Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
Sports «
National «
Editorial «
Op-Ed «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplement «

Asian women trail well behind their male counterparts in terms of social-economic advancement although the gap is closing in some countries, a regional survey released Monday said.
   The inaugural MasterIndex of Women’s Advancement measuring the social-economic success of women in 13 regional economies turned in an average score of 67.7 points, MasterCard International said.
   A score below 100 indicated gender inequality in favour of men, with the 100 benchmark representing complete equality, MasterCard said.
   It used four key indicators—labour force, tertiary education, managerial positions and median income—to measure the success of women against men.
   Gender equality was best for tertiary education and labour force participation with scores of 86.3 points and 70.3 points respectively.
   The index for women in managerial positions was 60.5, and 53.6 for income.
   Of the 13 markets surveyed, gender inequality was highest in South Korea with a score of 45.5 followed by Indonesia at 52.5 and Japan at 54.5.
   Women in Thailand fared best with scores of 92.3 followed by Malaysia at 86.2, China at 68.4, Australia at 67.6, Taiwan at 66.4, Hong Kong 65.1, Vietnam 63.7, Singapore 61.3, the Philippines 57.8 and New Zealand at 54.6.
   ‘The Asia-Pacific region compares relatively well in the global context in terms of women’s advancements in areas like labour force participation and higher education,’ MasterCard economic adviser Yuwa Hedrick-Wong said.
   ‘Progress is, of course, uneven across the region, and much more needs to be done in the future.’
   There were some rare areas that women fared better than men. In Malaysia, the index for women in managerial positions was 119.4 and in Thailand the tertiary education score was 131.9.
   Data for the index was gathered from each of the 13 markets’ national statistics bureaus and through surveys.

US policy towards the Middle East has unwittingly made Osama bin Laden nearly the most popular figure in the region, according to a respected Asian scholar whose new book has triggered debate on why Muslims hate America.
   Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s former two-term chief diplomat to the United Nations, warns that the level of anger in the Islamic world will become even stronger if the United States does not act swiftly to enhance its image among Muslims.
   ‘I think the moment to rectify the situation is now,’ he told a forum in Washington last week about his new book, ‘Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust between America and the World.’
   In the thought-provoking book, Mahbubani, now a Singapore university dean, describes positive US contributions to global society and how the superpower abruptly walked away from the world when the Cold War ended.
   He also conveys his own anguish over deepening distrust and resentment of the United States.
   Even in East Asia, whose rise as an economic power would not have been possible without US political, military and financial support, ‘the tone of conversation about America, sadly speaking, has turned negative,’ he said.
   ‘In my conversations, when I travel around the world, I discover there are two sets of conversations—there is one set of conversation when you have Americans in the room and everybody will say the right, nice things and how wonderful America is.
   ‘And then the Americans will leave the room and the real conversation begins. And inevitably, the comment comes up: ‘Who do these people think they are?’
   Mahbubani recounted that when he asked his Muslim friends in private who was the single most revered figure in the Islamic world, ‘the answer almost inevitably is Osama bin Laden.’
   They cited the Palestinian plight as ‘the number one issue’ for resenting the Americans, he said.
   ‘My fear—and this by the way is a very real fear—is that 10 years from now, 20 years from now, if we get things wrong, then the level of anger in the Islamic world may be much heavier, much stronger than it is now,’ warned Mahbubani.
   ‘The purpose of my book is to tell Americans that these are the voices I hear when they speak about you in private.’
   Thomas Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, agreed at the forum that US policy turned controversial after bin laden masterminded the deadly terror attack on the United States on September 11, 2001.
   ‘After September 11, things fundamentally changed,’ said the American, who has written various books on the Middle East and terrorism.
   After the terror attack, America was like ‘a fire-breathing dragon with an arrow in its shoulder swinging its tail wildly around the world,’ he said.
   But he disputed Mahbubani’s theory that when the Cold War ended, America did a U-turn and displayed indifference to the plight of the Muslims.
   ‘Since the mid-90’s, all American foreign policy has been about is saving Muslims—beginning in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and sponsoring Palestinian elections.
   ‘I can make an argument that all we do these days in save Muslims around the world, certainly more than the keeper of the two most (Islamic) holy sites—Saudi Arabia.’
   The United States did not have any strategic interest in Somalia or Bosnia or even Iraq, he said.

