China attacks Nobel prize for Chinese writer

BEIJING, Oct 13: China dismissed as mere politics today the award of the Nobel literature prize to blacklisted Chinese novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian.

The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that giving the 2000 prize to Gao "shows again the Nobel literature prize has been used for ulterior political motives, and it is not worth commenting on".

Gao, who lives in france and has French citizenship, became the first Chinese to win the Nobel prize for literature in awards announced yesterday.

The Foreign Ministry statement, the first official reaction from China, suggested the Nobel committee had ignored far worthier Chinese writers to make a political point.

"As we all know, China has a long history and brilliant culture," it said. "No matter in history or in modern China there are many world-famous outstanding works of literature and literary giants."

Gao, 60, whose work has been banned from Chinese theatres and official publications since 1986, left China the following year and settled in France as a political refugee.

"It is a great happiness, a great luck. I have not had time to realise what this will mean for my life," Gao told Reuters television at his home in a Paris working-class district.

"I am an artist. I live among my paintings. Writing is a luxury for me," Gao said in the fluent French of his adopted country.

Mai Ping Chen, a friend of Gao, told Reuters in Stockholm: "It will be very good support for the exiled Chinese writers. He cannot go back to China. His name is on the blacklist."

The academy refused to comment on the politics of awarding the world’s most prestigious literary prize to a writer who is persona non grata in his homeland.

"We have no geographical or political concerns. It is only the quality of the writing that counts," Horace Engdahl, the academy’s permanent secretary, told a news conference.

"He is a great writer of novel and drama and a renewer of both genres in the Chinese context but also a writer that has a universal knowledge to offer readers all over the world," Engdahl said.

Gao won the prize, worth about 900,000 dollars, for work "of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama", the academy said in its citation. (REUTERS)

‘Cosmonauts happier than astronauts’

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 13: Russian cosmonauts who served aboard the Mir space station were generally happier and more satisfied than their American counterparts, according to the first-ever mental health study of crews and controllers in manned space missions.

The study, conducted by University of California-San Francisco researchers, concluded that lopsided crew composition of two Russians and one American on each mission left US astronauts feeling both frustrated and lonely.

"In multicultural crews, especially small crews, one has to pay a lot of attention to the culture and language background of the people involved," Nick Kanas, a UCSF Professor of psychiatry, said yesterday. "A single person who is different from the other two can feel isolated."

Kanas’ study, which was conducted under contract to NASA and in conjunction with Russia’s institute for biomedical problems, surveyed 13 crew members and 58 mission control personnel during NASA missions to Russia’s Mir space station between 1995 and 1998.

It found unequivocally that the American participants were less satisfied with their group interaction and work environment than were the Russians, reporting less support and direction from superiors, more work pressure, less personal opportunity and less physical comfort.

Kanas said a major reason for the difference was likely the fact that on each mission, a solitary US astronaut was teamed with two Russian crewmates.

"This creates a potential imbalance," Kanas said. "The commander was always a Russian the language used was always Russian and the operational control of the Mir space station was in Russian hands."

Kanas, who is also associate chief of mental health services at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Centre, said that the results of the study should prove useful to NASA as it plans future, lengthy missions - from the international space station to potential missions to Mars.

"Any problems that exist are highlighted when you are confined and further highlighted when you are confined for months," Kanas said in an interview.

"One of the things we’re recommending in the future is that crews be alerted to this before they fly ... That there are mechanisms for crew members to look at how they are relating in space."

Three-person crews are likely to remain standard for some time, chiefly because the planned space station’s soyuz escape pod can hold only three people. Kanas’ report stressed that care should be taken on future missions to avoid setting up an automatic "odd-man out" situation, which could exacerbate tension among the crew.

"Three person crews are tough because the number three, even when everybody is demographically similar, is a very unstable number," Kanas said. "And it always gets more difficult when you go into it with an automatic minority, either by language or culture or sex."

Until crews can be expanded, Kanas suggested that officials set up a system whereby the leadership role can be rotated among the three crew members - preventing the formation of onboard power blocs.

Kanas said the study also indicated that NASA should strengthen psychological training for astronauts, noting that while most US space missions thus far have been relatively brief, future trips could send astronauts into space for months or even years with no outside support.

"On a trip to Mars, for example, there is going to be a time delay in communication, and any sort of medical problem that takes place is going to have to be taken care of by the crew itself," Kanas said.

