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At least 16 people
killed in Mexican massacres
MEXICO
CITY, May 5: Heavily armed men killed at least 16
people, all members of a ranchers' association,
in two different massacres in southern Mexico
over the weekend, Mexican media said.
Some 40 men riding
in luxury vehicles and wearing uniforms of an
elite police squad shot nine people dead in the
town of Petatlan in the state of Guerrero
yesterday, El Universal newspaper reported.
And a group toting
automatic weapons killed seven people in the town
of Iguala, also in Guerrero, on Saturday.
Reforma newspaper
said the ranchers were holding a meeting in
Iguala and at least two of the sons of the
association's state leader, Rogaciano Alba, were
killed in yesterday's attack.
Alba himself has
survived two other attacks in the past, Reforma
said.
The newspapers did
not say what could have triggered the attacks but
well-armed drug traffickers are active in
Guerrero, a poor, mountainous state on the
Pacific coast home to the Acapulco beach resort.
Clashes over land
rights or local politics are also common in
Guerrero.
(AGENCIES)
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Journalists elect
new committee
KATHMANDU,
May 5: Federation of Nepalese Journalists
(FNJ), umbrella organisation of Nepalese
Journalists, elected a new committee at a
convention held in Kathmandu.
Dharmendra Jha,
who represents democratic panel, has been elected
as the new president. Gobinda Acharya of
Revolutionary Journalists Association, close to
the Maoists, was elected vice president, while
Poshan KC, Ramji Dahal and Ramesh Bista have been
elected as general secretary, secretary and
treasurer respectively.
The election was
held to elect 24 member central working committee
at the end of the three-day 22nd general
convetion of the FNJ yesterday.
"Our
first priority will be to move the federation
forward on a professional manner and to ensure
financial transparency," the newly elected
FNJ president said.
(UNI)
Gen Franco
‘cheated Sir Cliff out of Eurovision title
LONDON,
May 5: India-born famous British crooner
Sir Cliff Richard was cheated out of success in
the Eurovision Song Contest in 1968 after General
Franco’s regime rigged the competition to
improve Spain’s image, claims a documentary.
Spanish singer
Massiel’s ‘La, La, La’ pipped Sir
Cliff’s hit song ‘Congratulations’
by one vote at the last minute in the contest
which was held at London’s Royal Albert Hall
in April 1968.
Now 40 years on,
filmmaker Montse Fernandez Vila has revealed in a
documentary, titled ‘1968. I lived through
the Spanish May’, that Spain’s only
ever Eurovision win was down to behind-the-scenes
negotiations by television executives from that
country’s state-run channel.
The filmmaker has
claimed that the executives toured Europe
offering cash and promising to buy TV series and
enter into contract with unknown artists from
other Eurovision member states to influence the
vote in the singing contest.
"There is
evidence that votes were bought to secure a win
for Massiel. The (Franco) regime was acutely
aware of the need to improve their image (both at
home and abroad).
"Looking back
at the parties that were organised and the way
Massiel was turned into a national hero-it seems
a bit excessive for a song festival but it all
served to glorify the regime," ‘The
Daily Telegraph’ quoted Villa as discussing
the documentary with Spanish newspaper ‘20
Minutos’.
Massiel, now 60,
whose real name is Maria Felix de los Angeles
Santamaria Espinosa, went on to become one of
Spain’s best loved singers and re-released
her Eurovision entry last year with a hip-hop
beat.
Sir Cliff, now 67,
made a second attempt to win the Eurovision Song
contest when in 1973 he represented the UK with
Power To All Our Friends. But he only reached
third place behind artists from Luxembourg and
Spain. (PTI)
Malaysia's Maybank
to acquire 20 pc of Pakistan's MCB
KUALA
LUMPUR, May 5: Malaysia's leading bank Maybank said
Monday it is planning to buy 20 per cent of
Pakistan's MCB Bank as it seeks to boost its
regional operations.
Maybank said in a
filing to the stock exchange that it will pay
2.17 billion ringgit (672.7 million dollars) for
a 15 per cent stake in MCB Bank.
It said it had
entered into a separate deal which will allow it
to eventually own up to 20 per cent of the
Karachi-listed MCB, the fourth-largest bank in
Pakistan by assets.
MCB operates 1,026
branches, including eight Islamic banking
branches within Pakistan and six outside the
country.
"The proposed
acquisition will enable Maybank to further expand
its regional presence in key growth
markets," Maybank said in the statement.
"The proposed
acquisition will provide the group with the
opportunity to position itself in a high-growth
and under-penetrated banking market with a large
population."
