Treaty on women’s rights signed
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 11 — Some 23 nations marked Human Rights Day by signing a legal protocol that will allow women to file complaints to the UN about discrimination, sexual exploitation and other abuses.

Russia deploys more N-missiles
MOSCOW, Dec 11 —Russia yesterday said it had deployed a second batch of its advanced Topol-M missiles as part of a scheme to upgrade the cash-starved country’s ageing nuclear arsenal with its deterrent of choice for the next century.

Oil-for-food plan extended
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 11 — the U.N. Security Council renewed for six months the Iraqi ‘’oil-for-food’’ programme and scheduled a vote on a more crucial resolution outlining its overall policy toward Baghdad.

Croatian President Tudjman dead
ZAGREB, Dec 11 — Croatian President Franjo Tudjman has died, interim President Vlatko Pavletic announced on national television today.

Lee arrested, indicted
ALBUQUERQUE( New Mexico), Dec 11 — After three years under suspicion as a spy for China, computer scientist Wen Ho Lee was arrested and charged with removing nuclear secrets from highly secure computers at the Los Alamos weapons lab.

241 killed in Lankan fighting

COLOMBO, Dec 11 (PTI) — The Sri Lankan army today claimed 230 rebels and 11 others, including eight soldiers, were killed in three concerted sea and land-based attacks by the LTTE on the island’s biggest military garrison at Elephant Pass located at the mouth of the Army-held northern Jaffna peninsula.

An army spokesman said troops at the camp, assisted by Air Force helicopter gunships and naval gunboats, successfully repulsed three attacks by the rebels on the well-fortified garrison, but an LTTE press note from London said its cadre penetrated the garrison from four sides and laid a siege around it.

The LTTE said its forces were pounding the camp with artillery and mortars, and denied the army claims that 230 of its guerrillas had been killed in the fighting.

Admitting the loss of only 15 of its cadre, the rebels said the army was projecting exaggerated LTTE casualties to “prop up” the declining morale of the Sinhalese soldiers.

Army spokesman Brig Sunil Thennakoon said after suffering heavy casualties in two of its abortive attacks in the morning, the LTTE attacked the garrison for the third time in the day, but it too was repulsed by the security forces.

He said 230 LTTE rebels and eight soldiers had been killed in the fighting and 90 army personnel injured.

The condition of many of the injured soldiers was stated to be serious. The LTTE’s clandestine radio said three civilians had been killed in army artillery shelling at the nearby northern Kilinochchi town.

Army sources here said today’s victory in repulsing the LTTE attack would boost the sagging morale of the troops.

The LTTE made spectacular gains last month when they overran some key military bases in Sri Lanka’s north.

The loss of the garrison would have opened the gates for the Tigers to attack the northern Jaffna peninsula.

Russia suspends Grozny offensive

MOSCOW, Dec 11 (UNI) — Russia seems to have postponed, at least for the time being, the military offensive against Chechnya’s capital Gronzy as talks are under way between the Kremlin and Chechan President Aslan Maskhadov’s representatives.

The five-day ultimatum to civilians to leave Grozny was to expire today.

Meanwhile, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he had received two Deputy Prime Ministers of Chechnya during the past few days. The two were sent by Mr Maskhadov to hold parleys with Kremlin, according to Novosti news agency.

Mr Putin told the visiting Chechan leaders that Mr Maskhadov must publicly denounce terrorism in all its forms, release all hostages and hand over those accused of causing destruction of many residential areas in Moscow and other Russian cities to the law enforcement bodies. The Chechan response is awaited, it is learnt.

A top general in the Interior Ministry, meanwhile has hinted that the Russians would opt to by-pass Gronzy and move towards the foothills in southern Chechnya where rebels are concentrating after having been driven out of the main Chechan cities.

General Vyachslav Ovechinnikov told Novosti that the pamphlets dropped on Chechan capital warning its civilians to leave within five days had not declared that federal troops would launch any operation on the expiry of the deadline.

