Technology intoxicated Americans
With American culture now increasingly intertwined with technology — from TV and movies to the Internet and electronic games — Americans are living in what social scientist John Naisbit calls a “technologically intoxicated zone”.

Kremlin buying party votes: Primakov
MOSCOW, Dec 3 — Former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov has accused the Kremlin of trying to steal votes from his Fatherland-All Russia political bloc, saying its officials were running scared of the movement.

Panel opposes freedom for Aceh
JAKARTA, Dec 3 — A day before thousands of people are expected to press demands for independence in strife-torn Aceh province, a parliamentary committee in Jakarta recommended that the region should not be allowed to secede, legislators said today.

Japan, N. Korea to have ties
TOKYO, Dec 3 — A Japanese all-party delegation signed an agreement with North Korea today to reopen talks on establishing diplomatic ties, Jiji Press News Agency said from Pyongyang.

Lords reject Bill on Catholics
LONDON, Dec 3 — The House of Lords has rejected a move to change the nearly 300-year-old law that bars Catholics from the British throne.

Darjeeling Rly on heritage list
MARRAKECH (Morocco), Dec 3 — India’s Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela served 18 years of imprisonment under Apartheid, and a Patagonian wildlife sanctuary are among the 48 new cultural and natural site included on UNESCO’s world heritage list.

Top Pak official quits govt

ISLAMABAD, Dec 3 (Reuters) — Mr Muhammad Yaqub, a former Central Bank governor, has resigned from the top council set up by Pakistan’s new military rulers, sources close to Mr Yaqoob said today.

They said Mr Yaqub quit the National Security Council (NSC), the first person to do so since it was set up after an October 12 coup brought the army to power and deposed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Pakistani newspapers said the former head of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) had resigned because of criticism from other members of the military-led administration.

The NSC comprises army ruler general Pervez Musharraf, the heads of the armed forces and four civilian experts.

“While the official reasons for Dr Yaqub was not available (SIC), it is believed he was faced with virulent criticism from within the present system”, the news reported.

Under Mr Sharif, Mr Yaqub watched Pakistan slip from poverty to the brink of default on its $ 32 billion foreign debt, a trap avoided by a comprehensive rescheduling this year. Mr Yaqub also presided over the freezing of foreign currency accounts in May last year to avoid capital flight in anticipation of sanctions for Pakistan’s nuclear tests.

Focus on Nawaz trial
From I.A. Rehman

LAHORE, Dec 3 — The military government is giving the trial of the ousted Prime Minister and has associates on plane hijacking charges more serious attention than appeared originally. Yesterday it took two steps, one ostensibly to give the trial greater public credibility and the other to tighten the prosecution’s grip over the case.

Hitherto, the Anti-terrorism Act did not envisage a special court to administer the working of courts created under it either in a province or in the country as a whole. The government had the option to entrust the administrative functions to the presiding judge of any one of the anti-terrorist courts. Yesterday the President made an ordinance to amend the law and provide for one special court in Punjab and Sindh each, headed by a serving judge of the high court. The latter will function as the administrative judge for all anti-terrorist courts in his provincial jurisdiction. All cases under the Anti-Terrorism Act will be filed in his court and he will assign them to anti-terrorist courts and may decide to hear any case himself. He may also transfer cases from one court to another.

Since presiding officers of anti-terrorist courts are of the level of sessions judges the creation of administrative tribunals headed by high court judges could be interpreted as a measure to secure more independent treatment of cases than hitherto possible. It is possible that the plane case against Nawaz Sharif and others may be heard by a court now provided for, that is by a high court judge. If that happened the regime might be able to meet any criticism of the trial and the verdict by protesting its bona tides by pointing to the higher than normal level of hearing. Some could read in the move lack of the regime’s confidence in courts set up to try lesser mortals than an overthrown prime minister or even signs of anxiety at the possible outcome. Arguably the appeal procedure will also be affected but we will probably hear of this in due course.

By the other step the regime has enlarged the schedule to the Anti-Terrorism Act in which offences triable by anti-terrorisms courts are listed so as to include in it the various offences Nawaz Sharif and others are charged with. This will be construed as none-too- sophisticated a bid to ensure that the accused in the plane case are tried by an anti-terrorism court. The reaction both at home and abroad may not be the one desired by the present authorities and trust in its professions to uphold the law and fundamental rights could suffer some erosion. As it is the Anti-Terrorism Act does not enjoy the favour of the country's’s jurists because it falls short of the guarantees of jurisprudence as the a trial is required to be completed within seven days.

