LIBERIA: Ceasefire brokered, ECOWAS military chiefs to meet LIBERIA: Food, medicine and blood in short supply
KM Special June 28, 2003 Careless Parents Cause the Tragic Death of 3 year old Girl Child MUSCAT - An Arab family here witnessed the tragic death of a three year old girl due to mere negligence of parents. According to informed people, an Omani picked up his kids . from a summer school. When they reached home in Al Hail near Seeb, the father took out the kids, locked the car and went inside the villa at around 2 p.m.
Even though one of the kids, a three year old girl, was sleeping in the backseat, the father did not notice her and took out only the other children. According to his neighbours, when the parents inquired about the girl other kids replied that she is somewhere downstairs! In big families, there are many kids and parents may not be aware of their whereabouts always. However, only at around 5 pm when the father got back to the car to go somewhere, did he notice the presence of his daughter inside the car.
When he looked at the back seat, he was astonished to see his 3 years old girl daughter lying dead.The locked car, with all the windows closed in the summer heat exceeding 45 degrees must have suffocated the girl to death. While the parents should be blamed for not taking care of the girl who slept inside the car, the incident should be an alarm bell to careless parents, especially those with a number of children to look after. A mere negligence has caused the loss of a precious human life. Be careful when you take out your children. The tragic death has shocked the residents of Al Hail area in Seeb, near Muscat.
Iraq oil to sail to U.S.ChevronTexaco gets contract for crude Escape from Microsoft Office Privacy June 28, 2003
Bin Laden Could Be Hiding on Pakistan Border: Karzai Agencies
WARSAW/KABUL, 27June 2003 — Chief terror suspect Osama Bin Laden could be hiding along the porous Afghan-Pakistan border, Afghan leader Hamid Karzai said in Warsaw yesterday. “If Osama is alive he is around this region of ours or somewhere there. On the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Karzai told a press conference in Warsaw.Full Report
Al Qaeeda Supporters Nabbed in Yemen
SANAA, 27 June 2003 — The mountain hideout where at least 60 Al-Qaeda-inspired militants had taken refuge was overrun yesterday by Yemeni troops, who discovered cassette tapes bearing pictures of the group’s leader Osama Bin Laden.The troops captured the lair of the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army near Hatat in the south of the country after launching a military assault which lasted several hours and involved artillery and Katyusha rockets.Full Report
Blair faces new row over war
June 27, 2003
PRIME Minister Tony Blair was last night facing new questions about his decision to go to war in Iraq after his right-hand man admitted including material from a graduate thesis posted on the internet in a dossier on Iraq's weapons capability.
Mr Blair's communications chief Alastair Campbell said the so-called "dodgy dossier" justifying military action had been cobbled together as a briefing note for journalists. Yet the Prime Minister told MPs that the document was an "intelligence report".Mr Blair even placed a copy in the House of Commons Library to give it added authority.
In the devastating revelation Mr Campbell, during a three-hour grilling by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, conceded a mistake had been made in the compilation of the "dodgy dossier", much of which was culled from the PhD thesis found on the internet. Full Report
X-ray to strip-search travellers
June 27, 2003
A new security scanning X-ray system which is being tested will effectively strips passengers irrespective of their sex naked. The controversial anti-terrorist measure could dramatically boost travel safety, but passengers will have to pass through an uncomfortable position of being stripped in airports and customs clearance . Whether privacy-conscious air travellers will be as relaxed as the USA's Transportation Security Administration security laboratory director has yet to be seen, the so-called backscatter system reveals weapons as well as flesh.
The backscatter X-ray produces a black-and-white image that reveals enough to produce a world-class blush. When one lady was demonstrated the system fully clothed, she was dressed in a skirt and blazer. But on the X-ray monitor, she is naked, except for a gun and a bomb that she hid under her outfit.
According to media reports the US government will consider using a new technology at airport checkpoints because the magnetometers in use cannot detect plastic weapons or substances used in explosives. Using this Air travellers are likely to be technologically undressed by security screeners.