Voice of Russia quoting sources in Gronzy said the rebels last night blew up some of the chemical explosives depots there, endangering the lives of civilians remaining in the embattled city.

Kremlin had yesterday offered talks with rebel leaders regarding the evacuation of civilians.It had also requested Mr Maskhadov to allow civilians to vacate the capital.

As a goodwill gesture, Russian troops did not attack the headquarters of Mr Masdakhov when the government troops wrested Shali village from the rebels.

Kremlin still hopes to work out a deal with Mr Masdakhov, dubbed the Kremlin boy by some of the Chechan warlords.

EU criticises Russia

HELSINKI (DPA): European Union leaders harshly criticised Russia’s use of force in Chechnya and pledged at their Helsinki Summit to switch money away from Moscow aid programmes to humanitarian assistance.

“The fight against terrorism cannot, under any circumstances, warrant the destruction of cities, neither can they be emptied of their inhabitants, nor can a whole population be considered as terrorist,’’ said a summit statement on the eve of a threatened major attack by Russian forces on the Chechen capital, Grozny.

EU leaders called for an end to Russian bombing and the use of force against Chechen civilians, and said the EU would transfer some funds from its tacis aid programme — worth $ 1.3 billion since 1991 — to humanitarian assistance.

In a move that could hurt Russian exports, the summit also called on the EU to start applying “strictly’’ all trade provisions with Moscow.

The European Commissioner for External Relations, Chris Patten, said Russia had a $ 10.2 billion trade surplus with the EU and that Moscow was in breach of numerous trade agreements. “We will pursue this vigorously,’’ Mr Patten said .

The summit earlier doubled to 12 the number of states negotiating EU membership, and upgraded Turkey to a lower-ranked candidate status for possible later inclusion in talks.

The UK , meanwhile, torpedoed a tax harmonisation package because of fears that a proposed cross-border withholding tax would harm London’s eurobond market.

A spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the package had been rejected because 100,000 jobs in London depended on the multi-trillion dollar international securities market.

Germany and other EU members bitterly complain they are losing tax revenue from their own citizens who park investments in London. Britain argues that a European-wide withholding tax would merely drive these funds to offshore banking sites outside the EU.

The summit also approved plans to create a crisis reaction force in a move giving the 15-nation EU. Its first ever military capacity, a spokesman for the Finnish Government said.

ANKARA,(AP): Meanwhile, Turkey has accepted the European Union’s offer to become a candidate for membership, an invitation that came with a series of tough demands.

“We got a yes,” EU Foreign Affairs Chief Javier Solana said here on Friday after meeting with Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.

Sharif’s lawyers denied evidence

ISLAMABAD, Dec 11 (PTI) — Lawyers of deposed Pakistani Premier Nawaz Sharif and others in the plane hijacking case have raised serious objection to the refusal by prosecution to provide them with copies of vital evidences and accused it of hampering fair trial through “lame excuses”.

Mr Sharif’s defence counsel Iqbal Raad said an application would be filed at the anti-terrorist court on Monday against the contention of the prosecution that the copies of the audio and video tapes, given as evidence against Mr Sharif and others, could not be provided to the defence despite an order by the court to that effect.

“The application will be filed on Monday, seeking time for filing objections because the prosecution has not mentioned any specific provisions of the Tokyo Convention in support of its contention,” Mr Raad, a former Advocate-General of Sindh, told English daily Dawn in a report published today.

Mr Sharif and others could not be formally indicted on Wednesday last when the prosecution submitted the charge sheet in the case as the defence demanded copies of all evidences, including that of audio and video tapes.

Judge Shabbir Ahmed of the anti-terrorist court had ordered the prosecution to provide the copies to the defence and had set December 13 as the next date for formal indictment.

But the prosecution moved an application before the court only a day later saying that it could not provide copies of audio and video tapes to the defence as it would be against the international conventions on civil aviation, and rather sought permission to play the tapes before the court.

