3,46,000 jobs in USA
WASHINGTON, May 3 — The USA has vacancies for a large number of hi-tech information technology posts and more positions would be created in the near future, US IT industry sources said.

It’s now ‘loner’ terrorism
LONDON, May 3 — “Old style” terrorist groups with conventional weapons and ideals are slowly giving way to individuals with more personal motives, keen to use the latest electronic and biological devices to achieve their aims, a London-based think-tank said today.

Indian sentenced to death
DUBAI, May 3 — A Dubai court has sentenced an Indian to death for premeditated murder of a colleague and concealment of his body but acquitted his accomplice in the crime, media reports here said today.

Algerian rebels kill nine
ALGIERS, May 3 — Muslim rebels cut the throats of nine civilians in Algeria last night, the first such mass killing since the election of the country’s new President a month ago.

Five killed in Nepal polling

KATHMANDU, May 3 (UNI) — At least five persons were killed and balloting was suspended at 28 polling centres as some 60-odd per cent of a 5.6 million electorate exercised their franchise to select 90 representatives to parliament in the first phase of general elections in the Hindu Himalayan kingdom today.

According to an Election Commission spokesman here, polling was suspended at 28 polling centres in 13 parliamentary constituencies of six districts following election-related violence in the first of the two-phase general elections. Polling was held in 35 of the 75 Nepali districts. Another 39 shall have voting on May 17 next when 111 representatives of the 205-seat Pratinidhi Sabha, the lower house of the Nepali bicameral parliament are slated to be selected.

While one seat has already been clinched unopposed by the Nepali Congress, elections in another three have been countermanded following the death of a candidate in each. Polling in these, too, shall be over by June 8 next, according to a revised programme announced by the Election Commission.

Meanwhile, Election Commission Secretary Purushottam Dhakal said polling today in 77 parliamentary constituencies of 29 districts was conducted "in a peaceful atmosphere" and "save for minor incidents". It was similar on other seats too. Quoting preliminary reports received here till late this evening, he said between 55 and 60 per cent of the voters took part, among other areas in the Kathmandu valley and the areas identified as affected by Maoist-violence.

According to the EC official, the presence of reinforced security personnel resulted in "an encouraging turnout of voters" in the areas affected by Maoists who are conducting a low-intensity but sustained armed uprising since 1996 to replace the constitutional monarchy with a Communist republic and who had called for a poll boycott.

However, the south-central district of Rautahat - from where the general secretary of the main Left entity here Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxists-Leninists), Mr Madhav Kumar Nepal, is contesting simultaneously on two seats — witnessed violent clashes between supporters of the CPN (UML) and Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala’s Nepali Congress leaving at least five persons killed and seven injured.

Balloting was suspended at 14 polling centres in the district — half of the total number of poll-suspensions ordered today.

Meanwhile, in the Kathmandu valley — comprising the three districts of Kathmandu, Lalitput and Bhaktapur, only some 55-odd per cent electors ventured to the polling centres displaying an apparent voter-apathy in the urban areas.

UN appeals to govts to protect media

Bogota (Colombia), may 3 (AP) — A Turkish reporter goes to cover a funeral and is flogged to death by the police, an Algerian journalist is shot three times in the head in his car, a Russian news director is fatally beaten up at St. Petersburg and his briefcase emptied of sensitive documents.

They are just a few of the brutal crimes against journalists to be remembered on the World Press Freedom Day being organised at the two-day UN-sponsored conference highlighting the dangers to journalists worldwide.

The event in Bogota follows a year in which at least 20 journalists were killed around the world. Other more subtle forms of censorship emerged and many assassinations remained unsolved, conference organisers said.

Each time a journalist is killed or attacked, society at large suffers a grievous wound, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said. and appealed to governments to protect the media and to ensure that crimes against journalists do not go unpunished.

The conference has been organised by UNESCO, UN’s educational and cultural arm, and the local Guillermo Cano Foundation named after the former publisher of Colombia’s El Espectador newspaper who was gunned down in 1986 by drug traffickers.

New York: Mr Slobodan Milosevic, Mr Jiang Zemin and Fidel Castro topped the list of enemies of the Press — released by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Presidents of Yugoslavia, China and Cuba were cited along with seven others for regimes that knowingly acted to suppress information through countless violations against journalists, including censorship, imprisonment, physical attack and even murder, said Ann K. Cooper, Executive Director of the advocacy group.

The list was released yesterday for the World Press Freedom Day, which is today.

Mr Milosevic was cited for suppressing the Press through intimidation, assault, crippling fines, and license denials.

UN team reaches Afghanistan

ISLAMABAD, May 3 (IANS) — An 11-member team of the UN international staff reached Afghanistan’s eastern city of Jalalabad yesterday to monitor relief activities following the UN decision to slowly resume the sending workers to the war-torn country.

The team will stay in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangrahar province, till May 5 and hold meetings with the local UN staff and NGOs about relief operations, UN spokesperson Stephanie Bunker said.

