Democrats float censure move
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 — As the sex-and-lies impeachment trial against President Bill Clinton has wound down, Democrats have released a draft censure proposal that would leave the President open to future criminal and civil actions.

Talks under way to defuse Pak media row
ISLAMABAD, Feb 7 — The Pakistan Government and the country’s largest newspaper group have opened talks to defuse a bitter row which sparked concerns over press freedom here, reports said today.

3 die in Kosovo blast
PRISTINA, Feb 7 — At least three persons, including a child, have been killed and several seriously injured in an explosion at a vegetable store here in Kosovo’s capital, the police at the scene said.

11 LTTE rebels die in Army attack

Jordan king dead, Abdallah new ruler

AMMAN, Feb 7 (Reuters, PTI) — Crown Prince Abdallah Ibn Hussein was formally sworn in today as the King of Jordan at a special session of Parliament here following the death of his father, King Hussein.

“The throne of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan has been passed, in line with the constitution and the law, to his royal Highness Abdallah Ibn Hussein,’’ Jordanian television said.

Earlier, King Hussein died, two days after returning to the country following failed treatment for cancer, a palace source said. A government minister said he died at 11.34 a.m.

The death followed reports that the 63-year-old monarch’s condition had deteriorated later yesterday and that he had been treated for a sharp fall in his blood pressure.

Medical sources said the drop in blood pressure had been a sign that his heart might be failing. Other internal organs had failed earlier and he had been unconscious since Thursday.

CAIRO: A crusader for peace in the troubled Middle East and architect of modern Jordan, King Hussein Bin Talal, weathered political unrest, war, and several assassination attempts, to rule the Hashemite kingdom with an iron hand for nearly half a century.

Under the 63-year-old King’s enlightened leadership the predominantly Muslim monarchy grew from a fringe state with little standing in the international arena, to a kingdom widely respected for its moderating influence in the oil-rich region.

Mr Hussein, who traced his hoary lineage to prophet Mohammed, played a key role in defining the region’s history by working ceaselessly to bring the Jewish state of Israel to the negotiating table with its warring Arab neighbours.

Inheriting in 1952 at the age of 17, a kingdom, desperately trying to overcome internal strife, King Hussein, set it during his years at the helm on to the path of progress and led the turbulent region to the threshold of peace by signing a peace deal with Israel.

After a bitter war with Tel Aviv in 1967 when Israel wrested the West Bank from Jordan’s hands, King Hussein remained officially at war with the Jewish state for over four decades before the shifting sands of Middle East politics led him to make peace.

The 1994 treaty served as a beacon to all other Arab states at war with the Zionist state, hitherto treated as a pariah state, paving the way for peace talks between Tel Aviv and the then outlawed Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).

As the Arab leader closest to Israel, King Hussein used his good offices to cajole Tel Aviv towards peace with the PLO, often intervening personally as he did in 1998 when he flew from a US clinic to infuse fresh life into the talks.

His ties with the USA, however, saw a number of twists and turns as did his ties with the Palestinians, who before the 1967 war were an integral part of his kingdom, and even later continued to play a key role in Jordanian politics.

King Hussein, the longest serving ruler in the world, stood loyally by the USA till the 1990 Gulf war when he sided with Iraq. Quick disillusionment with Baghdad, saw Hussein switching back to the US camp, this time for keeps.

The King’s death after a long struggle against lymphatic cancer leaves a deep political void in the region, although newly proclaimed crown Prince Abdullah, has shown signs of treading his father’s time-tested path of peace.

Born in Amman on November 14, 1935, King Hussein was pitchforked to the centrestage of politics by a quirk of fate in 1952, when his grandfather Abdullah appointed leader of the country by the British, was killed by an assassin.

In the eventful years that followed, King Hussein emerged as the undisputed leader of his country, surviving as many as 27 assassination attempts, a fallout of the bitter struggle between Palestinians and Jordan over division of the West Bank.