Malaysia has given Indonesia a one-month deadline to solve delays and help its workers return to work in the country legally, a report said Monday.
   The home affairs minister, Azmi Khalid, has told Indonesian manpower and transmigration minister, Fahmi Idris, that Malaysia would seek foreign workers elsewhere unless Indonesia resolves the problem, the Star newspaper said.
   ‘We have informed him that if these delays are not resolved within a month, the Malaysian government may be forced to open up its labour market to other countries,’ Azmi was quoted as saying.
   ‘This is because our employers cannot wait that long for Indonesian workers to come back,’ he said.
   ‘If the Indonesian government doesn’t move to resolve the delay, they may find that when their workers finally make it back to Malaysia, there won’t be too many jobs left over for them,’ he said.
   Azmi said he was disappointed that only 500 Indonesians had returned to Malaysia with legal permits since an amnesty pardoning illegals ended on February 28.
   He was commenting on reports that thousands of Indonesians wanting to return to Malaysia as legal workers were stranded at the 11 one-stop centres at Indonesian border points which were set up to facilitate their applications.

Israeli and Palestinian ministers met Monday in the latest in a series of top-level talks since last month’s landmark peace summit but clashes in the West Bank again clouded an informal ceasefire.
   Amid moves to break the ice since contacts were frozen after a suicide attack in Tel Aviv 10 days ago, the Israeli interior minister, Ophir Pines, and the Palestinian interior minister, Nasr Yusef, began talks in Jerusalem.
   It was the first meeting between the two ministers following Yusef’s appointment to the cabinet last month as the sole man in charge of the sprawling Palestinian security apparatus.
   On Sunday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat and top Ariel Sharon aide Dov Weisglass re-activated Israeli-Palestinian committees tasked with studying promises made at last month’s Middle East summit in Egypt.
   Charged with an expected transfer of security control within the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, prisoner releases and Palestinians wanted by Israel, the committees are to meet within ‘days’, a Palestinian official said.
   The Palestinian civil affairs minister, Mohammed Dahlan, and Israeli coordinator for the West Bank, major general Yosef Mishlav, were also set to meet Monday.
   Such contacts will pave the way for a crucial meeting between the Palestinian leader, Mahmud Abbas, and the Israeli defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, on Tuesday—the highest-level contacts between the two sides since the summit in Sharm el-Sheikh.
   The Abbas-Mofaz talks would ‘relaunch the peace process, press the Palestinian Authority to battle against terrorism, and discuss a transfer of authority in the towns’ of the West Bank,’ an Israeli security source said.
   Israel had been due to hand over security control of Bethlehem, Jericho, Ramallah, Qalqilya and Tulkarem as part of confidence-building measures, but the moves were frozen in the wake of the Tel Aviv bombing.
   Sharon and Abbas declared a mutual end to hostilities early last month in Egypt after more than four years of violence.
   Both leaders are to meet the US president, George W Bush, who has declared peace in the Middle East a new priority in his second term in office—at the White House—in coming weeks.
   A Palestinian official has said Abbas will meet Bush at the end of the month—the first time a president of the Palestinian Authority has been invited to Washington since Bush took office in 2001.
   Sharon’s office has said the Israeli premier would travel there in April.

Asian rights groups have urged the International Criminal Court in The Hague to help put a stop to abuses they allege have occurred on a wide scale since king Gyanendra seized power last month.
   The 14 rights and academic groups ‘jointly alerted the ICC... to the grave human rights violations in Nepal that could amount to crimes against humanity,’
   the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission said in a statement received here Monday.
   The groups, which met in Bangkok at the weekend, urged ICC prosecutors to take ‘all feasible steps to stop the ongoing crimes that fall within the mandate of the ICC as well as to take preventive measures, by way of diplomatic channels and other means, to avoid further crimes against humanity.’
   ‘The ICC, whose purpose is to prevent such serious offences, should do whatever it can to help stop and avert any mass rights violations,’ the groups said.
   The AHRC, which was one of the signatories, said it separately sent a letter to ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo ‘to urge him to initiate appropriate action over the situation of Nepal.’
   ‘Reports of attacks, arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, rape and forced disappearances are alarming. Civil liberties are being suppressed,’ the AHRC said.
   Political leaders, lawyers, journalists and human rights defenders ‘face daily threats and dangers posed by the authoritarian and military rule of the country,’ it said.
   Gyanendra on February 1 dismissed the government, imposed emergency rule and suspended civil liberties, saying he was forced to act to tackle
   a nine-year Maoist revolt that has claimed more than 11,000 lives.
   The power grab has drawn widespread international condemnation. India and Britain suspended military aid and Washington warned it will take similar action unless the king restores basic rights.
   ‘The February 1 coup in Nepal has brought the country under the control of the military, which has undermined the rule of
   law and cast doubt upon
   Nepal’s ability to fulfil its international obligations,’ the AHRC said.
   ‘If the ongoing violations are to continue on a mass scale, which is very likely, they may amount to crimes against humanity,’ it added.
   The groups demanded both the Nepal government and the Maoist insurgents it is fighting put ‘an immediate end to arbitrary detention, torture and extrajudicial killings.’
   Besides the AHRC, the groups at the Bangkok meeting included the Cambodia Human Rights and Development Association, the East Timor People’s Action and the Women’s Research and Action Group in India.

