Go to: [irish news]

Burmese put up roadblock to
Suu Kyi's path again

BURMA'S Nobel Peace Prize heroine Aung San Suu Kyi is trapped at a roadblock in another confrontation with the country's military regime.
The democracy leader was attempting to drive from her Rangoon home to meet party workers 100 miles away but only got about 19 miles west of the capital when she was stopped at the same roadblock where she had been held up for six days last month.
This time Suu Kyi was prepared for the stand-off. She travelled in a friend's van instead of the car she had used on previous trips. The van would allow more comfort for an extended stay and be able to carry more food and water.
The government said it blocked her because the journey was "unsafe". A statement said the government "encourages Ms Suu Kyi to return home and continue her political activities in a more secure environment." It didn't explain what was unsafe about the journey. Suu Kyi's activities are severely restricted.
Her previous blocked journey ended on July 29 after a six-day stand-off. Authorities seized her car, forcibly restrained her and drove her back to her home against her will. She spent several days recovering from a high fever and dehydration.
The government statement said Suu Kyi and her companions "remain free to return to their homes at any time or to continue staying by the roadside as long as the conditions remain safe."
Suu Kyi's six-day confrontation gained international attention, with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright saying the United States would hold Burma's government directly responsible for her welfare.
Her latest challenge follows the detention of 18 foreign democracy activists for handing out anti-government leaflets on the streets of Rangoon on Sunday. The detainees include six Americans, three Thais, three Malaysians, three Indonesians, two Philippine citizens and an Australian. They have not yet been formally charged with any crime.
Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, is largely confined to her home and has little political manoeuvring room. But she has recently stepped up challenges to the government.
Yesterday's foray was her fourth attempt in two months to drive outside Rangoon. More importantly, she has given the military an August 21 deadline to seat the parliament elected in a 1990 general election.
The military, which has ruled Burma since 1962, allowed the election to go forward but refused to honour the result when Suu Kyi's party won a landslide victory.
The league's elected MPs have faced fierce repression, with nearly 200 dead, imprisoned or in exile.
The military has allowed Suu Kyi to travel outside Rangoon only once since releasing her from six years of formal house arrest in July 1995. Her British husband, an Oxford don, and their children are rarely allowed into the country to visit her.
Since September 1996, the government has installed police checkpoints near her lakeside compound, refusing journalists entry and restricting access by diplomats and party members.