Hussein also strove to resolve disputes between warring Arab states. During the 1990-91 Gulf crisis, he exerted vigorous efforts to peacefully effect an Iraqi withdrawal and restore Kuwait’s sovereignty.

The tough-looking soft-spoken Hussein persevered in pursuit of genuine Arab reconciliation, wherever a conflict arose between neighbours or within a country, as in case of the Yemeni civil war.

Born in Amman on November 14, 1935, Hussein had his elementary education in Amman before attending Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, and later in Harrow School in England. He received his military education at the famed Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in England.

He was proclaimed King of the Hashemite Kingdom on August 11, 1952, after his father was found mentally unfit to be King. A Regency Council was appointed until his formal accession to the throne on May 2, 1953, when he assumed his constitutional powers after reaching the age of 18.

His firm but benevolent rule in the years to come saw Jordan rise from an economic pygmy to an economic and industrial powerhouse in the region with one of the best developed infrastructure and industry among Mid-East states.

Jordan also made rapid strides in the field of literacy, sanitation and power generation and the standard of living of the average Jordanian vastly improved. Soon he was to leave an indelible stamp on the region’s political profile as well.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, he was instrumental in drafting a landmark UN resolution calling upon Israel to withdraw from all Arab lands it occupied during the war in exchange for peace.

USA for extradition pact with India

COLOMBO, Feb 7 (PTI) — The USA has proposed to have extradition treaties with India and Sri Lanka and extended Washington’s support to the idea of a “facilitator” to bring the warring Tamil Tiger rebels to the negotiating table, official sources here said today.

Visiting US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Mr Karl F. Inderfurth, who is ending a two-day visit to Sri Lanka today, during his talks with Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar and Opposition leader Ranil Wickramasinghe, proposed an extradition treaty with Sri Lanka and discussed the island’s Tamil separatist conflict.

He told the Sri Lanka leaders that the US Government had already sounded the Indian Government on having a similar treaty which could help put down terrorist activities, the sources said.

India and the USA have declared the LTTE as a terrorist organisation which virtually amounted to a total ban on the outfit. The USA has also declared its support to President Chandrika Kumartunga’s package of constitutional reforms granting some autonomy to the Tamil-dominated provinces and appealed to the LTTE to give up armed struggle and settle for peace talks.

Mr Inderfurth also declared the US Government’s support to President Kumaratunga’s stand on holding talks with the LTTE through a third party “facilitation” instead of third party mediation as demanded by the LTTE and western countries including Britain.

The sources said the USA, while extending support to Sri Lankan Government’s stand on facilitation, also took into consideration the reservations expressed recently by India on third party mediation during President Kumaratunga’s visit to New Delhi.

The US stand on the issue was made known during Mr Inderfurth’s meeting with leaders of moderate Tamil parties yesterday, the sources said.

India for curbs on financial flows

MONTEGO BAY (JAMAICA), Feb 7 (Agencies) — India is likely to provide substantial inputs to the restructuring of the global financial architecture at the ninth G-15 summit commencing here from February 10.

The existing financial institutions and the multilateral trading agencies have not always worked in favour of the emerging economies. The recent South East Asian currency crisis demonstrates how successive devaluation led to low prices of exports thus tilting the terms of trade against developing nations.

The speed with which the crisis spread from one country to the other needs to be examined. Even though India largely escaped the meltdown, it suffered by way of trade as it has substantial exports to this region and also lost export markets in developed countries.

Though it is not the first time India is putting across its views on the new global financial architecture, the discussions in this forum are likely to be more meaningful because of the similar level of development of these countries.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who will head the Indian delegation has already made it clear that global financial issues will dominate the ninth G-15 summit.

“We have made some suggestions for reform of the global financial architecture. This issue will figure prominently at the forthcoming meeting of the G-15 that I would be attending next week,’’ Mr Vajpayee said on the eve of his departure for a three-nation eight-day official visit that will take him to Trinidad, Tobago and Morocco besides Jamaica.

Mr Vajpayee’s observation assumes significance as the need of the hour is a “collective response” to managing crisis arising out of volatility of capital flows, Indian official sources said.

