Pakistan looks beyond F-16s *(IANS/Yahoo)
	Pakistan is looking at combat jets like the Euro-fighter as a hi-tech multi-role substitute for the F-16s that the U.S. has steadfastly refused to supply. Even so, Pakistan has not given up hope of acquiring the F-16s, either from the U.S. or from third countries like Belgium, The News reported Monday. "Pakistan will go for more than one source for its needs of high-tech planes even after getting more F-16s, as it has done in the case of medium-tech and low medium-tech planes that are fulfilling the role in an excellent manner," it quoted defence experts as saying. "Islamabad is eyeing the Euro-fighter, which has outsmarted the F-16 and other contemporary planes in various roles.
	http://in.news.yahoo.com/031020/43/28nki.html
	Pakistan to counter Phalcon with Chinese SAM * (IANS/Yahoo)
	A Chinese missile termed an 'AWACS killer' is to play a key role in Pakistan's strategy to counter the airborne Phalcon radars that India is acquiring, media reports said Monday."The FT-2000 surface-to-air missile (SAM), commonly known as the 'AWACS killer', designed by Chinese experts are considered to be the most appropriate option if the U.S. refuses to provide the same kind of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to Pakistan being sold to India by Israel," The News said."If the U.S. refuses to sell AWACS to Pakistan, then getting the FT-2000 from China would be in the interest of both states who share a common threat perception," it quoted an European defence expert as saying in Brussels.
	http://in.news.yahoo.com/031020/43/28nkk.html

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Oct 20, New Delhi -- Indian investigators probing a 1999 Christmas Eve hijacking have interrogated a top official of the former Taliban regime, which gave safe passage to the hijackers and to Islamic militants who were freed to end the standoff, officials said Monday. Officers from the Central Bureau of Investigation flew to Afghanistan last week to question Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, who was the Taliban's high-profile foreign minister, a senior intelligence official and a CBI official told The Associated Press. Muttawakil surrendered to U.S. forces in the Afghan city of Kandahar on Jan. 8, 2002. He was believed to have been taken to the U.S. military's headquarters at Bagram. His testimony is considered crucial for Indian investigators because he has identified the leader of the hijackers in media interviews as the younger brother of Maulana Masood Azhar — a top militant leader among the rebel groups active in Indian-controlled Kashmir, and one of those freed in a swap for the hostages.

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Oct 20, Srinagar, India -- Islamic rebels were holding 12 villagers hostage in a house in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Monday in a standoff with paramilitary soldiers, an army officer said. The militants entered the home before dawn Monday. Five of the hostages were village elders whom paramilitary soldiers sent into the house to try to persuade the militants to surrender, the senior army officer said on condition of anonymity. The seven other hostages lived in the house. Soldiers surrounded the house in Tharyun village, about 70 kilometers south of Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu-Kashmir state, and there was intermittent shooting with the gunmen, estimated by the army to be four in number, the officer said. Indian forces frequently use civilians as negotiators in Kashmir, sending them into such hostile situations to negotiate with militants. Islamic militants have been fighting Indian security forces since 1989 in Indian-controlled Kashmir to merge it with Pakistan or to create an independent homeland. More than 63,000 people, most of them Muslim civilians, have been killed.

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Oct 20, Katmandu -- Prosecutors in Nepal charged confessed serial killer Charles Sobhraj on Monday with the murder of two backpackers in 1975, court officials said. Officials at Katmandu District Court said a preliminary hearing will determine whether there is sufficient evidence to go to trial. Sobhraj is suspected in the unsolved 1975 murders of two backpackers - Connie Jo Bronzich of Santa Cruz, California, and Laurent Ormond Carrierre of Manitoba, Canada - whose charred bodies were found on the capital's outskirts, police say. "The government case is very weak," Sobhraj's lawyer Sanjeev Ghimire told The Associated Press. "It should be over in a day or two and my client will be freed." Sobhraj was arrested at a casino in Katmandu last month and charged with immigration violations for allegedly using a fake passport to enter Nepal in 1975. Sobhraj was born in Vietnam during French rule and claims French citizenship.