Even though the prosecution raised no objection when the court passed the order, in its application it said: “Supplying of copies of audio cassette recording prior to commencement of trial or during the trial is unprecedented in the field of aviation and if the same are supplied, irreparable damage is likely to be caused to the civil aviation authority.”

Refuting the contention of the prosecution, Mr Raad argued that the formal indictment could not take place without providing evidence to the defence asking, “if all the evidence is not provided how are the charges going to be framed?”

He claimed that the prosecution was not confident of its case and argued that the charge sheet submitted before the court was incomplete unless all relevant documents were submitted along with that.

Without copies of the evidences “we cannot defend our client properly — and it (evidence) is our right”, he said.

The military government had earlier hurriedly brought an amendment to the Anti-Terrorist Act to provide for Mr Sharif’s prosecution under it as per which the trial should be completed within a week.

Treaty on women’s rights signed

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 11 (Reuters) — Some 23 nations marked Human Rights Day by signing a legal protocol that will allow women to file complaints to the UN about discrimination, sexual exploitation and other abuses.

The “optional protocol” to a 20-year-old women’s anti-discrimination treaty was adopted yesterday by the UN General Assembly in October and opened for signature. It takes effect after 10 national legislatures have ratified it.

The 21-Article protocol would enable women for the first time to submit sexual discrimination complaints directly to the UN as well as protest other violations covered in the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women.

This treaty was first approved by the General Assembly in 1979 and had been ratified by 165 countries but not by the USA, conservative Islamic countries and North Korea. It bars all forms of legal discrimination against women and demands equal access to and equal opportunities in political and public life.

Signing the optional protocol to the treaty yesterday were Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland,Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Senegal, Slovenia and Sweden.

The treaty, which also calls for affirmative action until equality is attained, is difficult to enforce. One method is investigations and, at times, public embarrassment when adherence to its articles is reviewed by the commission.

The treaty differs, however, from other human rights instruments in that women or their representatives have not been allowed to file individual grievances against their governments for allegedly violating the convention.

The new protocol would allow women to bypass governments and have the UN commission on the status of women investigate their grievances. The commission would then attempt to persuade governments to remedy abuses.

Aloisia Woergetter, the Australian Diplomat who spent three years negotiating the protocol, said many delegations had initially opposed it, partly because of its affirmative action provisions. But she said increasingly women were becoming part on UN, delegations and women’s advocate groups strongly lobbied their respective governments.

In 1999, she said “It became clear to governments that you cannot avoid this and you cannot deny women the rights that they have”.

Assistant Secretary-General Angela King, the Jamaican Director of the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, hoped that sufficient financial resources would be available after complaints began to mount.

Without proper financing, the protocol “will be a dead letter, quite frankly”, she said earlier this year.

Russia deploys more N-missiles

MOSCOW, Dec 11 (Reuters) —Russia yesterday said it had deployed a second batch of its advanced Topol-M missiles as part of a scheme to upgrade the cash-starved country’s ageing nuclear arsenal with its deterrent of choice for the next century.

A strategic rocket forces spokesman told Reuters the 10 intercontinental ballistic missiles went on to active duty at Tatishchevo in the southern Saratov region on Volga river. Ten of the missiles were deployed in the same area a year ago.

“Of the five nuclear powers, none of the others will match these weapons in the next few years,” Colonel-General Vladimir Yakovlev, the forces’ commander, told Russian news agencies.

Britain, China, France and the USA are the four other declared nuclear powers which, like Russia, have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

On Thursday during a visit to China, Russian President Boris Yeltsin warned the USA not to put pressure on Russia over its Chechnya military campaign and to remember Moscow had a huge nuclear arsenal. Washington played down the implied threat.

Topol-M, known to NATO as the SS-27, is a three-stage, single warhead missile with a range of 10,000 km. The 20 missiles deployed so far sit in silos and are meant as a replacement for SS-19 missiles, which date from the 1970s.

