The New Nation - Internet Edition

Rich, poor gap in Asia putting children's lives at risk: UN

AFP, Bangkok

The widening gap between the rich and poor in Asia's booming economies like India and China is leaving many mothers and children behind and putting youngsters' lives at risk, the UN said Tuesday.

UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency, said that more than 40 percent of the world's children who died before their fifth birthdays in 2006 lived in the Asia Pacific region, and that great improvements were needed.

"The divide between rich and poor is rising at a troubling rate within subregions of Asia Pacific, leaving vast numbers of mothers and children at risk," the State of Asia Pacific's Children 2008 report said.

Some 2.1 million under-fives died in India in 2006, and the report said the fast-growing economy must improve its health care, nutrition, education, gender equality and child protection across the board.

South Asia was lagging on public spending, with only 1.1 percent of gross domestic product allocated to health care.

The boom in private sector health care for the region's expanding middle classes was battering public health facilities, the report added, tempting qualified staff to better paid jobs in private clinics or overseas. With half of the world's kids living in the Asia Pacific, the report said that extending health services to the poorest people was key to achieving the 2015 global goal of reducing under-five mortality by two-thirds of 1990 levels.

"However the region's robust economic growth, the fastest in the world since 1990, has lifted millions out of poverty," UNICEF said in a statement.

Within the region, Southeast Asia made the largest strides in combating child deaths, with mortality for under-fives now half what it was in 1990.

In China, UNICEF said child mortality had dropped between 1970 and 1990, but added the decrease had since slowed and that the country needed to take big strides to regain early progress.

"China's overall disease profile now resembles that of an industrialized country, but inequities in access to quality health care and huge disparities in health outcomes remain prevalent and entrenched," it added.

The Asia Pacific as a whole has seen a 34 percent reduction in the under-fives mortality rate since 1990.

Out of every 1,000 births in the region in 2006, 59 infants died before their fifth birthday. The 2015 target is 30 deaths per 1,000 births.

Bush to kick off Asia trip with visit to S Korea

AP, Seoul

President Bush kicks off his Asian trip with a visit to a new friend while seeking solutions to sticky issues old and new.

After Bush arrives Tuesday in South Korea, he will meet for the third time with the conservative, pro-American president, Lee Myung-bak, who took office in February with promises to patch up relations with Washington that became strained under Seoul's previous decade of liberal governments.

Bush calls Lee a friend, which is good considering the raft of sensitive topics they will tackle Wednesday before the American president heads to Thailand, then to the Beijing Olympics.

At the top of the list is getting North Korea to live up to its commitment to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

Sunday is the earliest that Washington could move to strike North Korea from a list of state-sponsors of terrorism, a long-held demand from Pyongyang. But first, Washington wants the North to agree to procedures for verifying a declaration of its nuclear programs that Pyongyang submitted to the international arms talks - six months late and with fewer details than the U.S. originally demanded.

Washington has called for North Korea to allow thorough inspections and interviews with nuclear scientists, but Pyongyang has so far not accepted the proposal.

"We're at a very critical moment now for the North Korean government to make a decision as to whether or not they're going to verify what they said they would do," Bush said in an interview with China's state-run CCTV last week. "It's one thing to say it, but I think it's going to be very important for them to understand that we expect them to show us."

Clampdown in China Muslim region after attack on police

AFP, Kashgar

Chinese authorities moved Tuesday to keep a lid on further information about a bloody assault on police in Kashgar with a truck, explosives and machetes.

At the hotel directly across from the site of Monday's raid, which killed 16 policemen, guests were told in the morning that the Internet had been shut off across the city, on police orders. Police entered an AFP photographer's hotel room and forced him to delete photos he had taken of the scene. Plainclothes police followed journalists as they moved around the city. "We can't talk about that. You must understand if we talk about it, the police will come and arrest us," said a shopkeeper in Kashgar, a remote city in northwest China's Xinjiang region, who declined to be named.

Nevertheless some independent information emerged outside of the uniform coverage in China's state-run press, which was all based on reports from the official Xinhua news agency. Foreign witnesses described a "sickening" scene that unfolded as two assailants drove a truck at a group of policemen who were out jogging, then attacked the officers with small explosives and machetes.

Japan PM rules out visit to controversial shrine

Reuters, Tokyo

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda ruled out on Tuesday a visit to Tokyo's Yasakuni shrine, seen by many in Asia as a symbol of Japan's past militarism, on the August 15 anniversary of the country's surrender in World War Two.

Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi upset China and South Korea by visiting the shrine when he was in power and Japanese lawmakers, including some serving cabinet ministers, visit the Shinto shrine each anniversary to honor the war dead.

Asked whether he will go to Yasukuni shrine this month on the 63rd anniversary of Japan's surrender, Fukuda, who will attend the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony this week, told reporters: "Please look at my past behavior."

The 72-year-old premier vowed last year that he would not pay his respects at the shrine, which venerates Japan's 2.5 million war dead, including some convicted war criminals.

Finance Minister Bunmei Ibuki, newly appointed in a cabinet reshuffle last week, also said he would not visit the shrine on the anniversary.

Anthrax suspect connected to Princeton sorority

AP, Washington

One of the biggest mysteries surrounding the anthrax scare of 2001 - why the anthrax-laced letters were dropped off at a mailbox in New Jersey - may be connected to a sorority chapter at Princeton University. Bruce Ivins' decades-long obsession with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority could link the former Army biowarfare scientist to the four anthrax-laced letters, authorities said Monday.

Still, authorities acknowledge they cannot place Ivins in Princeton the day the anthrax was mailed. And the curious explanation connecting the scientist and a sorority is unlikely to satisfy his friends and former co-workers who question what motive the married father of two might have had for unleashing the attack.

Ivins, 62, killed himself last week as the Justice Department prepared to indict him on capital murder charges for the deaths of five people who were poisoned by the anthrax in the weeks following 9/11. His attorney maintains he would have been proven innocent were he still alive.

The mailbox just off the campus of Princeton University where the letters were mailed sits about 100 yards away from where the college's Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter stores its rush materials, initiation robes and other property.

Sorority members do not live there, and the Kappa chapter at Princeton does not provide a house for the women. Multiple U.S. officials told The Associated Press that Ivins was obsessed with Kappa Kappa Gamma, going back as far as his own college days at the University of Cincinnati when he apparently was rebuffed by a woman in the sorority. The officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

27 killed in Sri Lanka fighting

AFP, Colombo

At least 26 Tamil rebels and a government soldier were killed in fresh fighting in Sri Lanka's north, the defence ministry said Tuesday.

The clashes were in the Vavuniya, Mullaitivu and Weli Oya districts on Monday, the ministry said. There was no comment from the Tamil Tigers.

The latest fighting raises the number of rebels who have died in combat since January to 5,557, while 506 soldiers have been killed in the same period, according to a tally of defence ministry claims.

Independent verification of government figures is not possible as Colombo bars reporters from travelling to the combat zones.

Tens of thousands have died since the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam launched an armed struggle in 1972 aimed at carving out a separate homeland for minority Tamils in the island's north and east.

The government pulled out of a Norwegian-brokered truce with the rebels in January.

Leader of US-allied Sunni group killed in Iraq

AP, Baghdad

A member of a U.S.-allied Sunni group says that gunmen killed one of the group's senior leaders and six of his guards in an ambush south of Baghdad.

The official says the gunmen attacked the convoy of Sheik Ibrahim al-Karbouli in Youssifiyah on Monday. He was a senior leader of the so-called awakening council in the town, which is a former al-Qaida stronghold about 12 miles south of Baghdad.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity out of fears for his own security.

Al-Qaida has frequently mounted reprisal attacks against awakening councils because of their success in cutting into support for the terror movement among Iraqi Sunni Arabs.

5 Taliban killed in clash with Afghan police

AP, Kandahar

An official says police have killed five Taliban fighters in a gunbattle in southern Afghanistan.

Abdullah Khan, who is the deputy police chief of Kandahar province, says the militants ambushed a police patrol in Panjwayi district Monday.

Khan says officers fired back and killed five of the attackers. He said no police were wounded.

Southern Afghanistan is a focus for Taliban-led militants who are stepping up their campaign against the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.

More than 2,700 people have died in insurgency-related violence so far this year, according to an Associated Press tally of figures provided by Afghan and Western officials.

Obama backs some drilling, tapping oil stockpile

AP, Lansing

Barack Obama put forward a broad energy plan Monday designed to end U.S. reliance on imported oil within 10 years and shore up his standing amid a tightening White House race and high anxiety over gas prices.

Obama's proposal, though, includes two significant reversals of past positions: He had steadfastly fought the idea of limited new offshore drilling and had been against tapping the nation's emergency oil stockpile to relieve pump prices that have stubbornly hovered around $4 a gallon.

In a speech in Michigan, the Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting also endorsed long-term work on hybrid cars and renewable energy sources.

