Aid agencies appeal to help Afghan wounded

AID agencies yesterday appealed for more aircraft and fuel to rescue survivors of the earthquake that killed anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 people in northern Afghanistan.
In the village of Kol, hundreds of people swarmed a UN helicopter that touched down three days after Saturday's earthquake struck a remote mountainous area – rocked three months earlier by another massive quake that claimed some 2,300 victims.
Since Monday, UN helicopters flew 50 of the most seriously injured to emergency medical centres. Rescuers have reached only 29 villages, or about half of those believed to have been seriously damaged by the 6·9-magnitude quake. Of those, 12 were 80-100% destroyed, said UN spokesman Rupert Colville: ''It's now clear that the destruction is very widespread,'' he said.
Survivors carried the injured on stretchers of sticks and old clothes through winding hillside streets and past crumbled packed-mud houses to reach the helicopters.
The villages' remoteness and lack of transportation were hampering the aid effort. The UN, the Red Cross and other agencies have three borrowed helicopters to deliver medical aid.
The lack of aircraft ''is undercutting everything we are doing,'' Colville said. The agencies need at least one more cargo plane to deliver supplies, he added. Rescuers worked from the dirt airstrip of the nearby provincial capital of Faisabad, still littered with the rusting junk of old Soviet tanks and artillery from Afghanistan's decades-long civil war.
Aid workers said it would take several weeks to get a clear picture of how many people were killed.
Red Cross helicopters have delivered two tons of high protein biscuits, flour and oil to victims in Shari Basurkh, near the quake's epicentre, some 27 miles from Faisabad.
Mohammed Karim was in Faisabad when the quake hit his village on the outskirts of Shari Basurkh.
Hitching a ride in a car, he and four friends raced for home, walking the last few hundred yards.
They found the village virtually gone: ''We started digging. When we brought the people out they were already dead,'' said Karim. ''We brought the bodies from under the destruction and buried them without an Islamic prayer. We didn't have time.'' Most of the injured were women, children and the elderly who had stayed inside their homes while men worked the fields.
Most of the injuries are broken limbs, internal and head wounds, said Svante Yngrot, a medical coordinator with the Red Cross. Many of the survivors were still traumatised, made worse by the aftershocks.
''That frightened everybody. Sixty thousand people from the whole district will be spending the night outside,'' Colville said. ''The most traumatised were those who survived the February quake, when they saw friends and relatives killed before their eyes. Now they're going through it again.''

Homosexuals are denied Communion

by Frank Peters
Melbourne, Australia
IRISH-AUSTRALIAN gay and lesbian Catholics say the Church is wrong in preventing them from taking Holy Communion and now want the Pope to intervene.
About 80 gay and lesbian Catholics —some Irish — held a protest meeting in St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne, last Sunday.
All were refused Holy Communion which incensed the protesters.
They're also petitioning the Pope to "go easy", help, and protect, the careers of priests who admit to being homosexual.
"There are homosexual priests, just as there are homosexuals in any other walk of life," they said.
"God made homosexuals — he didn't make priests," Corkman Paddy Delaney (30), a self confessed homosexual and one of the Cathedral's protesters on Sunday. "They were homosexuals first, then they became priests."
The protesters want Pope John Paul II to encourage homosexual clergy and teachers to speak publicly about their sexuality "for their own good and the community they serve".
"Being homosexual is nothing to be ashamed about," said Irish Catholic father-of-three, Michael O'Halloran. "We are old-fashioned by the same architect to his precise specifications," he said.
Protester Alan Anderson said it was imperative the Church took a more Christian view.
"There are thousands of youths worldwide who commit suicide because they're unable to cope with their God-given sexuality," he said.
Spokesman Michael Kelly, from Dublin, said the Church could help stem this rising suicide rate by being compassionate towards homosexuals. "Gay role models in the Church could greatly assist young people wrestling with their sexuality," he said.
Brisbane Archbishop John Battersby said he supports Melbourne Archbishop George Pell's decision to refuse Communion to protesters wearing the distinctive rainbow sash, which identifies gays.

Botha denies authorising bomb attack

A 1988 bombing of the South African Council of Churches yesterday came back to haunt PW Botha, the country's last apartheid president.
Standing a few feet away from Botha, 82, former security guard Welcome Ntumba described to a court the night the bomb tore through the foyer of the building.
"I heard something, a very big noise like lightning," he said, speaking in Zulu through an interpreter. "I just saw the walls collapsing and the electricity went off."
A former national police chief has told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Botha authorised the bombing of Khotso House, where the church's offices were located.
The blast sent Ntumba plummeting into the basement. He escaped almost unharmed. No one was killed and only a handful of people were injured in the blast.
Botha shifted in his seat to look directly at Ntumba as the small, stocky black man told how he was pulled from the rubble by passersby and taken to a hospital.
The Rev Peter Storey, a former head of South Africa's Methodist Church, arrived at Khotso House after the blast and described to the court a scene of fallen masonry, shattered glass and smouldering fires. "We were met by a scene out of hell," he recalled.
Botha has denied authorising the bombing.
Botha is on trial in George, near his retirement home, for refusing to appear before the Truth Commission, which is investigating apartheid-era human rights abuses.