A Pakistani gang-rape victim led an International Women’s Day rally Monday less than a week after a court controversially acquitted her alleged attackers in a high-profile case.
   Several hundred women carrying banners and placards walked behind Mukhtiar Mai through the central city of Multan on the eve of the UN awareness day, witnesses said.
   ‘I shall continue my struggle for the rights of women till the last breath of my life and I will not bow before tyranny, exploitation, tradition or customs,’ she said.
   Mai says she has received death threats since promising to appeal a court’s decision to free five men earlier sentenced to death for the attack. The 30-year-old was raped for more than an hour in the village of Meerwala in Punjab province in June 2002, as punishment for her brother’s alleged affair with a woman of a rival clan.

A powerful separatist group in India’s northeastern state of Nagaland Monday renewed its demand for a merger of all Naga tribal areas in the region, two days ahead of fresh peace talks with New Delhi.
   ‘We are going to press our demand for unification of all Naga-inhabited areas in the northeast,’ National Socialist Council of Nagaland leader Kraibo Chawang said from Nagaland’s commercial hub of Dimapur.
   ‘There can be no compromise on our demand for a merger.’
   Guerrilla leaders of the NSCN led by Thuingaleng Muivah are to hold another round of talks with government ministers and New Delhi’s chief negotiator K Padmanabhaiah in the Indian capital on Wednesday to end one of India’s longest-running insurgencies. A previous round of talks between the two sides ended inconclusively last month.

Kashmiris have begun queuing for travel permits and the first bus ride in almost six decades to the Pakistani side of the divided region, as Indian officials said the road was almost complete amid demining efforts on the final stretch of road.
   The bus service, scheduled to start April 7, is the first tangible fruit of 14 months of dialogue between the nuclear-armed neighbours who have fought three wars, two over Kashmir which each hold in part but claim in full.
   On Friday officials distributed about 150 permits to be lodged by applicants on Monday.
   India and Pakistan agreed last month that Kashmiri residents would not need passports to cross the divided state by bus, instead permits which had been cleared by the police and civil administration, would be issued.
   ‘I am the happiest man today,’ said 65-year-old Mohammed Abdullah after lodging his application at the office of the State Road Transport Corporation in the Indian Kashmir summer capital Srinagar.
   Abdullah said he was eager to cross and meet his brother who lives in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
   Of the 150 applicants, 60 will be short-listed for the first two trips—the first on April 7 and the second a fortnight later—federal passport officer John Silshi said.

The Iraq outgoing prime minister, Iyad Allawi, has refused an offer to join a coalition government led by the election-winning Shia bloc, senior leaders in the alliance said on Monday.
   ‘He showed no interest in joining the government and turned down our offer,’ said Hussein Shahristani of the United Iraqi Alliance.
   Another figure in the UIA, which swept 140 of the 275 national assembly seats in January’s election, said Allawi was offered a role in proportion to the 40 seats garnered by his list.
   ‘We did not offer him a specific position, but more the principle of participation,’ said Jawad al-Maliky of the Dawa party, a leading member of the UIA, which is backed by the Shia spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
   ‘He told us ‘I will not take part but I will help you in crossing to the opposite river bank’,’ added Maliky referring to the country’s upcoming transitional phase in which the newly-elected parliament would draft a constitution that would be put to a referendum in October.
   Neither Allawi nor officials from his Iraqi List and National Accord party were immediately available for comment.
   Iraq’s national assembly will meet on March 16 as the UIA said it was putting the final touches on a deal to form a coalition government with the Kurdish bloc, which came in second in with 77 seats.
   Allawi announced a few days ago that he was still in the running to keep his job as he held negotiations with various political groupings.
   He is a secular Shia whose views on the role of Islam in politics and the need to reach out to former regime elements who committed no crimes clash with the hardline stance of many in the UIA.