Robinson supports
call for protection of children

AN ILO Convention which proposes to eliminate the worst forms of child labour before the new millennium, was strongly supported by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson at the 86th International Labour Conference in Geneva recently.
This was the first appearance of a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at an ILO conference, since that office was created by the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993.
"Is there a better way for the ILO to enter the next millennium than by adopting this Convention?" Mrs Robinson asked delegates from the 174 member states who attended the conference. "Clearly, there is no better way."
The ILO's Constitution states that the protection of children is one of the essential elements in the pursuit of social justice and universal peace. IPEC (its international programme on the elimination of child labour) is the world's largest technical co-operation programme on child labour in which more than 50 countries on four continents are currently participating.
In June 1994, for example the ILO and the Government of Pakistan signed a 'memorandum of understanding' for the progressive elimination of child labour within the framework of IPEC. Some 3.3 million children work in Pakistan: bonded labourers forced to reimburse past debts, domestic servants, carpet weavers, workers in brick kilns etc. Very few of them, however can hope to benefit from the spotlight afforded to their activities by the World Cup.
Just weeks before the start of the year's World Cup in France, ILO efforts focused on the region of Sialkot, in Pakistan, from where 70% of the 40 million hand sewn footballs that conform to FIFA standards are exported each year. There, some 10,000 to 14,000 children are employed in hand-stitching footballs, Mr Aslam Dar, president of the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry, informed reporters participating in a fact-finding media probe of the region initiated by the ILO.
The footballs are manufactured for large, sporting goods multinationals such as Reebok, Nike and Adidas by about 70 local manufacturing firms. The operation is highly labour intensive — and the labour is cheap. In these factories the synthetic leather is prepared and cut to shape, the hexagonal pieces are decorated with stencils and the quality of the ball is checked.
But there are also the "little hands" which sew the pieces of leather, though rarely in the factories. They work more general 'at home' in the outlying villages, or in groups in any space that can be found.
Of the 70,000 people employed in stitching footballs, some 10% to 14% are children under 14, but all do not work full-time, according to the Chamber of Commerce president.
"No Western worker would be prepared to use a needle and thread for over two hours in exchange for one dollar," reported the Italian daily, La Gazzetta dello Sport. Their reporter spoke to Sialkot-born Faiz Shah, a University of Kentucky graduate who had returned home to become a production executive at his company, Saga City.
Early last year an agreement was signed in Atlanta between the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce, the ILO, UNICEF, the Save the Children Fund and representatives of half the local manufacturers. These manufacturers — including Saga City — have pledged not to use child labour and have re-grouped the stitchers into teams that are monitored by 'flying squad' inspectors from the ILO.
The impetus behind the group of manufacturers (representing 70% of local football production) signing up for the programme was less than philanthropic. The initiative was taken in the face of a threatened consumer boycott following all the bad publicity allied to a proposed Bill before Congress in the USA prohibiting the importation of goods manufactured by children.
If the skin on the child's fingers are callused from long hours of stitching, the indications are that they have been sewing footballs for years, according to the ILO. Thirteen-year-old Ali Akbar had done just that and could neither read or write, reported the Danish journal, Jyllands-Posten.
"Nor can he explain how to play football because since he was seven years old he has been sewing so many footballs every day that there was no time left for either play or school attendance."
Ali is fed up with sewing footballs. He still does it though because his mother says that if the other members of the family can contribute to the family income, so must he: "He would like to be a miller like his father, but like the majority of children in Pakistan, he comes from a large family which cannot make both ends meet."
Haleema Bibi, a widow sits outside her one-roomed house stitching footballs, helped by her 10 year old daughter, Taheera, reports the ILO's own magazine, World of Work: "Taheera is silent and, except for a moment when she pauses to throw a doleful look, she does not stop her work." She spends most of the day helping her mother in this way. "I cannot afford to let her go to school," says the mother. She does, however, send the two younger daughters to a part-time school when they are not polishing and assembling footballs, in the hope that education may improve their lot.
The aim of the ILO project is to eliminate child labour in the soccer ball stitching industry in Sialkot over the next two years. A special range of activities has been designed to provide alternatives for the working children and their families whose income will be affected. These include the establishment of village education and action centres which provide rehabilitation and education services and income generating activities for adults in the family, as well as credit and savings facilities and awareness-raising.
The programme is being subvented by an initial contribution of $2million from ILO-IPEC, the Pakistan government, UNICEF, Save the Children Fund, the local Chamber of Commerce, the Soccer Industries Council of America and FIFA.
"It's the last phase which is going to be the toughest," predicts Rijk van Haarlem, a Dutch labour inspector who set up the ILO monitoring programme in Sialkot.
"To date, our monitors have only found 91 children in the stitching centres. All the rest are older. About 2,000 are in the special rehabilitation programme."
That means, in effect, that around 4,900 children are still missing: "It's pretty obvious that they are still working from home and it's going to be a hard task to remove such labour from the chain of production."