The technology is called "backscatter" because it scatters X-rays. Doses of rays deflected off dense materials such as metal or plastic produce a darker image than those deflected off skin. The radiation dosage is about the same as sunshine.
The agency is trying to find a way to modify the machines with an electronic fig leaf, which is a type of programming that fuzzes out sensitive body parts or distorts the body so it is unrecognisable. Another option may mean stationing the screener in a booth. keralamonitor.com Top
Israel: Germs, gas and A-bombs Fingers on all the buttons (english)Rowan Berkeley 12:57am Thu Jun 26 '03 (Modified on 12:02pm Thu Jun 26 '03)
This article first appeared in issue 1/03 of Index on Censorship: Inside the Axis of Evil. I found it in someone's archive of someone else's archive and thought it was a useful succinct and crisp summation of what we must presumably expect if we buck the Bosses.
The world's best-known and most efficient 'secret' manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction is not Iraq, not even North Korea, but Israel. Neil Sammonds looks at a nuclear, biological and chemical warfare programme that even the Israeli Knesset cannot get access to, let alone the United Nations.
In September 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear site, revealed to the Sunday Times that the nuclear military programme based there had produced 'over 200' nuclear warheads.
Days later he was tricked into flying to Rome where he was abducted by Mossad agents and secretly transported to Israel. In November 1986, he was tried in camera and sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment, 14 of which were spent in solitary confinement.
In 1999, in response to a petition from Yediot Ahronot newspaper, the government released about 40 per cent of the trial documents.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimates that Israel has the world's fifth largest stockpile of nuclear warheads (more than Britain, which it believes has 185).
In February 2000, Knesset member Issam Mahoul said Israel had '200 to 300' nuclear weapons; in August of that year, the Federation of American Scientists said that Israel could have produced 'at least 100 nuclear weapons, but probably not significantly more than 200'; the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates 200.
Other sources, including Jane's Intelligence Review, estimate between 400 and 500 thermonuclear and nuclear weapons.
What Dimona is to Israel's nuclear programme, the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) at Nes Ziona is to its chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programme. The high-security facility is absent from aerial survey photographs and maps, on which it has been replaced by orange groves.
Except for token visits to Dimona by a Norwegian team in 1961 and a US team in 1969, there has been no international scrutiny. Even the Knesset is denied access.
However, the 1993 report by the Office of Technology Assessment for the US Congress states that Israel has 'undeclared offensive chemical warfare capabilities' and is 'generally reported as having an undeclared offensive biological warfare programme'.
Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies states that Israel has conducted extensive research into gas warfare and is ready to produce biological weapons.
According to an exhaustive study by Karel Knip, a Dutch journalist, the IIBR's work has included the synthesis of nerve gases such as tabun, sarin and VX.
The October 1992 crash an of El Al cargo plane in Amsterdam that caused at least 47 deaths and caused hundreds of immediate and subsequent mysterious illnesses led to the disclosure in 1998 that flight LY1862 was carrying chemicals including 50 gallons of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) - enough to produce 594 pounds of sarin. The DMMP was supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc of Morrisville, Pennsylvania, and was destined for the IIBR.
Avner Cohen has catalogued reported uses of biological weapons by Jewish forces during the 1948 war in Palestine. The Israeli historian Uri Milstein alleged that 'in many conquered Arab villages, the water supply was poisoned to prevent the inhabitants from coming back.' Milstein states that one of the largest of such covert operations caused the typhoid outbreak in Acre in May 1948.
The Palestinian Arab Higher Committee reported in July 1948 that there was some evidence that Jewish forces were responsible for a cholera outbreak in Egypt in November 1947 and in Syrian villages near the Palestinian-Syrian border in February 1948.
In May 1948, the Egyptian ministry of defence stated that four 'zionists' had been captured while trying to contaminate artesian wells in Gaza with 'a liquid which was discovered to contain germs of dysentery and typhoid'.
In 1954, it was widely reported that defence minister Pinchas Lavon had proposed using BW for special operations. Cohen says: 'Israel has presumably employed biological or toxin weapons for special operations.'