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Oct 20, Colombo -- A top Tamil Tiger leader said Monday that the rebels are ready to resume peace talks before the government reviews their power-sharing plan, reversing the guerrillas' earlier demand to negotiate only after the proposal is accepted. ``We are ready to attend the peace talks any time,' said M. Karuna, a senior guerrilla commander. ``We will join the talks even if the government of Sri Lanka invites us before reviewing our proposals.' The Tigers had earlier said they would not resume peace talks until Colombo accepted their proposal to give ethnic Tamils greater control in the island's northeast. The plan will be handed to Norwegian peace brokers before Oct. 26, Karuna was quoted as saying by the TamilNet Website, which reports on Tamil affairs. Officials involved in the peace process said the Tigers reconsidered their stand after discussions in Oslo last week with Vidar Helgesen, Norway's deputy foreign minister, and Erik Solheim, a peace broker who has been trying to bring the two sides together.

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Oct 20, Colombo -- A soldier threw a grenade at his wife on a busy street in southern Sri Lanka on Monday, killing a 10-year-old girl and wounding 34 other passers-by, police said. The wife was in critical condition along with the other wounded in the town of Galle, 65 miles south of Colombo, hospital officials said. The suspect was set upon by other passers-by and was also hurt, according to witnesses. He was arrested and was being questioned, said M.N. Junaid, secretary to the interior ministry in charge of police. It was not immediately clear what the couple argued about or if they were related to the girl who was killed. Sri Lanka has been fighting a 19-year civil war with the Tamil Tiger rebels that has killed nearly 65,000 people.

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Oct 20, Quetta, Pakistan -- Abdul Zahir and 14 other Pakistani men set out by bus for Afghanistan last summer, determined to join Taliban forces waging a renewed jihad against U.S. and Afghan government troops. t was almost too easy. Stopped by border guards in the town of Chaman, they said they were Afghan refugees returning home on various personal or business errands, Zahir said. "I said I had sold a water buffalo to someone in Afghanistan and I needed to collect my money." The guards waved them through. A few days later, he and his comrades joined a Taliban unit in the mountains of Zabol province, where they were issued weapons and spent the next 40 days engaged in sporadic combat -- including the ambush of an Afghan army patrol -- before he and several others returned to Pakistan by taxi in late July. Their commander gave them each 250 Pakistani rupees -- about $4.50 -- to cover the fare.

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Oct 20, Calcutta, India -- Wounds were dressed, children fed and the elderly nursed as Mother Teresa's charity went on helping the needy on Monday, a day after a quarter-million people celebrated her beatification in Vatican City. "The beatification gives us new vigor and zeal because Mother Teresa has been held up as a model of holiness by the Roman Catholic Church," Sister Christie of the Missionaries of Charity told The Associated Press. "We express all our joy, sorrow, gratefulness through prayer and service. So, it's normal work for us now after a wonderful Sunday," said Sister Paula Marie. At a home for the poor, sisters and volunteers of the order tended to the festering injuries of an old man picked up from the pavement. "He was lying near a heap of garbage, almost dead from hunger and bleeding from two wounds on his legs," said Agatha, a volunteer from the Netherlands who gave only her first name. At an orphanage, nuns bathed and fed the children.

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Oct 20, Dhaka -- Almost 60 percent of South Asia's nearly 1.7 billion people suffer from poor sanitation, which causes thousands of deaths each year as well as malnutrition and lost working hours, organizers of a regional conference said Monday. ``Sixty percent of people do not have access to safe sanitation and the result is a heavy toll — mostly on children's and women's health — and malnutrition and deaths caused by preventable diseases like diarrhea,' Naseem-ur-Rehman of the United Nations Children's Fund told reporters Monday on the eve of the conference. Poor sanitation is hampering socio-economic development in one of the world's poorest regions, as children often have to miss school and adults cannot go to work due to ill health, the organizers said. It also causes pollution as millions of people useair latrines and dump human waste in rivers, ponds and lakes that are sources of drinking water. ``The practice ofdefecation by the majority in this region is a serious threat to the environment and disease control,' Bangladesh's Local Government Division, another organizer, said in a statement. Seeking to raise political awareness, nearly 115 delegates from Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh will gather in Dhaka for the three-day conference that begins Tuesday.