Maybank, the
fourth-largest company on the Malaysian bourse by
market value, has embarked on an aggressive
overseas expansion drive.
It has said that
Indonesia, Pakistan and Thailand are the three
"must-have" markets in its efforts to
transform itself into a regional entity.
However, Maybank
has faced criticism that it is paying too much
for its recent acquisition of stakes in
Vietnamese and Indonesian banks.
Malaysian banks
have been actively exploring investment
opportunities overseas in recent years as they
face rising competition and slowing growth at
home amid the central bank's moves to open up the
domestic banking industry. (AGENCIES)
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Clinton dismisses
"elite" economists on gas tax plan
WASHINGTON,
May 5: Democratic presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton dismissed the ''elite opinion''
of economists who criticized her gas tax
proposal, using a term that has dogged rival
Barack Obama in recent weeks.
Obama, meanwhile,
accused the New York senator of pandering on gas
taxes and saber rattling toward Iran as both
candidates gave television interviews before
primary contests in North Carolina and Indiana.
The two are battling to be their party's nominee
to face Republican John McCain in November's
election.
Appearing on ABC's
''This Week,'' Clinton said yesterday it was time
to move beyond the controversy surrounding
Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
''We should
definitely move on,'' the New York senator said
in response to a question from the audience. ''We
should move on because there's so many important
issues facing our country that we have to attend
to.''
Clinton raised
questions about Obama's ability to connect with
working-class Americans while dismissing
economists who have said her plan to suspend gas
taxes over the summer would do little good.
''I'm not going to
put my lot in with economists,'' Clinton said
when asked to name an economist who backed her
proposal.
''We've got to get
out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion
is always on the side of doing things that really
disadvantage the vast majority of Americans,''
said Clinton, a former first lady who would be
the first woman president.
Critics have
painted Obama as elitist for a comment he made
about job losses causing some small-town
Americans to become bitter and to cling to guns
and religion.
That perception
hurt the Illinois senator in the big blue-collar
state of Pennsylvania, where Clinton won a
crucial victory last month in the protracted
Democratic contest.
The two candidates
next square off in primaries in North Carolina
and Indiana tomorrow. Polls close by 7 p.M.
EDT/0430 IST in Indiana and by 7:30 p.M. EDT/0500
IST in North Carolina. Results are expected
shortly after.
'WASHINGTON
GIMMICK'
In an interview on
NBC's ''Meet the Press,'' Obama dismissed
Clinton's gas-tax proposal as ''a classic
Washington gimmick'' that has no chance of
becoming law.
''What this is is
a strategy to get through the next election,'' he
said.
Obama acknowledged
he should have more quickly distanced himself
from his former pastor who has suggested the US
government created AIDS to kill blacks and the
September 11 attacks were payback for U.S.
Foreign policy.
He did not
repudiate Wright completely until last week,
after the Chicago preacher reiterated his views.
''When you're in
national politics, it's always good to pull the
Band-aid off quick,'' Obama said. ''But life's
messy sometimes, it's not always neat, and things
don't always proceed in textbook Political 101
fashion.''
Obama launched a
new ad slamming Clinton's gas tax plan.
''Clinton aides
admit it won't do much for you, but would help
her politically,'' the ad's announcer says.
Clinton aides said
the spot was misleading because a person cited in
the Obama ad was actually criticizing McCain, not
Clinton.
Opinion polls show
Obama losing ground to Clinton in Indiana and
North Carolina during the past several weeks.
He now leads
Clinton by an average of 7 points in North
Carolina and trails her by an average of 6 points
in Indiana.
Obama spent the
afternoon campaigning door-to-door in Elkhart,
Indiana, where much of the talk was about high
gas prices. One woman said it cost 4 dollars to
mow her lawn.
Clinton,
meanwhile, encouraged supporters in Fort Wayne,
Indiana, to help get people to the polls on
Tuesday.
She has spent 6.7
million dollars in the two states, according to
her campaign aides, while Obama has spent 10.5
million dollars.
On Saturday night,
Obama eked out a narrow seven-vote victory in the
US Pacific island territory of Guam. (AGENCIES)
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Australia kidney
specialist sparks organ sales row
SYDNEY,
May 5: An Australian kidney specialist
sparked a bitter medical ethics row today by
calling for organ sales to be legalised to stop
patients travelling to countries like India and
Pakistan buy them on the black market.
Nephrologist Gavin
Carney said Australia should legalise the sale of
organs, which currently carries a penalty of six
months jail and a USD 4,092 fine, to help cut the
bloated transplant waiting list.
