UNIVERSAL CITY, USA : Madonna performs a medley of "Shanti" and " Ray of Light" at the MTV Video Music Awards in Universal City on Thursday night. AP/PTI

Taliban threat to China
MUSLIM terrorists trained by the Afghan fundamentalist Taliban movement are infiltrating China’s Far West, according to a briefing by senior Communist Party officials.

Republicans’ rating up: poll
WASHINGTON, Sept 11 — Republican leaders in Congress are getting higher marks for their work from the US public than at any time since the government shutdowns almost three years ago, according to a poll release yesterday.

Bangladesh disowns migrants
DHAKA, Sept 11 — Bangladesh has sought Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s intervention in solving the crisis emerging from what it has called “Indian attempts” to push in “illegal Bangladeshis” into the country.

India, Portugal agree to avoid double taxation

LISBON, Sept 11 (PTI) — India and Portugal today signed a convention for avoidance of double taxation in order to give fresh impetus to exchange of investments, technology, trade and service between the two countries.

The convention, first of its kind between the two nations, was signed by Power Minister P.R. Kumaramangalam and Portugal Secretary of State for Treasury and Finance Fermando Texeira Santos.

It will come into force 30 days after receipt of a letter of notification by the two governments to each other regarding completion of procedures.

The convention provides for lower rates of tax in case of interest, soyalties and fees for included services.

Capital gains from alienation of immovable property forming part of permanent establishment as well as on alienation of shares of a company will be taxable both in the country of source and the country of residence.

It will enable the two countries to exchange information on respective domestic laws. Another salient feature of the convention is inclusion of a provision regarding "collection assistance".

In his speech at the banquet hosted by his Portugal counterpart Jorge Sampaio, President K.R. Narayanan said: "As a country that has advocated, passionately, during the past 50 years the cause of world peace, India believes that disarmament especially nuclear disarmament, universal, comprehensive and non-discriminatory, is imperative for the peace of the world."

He said: "We are willing to join any non-discriminatory international arrangement that would safeguard our security for realising this objective."

On relations with neighbours, the President said despite the fact that differences continued to hamper the normalisation of India’s relations with Pakistan, "we intend to keep our bilateral dialogue going."

Duma approves Primakov as PM

MOSCOW, Sept 11 (PTI, Reuters) — Ending weeks of political turmoil, the Russian Duma today overwhelmingly approved Conservative Yevgeny Primakov as Prime Minister to pull the country out of an unprecedented economic crisis that has sent tremors around world markets.

Communist hardliners voted 315-63 to approve the former intelligence chief as Premier to replace reformer Sergei Kiriyenko after he vowed a return to stronger central rule and judicious reforms to stem the downward slide of the economy. There were 15 abstentions.

Voting went into the third round after an obdurate Duma refused to back President Yeltsin's original candidate to the top post, Mr Vicktor Chernomyrdin, twice in a row, forcing him to put up Mr Primakov as a compromise candidate.

2 Communists to join Primakov Cabinet
Earlier, the leader of Russia’s Communist Party said after talks with Yevgeny Primakov today that he had promised to make a Communist his first deputy and a Soviet era banker the new central bank chief.

“We have agreed on two candidates — Yuri Maslyukov and Viktor Gerashchenko,” Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov told reporters.

“Maslyukov will be the first Deputy Premier and Gerashcenko will be the central bank chairman,” he said. The state Duma (lower house) will vote later today to confirm Primakov in office.

Yevgeny Primakov’s nomination as Prime Minister was welcomed as defusing a political crisis by the Russian press, whose opinions often reflect those of the influential business magnates who control them.

But their welcome for the political compromise that is set to see the Foreign Minister and former spymaster endorsed by the Communist-led Parliament yesterday did not dispel doubts about the policies he would pursue to drag the economy out of crisis.

“Political crisis postponed,” headlined Russky Telegraf, part of the business empire of Uneximbank Chief Vladimir Potanin. “Yevgeny Primakov suits everyone for now,” it added.

But Sevodyna, a pro-market daily controlled by media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, went on the offensive from the start. “Reds at the White House?” it headlined, referring to the Russian government headquarters in Moscow.

IPS: Russian President Boris Yeltsin extricated himself from his political quagmire, bowed to his Parliament and nominated a Prime Minister whose main qualification is his lack of presidential ambition and party affiliation.

Yevgeny Primakov (68) has other qualities, but yesterday his decent record as Foreign Minister and expert orientalist came strictly secondary to his political inoffensiveness in the eyes of the fractured, factional lower House of Parliament (the Duma).

His nomination broke the stalemate in the Duma over Mr Yeltsin’s first choice, recalled former Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin.