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Oct 20, Srinagar, India -- Suspected Islamic militants hurled a grenade at a busy bus station in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Monday, injuring at least 30 people, police said. The militants apparently were targeting a paramilitary police post, but it missed and exploded near the bus station where scores of people were waiting to board buses, an official said. "At least 30 people were injured in the grenade attack in the Batmalloo suburb of Srinagar," said Tirath Acharya, spokesman of the paramilitary Border Security Force. Srinagar is the summer capital of the northern Indian state of Jammu-Kashmir, which both India and Pakistan claim in its entirety. Panicked passengers scattered and nearby shopkeepers fled their shops after the powerful blast. No militant group has claimed responsibility for the blast, Acharya said.

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Gov. Mike Foster charges on the radio that if Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco is elected governor, her husband "would be the most powerful man in Louisiana."Vernon Parish voter Neil Nash calls a news office to say he's voting for "that woman Blanco because we don't need this 32-year-old foreigner in the mansion."Ashley Bell, president of the College Democrats at Louisiana State University, in a call to Democratic students throughout the country to come campaign for Blanco, refers to Jindal incorrectly as an "Arab-American." He later apologizes, saying as a minority himself, he should have known better.No matter the results of the Nov. 15 runoff, Louisiana will make history electing its first woman governor or the nation's first Indian-American governor.

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The death sentence of an Arizona man for the 2001 hate-motivated murder of a Sikh gas station owner has confirmed East Bay Sikhs' trust in American justice, even if some disagree with the death penalty on religious grounds, leaders say."Justice has been done," said Hapreet Sandhu, president of the El Sobrante Sikh temple, where the victim, former Walnut Creek resident Balbir Singh Sodhi, worshipped before he moved to Arizona in 2000."The message goes out that hate crimes will not be tolerated, that in case of hate crimes, (authorities) will prosecute to the maximum limits," Sandhu said.On Sept. 15, 2001, Sodhi, who was about 50, became the first murder victim of a Sept. 11-related hate crime in America. He was shot to death from a pickup truck as he stood in front of the Mesa, Ariz., Chevron station he had bought less than a year earlier.

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Oct 20, Gurgaon, India -- Tarun Narula, a 25-year-old computer instructor, celebrated Mohandas K. Gandhi's birthday on Oct. 2 by going to the Metropolitan Mall. So did so many thousands of others that the parking lot was full, as were those of the other two malls across and down the street. Indian-made sport utility vehicles, cars and motorcycles fought for space, choking the roads of this satellite city south of Delhi. Inside the malls, young people sipped coffee at Barista Coffee, the Starbucks of India. They wandered through Indian department stores, Marks and Spencer, Lacoste and Reebok. Families took children to McDonald's, or the Subway sandwich shop. Moviegoers chose between "Boom," a Bollywood film with a decidedly Western touch of vulgarity, and "2 Fast 2 Furious." This is no longer the India of Gandhi, among history's most famous ascetics. The change in values, habits and options in India — not just from his day, but from a mere decade ago — is undeniable, and so is the sense of optimism about India's economic prospects. Much of India is still mired in poverty, but just over a decade after the Indian economy began shaking off its statist shackles andng to the outside world, it is booming. The surge is based on strong industry and agriculture, rising Indian and foreign investment and American-style consumer spending by a growing middle class, including the people under age 25 who now make up half the country's population.

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              --- South Asian News, October 20, 2003 ---

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