In 1955, Prime Minister Ben Gurion ordered the weaponisation and stockpiling of chemical weapons in case of a war with Egypt. Former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky claims that lethal tests have been performed on Arab prisoners at the IIBR.
There are allegations that Israel has used CBW on numerous occasions:
Chemical defoliants used by the army against Palestinian lands, including Ain el-Beida in 1968, Araqba in 1972 and Mejdel Beni Fadil in 1978;
Armed nuclear missiles in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars;
Chemical weapons in the 1982 war on Lebanon, including hydrogen cyanide, nerve gas and phosphorus shells;
In the 1980s lethal gases against Palestinian civilians and Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli Jewish prisoners.Discussing delivery systems, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists states that Israel's F-16 squadrons based at Nevatim and Ramon are the most likely carriers of nuclear warheads and that a small group of pilots has been trained for nuclear strikes.
According to the Sunday Times, F-16s crews are also 'trained to fit an active chemical or biological weapon within minutes of receiving the command to attack'. Israel's F-4s, F-15s and Jaguars are also nuclear-capable.
Israel's Jericho I (with a range of 660km) and Jericho II (1,500km) missiles are nuclear-capable. The Shavit satellite launch vehicle is convertible into an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 7,800km.
Israel also has three Dolphin-class submarines, the Dolphin, the Leviathan and the Tekuma, which are reportedly modified to carry nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
It is widely believed to possess a tactical nuclear capability, including small nuclear landmines, and strategic nuclear warheads that it can fire from cannons.
The UN Security Council regularly calls on Israel 'urgently to place its nuclear facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.' Israel has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, but is one of only four countries in the world - with Cuba, India and Pakistan - not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty .keralamonitor.com Top
Iraq oil to sail to U.S.ChevronTexaco gets contract for crude
For the first time since the U.S. war in Iraq ended, ChevronTexaco Corp. will load a tanker with crude oil from the nation's Persian Gulf port of Mina al-Bakr on Saturday.
The Iraqi oil will be sent to a refinery on the U.S. West Coast, ChevronTexaco spokesman Andy Norman told Bloomberg News Tuesday. The company bought 2 million barrels of Basrah light crude oil earlier this month.
Iraqi oil was pumped onto a tanker at the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan on Sunday, Iraq's first exports since the start of the U.S.-led war in March.
Exports from Mina al-Bakr will begin Thursday, Thamir Ghadhban, the U.S.- appointed Ministry of Oil chief executive, told reporters.
Earlier this month, ChevronTexaco and five other companies won contracts for 10 million barrels of Iraqi crude, the first round of contracts following the war.
The contracts, disclosed by Iraq's state oil marketing firm, could generate around $300 million at current prices. The proceeds will go to a fund controlled by the United States and its allies and earmarked for Iraq's reconstruction.
ChevronTexaco, headquartered in San Ramon, was the only U.S. company to be awarded Iraqi oil. The other firms winning contracts were Tupras, in Turkey; Total, of France; ENI, in Italy; and Repsol and Cepsa, both in Spain.
Much of the oil being sold has been sitting in storage tanks in Iraq and Turkey since before the war began. Arranging a sale has been problematic because of questions of ownership, diplomacy and security.
Last month, the major roadblocks vanished when the United Nations Security Council voted to lift the sanctions it had imposed on Iraq following the Gulf War in 1991. Iraq's state oil marketing company -- overseen by U.S. administrators -- became the new steward for crude sales.
Previously, the company had to funnel sales through the U.N. oil-for-food program, which was implemented in 1995 to ensure that Iraq used the proceeds to buy food and medicine, not weapons.