Italy paid homage Monday to an intelligence officer killed in Iraq by US forces, giving him a full state funeral that was tinged with anger over how he was gunned down while protecting a freed Italian hostage.
   Among the mourners was the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who sent Nicola Calipari on his fatal mission to Baghdad and is struggling to reconcile his fervent pro-US policies with demands for the truth from Washington over the shooting.
   The Italian government has made clear that it will continue to support President Bush despite the killing and will not withdraw its troops from Iraq. But at the same time it is demanding those responsible for the shooting be punished.
   Nonetheless, there was anger across Italy, with politicians of all colours rejecting the official US explanation.
   Calipari worked out of Berlusconi’s office and was a highly experienced hostage negotiator who had secured the release of two Italian aid workers taken captive in Iraq last year.
   Bush has promised Berlusconi, one of his closest allies in Europe, a full investigation into Calipari’s death. The Italian prime minister is hoping for answers before he addresses parliament Wednesday over the shooting.
   In previous ‘friendly-fire’ deaths, the Pentagon has not publicly admitted to any culpability on the part of US forces.
   Hundreds of Italians lined the streets as Calipari’s body was driven to the imposing basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels and Martyrs for the funeral, which was shown live on television.
   Uniformed soldiers provided a guard of honour and crowds broke into applause as the coffin, draped in the Italian flag, was carried aloft into the packed church.
   But his killing has cast a spotlight on widespread speculation that Italy is paying off hostage-takers.
   The United States and Britain, which have the biggest military contingents in Iraq, condemn such payments, arguing that they fuel the hostage trade.

The two papers added that private security firms could be employed to monitor terror suspects in an attempt to save money, according to the preparations being made to implement the policy by the Home Office.
   Stevens, who retired last month, said in Sunday newspaper article that nearly 200 trained al-Qaeda terrorists are on the loose in Britain.
   Writing in the News of the World newspaper, Sir John Stevens who as Britain’s most senior police office had unique access to top-secret intelligence—said there were ‘at least 100 Osama bin Laden-trained terrorists’ in the country.
   ‘The number is probably nearer 200,’ Stevens added. ‘The cunning of al-Qaeda means we can’t be exact, but they would all commit devastating terror attacks against us if they could, even those born and brought up here.’

George Zamka has been an astronaut for almost seven years and he still hasn’t made it to space. But he’s far from alone. Grounded for two years, a third of the nation’s nearly 150 astronauts have never flown in space, and some wonder when they will.
   Part of being at NASA is very few people get to fly in space,’ Zamka said. ‘Everyone else gets their enjoyment by contributing to the space mission.’
   The last class of astronauts has already been warned that it’s unclear whether any of them will fly during the shuttle era — which ends in five years. All face an uncertain future and development of the next-generation space vehicle could take until 2015.
   ‘They knew very well that they arrived at the sunset of the shuttle and the dawn of the new vehicle and they may be exposed to the gap in between the two,’ Zamka said of the newest class of astronauts. ‘For the last classes, there has been an effort made to make sure they are informed as to what the wait may be like. And they come anyway.’
   Forty-six of the nation’s 142 astronauts have not flown in space; some of them are rookies, others have waited for years.
   Zamka didn’t think his wait would be so long. He expects to be assigned to a flight in another two years and hopes to fly within the next four.
   By that time, he’ll have waited a decade.
   ‘The nature of the business is it is a risky business, and certainly, part of that risk is delays and unforeseen events,’ Zamka said. ‘A lot of these things are just out of my control.’
   Astronaut Mark Polansky, who has flown one space mission and is set to command a mission, next year, said some of his colleagues have expressed concern about where they are in line and when the opportunity to fly will come their way.
   Zamka tries not to focus on it and says it only crosses his mind when he’s idle.
   ‘We are not stewing over here because we are not flying,’ he said. ‘We are all busy trying to get back to flying. We all turn ourselves to the task at hand and that is how we
   deal with it.’
   They get inspiration from former astronauts, such as Story Musgrave, who waited 16 years to fly. He was selected as an astronaut in 1967 and didn’t make it to space until 1983.
   ‘I never had the attitude: ‘I finally made it,’’ Musgrave said from his Florida home. ‘That wasn’t the way I was thinking.’