In other areas the new regime is still looking for instruments to carry out its agenda. An advisory body on economic management and reform has finalised its recommendations and rhetoric about alleviating poverty and special concern for the disadvantaged has increased. Not only references to a resolve to safeguard human rights have increased, the ministers of law at the Centre and in the provinces have been allotted the human rights portfolio. A new advisory committee has been announced to make suggestions to the authors of foreign policy. To what extent these advisory bodies will be able to influence a highly centralised apparatus of rule remains to be seen, with the sceptics not being insignificant in number.

The regime should obviously have received information about signs of uneasiness in the public at the non-materialisation of material relief that it has been led to expect. On the contrary the increase in electricity bills and the prospect of petroleum prices going up are adding to the anxieties of not only ordinary and poorer sections of the population but also the affluent classes.

On the other hand, the regime has received encouragement from the speed with which the Western world has backtracked and signified its willingness to go along with it. The Indian refusal to sit with Pakistan in Seattle is not unwelcome to Islamabad on the basis of the theory that whatever is disliked by India must be liked by the people here. Rescheduling of external debts is going apace and the economic managers are confident of coming up with promises and programmes that will not fail to melt hearts at the IMF and World Bank. A new blueprint for local government has been unveiled.

But the civil society has its eyes on dangers lurking on the horizon — on a brutalised society’s capacity for self-destruction. The whole country is reeling in fright and shame following the disclosure that in Lahore, the so-called cultural capital of the state, a beast of a man killed 100 children after subjecting them to sodomy. He will be condemned as a deranged sex fiend but what will be said about a society in which a hundred boys go missing in city and cannot be traced and neighbours cannot get wind of horrible butchering of little ones in a densely populated locality. The newspapers have published pictures of a number of victims but one does not know whether the readers will only mourn the snuffing of so many young lives or will also suffer the pangs of what is undoubtedly an outrageous failure of social order and the collective mind.

Manhunt launched for mass killer

LAHORE, Dec 3 (Reuters) — Pakistani police today searched for a man who left the mutilated bodies of two children in a barrel with a note claiming he had killed 100 people.

“I have killed 100 children and put their bodies in acid containers and later disposed of the undissolved body parts,’’ the news quoted the letter as saying.

APP news agency, quoting senior police officials, said “the gruesome act...came to light when two bodies, which were mutilated beyond recognition, were recovered from a dingy and deserted house in the Ravi Road area here on Thursday.’’

“The unidentified killer also left a note pasted on the wall saying that he had murdered more than one hundred persons while the addresses and photographs of those murdered by an unidentified assassin is also noted in his personal diary.

Russians take key town near Grozny

MOSCOW, Dec 3 (Reuters) — A Russian commander said today Moscow’s forces had seized the key Chechen town of Argun and were beginning operations to clear it of Muslim rebels.

The town guards the eastern approaches to the Chechen capital, Grozny, and is the third major settlement to be seized by Russian forces since they began their offensive three months ago to restore Moscow’s control over the territory.

But rights organisations and Western nations have kept up a steady stream of criticism of the offensive, which has caused many civilian casualties and forced around 200,000 refugees to flee to neighbouring regions.

“Operations are beginning from dawn to clear this town,’’ Interfax news agency quoted the First Deputy Head of the General Staff, Gen Valery Manilov, as saying of Argun. The Muslim rebels whom Moscow has vowed to wipe out had lost 100 men in the fight for Argun while Russian losses were 34. The figures could not be independently confirmed.

The other key towns of Gudermes and Achkhoi-Martan were taken without a shot after elders persuaded the rebels to leave and allow Russia’s forces to troop in.

Grozny remained under siege and Interfax quoted the military at Russia’s base of Mozdok, just outside Chechnya, as saying the capital, Argun and the town of Urus-Martan, heavily defended by the rebels, were hit by air raids in the past 24 hours.

Grozny has been bombed and shelled for several weeks by Russian forces but Moscow’s top commanders have several times denied they would try and take the city by storm.

AP adds: Chechen commanders said their forces were still fighting in Argun town and the Russian claim to have taken the town could not be confirmed.

The Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, General Valery Manilov denied the report of killing of soldiers yesterday in their efforts to encircle Argun, saying the federal troops casualties were ‘minimal’ and only four men were killed, Ekho Moskvy reported.

Argun is the gateway to provincial capital.

Col Puri Em, the commander of a crack paratrooper unit, which stormed the heavily fortified militant positions on the outskirts of Argun yesterday, told NTV that militants had put up very stiff resistance before withdrawing from the town. The Russian troops were expected to start mopping up operations in a day or two.

Meanwhile, Ekho Moskvy radio reported heavy fighting in the area of another key rebel stronghold of Urus-Martan, which controls the road to the mountains in the south and provides a direct access to Russia’s international border with Georgia through which, as Moscow claims, the rebels are receiving reinforcements.