Iraq produced about 2.5 million barrels a day before the war, or about 3 percent of the world's oil supply. Iraq's oil industry, however, has been severely wounded by the war and its aftermath. Looting and sabotage of facilities have cut production to about 700,000 barrels of crude per day, by some estimates.keralamonitor.com Top
Escape from Microsoft Office Privacy
Submitted by: Anonymous "SiaNews Exclusive Commentary
June 25, 2003As many may know, Microsoft Office deposits secret, unique identification numbers in every document it creates. These numbers can be used to identify the author of any MS Office document by tracing his copy of the product to his home or office. Now comes news that Microsoft plans even better things for our future. Soon you will not own your own files -- instead, your operating system will own them for you. Louis Suárez-Potts writes that "While the US Department of Justice is busy conceding the last war - the one in which Microsoft 'integrated' Internet Explorer in the operating system - Microsoft is moving its battalions ahead to win the coming war."
Little publicized privacy invasions and freedom restrictions have always been the order of the day for Microsoft customers. What do you expect from a company built on stock fraud? Ethical software?
It has been known for many years, for example, that "Microsoft Internet Explorer has not been clearing your browsing history after you have instructed it to do so, and Microsoft's Outlook Express has not been deleting your e-mail correspondence after you've erased them from your Deleted Items bin." For its own bizarre purposes, Microsoft insists on retaining files that you would rather delete.
It's not as if we don't already have enough to worry about in Windows. The infamous NSA key incident, or the humdrum commercial snooping defeated by tools like SpyBot Search and Destroy and SpyCop. Windows is so full of holes that it takes a platoon of software products just to protect it from, say, Homeland Security MIBs or corporate managers ready to keystroke-log you.
What to do? Well, even if you are not ready to switch from Windows to Linux, you can certainly migrate to the open-source, cost-free OpenOffice suite. No more secret behaviors, no more upgrade fees, and OpenOffice will read and write MS Office formats. Defenders of liberty everywhere should make the switch and stop supporting the Beast that lives in Redmond.- keralamonitor.com Top
LIBERIA: Ceasefire brokered, ECOWAS military chiefs to meet
ACCRA, 27 June (IRIN) - West African mediators negotiated a fresh ceasefire in the Liberian civil war on Friday and hinted that a special African summit would be called to give a fresh impetus to negotiations on a lasting peace settlement.
Shortly after the truce was agreed by representatives of President Charles Taylor and the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement in the Ghanaian capital Accra, fighting subsided in the Liberian capital Monrovia.
General Abdulsalami Abubakar, the official facilitator of the Accra peace talks, told reporters: "Both the Government of Liberia and LURD have agreed to initiate an immediate ceasefire by Friday afternoon and I hope the two parties stick to their guarantee."
A fresh LURD assault on Monrovia this week and Taylor's rejection of rebel calls for him to step down had threatened to blow apart the Liberian peace process, which is aimed at ending 14 years of near constant civil war.
Abubakar, a former Nigerian head of state, said he was adjourning the peace talks for a week so that the original 17 June ceasefire agreement between the government, LURD and a second rebel group, the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) could be resurrected.
Abubakar was appointed to find a negotiated solution to the Liberian conflict, which is threatening to destabilise neighbouring countries, by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
A diplomatic source at the Accra peace talks said the ECOWAS Defense and Security Committee would probably meet next Thursday in Abuja, Nigeria, to "look into creating a military buffer zone" between the government and the rebels. The committee is made up of the chiefs of defence staff of member states.
"It will discuss growing calls for an intervention in Liberia and recommend to the heads of state whether ECOWAS should send such a force," the source said. "A meeting of the heads of state may take place thereafter to endorse the recommendations."
LURD, which has been fighting to oust Taylor since 1999, reaffirmed its commitment to the new ceasefire. The rebel movement said in a statement: "Our commitment to obeying the rules of the new ceasefire is driven mainly by our concern about the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Liberia."
Liberian Defence Minister Daniel Chea was quoted by international news agencies as welcoming the truce, which leaves LURD in control of the western suburbs of Monrovia. He told Reuters that government forces would respect the ceasefire.
An uneasy calm fell over Monrovia on Friday afternoon following sporadic gunfire in the morning, but there were conflicting reports as to who controlled the city's vital deep-water port on Bushrod Island.