The Bolivian president, Carlos Mesa, said on Sunday he was resigning after 17 months in office as new protests spread through South America’s poorest nation and threatened the important oil and gas sector.
   Mesa, a political independent, announced his decision on radio and television on Sunday night and said he would tender his resignation to Congress on Monday.
   ‘I have reached a limit in my work,’ Mesa told the Andean nation of 8 million, adding that his government had faced 820 protests since taking office in October 2003.
   That protest is organised by coca farmer Evo Morales’ Movement to Socialism or MAS, which is unpopular in Washington because of its opposition to the US-led war on drugs.

Sharing information between intelligence and law enforcement agencies–changes recommended after the September 11, 2001 attacks–could backfire and make the United States more vulnerable to al-Qaeda and other enemies, former intelligence officials say.
   As the Senate prepares for confirmation of a new director of national intelligence, former officials said the broad US intelligence and law enforcement establishment has likely been penetrated by foreign intelligence services, both through human agents and high-tech information-gathering devices.
   ‘It’s an absolute certainty that there are spies now in the national intelligence establishment,’ the former CIA agent, Paul Redmond said.
   There could be operatives tied to foreign nations or followers of al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden in Islam’s fundamentalist Wahhabi movement among an estimated 900,000 people with US security clearance, and this would be particularly dangerous in an era of reform-minded information-sharing, officials said.
   ‘I really have been disturbed at the broad use of the term ‘information sharing’,’ said former CIA Director James Woolsey.
   ‘It’s good not to be too enthusiastic about how well it could go if everybody in large bureaucracies knew everything. One of them’s going to be a Wahhabi or a Chinese,’ he said.

Pakistan to release 700 Indian
prisoners soon
Pakistan will soon free 700 Indian fishermen and civilian prisoners after the president, Pervez Musharraf, ordered their release on humanitarian grounds, the foreign office said Monday. The move is one of a series of peace gestures between the nuclear-armed rivals, who often arrest fishermen for straying into each other’s territorial waters or villagers who inadvertently cross land borders. Islamabad was preparing to free the men after New Delhi confirmed the national status of 630 fishermen and of about 70 civilian prisoners, foreign office spokesman Jalil Abbas Jilani told a weekly press briefing.
— AFP

Vietnamese nurse tests positive to bird flu
A 26-year-old Vietnamese nurse who cared for a patient with bird flu in northern Vietnam has contracted the deadly virus, doctors said Monday. It was still unclear whether the man contracted the virus from the patient or sick poultry, a doctor from Hanoi’s Institute of Tropical Diseases said, adding further investigations would be carried out. ‘He is the nurse who took care of a patient confirmed positive to H5N1,’ she said. Local doctors on Monday however downplayed the possibility of human-to-human transmission. ‘The commune where the patient was staying has been heavily hit by bird flu and the nurse visited it very often,’ Phan Van Diu, director of Thai Binh Preventive Medical Centre said.
— AFP

Floods kill three in western Afghanistan
Heavy rains triggered floods in remote western Afghanistan that killed at least three people and destroyed some 300 houses, an official said Monday. The worst affected area was impoverished Nimroz province, which lies at the confluence of the war-shattered country’s three major rivers, the provincial governor, Ghulam Dastageer Azad, said. Hundreds of people have already died from disease and accidents during Afghanistan’s worst winter in a decade and local and US officials have warned that melting snow could now cause disastrous floods. ‘At least three people have died due to collapse of houses in Zaranj, the provincial capital, and more than 50 houses have been destroyed due to heavy rain showers,’ Azad
said.
— AFP

Five killed in south Thailand shootout
Five people, including two police, have been killed in a shootout with gunmen who disguised themselves as fully-veiled Muslim women in Thailand’s violence-wracked south, senior police said Monday. Five attackers walked up to a police checkpoint at a railway crossing and opened fire Sunday afternoon in Narathiwat province’s Ruso district, the police colonel, Watcharin Amarapitak, said. The gun battle lasted 10 minutes, leaving two policemen and one attacker dead at the scene, while another attacker died in hospital, Watcharin said. Another of the attackers was killed in the ensuing chase, and police were still hunting for the two other gunmen, he said.
— AFP