Fit, young and
healthy people should be allowed to peddle their
kidneys for up to 50,000 dollars to save lives
and money and to discourage needy patients from
going to developing countries like Pakistan and
India to buy black market organs for up to 30,000
dollars, he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
"Australians
should be dissuaded from going to Third World
countries to buy kidneys because such countries
do not have the ethical, moral or compensatory
infrastructure to make such a practise workable
and appropriate," he said.
"But we can
do the opposite here. Let's pay people some money
for a new car or a house deposit and those
waiting lists will be halved within about five
years," he told the paper.
Australian kidney
transplant patients currently wait for up to 10
years for a healthy organ, with more than 1,800
people on the list while only 343 kidneys were
donated last year, costing health services
billions of dollars.
But organ
transplant groups slammed Carney's controversial
suggestion that Australia legalise a practise
outlawed in most of the world, saying it would be
open to abuse and would leave the poor vulnerable
to exploitation.
"It really
focuses on the poor and people who are least able
to pay for things in society. They get attracted
to these types of things," Transplant
Australia chief executive Chris Thomas told the
Australian Broadcasting Corp. (AGENCIES)
Axis Bank opens
representative office
DUBAI,
May 5: The fourth largest Indian bank by
market capitalisation Axis Bank, formerly UTI
Bank, has opened its first representative office
in the UAE in Dubai.
The Dubai office
is part of the bank’s strategic expansion
plan focused on Asia. According to the
Bank’s Chairman and CEO to P J Nayak, the
UAE has become a very important market for Axis
Bank during the past few years and the Dubai
office will mainly promote the bank’s retail
non-resident Indian (NRI) products and services.
In addition to
retail banking offerings, the bank offers
mortgage products, insurance, mutual funds and
online trading in Indian stocks. The bank also
offers offshore wealth management and private
banking solutions in association with Luxemburg
based Rothschild.
Currently, the
bank has presence in Qatar through an alliance
with Doha Bank. In the UAE it has marketing
arrangements with Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and
RAKBank. In other GCC countries, Axis Bank is
exploring strategic alliances with banks and
exchange houses.
Though many Indian
banks have representative offices in the UAE,
only Bank of
Baroda has been
allowed by the Central Bank, UAE to offer full
fledged retail services.
(UNI)
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Closest Solar probe
mission by 2015
WASHINGTON,
May 5: NASA has roped in Applied Physics
Laboratory of The Johns Hopkins University for
its ambitious Solar Probe mission for sending a
spacecraft closer to the sun by 2015.
The findings have
the potential to revolutionise what we know about
our star and the solar wind that influences
everything in our solar system, Science Daily
reported.
The mission will
study the streams of charged particles the sun
hurls into space from a vantage point within the
sun’s corona its outer atmosphere where the
processes that heat the corona and produce solar
wind occur.
At closest
approach Solar Probe would zip past the sun at
125 miles per second, protected by a
carbon-composite heat shield that must withstand
up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit and survive blasts
of radiation and energized dust at levels not
experienced by any previous spacecraft.
In February an
APL-led team completed a Solar Probe engineering
and mission design study at NASA’s request,
detailing just how the robotic mission could be
accomplished. The study team used an APL-led 2005
study as its baseline, but then significantly
altered the concept to meet challenging cost and
technical conditions provided by NASA.
''We knew we were
on the right track,'' Solar Probe project manager
Andrew Dantzler at APL said adding ''Now
we’ve put it all together in an innovative
package; the technology is within reach, the
concept is feasible and the entire mission can be
done for less than 750 million dollar.''
APL will design
and build the spacecraft, on a schedule to launch
in 2015. The compact, solar-powered probe would
weigh about 1,000 pounds.
(UNI)
Taiwan's vice
premier quits ruling party
TAIPEI,
May 5: Taiwan's vice premier quit the
ruling party to take responsibility for a
diplomatic bungle that cost the government
millions of dollars.
Chiou I-jen's
announcement came three days after he
acknowledged arranging for the Foreign Ministry
to transfer USD 29.8 million to a Taiwanese man
acting as intermediary in a deal to try to get
Papua New Guinea to officially recognise Taiwan.
Both the man,
Ching Chi-ju, and the money have since
disappeared.
"I feel
deeply ashamed in the face of my country and
people," Chiou said in a brief statement.
"In addition to helping with judicial
investigations, will withdraw from my beloved
Democratic Progressive Party."
Foreign Minister
James Huang said Friday that the missing funds
were intended to be used as economic aid for
Papua New Guinea, once it agreed to switch
diplomatic relations from China to Taiwan.
The effort was
abandoned after only a few months in late 2006
after the Taiwan government concluded Papua New
Guinea was unlikely to do so.