Articulating India’s stand on the new international financial architecture, Commerce Minister Ramakrishna Hegde said at G-15’s trade and economic ministers meeting on Saturday that an effective crisis prevention strategy would require structural changes and sharper tools.

“Regulating and taxing destabilising short-term flows by the recipient countries has now widespread acceptance amongst international experts,” he said.

However, if international and source-country regulation is not developed, international private investors and creditors will continue to assume excessive risks in the knowledge that they will be bailed out if the situation became critical, he said elaborating India’s thinking on the issue.

“Ironically existing regulatory practice has a bias towards encouraging short-term lending by banks with distortions in the prescribed risk weightage for the purpose of capital adequacy,” he said adding moreover no regulatory framework internationally exists for portfolio flows.

Noting that the financial crisis which initially engulfed east Asia has now spread to Russia, other economies in transition and Brazil assuming global dimensions, Mr Hegde said this had challenged the very foundations of global economic structure and its prevalent dictums.

World output in 1998 has grown less than two per cent. The growth in developing countries has come down sharply to less than half of that in 1997.

At the summit, India will also be proposing a new strategic sectors initiative aimed at stepping up the scope and level of cooperation in some core technology areas such as telecom and it, biotechnology advanced materials and information technology.

Members of the summit include Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Senegal, and Venezuela.

Offer to host G-15

MONTEGO BAY: India is likely to host a meeting in New Delhi prior to the ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) later this year to enable developing countries to coordinate and harmonise their positions. The offer by India at the Trade and Economic Ministers’ Meeting here preparing for the Group of 15 (G-15) summit was widely welcomed.

Democrats float censure move

WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (AFP) — As the sex-and-lies impeachment trial against President Bill Clinton has wound down, Democrats have released a draft censure proposal that would leave the President open to future criminal and civil actions.

The proposal, put together by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, states President Clinton “gave false or misleading testimony and impeded discovery of evidence in judicial proceedings” related to his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Mr Clinton therefore “remains subject to criminal and civil actions,” reads the proposal published yesterday in The New York Times.

Moreover, because Mr Clinton “deliberately misled and deceived the American people (he) fully deserves censure for engaging in such behaviour,” it concludes.

“The United States does hereby censure William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States, and condemns his conduct in the strongest terms,” Mr Feinstein’s proposal says.

The proposal to censure the President comes as the impeachment trial, highlighted by Lewinsky’s videotaped testimony, was not expected to yield the two-thirds majority needed to convict Mr Clinton and remove him from office.

A Republican “finding of fact” option stating that Mr Clinton lied under oath, but would not declare him guilty of the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice stemming from efforts to hide his affair with Lewinsky, has died out.

Mr Feinstein’s proposal is the latest attempt to patch together a bipartisan conclusion to the year-long scandal.

President Clinton, however, claimed that he was “ministering” ex-white house intern Monica Lewinsky as a woman in trouble in his periodic meetings with her, a top Clinton aide has said.

Even Hillary Clinton believed that her husband was “ministering” the ex-intern, the President’s speech writer and communications specialist Sidney Blumenthal said while deposing before the House of Representatives prosecutors yesterday.

“I told Clinton,” he said “that the first lady had called me earlier in the day, and in the light of the story in the post had told me that the President had helped troubled people in the past and that he had done it many times”.

“He was a compassionate person and he helped people also out of his religious conviction and this was part of his nature,” Mr Blumenthal quoted Ms Hillary Clinton as telling him.

In his testimony, the communications adviser said he told the President: “they (these ministrations) can get you in a lot of mess and you will have to cut yourself off from it and you just have to do it”.

“You really need not get near anybody who is even remotely crazy. You are President,” he told Mr Clinton.

Asked if he believed that President Bill Clinton lied to him about his relationship with Ms Lewinsky, Mr Blumenthal said: “I do.”