Taliban score critical victory

THE Taliban claimed another in a string of victories yesterday, advancing toward their goal of putting all of Afghanistan under their rigid version of Islamic law.
Taliban spokesman Abdul Hay Muttayn said Pul-e-Kumri, 100 miles north of Kabul, fell with little resistance and the opposition retreated south toward the central province of Bamiyan, one of its last remaining strongholds.
Anti-Taliban coalition leader Syed Jaffer Naderi had his headquarters at Pul-e-Kumri.
If Muttayn's report is confirmed, it would be the fourth strategic site to fall to the Taliban in 10 days.
A major prize came Saturday, when Taliban troops captured Mazar-e-Sharif, the biggest city in the north.
Muttayn said Taliban troops were continuing their march north after taking Pul-e-Kumri.
Rejecting calls for peace talks, the Taliban Foreign Ministry vowed last week to pursue a military solution to the civil war and establish "100% Islamic law."
The Taliban — whose name means "students of Islam" — emerged in southern Afghanistan in 1994 and surprised many with the speed at which they have captured most of the country, including the capital, Kabul.
Under their strict interpretation of Islamic law, girls are barred from school, most women are confined to their homes, and music, films and television are banned.
The Taliban have pledged to bring peace to a country that has been in conflict since a series of military and communist coups in the 1960s.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said the Taliban advances posed "a real threat" to the coalition of former Soviet republics, the Commonwealth of Independent States. Russia is ready to fortify the southern borders of former Soviet republics in Central Asia to guard against any spillover of the turmoil in Afghanistan, the ministry said.
Afghanistan borders three former Soviet republics: Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Tajik officials have said that in some areas the Taliban have advanced to 12 miles of the border.
Russia fears the entrenchment of a radical Islamic state in Afghanistan would bring an influx of refugees and weapons into the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

Child sex file could
close on sci-fi writer

SRI LANKA will close its investigation of science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke unless a British newspaper hands over evidence to support its allegation that he was a paedophile, a government official said yesterday.
Police sought the tape recording of an interview conducted by the Sunday Mirror on which it based its allegation that Sir Arthur had sex with children, but the paper had not responded to repeated requests, said CR De Silva, the Sri Lankan government additional solicitor-general.
"We have approached Interpol. Our embassy in London did its best. In short, we did everything, but the tape has not come," de Silva said.
"Our investigations in Sri Lanka have not found any evidence against him.
"Keeping this in view, and the situation that we are unable to get the tape, we will have no option but to close the case," he said.
Sir Arthur's office said his lawyers were discussing with government officials how to close the file.
He has strenuously denied the allegations made against him.
The Sunday Mirror published its story in February, a few days before the 80-year-old writer was to be knighted by the Prince of Wales who was visiting Sri Lanka at that time. The ceremony was postponed at Sir Arthur's request.
Police questioned the author and three of the four men quoted by the British tabloid newspaper as having claimed to have had sex or discussed sex with him.
Sri Lanka asked Interpol in April to get the interview tape from the newspaper. A reminder was sent a month later. The Sri Lankan High Commission in London also attempted to get the tape from the Sunday Mirror.

Data to convince doubters
of global warming

A CLIMATIC effect, which has led some experts to doubt the existence of global warming, is an illusion caused by falling satellites, it was claimed today.
Global warming predictions have been hampered because, while temperatures at the Earth's surface have gone up over the last two decades, the lower atmosphere appears to be cooling.
The finding, based on satellite measurements, conflicts with computer forecasts and has been seized upon by sceptics who doubt that man-made global warming is really happening.
But research published yesterday in Nature journal could account for the anomaly and silence doubters.
Frank Wentz and Matthias Schabel, from the company Remote Systems Sensing in Santa Rosa, California, have shown the data discrepancy could be caused by satellites falling slightly as they brush against the atmosphere.
The change in the satellite's angular view of the Earth affected measurements enough to produce a significant error in their data.
Records covering 17 years up to 1995 showed ground air temperatures rising by about 0·13 kelvin per decade, while the lower atmosphere temperature fell by 0·05 kelvin per decade.
But taking into account previously neglected orbital decay of satellites adjusts the data to give a lower atmosphere temperature rise of 0·07 kelvin per decade rather than the fall which was previously measured.
Kelvin is a temperature scale used by scientists which begins at absolute zero (-273.15C) and increases by the same
degree intervals as the Celsius scale.
The figures are in closer agreement with the trend observed for surface temperatures. They also solve the problem of a previously unexplained cooling of the lower troposphere — the bottom part of the lower atmosphere — relative to the middle troposphere.
A call by the authors for more accurate and robust climate monitoring systems was strongly supported by a fellow expert writing in Nature.
Dian Gaffen, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Air Resources Laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA, said: "We have to decide if we are really interested in monitoring the health of the Earth's atmosphere.
"If we are, more sophisticated arrangements for tracking the patient's
temperature are needed."
On Monday, US vice-president Al Gore issued a dire warning about global warming after the NOAA released data showing that last month was the hottest July world-wide since reliable records were started more than 118 years ago.
But Sir John Houghton, a member of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, accused the United States of "dragging its feet" over international agreements for measures to combat climate change.