Taiwan and China
have been engaged in fierce competition to win
diplomatic allies since the two split amid civil
war nearly 60 years ago.
China, which
considers Taiwan part of its territory, has used
its rising economic clout to systematically
reduce the number of Taiwan's allies. In turn,
Taiwan has tried to use economic enticements to
lure some of them back and to maintain the ones
it has. (AGENCIES)
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UN offers help
for cyclone victims in Myanmmar
UNITED
NATIONS, May 5: The United Nations has offered help
to mobilise international aid for the thousands
of victims of cyclone Nargis which struck
Myanmar.
The United Nations
Disaster Assessment and Coordination team has
been put on stand by to respond to the
humanitarian needs if and when required.
The UN officials
say it could take days before the extent of
casualties and damage is known. The humanitarian
agencies cannot go in without the permission of
the Government and hence they would have to seek
the UN’s help.
United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he is
"deeply saddened" by the loss of life
and destruction suffered by the people.
"He extends
his deepest condolences to the families of those
who have been killed, injured, or made homeless
because of the storm," his spokesperson
said. (PTI)
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Parents
'abdicating responsibility of their children'
LONDON,
May 5: English parents buoyed by ''back to
work culture'' are ''abdicating their
responsibility'' by leaving children in school
for up to 10 hours a day.
Some mothers and
fathers ''dump'' pupils at breakfast clubs and
pick them up late in the evening because of the
demands of work, said Mick Brookes, general
secretary of the National Association of Head
Teachers, Daily Telegraph reported.
Britain_s
so-called ''back to work culture'' - which has
also prompted many parents to place children in
nurseries from a young age - risked undermining
family life, he said.
Under Government
reforms, so-called extended schools open from 8am
to 6pm, providing ''wraparound'' childcare to
help mothers return to full-time jobs. Around
10,000 primary and secondary schools in England
now offer breakfast clubs and after-school
sessions.
But Mr Brookes
insisted teachers should not be turned into
surrogate parents.
''Some parents are
abdicating responsibility for their children.
They dump them early in the morning at school and
are late picking them at the end of the day.
There is definitely a lack of care,'' he said.
(UNI)
China, Dalai
Lama aides agree to further contact
SHENZHEN,
CHINA, May 5: Envoys of the Dalai Lama and Chinese
officials have agreed to further contact after a
day of talks aimed at mending fences amid a wave
of unrest pushed Tibet to centre stage ahead of
the 2008 Olympics.
The closed-door
meeting yesterday in the southern city of
Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, was the first since an
anti-Beijing riot in Lhasa and unrest rocked
Tibet and nearby areas in March.
The Tibetan riots
and protests, which China blames on the Dalai
Lama, were the most serious challenge to Chinese
rule in the mountainous region for nearly two
decades.
They prompted
anti-China protests that disrupted the
international leg of the Olympic torch relay and
led to calls to boycott August’s Beijing
Games, which in turn triggered counter-protests
by Chinese fiercely proud of holding the Games.
"Chinese
Central Government officials and the private
representatives of the 14th Dalai Lama
agreed to hold another round of contact at an
appropriate time," Xinhua news agency said
late yesterday.
State media
quoted the Chinese officials attending the talks
as saying the unrest added new
"obstacles", a sign that contact
between the two sides, already fraught with
mistrust, was likely to get even more difficult.
There was no
clear word that the talks had ended, but security
was loosened on Monday at the guest house where
they were believed to have taken place, and the
hotel which had said it was booked full was
taking reservations.
Tenzin
Taklha, a senior aide to the Dalai Lama, had said
the talks were expected to continue on Monday and
possibly Tuesday.
China
proposed the talks last month after Western
Governments urged it to open new dialogue with
the Dalai Lama, who says he wants a high level of
autonomy, not independence, for the predominantly
Buddhist Himalayan homeland he fled in 1959.
The official
Xinhua news agency quoted unnamed sources as
saying yesterday’s meeting was arranged at
the Government-in-exile’s repeated request
for contacts and consultations with the central
government.
A. Tom
Grunfeld, a China and Tibet expert at State
University of New York, said years of mistrust
between Beijing and the Dalai Lama’s people
made it difficult to expect much from the talks.
"The
best-case scenario is that both sides commit
themselves to small, doable, reasonable actions
from now until the end of August," he said
by email. "Then, if they have both fulfilled
their commitments, serious talks can
commence."
The torch
today was being paraded through the southern
island of Hainan for the second day where it was
greeted by joyous crowds as a second torch awaits
clear weather to climb the world’s highest
mountain, Everest.
(AGENCIES)
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