“We must confirm a Prime Minister who would not have to be sacked in three months. He should not belong to any political party,” prominent Liberal Grigory Yavlinsky told the Duma, just before it voted to reject Chernomyrdin for a second time on Monday.

“He should have sufficient political authority, be known in the world and lack any desire to run for President. There is such a person, it is Yevgeny Maximovich Primakov.”

“Russia’s new Premier faces a tough job of tackling the crisis,” says Nikita Moiseev, a prominent economist and member of Russia’s academy of science. “He’ll have to think fast.”

Mr Primakov, 68, was born in Kiev in Ukraine, but spent his youth in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. He graduated from Russia’s College of Oriental Studies in 1953 and worked as foreign correspondent in the West Asia. In the 1970s he became Deputy Director of the Influential Institute of World Economics and International Relations and later headed the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies.

Mr Primakov is a member of the prestigious Academy of Sciences and has a doctorate in economics. Elected to the Soviet Parliament in 1988 he chaired the chamber for roughly a year between 1989 and 1990.

In 1990, he joined Michal Gorbachev’s presidential council, and following the Soviet collapse in 1991 he became director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), one of the successors to the Soviet-era KGB secret police.

In January 1996 Mr Primakov replaced Andrei Kozyrev as Foreign Minister, a man seen in Russia as a pro-western figure. Mr Primakov however, has steered his own course, particularly in West Asia.

His mediation with Iraq on the eve of the 1991 U.S.-led attack on Iraqi forces in Kuwait infuriated Washington, and as Foreign Minister he has succeeded in ensuring that Russia, though debilitated by the break-up of the Soviet Union, continues to make its view heard on the world stage.

Taliban threat to China
from John Gittings in Hong Kong

MUSLIM terrorists trained by the Afghan fundamentalist Taliban movement are infiltrating China’s Far West, according to an usually candid briefing by senior Communist Party officials.

This open admission makes it clear that China now regards the threat of Islamist insurrection in the vast Xinjiang region, astride the ancient Silk Road, as more serious than the independence demonstrations in neighbouring Tibet.

“Hardcore elements who have received instruction in Afghanistan” are said to have slipped across the border and to be “inciting young people to violence on the pretext of religion”. There has been a series of riots, bombings and assassinations in Xinjiang in the past year, but China usually claims that these are the work of local criminals.

Wang Lequan, party secretary for Xinjiang, told Hong Kong journalists that up to 20 training bases had been set up by “minority splittists”. He said that they comprised small groups of youths, instructed by the hardcore terrorists. The latter, he maintained, had now “all been captured”, while most of the youths they had misled had been released “after receiving education”.

Mr Wang’s claims of success are obviously intended for the ears of Beijing, where senior leaders recently castigated local officials for failing to crack down on the “terrorists”. The Chinese security forces, he said, had launched a “stern assault” against national splittism” and “illegal religious activities”.

In reality the struggle is intensifying, although police and border guards have taken very tough action against the alleged terrorists, some of whom have been executed. Local Chinese propaganda says that they must be dealt with “like a rat, of whom, when it crosses the street, everyone shouts ‘kill it!’.”

Xinjiang is one of the outer reaches of the former empire which was only loosely attached to the Chinese heartland. The population consisted mainly of Turkic-non-Chinese-Uighurs and Kazakhs.

During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, all mosques were closed and Muslims persecuted. Chinese migrants became the majority. China now admits that it is paying the price for those years, as militant Islam abroad influences young Uighurs.

Chinese officials in the regional capital, Urumqi, have given further details to recent serious incidents. These include three bomb blasts in public buses in the city, and armed clashes in the lli border region — where a short-lived independent republic was set up before the Communist takeover in 1949.

Mr Wang denied a recent story that separatists had freed more than 80 political detainees from an lli prison.

There have also been disturbances in the Kashgar area, leading to restrictions on foreign tourism. Unofficial reports last month claimed that eight Kashgar policemen had been killed.

China has been making a big diplomatic effort to built bridges with the new independent states of former Soviet Central Asia. The president of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, has just ended a six-day visit to China.

The two countries agreed to move against any subversive action launched from either territory. Their police will collaborate in cracking down on smuggling across the border. The target is not only drugs but “spiritual poison” — a euphemism for Islamist and anti-Chinese literature.

Last month President Jiang Zemin visited Kazakhstan, where he reaffirmed Beijing’s interest in an oil pipeline of Xinjiang. Pausing in Urumqi, Mr Jiang urged local officials “not to take the terrorist threat lightly”.
— The Guardian, London.

2 Iran diplomats escaped attack

TEHERAN, Sept 11 (AFP) — Two Iranian diplomats managed to escape after Taliban militia men had raided the Iranian consulate in northern Afghanistan last month, Iran’s Foreign Ministry announced today.