Report claims run-down sewers
spark explosion in rat population

FAST FOOD, more litter and badly maintained sewers have sparked a huge increase in the rat population, experts warned yesterday.
A survey of local authorities in England and Wales by the Robens Centre for Public and Environmental Health shows that 45% believe rat infestations have increased.
Seventy-nine authorities say there has been a total of 10,000 more complaints about rats in people's homes over the past three years.
Now Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, is being urged by a Labour MP to hold a special summit on the vermin crisis.
The MP, Joan Walley, chairperson of the Campaign for the Renewal of Older Sewerage Systems described it as a "desperate situation".
But the water industry rejected claims that the sewers are crumbling.
However, the report says fewer than half of local councils have sewerage maintenance agreements with the water company providing the service.
In more than one in 10 local authority areas, there is no baiting of sewers to control the rats.
Much of the 300,000 kilometres of the network goes uninspected.
The similar length of private sewerage pipes connected to individual homes, is inspected only when there is a complaint, because a problem is apparent, such as a blockage or collapse with raw sewage in the yard or garden.
The poor quality plastic and pitch fibre often used for private sewers and drains are more susceptible to damage, including rats' gnawing. This allows raw sewage and rats to escape.
Once above ground, the rats quickly flourish.
Councils list climate change, more fast food and litter as factors.
Vermin often avoid existing bait, because of more attractive options.
Just one pair of rats can produce a colony of 2,000 in one year, and it's been discovered that they carry an even greater number of diseases than had previously been thought.
Stephen Battersby, author of the survey report and founder of the Campaign for the Renewal of Older Sewerage Systems (CROSS), said "We're already seeing the beginnings of the disintegration of the sewerage system, as a direct consequence of the situation being ignored for so long by everyone, from the government down."
"We really do face a quite desperate situation," Ms Walley said.
"Pollution of groundwater by raw sewage or loss of groundwater into sewers as well as the escape of rats, are serious environmental health matters.
"We have to take action now. I have written to the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott to call for a sewerage summit to resolve the crisis."
A spokesman for the industry body Water UK said "We reject any suggestion our industry's sewers are crumbling or causing dangers to public health.
"All the water service companies have extensive sewer maintenance and replacement programmes in place.
"Last year alone, over £1,500m was invested in the sewerage service, of which nearly £600m was spent on maintaining and improving the network itself in terms of sewers, storm overflows and in-line pumping stations.
"While it is accepted that more needs to be done, decades of under-investment and neglect cannot be put right in a few short years."