A report from Sernovodsk (Russia) quoted officials as saying that a Russian troops unit was attacked near Urus-Martan, 20 km south-west of Grozny.

Mr Ali Dudarov, Deputy Interior Minister of the Republic of Ingushetia said some 200 soldiers were killed in the assault and 50 more taken prisoner had been executed.

Quoting sources in Grozny, Ekho Moskvy said the Russia army columns in the west and the east were only 30 km apart and were heading for link-up to seal the provincial capital.

BRUSSELS: NATO Defence Ministers, reminding President Boris Yeltsin of his recent commitment to seek a political solution, today urged Russia to end the use of “disproportionate and indiscriminate” force in Chechnya.

The statement yesterday reflected that concern Yeltsin was not honouring his commitment made at a European security conference last month in Istanbul since Russian attacks against rebels in the republic were continuing unabated.

Besides, NATO officials observed, the Russians were not forthcoming in organising visit by foreign observers to Chechnya — something Mr Yeltsin had agreed to at Istanbul.

“We urge Russia to exercise the fullest restraint, cease the disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force which has given rise to severe hardship for the civilian population and take urgent steps towards a political solution building on the commitments of Istanbul,” the ministers said in a statement after a one-day meeting.

It said the allies hoped Mr Yeltsin would honour his commitment, made at a November OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation Europe) summit in Turkey to allow foreign observers into the war-torn republic and work for a “political solution” in Chechnya.

Technology intoxicated Americans
from Batuk Vora in Washington

With American culture now increasingly intertwined with technology — from TV and movies to the Internet and electronic games — Americans are living in what social scientist John Naisbit calls a “technologically intoxicated zone”.

This zone is sometimes confusing and in a distracted state where they both fear and worship technology. They get obsessed with what is “real” and what is “fake” — from the violent games children play to genetically modified food they eat, which by the way, Europe does not want to import, resulting in a trade war between the USA and Europe on this issue.

It is technology saturation of American society — with its fabulous innovations and its devastating consequences. Like Galieo’s insistence that the earth revolved around the sun and Darwin’s theory of evolution, this new technology has produced major changes in mankind itself.

Some serious questions are being raised by the same scientists and innovators who gave this new IT to humanity: the destructive effects of video entertainment, which now makes twice as much money as the film industry; the way technology has changed the way we live; and the way genetic science — and technologies such as cloning and gene therapy — will change our daily lives, from the most mundane to the most profound ways.

Does this technology really free man from constraints of the physical world or does it tie us down to the machines? Does it save time in day-to-day lives or does it create a void we feel compelled to fill with more tasks and responsibilities?

What about advances in biotechnology? Recent developments in genetic engineering now raise the possibility of a future that will someday free American lives from birth defects, disabilities and diseases that mark daily lives at present. But in an age where such things are possible, what is natural and what is artificial, afterall? When people can be created in a laboratory as easily as in the womb, what does it truely mean to the human being?

Feeling a void, people are continuously searching for a meaning in their lives. Today, more Americans belong to a church, synagogue, temple or a mosque (68 per cent today, compared to 17 in 1776!) than in any other time in history.

By breaking out of the “technologically intoxicated zone and developing a conscious awareness of technology, the relevance of existing technology can be evaluated with clarity and appropriate relations built with them.

The Internet, cellular phones, laptops and palmtops, video cameras and other bells and whistles are attractive but at the same time they distract people from their daily lives. Americans take 17 billion photographs a year, 5 per cent of them at Disney theme parks. But do cameras document life’s most important events, or do they distract us from experiencing emotions, sights and sounds of the occasion?

The electronic games industry now generates $ 16 billion a year income in the USA alone. Yet this “military-nintendo complex” is a perversion of genuine games. Modern military actions resemble hi-tech games which the Pentagon increasingly blends to its strategic perceptions. The impact is felt by people at large who have to be oriented accordingly.

Consequently, there high tech weapons have to be glorified. This task is performed through violent video games. — IPA

Kremlin buying party votes: Primakov

MOSCOW, Dec 3 (Reuters) — Former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov has accused the Kremlin of trying to steal votes from his Fatherland-All Russia political bloc, saying its officials were running scared of the movement.

The centrist Fatherland-All Russia bloc, headed by Mr Primakov and powerful Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, is expected to do well in a parliamentary election due on December 19. Both leaders have accused the Kremlin of trying to undermine their campaign.

“There is no limit to the dirty tricks conducted against our movement. We are the only target,’’ Mr Primakov told NTV television yesterday.

“We are making them scared. They are scared we will stop them if people vote for us. We will stop the embezzlers of state money.’’

