DUBAI, Oct 28:

Indian film star and former Member of Parliament Sunil Dutt is currently in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to help raise public awareness about cancer. ...more

China pilot hijacks plane
to Taiwan, detained

BEIJING, Oct 28: The pilot of a Chinese civilian airliner hijacked the plane he was commandeering with 102 people including 20 foreigners on board to China’s arch rival Taiwan, bringing his wife saying he disliked life in the Communist mainland.

Pilot Yuan Bin of the state-owned air China Boeing 737, which was on a flight from Beijing to Southwestern city of Kunming en route to Yangon, and his Iexu Mei were detained at the Taipei’s Chiang.....more

The accusation was made in a 25-page submission the ANC sent to the TRC after learning that the truth body planned to implicate the party in torture, executions and other abuses in the report it will hand to Mandela tomorrow, the Sapa news agency reported yesterday.

TRC has found that the party and its former armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe was politically and morally accountable for Commission of gross human rights violations.

It sent a copy of these preliminary findings to the ANC in August to notify the party that it would be implicated in the report and give it a chance to respond.

In the ANC submission, of which a copy was leaked to Sapa, the party said the TRC had grossly misdirected itself And denounced the findings as capricious and arbitrary.

The ANC has been at odds with the TRC since it received the notice and the commission refused its demands for a private meeting to discuss the findings. (AFP)

A social gathering organised on Sunday at Edgbaston near Birmingham by the Kashmiri Association of Great Britain drew an overwhelming response with over 200 Kashmiri Muslim families, constituting 99 per cent of people from the Valley in the UK, attending.

This was for the first time that people from the Kashmir Valley — Muslims, Pandits and Sikhs — got together in a show of solidarity which apparently was a big blow to extremist groups which masquerade here in the name of representing the people of Jammu and Kashmir, observers said.

The meeting held under the chairmanship of barrister Kurshid Drabhu observed a two-minute silence in memory of thousands of Kashmiris who had died in the Valley in the past decade since militancy erupted.

The speakers at the meeting, who included prominent Kashmiri Muslims in Britain including Mr Kurshid Drabhu, Prof Abdullah Raina, Dr A R Mehru, Dr Siraj Shah, Dr Nooruddin Shah, Krishna Bhan, Dr G N Bhat and Dr Mohiuddin Gundroo, stressed on the steps to keep Kashmiriyat alive.

The occasion was marked by serving of Kashmiri cuisine prepared by housewives who joined the community cooking, a major attraction of which was the world famous Gushtabaa.

A cultural evening was also organised with children and women joining the musical performance and a quiz on Kashmir.

Barrister Kurshid Drabhu was elected the new chairman of the Association, Krishna Bhan the vice-chairperson, Dr Nisar Bakshi the secretary-general and Khalid Sofi the assistant secretary-general.

His was the first time since 1989, when militancy took a serious turn in the Valley, that Kashmiri Muslims, Pandits and Sikhs came forward to organise a common gathering here. (PTI)

Move awayfrom the sidelines and come to the centre, and become a part of the majority. All the demands that Mahatma Gandhi had made when he was in South Africa are now contained in our non-racial democracy.

Once Indian South Africans do this, they will play a much greater role than they have already done in the past when we were struggling for democracy, he said yesterday.

Mandela made the call during a radio talk show Viewpoint, broadcast on radio Lotus, a national Government-funded station that caters predominantly to the country’s Indian community.

Presenter Devi Sankaree Govender and listeners asked Mandela various questions relating to affirmative action, high crime rate, death penalty, skilled manpower flight, unemployment and falling standards in education in South Africa.

Mandela rejected concerns that Indian South Africans were being deliberately discriminated against by his Government

Our stated policy is that affirmative action applies to all those who had been disadvantaged in the past. They include Indians, Africans and coloureds.

Businesses may be discriminating against Indians but this is not official Government policy. Those businesses may be doing so deliberately in order to put our Government in bad light, he said.

When one looks at my Government and the civil service no one can claim that affirmative action is discriminatory against Indians.

My Cabinet has five Indians, my personal public relations person is an Indian, the Chief Justice is an Indian and many many more people of Indian descent occupy high positions in every sector of our society, he said.

When one looks at his no one can justifiably claim that Indians are being discriminated, he asserted.

Referring to the high crime rate and calls for the return of death penalty, Mandela said they had inherited a force that had been trained to counter political opponents and not to fight crime. (PTI)

Even though fertility is continuing to decline in much of the world, global population is expected to climb to 6 billion in 1999 and the AIDS epidemic will not reverse Africa’s population growth, the U.N. population division said.

Last year, AIDS killed 2.3 million adults and children, and 30 million people are currently infected by the HIV virus. According to the U.N. figures, 91 per cent of AIDS deaths occurred in 34 countries, 29 in sub-Sahara Africa.

But in the 29 African countries hardest-hit by AIDS, the population will remain the same or continue climbing because fertility in these countries is high, according to the U.N. estimates.

The continuing spread of AIDS is nonetheless having serious population repercussions: children born today in those 29 African countries will have an average life expectancy of 47 years rather than 54 years if there had not been an AIDS epidemic, the U.N. said.

And the demographic impact "is expected to intensify in the future," especially in the nine African countries where more than 10 per cent of the adult population has the HIV virus Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe, it said.