Liberian government military sources told IRIN that Taylor's forces had retaken the Freeport on Friday morning. An IRIN correspondent in the tattered city of one million people saw two pickup trucks carrying jubilating soldiers who claimed to have come from the Freeport, driving through the empty streets.
However, LURD also claimed to be in control of the port as the guns fell silent.
LURD political advisor Tarky Teh told reporters in Accra that his movement still controlled the Freeport and would make it available to the international community to deliver relief supplies and deploy a proposed peacekeeping force in Liberia.
He said LURD, which withdrew from Monrovia before last week's ceasefire, would continue to occupy its newly conquered positions in the city.
"We will remain in our current positions in Monrovia and in other parts of Liberia while we observe this ceasefire," Teh said. "However, our forces have been instructed to attack and deal decisively with any threats from the other side," Teh added.
Abubakar said that although talks on a political settlement for Liberia would remain on ice over the coming week, discussions on conflict prevention and resolution would continue. Diplomatic sources said these would cover sensitive issues such as the Liberian government's demand that LURD move back to the positions it held before the 17 June ceasefire agreement.
"Hopefully by next weekend, the ECOWAS-led Joint Verification Team (JVT) will leave for Liberia to ascertain the positions of the various combatants," Abubakar said. "This will pave the way for an international intervention force to move in and serve as a buffer zone,"
It remained unclear, however, who would provide the troops for such a force. Many Western and African governments would like the United States, which has traditionally enjoyed close ties with Liberia, to take the lead. However, Washington has so far shown no sign of being willing to do so.
President George Bush urged Taylor to step down on Thursday, to avoid further bloodshed, but he did not spell out what the United States would do to help resolve the conflict.
Diplomatic sources said Bush's statement had created something of a problem for the mediators at the peace talks since his demand for Taylor to resign contravened the African Union declaration on the removal and appointment of elected African presidents.
The 17 June ceasefire document called for agreement to be reached within 30 days on a transitional government that would exclude Taylor. The rebels have interpreted this to mean that the president should step down by July 18, but Taylor himself has pledged to stay on until he completes his term in January 2004.
"Everybody in a way wants to be helpful in ending the crisis in Liberia," Abubakar told IRIN on Friday. "However, in their attempts, they are being stumbling blocks to the peace process. We now have to take over and do the damage control."
Although LURD, which controls most of northern Liberia, has been more prominent than MODEL in the latest fighting, the rebel movement said it would not demand the leadership of an interim government as a condition for peace.
"The issue of who forms the interim government is to be decided by the Liberian People and not LURD. Even if we take over Liberia completely, we will not draw a government. This conference in Accra consisting of all Liberians has the capacity to do so," LURD co-Chairman, George Dweh told IRIN.
LIBERIA: Food, medicine and blood in short supply
MONROVIA, 27 June (IRIN) - As a fresh ceasefire took hold in the Liberian capital Monrovia on Friday, the mortuary at the city's main hospital overflowed with corpses from the latest four-day battle between government and rebel forces for control of the city.
Hundreds of sick and wounded people milled helplessly round the corridors of the John F Kennedy hospital. Overworked doctors and nurses said they had virtually run out of supplies of medicine and blood to treat the human tide of suffering.
Soldiers arrived constantly with more bodies from the frontline, but overwhelmed hospital staff told an IRIN correspondent who visited the scene that they could not accept any more cadavers unless somewhere could be found to bury the heaps of corpses that already clogged the mortuary.
Meanwhile more displaced people continued flocking to the Samuel Doe sports stadium to the east of the city centre. Thousands of people forced to leave their homes by two rebel attacks on the capital over the past three weeks have been sleeping in the open there, lashed by heavy rains.
By Friday, supplies of food and drinking water at the stadium had run out completely. Several displaced people there told IRIN they had not eaten since Monday. Children cried with hunger as their helpless parents watched, unable to do anything.
"Monrovia is in a state of violent chaos since the sudden collapse of the fragile ceasefire on 24 June," the aid agency Oxfam warned in a statement. "Shops are closed because owners are scared of looters and people are coming into the centre of the city to escape fighting on the outskirts. Food supplies are dwindling."