Scientist suspended over
'misleading' data

A SCIENTIST who claimed his research raised doubts about the safety of genetically-modified food was suspended yesterday after his bosses said his evidence was ''misleading''.
Dr Arpad Pusztai referred to research which involved feeding rats genetically-modified (GM) potatoes and claimed they had suffered damage to their immune systems.
But Monsanto, the biotechnology company currently testing GM crops in the UK, seized gleefully on the development, claiming the data used by Dr Pusztai in fact related to tests carried out on potatoes which had been modified with a known poison. Dr Pusztai was suspended from his post at The Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen yesterday morning.
In a statement, the institute said it suspended Dr Pusztai after concluding that ''misleading information'' had been released. He will now retire.
''The institute regrets the release of misleading information about issues of such importance to the public and the scientific community,'' it said.
Monsanto said the revelation was ''absolute dynamite''. Colin Merritt, technical manager of biotechnology at the giant US-based firm, said: ''It seems the researcher actually leading this programme was out of the country at the time travelling and only came back yesterday morning.
''Meanwhile, he (Dr Pusztai) had gone to the media. Basically he has picked up non-genetically modified potato data in which the naturally occurring poison Con A has been added and read that as the effect of transgenic modified potatoes.
''It is an awful mistake and these revelations are absolute dynamite.''
Foodfuture, which aims to tell consumers about the benefits biotechnology industry, said opponents of their work had jumped on the bandwagon of ''spurious evidence''.
Director Karen Barber said: ''It is disappointing to see opponents of genetic modification jumping aboard any bandwagon which offers an opportunity to attack this technology, no matter how spurious.''
Monsanto spokesman Dan Verakis claimed the retraction proved that consumers had nothing to worry about from GM foods.
He said: ''In just 48 hours we have gone from statements that GM foods can harm immune systems to 'Sorry, but it was bad information'.

Nigeria's leading political
prisoner died naturally

NIGERIA'S leading political prisoner was not murdered by the country's ruling military regime, an international team of pathologists claimed yesterday.
Chief Moshood Abiola died from natural causes rather than poisoning as his family had feared, declared Dr James Young, the chief coroner of Ontario, Canada.
"We are prepared to stake our professional reputations on the fact that this death is from natural causes," stated Dr Young yesterday afternoon at a press conference, staged in Canada and relayed to the Canadian High Commission in London.
Dr Young headed the team of British, Canadian, Kenyan and American doctors called in after Chief Abiola's family rejected the findings of an earlier international medical inquiry.
Presumed winner of the presidential elections in 1993, Chief Abiola was imprisoned by the late military leader General Sani Abacha.
Reports claimed Abacha's successor, General Abdulsalam Abubakar, was on the verge of freeing Abiola when he died in custody in Abuja, Nigeria, on July 7, and the late chief's family insisted that he had been murdered by the regime.
Chief Abiola's daughter, Hafsat Abiola, 23, who lives in the United States, had claimed: "The military conveniently took him out."
However, speaking yesterday, Dr Young insisted that an autopsy conducted on Chief Abiola along with his documented medical history of severe heart disease allied to statements from witnesses who were with the prisoner when he collapsed combined to prove that he had died from heart failure.
A lack of medical care during Chief Abiola's imprisonment could have contributed to his death, reasoned Dr Young, but it was a complex issue which the team has not been requested to investigate.

World Cup coma cop cannot speak

A FRENCH policeman yesterday left the hospital where he lay in a coma for six weeks after German hooligans clubbed him during the World Cup finals.
Daniel Nivel, 44, was accompanied by his wife by helicopter from Lille to a military hospital near Paris where he will undergo physical therapy for many months. Doctor's have been optimistic about his progress since he regained consciousness and was taken off a respirator a week ago.
"He's recuperating. As far as his level of comprehension, it's better, but he still can't speak," said hospital spokesperson Annie Evrard.
Nivel was attacked by a group of German fans shortly after a June 21 soccer match between Germany and Yugoslavia in the northern French town of Lens.
At the time of the attack, Nivel was guarding a police vehicle near the stadium. He was hit on the back of the head with an iron bar.
Four suspects are in custody in Germany, facing charges of attempted murder, causing serious bodily harm, and disturbing the peace. Another man is being held in France. German prosecutors say they have caught most of those involved, but that their investigation remains open.

© Examiner Publications Ltd, 1998