The aim is for Topol-M eventually to replace all six land-based missile types in silos and on mobile launchers. Russia also has missiles aboard submarines and aircraft.

Mr Yakovlev told a news conference earlier this week that 72 per cent of Russia’s arsenal of 2,000 missiles was beyond their original shelf-life. But he said that did not mean they were obsolete.

Mr Yakovlev and other Russian military officials have said Topol-M is designed to carry a single warhead but could easily be adapted to carry multiple warheads as a way to counter the USA if it goes ahead with a national missile defence system that would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Pact.

Even now Topol-M is unbeatable, Mr Yakovlev said.

Oil-for-food plan extended

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 11 (Reuters) — the U.N. Security Council renewed for six months the Iraqi ‘’oil-for-food’’ programme and scheduled a vote on a more crucial resolution outlining its overall policy toward Baghdad.

The British Ambassador, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the current Council President, said he was calling a vote for Monday afternoon on the resolution that would restart U.N. arms inspections in Baghdad and lead to a suspension of trade sanctions imposed more than nine years ago.

The USA and Britain had pressed for a vote today but China said it needed further instructions, hinting it would use its veto power to kill the draft if the meeting was not delayed.

Sir Greenstock, however, appeared fairly certain Russia and China, who have criticised the resolution, on Monday would not kill the draft by exercising their veto power.

‘‘I am confident that this is a good text and should get support from a maximum number of council members and will be carried,’’ he said.

Life from chemicals soon?

WASHINGTON, Dec 11 (PTI) — Human beings may soon be able to design and create new forms of life — living organisms — from scratch, with chemicals in a laboratory.

The explosive implications of this new development in genetic science — religious, ethical and other — are not yet clear but a team of geneticists has come close to determining the minimum number of genes required for life to arise, The Washington Post has reported.

Tired of waiting for philosophers to answer the question “What is life?”, researchers at Celera Genomics in Rockville, Maryland, and other laboratories adopted a scientific approach and concluded that about 300 genes were needed for a life form to pass for “alive” — a state generally defined by the ability to reproduce and to respond to the environment.

The discovery of what appears to be the simplest recipe for making a living thing is described in yesterday’s issue of Science.

The Post said this could shed new light on the origin of life and myriad ways that biology has cooked itself up since evolution first stirred the primordial soup.

But of greater interest to ethicists, who had been tracking the Minimal Genome Project since its inception two years ago, said The Post, was that the new research might enable scientists to engineer life in the laboratory for the first time from essential chemical ingredients — not by altering existing organisms, as genetic engineers do today.

That ability, said J. Craig Venter of Celera Genomics, could be liberating or could sow the seeds of destruction.

Novel cells could be designed to clean up toxic wastes with unprecedented efficiency, he said, warning that they could be programmed to serve as horrendous biological weapons.

For people who already fear that gene researchers were playing God, the prospect of scientists actually becoming creators might be downright blasphemous, Ventor said.

That is why, he said, he and his colleagues — many of whom were at the Institute for Genomic Research, a non-profit centre he founded in Rockville — had agreed not to attempt a replay of Genesis until more public discussion took place.

However, an accompanying Science report by a 25-member Ethics Panel of the institute found no compelling reason to stop researchers from making new life forms if the scientific and ethical implications were carefully weighed.

“The creation of new free-living life forms does not violate any fundamental moral precepts or boundaries, but does raise questions that are essential to consider before technology advances further,” said Mildred K. Cho of the Stanford University Centre for Biomedical Research, who headed the panel.

Croatian President Tudjman dead

ZAGREB, Dec 11 (AFP) — Croatian President Franjo Tudjman has died, interim President Vlatko Pavletic announced on national television today.

The 77-year-old leader had been in hospital since November 1 when he underwent an operation for what was officially described as a perforated intestine but which independent newspapers have said was cancer of the digestive system.

The veteran leader died at around 1 a.m. GMT (6.30 a.m. IST). No pictures of the ailing Tudjman had been shown on the media for several weeks.