Mr Primakov also accused the Kremlin of giving money to persuade members of the bloc to leave, adding that the party had evidence to back up the allegation.

“We are receiving reports that the administration, or at least some of its members, are offering huge bribes...To those who agree to leave our bloc’s list. We have the evidence,’’ Mr Primakov said.

Mr Igor Shabdurasulov, first deputy head of President Boris Yeltsin’s administration, denied the allegations, calling on Mr Primakov to name the officials.

Fatherland-All Russia are running second in the opinion polls with 14 per cent of the vote after the Communist Party, which expects about 27 per cent.

Panel opposes freedom for Aceh

JAKARTA, Dec 3 (AP) — A day before thousands of people are expected to press demands for independence in strife-torn Aceh province, a parliamentary committee in Jakarta recommended that the region should not be allowed to secede, legislators said today.

Instead, the panel proposed that Indonesia’s westernmost province be allowed to hold a referendum on greater autonomy, said Julius Usman, a member of the Special Parliamentary Committee on Aceh.

The panel also said anyone accused of human rights abuses in Aceh should be tried by civilian courts, Usman said.

The panel had already questioned seven active and retired generals, including General Wiranto who was now a senior government minister.

The military had insisted that it would use a military tribunal to prosecute its soldiers who stand accused of human rights abuses.

The committee also dismissed calls from the security forces to impose martial law in Aceh.

Supporters of the secessionist free Aceh movement are planning large celebrations tomorrow to mark the anniversary of the group.

Japan, N. Korea to have ties

TOKYO, Dec 3 (AFP) — A Japanese all-party delegation signed an agreement with North Korea today to reopen talks on establishing diplomatic ties, Jiji Press News Agency said from Pyongyang.

“The two agreed on the importance of resuming talks between Japan and North Korea, and will urge each other’s governments to reopen talks as soon as possible”, the accord said.

Lords reject Bill on Catholics

LONDON, Dec 3 — (AP) — The House of Lords has rejected a move to change the nearly 300-year-old law that bars Catholics from the British throne.

The 1701 Act of Settlement, which also forbids anyone married to a Catholic from becoming monarch, is widely regarded as offensive in a modern, multi-cultural Britain.

But the Lords, the unelected upper chamber of Parliament, decided that the issue should be taken on at a higher level by the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Darjeeling Rly on heritage list

MARRAKECH (Morocco), Dec 3 (AP) — India’s Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela served 18 years of imprisonment under Apartheid, and a Patagonian wildlife sanctuary are among the 48 new cultural and natural site included on UNESCO’s world heritage list.

There are now 630 sites of “outstanding universal value” in 118 countries on the heritage list announced yesterday.

690-year sentence
MADRID: A Spanish court called for a total of 690 years in prison for one of the worst rapists in Spanish history. Arlindo Luis Carbalho, 34, who has confessed to committing 150 rapes over an eight-year period, must now wait for the final ruling from the Madrid court, which has reserved its verdict on Thursday. Carbalho has only been judged for 43 cases, as the rest of his victims did not bring their cases to court. — AFP

One-night pension
NAIROBI: A sugar company employee who took early retirement lost his 3,600 dollars pension in a one-night orgy of beer, women and song, Kenyan newspapers have reported. The man, who was unnamed, cashed his 270,000 shilling pension cheque as soon as he stopped work and headed for a bar. “Feeling thoroughly liquid and hence unstoppable, he set to conquer a woman from a neighbouring country,” The Kenya Times said on Thursday. — Reuters

Gay immigration
JOHANNESBURG: South Africa’s constitutional court has ruled that foreign partners of gays and lesbians should be entitled to the same residence rights as marital partners of heterosexuals. The court ruled on Thursday that the country’s aliens control act discriminated unfairly against gays and lesbians by failing to give them the same benefits extended to heterosexual spouses. — Reuters

Tasty grasshoppers
KAMPALA: Ugandans are going hopping mad to catch and eat tens of thousands of grasshoppers which have swarmed into the city following seasonal rains. Young and old, men and women, wealthy and vagrants gather under streetlights at night in December to try to snare the bright green grasshoppers attracted by the glare. — Reuters

Duped Miss UK
LONDON: Miss United Kingdom will be allowed to compete in the Miss World beauty contest despite a row over topless photographs of her in a tabloid newspaper. Organisers of the event said on Thursday that 18-year-old Nicola Willoughby was “duped” into doing a topless photo shoot and said her heart-felt plea not to be excluded from the global beauty show had found favour. — Reuters

Clinton’s crooning kin
TOKYO: President Bill Clinton’s crooning half-brother Roger has arrived in the North Korean capital Pyongyang with his rhythm and blues band and was expected to perform at a pop concert there. — Reuters