Talks under way to defuse Pak media row

ISLAMABAD, Feb 7 (AFP) — The Pakistan Government and the country’s largest newspaper group have opened talks to defuse a bitter row which sparked concerns over press freedom here, reports said today.

The two-week-old dispute led to acute newsprint shortages for the Jang group and what it described as a nationwide police “siege” of its offices.

The simmering row burst into the open early last week when the group alleged it had been forced to sack certain journalists and support government policies.

The authorities hit back that the group had tried to create a stir to cover up more than Rs 2 billion ($ 40 million) it allegedly owed in income and wealth taxes as well as Customs duties on its newsprint imports.

“The dispute has begun to move towards a resolution but let me make it clear that it will be unconditional,” Jang’s owner and Chief Executive Mir Shakilur Rehman said.

He confirmed a “lengthy” meeting took place yesterday with a high-level government team, including Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s younger brother Shahbaz Sharif, Chief Minister of the heartland Punjab province.

“The principle of press freedom remained in the forefront during the talks,” which would continue, Mr Shakilur Rehman, was quoted as saying by The News, one of the Jang group’s papers, in both English and Urdu.

3 die in Kosovo blast

PRISTINA, Feb 7 (AFP) — At least three persons, including a child, have been killed and several seriously injured in an explosion at a vegetable store here in Kosovo’s capital, the police at the scene said. The blast happened at around 2315 (IST) on Saturday, within minutes of French President Jacques Chirac opening the Kosovo peace talks at Rambouillet Castle, outside Paris.

One police officer said the explosion was caused by a “powerful explosive device,” but he refused to allow journalists closer to the site, and traffic was halted on the street on which the store was located.

The officer, who requested anonymity, said members of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which verifies the ceasefire, were at the scene.

Mr Gabriel Keller, deputy head of the Kosovo verification mission, said Danica Marinkovic, a magistrate investigating the blast, had said the store owner was an Albanian loyal to the Belgrade authorities, implying that the explosion could be the work of Albanian separatists.

11 LTTE rebels die in Army attack

COLOMBO, Feb 7 (PTI and AFP) — Eleven LTTE guerrillas were killed and several others injured in an artillery attack by Sri Lankan troops on identified LTTE locations in northern Vanni region yesterday, a defence press release said here today.

Troops bombarded identified LTTE positions with long distance artillery guns killing 11 rebels, it said, adding LTTE wireless radio transmissions later confirmed the deaths.

State crime
WASHINGTON: North Korea uses up to 6,800 hectares (17,000 acres) of land to produce some 44 tonnes of opium each year as part of a global ‘crime spree’ generating more than 100 million dollars a year, according to a US news magazine. U.S. News and World Report, in its issue appearing in February 8, says North Korea’s government-sponsored crime includes drug trafficking, counterfeiting, trading in endangered species, and setting up of industrial-scale plants to turn out opium, heroin, methamphetamines and counterfeit US Dollars. — AFP

Gates donation
WASHINGTON: Microsoft company chairman Bill Gates and his wife have donated $ 3.3 billion to two charitable family foundations, a foundation official has said. Gates, reputedly the world’s richest man, is said to be worth 82 billion dollars. The Learning Foundation was established by Gates to provide computer and Internet access to public libraries. The William H. Gates Foundation supports initiatives in education, world health and population and community efforts in the Seattle area. — PTI

Statue returned
BEIJING: A gilded bronze statue of Buddha, belonging to the ancient Chinese kingdom of Dali, has been returned to Beijing after being abroad for more than half a century. The statue, with a height of 48 cm, has inscriptions of annals inside it and was made some 900 years ago, the curator of the Shanghai municipal museum, which was gifted the statue by a Hong Kong banker recently, Machengyuan said. — PTI

Ershad’s offer
WASHINGTON: Former Bangladeshi President Hussain Mohammad Ershad has said he is ready to mediate between the USA and Iraq to end the gulf crisis. Claiming “deep” friendship with both US leaders and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Mr Ershad told the Washington Times newspaper that he could mediate between the two enemies. — PTI