"It is important that at least one of the members, and maybe more, have some therapeutic and psychological counselling training." (REUTERS)

Arms-type treaty needed to halt tobacco smuggling

LONDON, Oct 13: An international treaty to regulate the tobacco trade, similar to controls on the arms business, is the only way to stop cigarette smuggling, experts said in the British Medical Journal today.

"We are talking about a substance that kills hundreds of thousands every year, yet in many countries, including Britain, tobacco import and export controls are alarmingly lax," Martin Raw, an honorary senior lecturer at Guy’s, King’s and St Thomas’s School of Medicine, London, said in a statement.

"That is why we are recommending that tobacco transit should be controlled by mechanisms similar to those used in arms control."

Raw and Luk Joossens, a consultant at the International Union against cancer in Brussels, said that around one third of global tobacco exports disappear into the contraband market.

They rejected tobacco industry assertions that smuggling occurred because of price differences between countries.

Most smuggling was "container fraud" whereby cigarettes were exported duty-free to a country where no real market existed before being smuggled back into their country of origin, or to a third country, avoiding duty, Raw said.

"The main smuggling market is containers of cigarettes legally exported from, for example, england to Andorra and then smuggled back into England thus avoiding duty," Raw told Reuters. "The key here is not cross border price differences — it is the illegal evasion of duty."

In September British media said that tax officials would quiz British tobacco firms about why they exported billions of cigarettes to countries where their brands were rarely smoked.

"One of the problems has been that the manufacturers are technically within the law, arguing that what dealers do with their (legally bought and sold) cigarettes is not their business," Raw and Joossens said in the BMJ.

Bootlegging, where cigarettes are bought cheaply and then smuggled to countries where they are more expensive, was a minor portion of the global smuggling market, Raw said.

Lowering taxes would not halt smuggling.

Thus the researchers rejected the idea that lowering taxes, as advocated by the tobacco industry, would prevent smuggling.

The tobacco industry holds that lowering taxes in countries where cigarettes were expensive would reduce inequalities in price thus reducing bootleg smuggling.

But Raw said Canada had reduced taxes only to find that cigarette consumption increased and tax revenue decreased.

Lowering taxes would not have a great effect on container smuggling because profits from tax evasion would still be attractive, Albeit reduced, he added.

One example of successful International Cigarette Control was cooperation between authorities in Spain, France, Britain, Ireland and Andorra in 1997 which reduced the illegal cigarette market in Spain from 15 per cent in 1995 to five per cent in 1999.

The BMJ report comes as the world’s top cigarette makers and the World Health Organisation face off in Geneva to debate an anti-tobacco pact which is seeking a global ban on tobacco ads, higher taxes and tighter controls on underage smoking.

The hearings pit tobacco companies, farmers and smoking groups against medical associations and health campaigners.

The WHO’s chief Gro Harlem Brundtland has made the fight against smoking a policy priority and aims to establish the world’s first anti-tobacco pact by 2003. (REUTERS)

South Korean President wins Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO, Oct 13: South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung won the Nobel Peace Prize today for his work toward peace and reconciliation with North Korea that led to a groundbreaking summit with his North Korean counterpart.

"In the course of South Korea’s decades of authoritarian rule, despite repeated threats on his life and long periods in exile , Kim Dae-Jung gradually emerged as his country’s leading spokesman for democracy," according to the citation.

South and North Korea, foes on the battlefield a half-century ago, have warmed to each other more in the last few months than in more than a generation. Their armies remain locked in a standoff across a sealed border, but the mood on the peninsula is considerably lighter.

After patiently pursuing contacts with North Korea during the first two years of his presidency, Kim traveled to Pyongyang in June to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The two countries then stopped propaganda broadcasts, held a reunion of separated families, opened border liaison offices and agreed to reconnect a cross-border railway.

"His visit to North Korea gave impetus to a process which has reduced tension between the two countries," the Norwegian Nobe Institute said. "There may now be hope that the cold war will also come to an end in Korea."

The announcement was a cliffhanger to the last minute as the speculation was more muted than usual. Last year’s winner, the Humanitarian Group Doctors Without Borders, figured heavily in guesses ahead of the announcement.

The five-member committee and its non-voting secretary Geir Lundestad stake their pride in keeping the secret. (AP)

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