All UN international workers had been pulled out of Afghanistan in August, last year, following the killing of three UN staffers — two local workers and the third an Italian military official.

An eight-member UN international team returned from the Taliban’s stronghold of Kandahar, last week, after it reviewed relief activities in the southern Afghan town. Bunker hinted that the UN also intends to send international staff to the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif shortly.

In October, last year, the UN and the Taliban signed an agreement for the return of the UN international staff. The agreement bound the Taliban to provide protection to the staff as well as to the UN premises and investigate the killing of the three UN staffers.

In March, the UN announced plans to gradually send humanitarian workers back to Afghanistan after reaching an agreement with the Taliban to ensure their safety and security.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan said last week that he would consider the withdrawal of the UN staff from Afghanistan for the second time if the Taliban leadership does not ensure their security.

He issued the warning in a report on Afghanistan to the Security Council and the General Assembly.

Unless there is clear evidence that all commitments made by the Taliban regarding security have been carried out, the UN would be compelled to review its decision about the return of international staff of Afghanistan, a spokesman warned.

Colombia peace talks

BOGOTA (Colombia), May 3 (AP) — President Andres Pastrana and the leader of Latin America’s most powerful guerrilla insurgency have announced they will begin substantive peace negotiations this week.

The peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, will begin on Thursday, according to a joint statement read to reporters yesterday by Foreign Minister Guillermo Fernandez de Soto.

Without explicitly saying so, the President was in effect announcing that he would extend a controversial withdrawal of all government forces from a massive southern region where Mr Pastrana met yesterday with FARC’s legendary leader, Mr Manuel Marulanda.

The troop withdrawal was set to expire later this week, and Mr Pastrana had warned he would only extend the measure if he felt that progress was being made in preliminary discussions to define an agenda for the talks.

In the statement issued yesterday, both sides said they had reviewed efforts thus far and found concrete and significant advances.

The two sides also announced they would form an international commission to help verify agreements and appealed to Colombian society and the international community to have patience during a potentially lengthy peace process.

“Obtaining peace will require the necessary time to lay the basis for a true and lasting peace,” the statement said.

Negotiations between the government and the 15,000-member rebel group were formally initiated in January in a Switzerland-sized region in southern Colombia that has been cleared of all government troops as a concession to FARC.

Last week, government and rebel negotiators meeting near San Vicente Del Caguan, the largest of five towns in the demilitarised zone, announced they were near agreement on a far-reaching agenda for talks to end Colombia’s 35-year conflict.

A prolonging of the troop withdrawal goes against the expressed desire of several key Republicans in the US Congress, who say it has hampered drug crop eradication efforts and given FARC the opportunity to increase its profits from the local cocaine trade.

FARC commanders deny “trafficking” in cocaine, but acknowledge taxing production and cultivation.

Senior US diplomats have said Mr Pastrana was in danger of losing credibility if he continued the pullout without getting the rebels to agree to formal peace talks.

Yesterday’s talks were the second time Mr Pastrana has surprised the nation since his election by meeting with the reclusive rebel chief.

Television footage released by the Presidency showed the two men chatting and strolling side by side along a dirt road. Mr Pastrana wore dark slacks and a white polo shirt, Mr Marulanda wore a green camouflage uniform, farmers’ black rubber boots and a red towel over his shoulder.

Everest pioneer's body found

BOSTON, May 3 (AP) — Members of an expedition seeking to determine whether Englishmen George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were the first to scale the Mount Everest say they have located the body of Mallory near the summit.

"They found a name tag sown into his clothing,’’ Mr Peter Potterfield, Editor of Mountainzone.Com, a Seattle-based Internet company relaying dispatches from the climbers, said yesterday.

Eight climbers have been looking for the bodies of the Englishmen who disappeared in 1924 and a camera that could contain pictures proving they reached the summit 29 years before Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

They found the body on Saturday but haven’t yet found the camera or evidence to prove they had reached the summit, Mr Potterfield said.

The expedition is being documented by the locally produced television show Nova, and is sponsored by the Public Broadcasting Service, an association of government subsidised television stations, and Mr Potterfield’s company.

Expedition leader Eric Simonson and fellow climber Dave Hahn, who was the first to come across Mallory’s body, described their excitement over the Internet.

"And so when we realised that it was George Mallory, we were really blown away by that,’’ Hahn said. "We didn’t want to disturb him, he’d been lying there for 75 years. But at the same time we thought what better tribute to the man than to try and find out if he had summitted Mt Everest in 1924.’’ he added.

The body was found about 800 feet (245 metres) from the windblown 29.028-foot (8.848-metre) summit not far from that of a Chinese climber, whose accounts were used by the Nova crew to try to locate Mallory and Irvine.

Jochen Hemmleb, a 28-year-old German climber and Mallory historian, chose a location for the team to search based largely on a report from the climber, Wang Hongbao, of a body on the north ridge route Mallory and Irvine would have taken.

Hongbao described the body as "English dead’’ and indicated its vintage clothing broke to pieces when he touched it.