Tudjman is considered the “Father of the Nation,” his fervent nationalism paved the way for Croatia’s independence in 1991.

The body of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman will lie in state at the President’s Palace until Monday.

Lee arrested, indicted

ALBUQUERQUE( New Mexico), Dec 11 (AP) — After three years under suspicion as a spy for China, computer scientist Wen Ho Lee was arrested and charged with removing nuclear secrets from highly secure computers at the Los Alamos weapons lab.

There was still no proof that he passed information to China or any other country, officials said.

The Taiwan-born scientist, whose two decades of work at Los Alamos included weapons design, was charged in a 59-count indictment yesterday, which Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Gorence read as Lee appeared before a Federal magistrate.

Quebec secession Bills
OTTAWA: The Canadian Government sparked furious protests from Quebec by unveiling long-awaited but controversial legislation to make it more difficult for the French-speaking province to secede. The separatist Quebec government, gearing up for yet another round of sparring with Ottawa on Friday, immediately declared it would introduce a Bill as early as next week reaffirming the province’s right to self-determination. — Reuters

Internet in space
WASHINGTON: An American company is planning to launch the Internet in space on board the international space station, allowing communication with astronauts and showing live feeds of their experiments. Spacehab Inc., which is providing astronaut quarters for the space station due to be completed in 2004, on Friday unveiled plans for the first permanent commercial presence in space through their Internet “space portal”. — Reuters

Nepalese General
UNITED NATIONS: A Nepalese officer, Maj-Gen Victory Rana, was named as the new Commander of the 1,200-member UN peacekeeping force stationed on the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus since 1964. He will succeed Maj-Gen Evergisto Arturo De Vergara of Argentina, who was appointed in 1997 and relinquishes his post on December 15.— Reuters

Saliva leads to arrest
HONG KONG: A repentant robber who gave money back to his victim using his teeth to avoid leaving fingerprints was caught after DNA samples were taken from his saliva. Lee Ming-Chi, 31, was jailed for five years after what his defence barrister called his “kind-heartedness’’ backfired, the South China Morning Post reported here on Saturday. — DPA

Internet paedophile
LONDON: A London court has sentenced a man for four years of imprisonment described by the police as Britain’s most prolific distributor of child pornography after finding 5,872 paedophile pictures on his computer. Leslie Bollingbrooke, 42, stored pornographic pictures featuring children and babies, some of which depicted violent scenes and exchanged these pictures with other paedophiles. — AFP

Monica Lewinsky
WASHINGTON: Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern, will probably be subpoenaed to testify next week in the Maryland wiretapping case against former co-worker Linda Tripp, her lawyer has said. The lawyer, Plato Cacheris, said on Friday that he had been advised that state prosecutors might need to call Lewinsky for a pre-trial hearing. — AP

1 dies in prison attack
SAN CRISTOBAL: A baby died while two guards were wounded during an armed attack on a southern Mexico prison and a subsequent riot by prisoners resulting in escape of 44 prisoners, officials said here. Armed men attacked the prison from the mountains on Friday targeting an electric transformer and causing an immediate blackout inside and when the guards returned fire, inmates started a revolt, Chiapas state prison director Manuel de Jesus said. — AFP

3 die in plane crash
KUWAIT: Three soldiers were killed and 16 injured when a US Air Force troop transport plane made an emergency belly landing in fog and rain after its wheels failed to come down. The three servicemen died from inhaling smoke after the landing sparked a fire in the rear of the C-130 aircraft on Friday, Kuwait’s state-run television said.— AP

Elephant hides auction
HARARE: Zimbabwe sold 28 tonnes of elephant hides to both domestic and foreign buyers at an auction which fetched 23.2 million Zimbabwe $ (610,000 US) to the organisers. The hides, auctioned at the headquarters of the country’s National Parks and Wildlife (NPH) Department in Harare are used to manufacture high quality leather products. — AFP