries to finally end World War II. The dispute over ownership of the tiny islands has stopped them from ever signing a formal peace treaty.