Value of Church of England's shares in Pfizer shoot up

THE worldwide success of the new anti-impotence 'wonder drug', Viagra, is helping the Church of England make a large return on its investments, it emerged yesterday.
A spokesman for the Church Commissioners' confirmed they held shares in the American manufacturers of the drug, Pfizer, which were worth £1 million at the end of last year.
Shares in the company have since doubled in value thanks partly to the unprecedented demand for the "miracle sex pill", although there have been questions over the drug's safety.
"The job of the Church Commissioners is to invest wisely and we certainly have had a good return on that investment," the spokesman said.
"The Church has no problem with making money out of a drug that restores a normal healthy function to people who have lost it.
"This is just one part of a portfolio of shares totalling £2.2 billion. We've held shares in Pfizer since the early 1990s and Viagra is by no means the only product it makes. We operate an ethical investment policy and if we have concerns about what a particular company is doing we will raise those concerns with that company.
We have not yet done that in this case," the spokesman added.
Viagra is not yet been licensed in Britain, but is available over the Internet and from private clinics.
More than a million people have taken it in the United States since it was approved for sale in March, but an investigation is underway into the deaths of six men who took the small, blue, diamond-shaped pills.
In the Middle East there has been a huge demand for the drug, prompting the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Authority to both issue warnings of the dangers of taking it.
The Church Commissioners include the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, bishops and members of the clergy as well as the Prime Minister and Home Secretary.

Neutral nations supplied materials for Nazi war machines, report says

NEUTRAL nations kept Nazi Germany's war machine running with hundreds of millions of pounds of trade in key materials, says a US Government report released yesterday.
Much of it was paid for by gold that Hitler's troops looted from banks and by valuables taken from Holocaust victims, says the report.
The report concludes that although Switzerland was Nazi Germany's banker, other neutral nations — Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Argentina — provided goods and tools to keep the war going.
"The cumulative trade of World War II European neutral countries helped to sustain the Nazi war effort by supplying key materials to Germany essential to their conduct of the war," said Stuart Eizenstat, undersecretary of state for economics, who released the report.
In many cases, the neutral nations, which also traded with the Allies and said they feared a Nazi invasion if they cut off German supplies, continued helping the Nazis until near the end of the war — "in many cases well past the point where, from the Allied perspective at the time, there was a genuine threat of German attack," Eizenstat added.
Despite the record of economic Nazi succour, the US report said, the neutral nations at the same time helped refugees escape almost certain death in concentration camps where six million Jews were exterminated.
Spain helped 30,000-40,000 refugees; Portugal allowed 5,000 to pass through to America; Sweden saved 7,000 Danish Jews and 20,000-30,000 in Hungary; Turkey helped 100,000 flee; and Argentina accepted 25,000-45,000 Jews, the most of any Western nation during the war.
In contrast, the United States accepted only 21,000 Jewish refugees during the war, without significantly raising or even filling quotas.
"America's response to the early stages of the slaughter of European Jews was largely one of indifference," said Eizenstat, who heads the US government team reassessing wartime actions.
According to the report, Sweden, one of Nazi Germany's largest wartime trading partners, supplied iron ore and ball bearings.
Portugal and Spain provided nearly all of Germany's tungsten, used to produce weapon-grade steel.
In some years, Turkey provided 100% of Germany's chromite, used to harden steel to make armour.
Argentina also did business in wartime goods, but was most helpful as a Nazi sympathiser.
In all, those five neutral countries handled £308 million in assets for the German Government and its citizens during the war and dealt in £185 million in looted gold, the report said. That would be £4.3 billion at today's values.
In Madrid, Foreign Minister Abel Matutes said Spain acted correctly in its business dealings with Nazi Germany. He cited a Government report in April that absolved the Franco regime for purchasing gold, saying it did so out of economic necessity after the Spanish Civil War.

Boris blasts 'lazy' taxmen

RUSSIAN President Yeltsin denounced his staff yesterday for failing to fulfil one of government's key tasks – collecting taxes.
''The tax situation has not improved, only worsened, especially in recent months,'' a gruff-sounding Yeltsin told law enforcement officials in a Kremlin meeting .
Russia's pitiful tax collection system is at the heart of the country's current financial crisis, which worsened on Monday when the stock market dropped another 10%. Altogether, the market has fallen 44% in the past month.
Trying to halt the slide in Russia's financial markets, Yeltsin summoned government and business leaders to confer with him yesterday.
Chief among them were ten heads of Russia's powerful banking, business and media conglomerates. The ''oligarchs,'' as they are known, were expected to give the president their ideas to ease the crisis. A Central Bank official acknowledged the bank has spent nearly a £617m in reserves over the past month to support the rouble.

Warning of death risk for refugees

by Neans McSweeney
ASYLUM-seekers will die trying to sneak into the country this summer and all EU governments will have blood on their hands, the Irish Refugee Council has warned.
Governments must recognise that these people have a right to asylum in law and this must be respected, the group said.
Many are taking their lives in their hands by travelling in inhumane conditions because of anti-refugee sentiments, said council spokesperson Blathnaid Ni Rathaille.
Her comments came as the eight Romanians who were discovered aboard a truck in Kildare on Monday were being found temporary accommodation in Dublin. All have sought asylum and the council said it would closely monitor them.
"Governments should realise that this is a horrendous way for people to have to travel," she said. "Every effort seems to be made to prevent these people from getting into countries. They are forced into a situation in which they have to smuggle themselves in. It's only a matter of time before someone dies.
"It is absolutely atrocious that people should feel that the only way for them to reach a country is to be smuggled in. It is a horrendous choice to be forced to make.
"We are concerned that this latest group should have the right to fair procedure and the right to appeal any decision to deport them. They need access to information."
At least 12 asylum-seekers have been banished from Ireland this year under the Dublin Convention. Under this directive, anyone who enters Ireland via another EU country and seeks asylum can be sent back to the first country they entered.
Summer heat will make travelling even more hazardous for asylum-seekers, with temperatures in trucks and containers reaching 40 degrees.
"The response from most count-ries to these asylum-seekers is to put up barriers rather than welcome them with open arms," Ni Rathaille said. "There are already over 1,000 deaths on record world-wide and there will be more unless something is done now."