"By 2010-2015, the average life expectancy at birth in these countries could be only 47 years. In the absence of AIDS, it would have been expected to reach 63 years. This represents 16 years of life expectancy lost to AIDS," the U.N. said.

The population estimates and projections are prepared every two years by the population division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. The figures are used throughout the United Nations system.

According to the new estimates, world population stood at 5.9 billion in mid-1998, and was growing by 1.33 per cent per year, an average of 78 million people. Countries adding the most population were India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, the United States, Brazil, Bangladesh, Mexico and the Philippines.

The 1995-2000 population growth rate is significantly less that the peak growth rate of 2.04 percent in 1965-70, and less than the rate of 1.46 per cent in 1990-95, the U.N. said.

Depending on future fertility trends, the world’s population in 2050 is projected to be in the range of 7.3 billion to 10.7 billion, it said.

Africa has the highest population growth rate of all major regions of the world 2.36 percent. And during the last two years, Africa’s population, now 749 million, surpassed Europe’s, which is currently 729 million, the U.N. said.

In contrast, Europe has the lowest growth rate, just 0.03 per cent, and in Eastern Europe the rate is minus 0.2 per cent, indicating a population decline, it said.

The developed world has led the process of population ageing since the beginning of the 20th century and Europe is most affected. The proportion of older people in Europe will increase from 20 percent in 1998 to 35 percent in 2050, the U.N. said.

For the first time, U.N. experts estimated the number of people in their 80s, 90s and over 100 and found 66 million people over 80 including 6.4 million over 90 and 135,000 centenarians.

" With the continuation of fertility decline and increase in life expectancy, the population of the world will age much faster in the next half-century than previously," the U.N. said. (AP)

A three-point proposal has been made by the Beijing-based semi- official Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) to its counterpart in Taiwan, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Arats demanded that Taiwan must guarantee the safety of passengers and the plane, provide the necessary assistance for the plane’s smooth return and repatriate the hijackers.

Earlier, Yuan Bin, commander of a boeing 737 Air China flight CA905 from Beijing to Southwestern Chinese city of Kunming hijacked his own plane and landed safely in Taipei’s international airport under military Jet Escort.

Xinhua said Pilot Yuan was accompanied by his wife on board the plane which was carrying 95 passengers, including 20 foreigners and a crew of nine.

The plane was enroute to Yangon, capital of neighbouring Myanmar.

No passengers were hurt during the hijack, media reports from Taipei said.

Television reports from Taipei aid the disgruntled Chinese pilot brought his wife along as he tried to escape life in the communist country.

A CNN report showed commander Yuan in his white uniform with a suitcase being led out of the plane by Taiwanese policemen in helmets and bullet-proof vests. His wife was also seen while being escorted out of the plane.

Xinhua reported that Yuan and his unnamed wife were initially identified as the ‘hijackers.’

Media reports from Taipei also said that the couple would be detained in Taiwan to face trial. Authorities were planning to let the other passengers leave taipei with the Air China aircraft.

There wa a spate of hijackings from mainland China to Taiwan in 1993 and 1994 by Chinese who said they were seeking freedom and better prospects outside the communist country.

Hijackings in the opposite direction— from Taiwan to the mainland, have been rare.

Taiwan and China have been arch-rivals since a civil war left the communists led by Mao Zedong in power on the mainland in 1949 and forced the nationalists led by Chiang Kai-Shek into exile on the Taiwan island. (PTI)

DUBAI, Oct 28: Indian film star and former Member of Parliament Sunil Dutt is currently in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to help raise public awareness about cancer.

He spoke at a first of three meetings, organised by the Malabar Cancer Institute and Research Centre in Kerala, in Al Ain last night.

Another is due to be held in Dubai this evening and a third meeting will be held in Sharjah tomorrow.

Mr Dutt told reporters here that his own awareness about cancer was low until his wife, actress Nargis Dutt, fell victim to the disease nearly two decades ago.

"I ran from place to place in India and the United States...Cancer is a constant pain for its victim and the family", he said.

After his wife’s death, Mr Dutt set up the Nargis Dutt Memorial Cancer Foundation, which is now in its 17th year.

"There are millions who are suffering from cancer and they need our attention and care", he said.

According to him, there was much greater public awareness about the disease now in India and urged the media to do all they could in this regard. "In the US and Canada, health issues get page one coverage and not (US President) Bill Clinton. But in India, it is always the politician who gets page one attention and not a good doctor, social activist or sportsman", he said.

Mr Dutt praised the efforts made by the Malabar Cancer Institute and Research Centre (MCIRC) and its trustees, including Mr K M Noordeen, for cancer patients.

He said Kerala was setting a good example through activities such as those undertaken by the MCIRC. "They (Keralites) are always in the forefront. Better education leads to better awareness", he said, referring to the literacy levels achieved in Kerala.

The MCIRC is setting up a 300-bed cancer hospital in Kerala and it is expected to be ready by the year 2005. It is also setting up early cancer detection centres in all the districts of Kerala. The hospital’s pain and palliative care block is expected to be opened by the year 2000.

Dr Suresh Kumar, a consultant in palliative medicine and secretary of the pain and palliative care society in calicut, Kerala, said the success of a palliative care project in Kerala had led to its recognition by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a demonstration project for Asia and third world countries. (UNI)

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