The body was found on a snow terrace, just below the spot where an ice axe believed to be Irvine’s was found in 1933. The axe had three notches on the handle, which was how Irvine marked his equipment. Two days after Hongbao told his story in 1975, he died in an avalanche on Everest’s north face.

Nova is also posting online updates throughout the expedition.

The climb, which began on March 29, is being made in six stages. The mountaineers establish camps at ever higher altitudes and then descend to base camp as they become acclimated to the thin air.

High winds combined with low precipitation have scoured the mountain clean, helping the expedition.

3,46,000 jobs in USA

WASHINGTON, May 3 (PTI) — The USA has vacancies for a large number of hi-tech information technology (IT) posts and more positions would be created in the near future, US IT industry sources said.

There are about 346,000 unfilled information technology jobs in USA, now and over 130,000 new hi-tech jobs would be created yearly through 2008, Mr Duncan Anderson, the President of the Global Knowledge Inc., an independent IT training company, said here yesterday.

The IT training associations’, 380 members have planned to help train five million hi-tech workers in various fields in 1999, Whitt Flora of Columbus Dispatch and Scripps-Howard newspapers said.

The computing technology industry association said in 1996, the average wage in the field was nearly $ 50,000 a year — 73 per cent more than the private sector’s average, Flora added.

To fill hi-tech jobs with Americans, Senator Kent Conrad and Congressman James Moran have introduced a Bill to provide tax credits up to $ 6,000 per worker for training or retraining employees in information technology.

It’s now ‘loner’ terrorism

LONDON, May 3 (AFP) — “Old style” terrorist groups with conventional weapons and ideals are slowly giving way to individuals with more personal motives, keen to use the latest electronic and biological devices to achieve their aims, a London-based think-tank said today.

While it will still be some time before they supplant the traditional groups, the “new style” terrorists should not be taken lightly, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said in its annual report.

Last year, however, politically motivated terrorists were attempting to assassinate the Presidents of Georgia and Uzbekistan and the Pakistani Prime Minister.

Mass killings were perpetrated in Algeria, Israel and Sri Lanka as well as the bomb attacks on the US Embassies in Kenya and in Dar es Salaam, which were blamed on the Islamic radical Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden.

Indian sentenced to death

DUBAI, May 3 (PTI) — A Dubai court has sentenced an Indian to death for premeditated murder of a colleague and concealment of his body but acquitted his accomplice in the crime, media reports here said today.

Both accused and the victim are Indians.

N.K. Bodoram, 31, was convicted yesterday of stabbing and strangling his victim, Mool Chand, to death behind a cement factory in Al Quoz industrial area here January last year, the Khaleej Times reported.

His accomplice, Seetaram Jeet Banjtmal, 33, who was charged with pinning down the victim while he was killed, was found not guilty.

Algerian rebels kill nine

ALGIERS, May 3 (Reuters) — Muslim rebels cut the throats of nine civilians in Algeria last night, the first such mass killing since the election of the country’s new President a month ago.

Government security forces, in a statement carried by the official Algerian news agency, APS, said yesterday that the nine were all members of families of shepherds.

They all lived in Kasni hamlet in Tiaret province, 220 km southwest of Algiers. The statement did not say to which of Algeria’s several rebel groups the killers belonged.

The attack was the first reported killing of civilians since the April 15 election of the army-backed Abdelaziz Bouteflika as Algeria’s new President.

Queen’s pay
LONDON: Queen Elizabeth II has asked for an annual pay rise of £ 3 million a year starting from 2001, The Sunday Times newspaper reported. The increase would raise the monarch’s benefits from the Civil List by 12 per cent. She currently receives £ 8.9 million a year from state coffers. The figure was set for 10 years in 1991 and has not been pegged to inflation. — DPA

Hand transplant
LONDON: Six months after medics performed the first hand transplant from a donor on New Zealander Clint Hallam, the operation is proving successful, doctors reported in the British medical journal, The Lancet. One hundred days after the operation, Hallam already had feeling in his wrist, and after six months he can now sense pressure in the palm of his hand. Hallam received his new hand in a 13-hour operation by an international team of experts in Lyon, France September last. — DPA

Oliver Reed dead
LONDON: Oliver Reed, the feisty hard-drinking British actor who was as well known for his antics off-screen as he was for his performances on-screen, died on Monday in Malta. He was 61. Reed, in Malta filming for a new movie “The Gladiator,” died on the way to a hospital about 15 minutes after being taken ill in a bar in Valetta, the Malta police said. A police spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there would be an autopsy on Tuesday. — AP

Christians detained
HONG KONG: The Chinese police broke up an underground church service in central Henan province and detained 25 Christians, a Hong Kong-based human rights group said on Monday. The police confiscated all Bibles in the crackdown in Sui County on April 25, and at least 15 Protestants were still being held, the Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said in a statement. Two dissidents in the north-eastern province of Liaoning were also detained over the weekend, the human rights group said. — Reuters