Oxfam added: "The situation is extremely volatile and unpredictable. [Our staff] have seen a lot of dead bodies. People are roaming the streets looking for food." It urged the fighters to respect international humanitarian law, stop attacks on civilians and forced recruitment and provide free access for aid agencies.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said the few health facilities in Monrovia that were still functioning had been stretched to their limits, prompting MSF to turn two of its compounds in the Mamba Point diplomatic quarter into emergency hospitals with out-patient and in-patient facilities. On Wednesday 150 wounded came to seek treatment. On Thursday a further 50 turned up.
The vast majority of people seeking treatment from MSF were civilians wounded by stray bullets and mortar shells. "One of the saddest things is that we have to turn away people who show up with signs of cholera, as we can not build an isolation ward in our compound," MSF doctor Nathalie Civet said.
"We stabilise the wounded and perform minor surgery; for more complicated treatment we refer people to the John F Kennedy surgical ward," Civet said. "But we had to amputate an arm of a one-and-a-half year old baby. On Wednesday, three people died and we had to bury them on the beach. Yesterday again, three people died."
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, called for the deployment of an international peacekeeping force to fill the current security vacuum in the war-ravaged nation. Earlier the UK representative to the Council, Jeremy Greenstock, had suggested that the US lead an intervention force into Liberia.
"[Lubbers] believes that whether the force is in the form of an expanded UNAMSIL [the UN peacekeeping force in neighbouring Sierra Leone] mandate, under the leadership of a UN Security Council member state, or through some other arrangement, something needs to be done now to stop the killing and end the suffering of Liberia's people," UNHCR said in a statement
On Thursday night, US President George Bush echoed Liberian rebel demands that Liberian President Charles Taylor step down to avoid further bloodshed. Liberia, which was founded by freed American slaves in the early 19th century, has been in a state of near constant civil war since Taylor launched a rebellion against the former military government of Samuel Doe in 1989.
The government issued a statement "welcoming" Bush's expression of concern over Liberia, but avoiding comment on his call for Taylor to quit. "The government welcomes the interest the US government has taken in the Liberian conflict. [but] the government of Liberia calls on the international community to double its efforts to provide humanitarian relief to the displaced in Monrovia," the statement said.
By Friday afternoon, the guns had fallen silent but looting continued on the streets, despite a directive by Defense Minister Daniel Chea that soldiers should maintain discipline.
The government announced it was retrieving all vehicles looted by soldiers and was keeping them at a military base of the elite Anti-Terrorism Unit. Some 40 vehicles, including those of the Red Cross, were recovered on Friday morning.
On Thursday, health minister, Peter Coleman, said in a radio broadcast that at least 200 people had been killed and 350 civilians and combatants wounded in the latest upsurge in fighting in Monrovia.
Coleman appealed for the residents of the capital to come forward and donate blood. He also appealed to the security forces to allow medical staff to go to their place of work without harassment. He urged the international community to urgently donate medical supplies and fuel to Liberia's over-stretched health services, saying the situation was out of hand.
Salty diet raises blood pressure among town dwellers
OUAGADOUGOU, 27 June (IRIN) - A leading cardiologist has largely blamed the growing problem of high blood pressure amongst town dwellers in Burkina Faso on a diet that has too much salt in it.
Jean Paul Kabore, one of only seven heart specialists in Burkina Faso, told a meeting of West African cardiologists in the capital Ouagadougou on Thursday that 15 to 20 percent of the urban population suffered from medical problems related to high blood pressure. In Ouagadougou alone between 150,000 and 250,000 people were affected, he added.
Kabore said too much salt in the diet - much of it incorporated unintentionally through the addition of stock cubes to stews and soups - was the main reason for the rise in medical problems associated with high blood pressure.
The heart specialist said many patients failed to realise that once they had high blood pressure they would have to receive long term medical treatment to control it.
"A lot of people are unaware that they are ill and are only informed of the fact when they visit a doctor for other reasons," Kabore said. "Still, the problem is that they do not accept that they will have to treat themselves for the rest of their lives."