"Breaking our oil addiction is one of the greatest challenges our generation will ever face," the Illinois Democrat told a supportive audience as he began a week's focus on energy issues. "It will take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy," he said.

Presumed Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, speaking in Pennsylvania, again advocated more oil drilling off the U.S. coast. "Anybody who says that we can achieve energy independence without using and increasing these existing energy resources either doesn't have the experience to understand the challenge that we face or isn't giving the American people some straight talk," he said.

Israel's Barak predicts more strikes on Gaza

AFP, Jerusalem

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said Israel will go back to carrying out military strikes on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip despite a month-old truce, army radio reported on Tuesday.

"Those who miss the operations in the Gaza Strip, don't worry, they will come," Barak told a Labour party event in Jerusalem, without elaborating.

In June, Israel agreed to an Egyptian-brokered truce with Palestinian militants in Gaza that has mostly halted the near daily rocket and mortar attacks launched from the impoverished territory on southern Israel. But Israeli officials remain wary of the deal and suspect Gaza's Hamas rulers and other armed groups are using the calm to train and rearm with weapons smuggled through a vast network of tunnels under the border with Egypt.

Israel had also said the truce depended on progress in releasing Gilad Shalit, an Israeli corporal seized by Gaza militants in a deadly cross-border raid on June 25, 2006.

Lebanon-Syria summit to be held next week

AFP, Beirut

Lebanon's President Michel Sleiman will visit Damascus next week for talks with Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad, as the two neighbours move to establish diplomatic ties, an official said on Tuesday.

"The summit will be held on August 13," an official from the presidential palace told AFP.

Relations have been tense since Syria pulled out its troops from Lebanon in 2005 in the aftermath of the assassination of Lebanese billionaire former premier Rafiq Hariri, ending a three-decade military presence.

Syria was widely blamed for the killing but denies involvement and the issue remains a key bone of contention between the two countries. It will be Sleiman's first official visit to Syria and the first meeting with Assad since the two leaders announced in Paris last month that they planned to establish ties.

The two countries have never had official diplomatic relations and the move is widely seen as a necessary step for Syrian recognition of Lebanese sovereignty.

More AIDS risked as poor women trade sex for food

Reuters, Mexico City

Rising food prices around the world are likely to drive poor women to trade sex for basic goods like fish and cooking oil, raising the risk of new AIDS infections, U.N officials said on Monday.

Delegates at a major AIDS conference in Mexico cited the cases of fisherwomen in the Pacific and women in Kenya desperate for food being forced to sell their bodies, adding to concerns of a new twist in the spread of the deadly pandemic. "Food is such a basic need that you can see people really going to great lengths," said Fadzai Mukonoweshuro of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization in southern Africa. Climbing food prices-due to increased use of biofuels, the growing demand for grains to feed a booming Asia, droughts and market speculation-caused 50 million more people to go hungry last year compared to the year before, the United Nations said.

"That might lead to various distress responses, one of which on the part of women is having transactional sex to feed their kids," Stuart Gillespie of the International Food Policy Research Institute said.

Olmert, Abbas to meet in Jerusalem today

Reuters, Jerusalem

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet in Jerusalem on Wednesday, a week after Olmert threw U.S.-sponsored peace talks into turmoil by announcing that he would step down.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the meeting would take place at Olmert's official residence in Jerusalem. "The president will raise a number of issues, such as the permanent-status issues, checkpoints and prisoners," he said.

Olmert's spokesman, Mark Regev, confirmed that the meeting would take place on Wednesday. Faced with a widening corruption probe, Olmert announced last Wednesday that he would stand down as premier after a September 17 leadership contest within his centrist Kadima party.

It could take months for a new Kadima leader to form a new government, possibly giving Olmert some time to press ahead with the negotiations.

Power-sharing deal closes in Zimbabwe

Reuters, Johannesburg

Zimbabwe's ruling party and opposition are close to a power-sharing deal to end a political crisis, a South African newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Zimbabwean government officials and opposition members were not immediately available for comment on the report in The Star newspaper.

It cited unnamed sources close to the negotiations as saying the agreement would make opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai prime minister and President Robert Mugabe ceremonial president. "They are down to detail now," said one source.

"Although how long that will take is still unclear. But a deal is not far off. Not at all." Mugabe's ZANU-PF began power-sharing talks with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change two weeks ago in South Africa to try to resolve the crisis after Mugabe's unopposed re-election in a poll boycotted by the opposition. Talks between ZANU-PF and the opposition resumed on Sunday after adjourning early last week, South Africa's presidency said. South African President Thabo Mbeki has been mediating.