"Two of the 11 Iranians present at the consulate were able to escape from the Taliban" after the Islamic militia’s raid on the consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif on August 8, deputy Foreign Minister Mohsen Aminzadeh said.

"They were able to escape taking advantage of an opportunity," he told the official Iranian news agency Irna. "One of them who was injured in the Taliban attack on the mission was able to flee Mazar-i-Sharif with the help of a friend," he added.

Republicans’ rating up: poll

WASHINGTON, Sept 11 (AP) — Republican leaders in Congress are getting higher marks for their work from the US public than at any time since the government shutdowns almost three years ago, according to a poll release yesterday.

The Republicans had a slight edge over the Democrats, 48 per cent to 45 per cent, when voters were asked their party preference for candidates in November’s Congressional elections, said a poll by the PEW Research Centre for the People and the Press. The party’s advantage was just over the margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

But the Republicans have made progress on several issues long considered strengths of the Democrats such as education, health care and social security, the poll indicated. The Democrats still had an advantage in those areas, but the Republicans cut that margin by more than half, according to the poll.

“We are running and winning on an issue-oriented campaign,” said Mr Jim Nicholson, Chairman of the Republican national committee.

In the upcoming Congressional elections, a gain of 11 seats would give the Democrats control of the House.

Bangladesh disowns migrants

DHAKA, Sept 11 (PTI) — Bangladesh has sought Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s intervention in solving the crisis emerging from what it has called “Indian attempts” to push in “illegal Bangladeshis” into the country.

Bangladesh Foreign Minister, Mr Abdus Samad Azad, said in his weekly news briefing yesterday that he had made the plea to Mr Vajpayee at the just-concluded NAM summit in Durban.

Stressing that there was no Bangladeshi citizen living illegally in India, he said Dhaka firmly believed that New Delhi would give due importance to the matter and take necessary steps to put a stop on the “push-in attempts” along the Indo-Bangla border.

Crowe to head probe
WASHINGTON: Adm William Crowe, a former US Ambassador to Britain, will investigate whether there were security lapses at the two US embassies in Africa hit by suicide bombings on August 7, the State Department has said. Admiral Crowe will head two ‘accountability review boards’, which will probe the bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. Questions he will look into include whether security measures were adequate and properly implemented. — Reuters

Al Fayed sued
LONDON: Billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed is refusing to pay some legal costs incurred by the sole survivor of the Paris crash that killed Princess Diana and his son, Dodi, his spokesman has said. Laurie Mayer said on Thursday that Fayed questioned the amount of bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones’ 27,000-pound ($ 43,000) legal costs and “whether they are reasonable and proper.” Rees-Jones, who was employed as a bodyguard for Fayed, has filed a summons in county court to recover the money.— AP

11 die in mishap
JAKARTA: Eleven persons were killed and 38 injured when two inter-city buses collided head-on in a village in west Java and both plunged off a bridge, state Antara news agency said on Friday. Antara quoted the police in Indramayu, some 160 km from here, as saying a Jakarta-bound bus tried to overtake another vehicle on Thursday and smashed into the second bus coming from the opposite direction. — AFP

Bhutto’s move
KARACHI: Pakistan’s main opposition party led by former Premier Benazir Bhutto has launched a bid to dislodge the government in the Sindh provincial assembly, political sources said. The Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) submitted a notice for a no-confidence motion against Sindh Chief Minister Liaquat Jatoi to the Speaker of the assembly on Thursday. — AFP

Britain’s image
LONDON: The Spice Girls, Shakespeare and the Royal Opera will share equal billing in a new public relations campaign to boost Britain’s sometimes stoogy image abroad. Acknowledging that the “world does not always think us quite as wonderful as we think we are,” a government committee, called Panel 2000, launched a strategy on Thursday that also includes revamping British embassies and sprucing up the “gateways to Britain,” particularly Heathrow and Gatwick airports. The effort is in line with Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “cool Brittania” campaign.— AP

Dogs kill women
LONDON: A Spanish woman was mauled to death by her son’s four dogs, on Thursday night. Reports from Trinidad said that the retired hairdresser Kimmoi Wong Won (71), was attacked by the dogs as she stepped out of her car. Her arms were almost chewed off as she was bitten on her arms, body and head. An off-duty army captain was summoned to shoot the dogs dead. It took 59 bullets to kill the dogs. — ANI

Seaman kills 5
MOSCOW: A soldier from Russia’s Northern Fleet shot dead at least five of his comrades in a nuclear submarine on Friday and then barricaded himself inside, Interfax news agency said citing naval chiefs. — AFP