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WASHINGTON: A key advisor to Barack Obama quit Friday after
calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” and sparking a new Iraq war
policy row, as the hyper-competitive Democratic White House race
took another nasty twist. A day ahead of the next caucuses in the
western state of Wyoming, the Clinton camp crowed that it was
“amateur hour” in the Obama campaign’s foreign policy team,
after Pulitzer Prize winner and Obama foreign policy advisor
Samantha Power’s explosive remarks during a book tour in Britain.
The episode suggested the frustration in the Obama camp after the
former first lady’s comeback wins in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday
revived her campaign.
-- AFP
SEOUL: Communist North Korea Saturday marked
International Women’s Day by urging its women to reject Western
fashions and to “set good examples” in their clothes and
hairstyles. While the UN has lent its support to a worldwide drive
to invest in women and girls to foster gender equality, the
reclusive state has issued its own calls to its female population.
In an editorial by Rodong Sinmun, the official daily of the
North’s ruling Korean Workers’ Party, it urged women to raise
their children as trustworthy revolutionaries “thoroughly armed
with revolutionary principles and class consciousness, women must
not allow reactionary ideas and alien lifestyles being propagated by
imperialists to penetrate our society.”
-- AFP
BEIJING: China will take tangible measures to
save energy and cut pollution in 2008, Li Pumin, the spokesman for
the National Development and Reform Commission, said on Saturday in
an interview posted on the Chinese www.gov.cn website. “The
country will continue eliminating outdated production capacity,
including 13 million kilowatts of small thermal power plant
capacity, 50 million tons of cement capacity, 6 million tons of
steel capacity and 14 million tons of iron production capacity,”
said Li. China plans to eliminate 100 million tons of iron
production capacity and 55 million tons of steel production capacity
from 2006 to 2010.
-- Xinhua
PORT-AU-PRINCE: Dozens of voodoo practitioners
dressed in white, scarves around their necks in red, yellow or green
transformed a Haitian dance hall into a temple on Friday to pay
homage to their first-ever “supreme master,” the 72-year-old Max
Beauvoir. “Open the barriers,” a sole voice intoned in Creole.
“The master has arrived,” as men and women rose to greet their
leader. An anthropologist, Beauvoir is well known to his fellow
voodooists. He has written numerous works about the religion, and is
often called upon to defend it for followers in other countries who
are often too shy about their beliefs to practice in public. “We
do not want to vie with other religions, but we want to recover our
real place in society,” Beauvoir said.
-- AFP
PRISTINA, Serbia: A senior US official on Friday
rejected Russian claims that the Western-backed declaration of
independence left Kosovo destined for partition. “Independence is
a fact. This is a reality. History is only going to move forward,”
said US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried in Pristina after
his meeting with Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu. Serbia’s ally
Russia strongly opposes the secession of Kosovo from Serbia. The
Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, said
Tuesday Moscow had warned repeatedly that a “unilateral
declaration of independence might lead to the de facto partitioning
of Kosovo, and this is exactly what is happening there.” Ethnic
Serbs in northern Kosovo have staged protests since Kosovo’s
unilateral declaration of independence.
-- Xinhua
BANGKOK: A Thai court Saturday sent Russian arms
dealer Viktor Bout to a maximum security prison, as his lawyer
denied that the man known as the “Merchant of Death” was
supplying arms to Colombian rebels. Over the years, the former
Soviet air force officer is said to have supplied arms to
Afghanistan’s hardline Taliban militia, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda
terror network, Marxist rebels in South America and former Liberian
leader Charles Taylor. Bout, 41, appeared relaxed during his brief
hearing Saturday, giving a thumbs-up to a Russian man in the crowd
at the courthouse while joking and laughing with police as he waited
to be taken to the Klong Prem prison outside Bangkok.
-- AFP
YANGON: Myanmar’s prodemocracy leader Aung San
Suu Kyi was taken Saturday in a convoy from the home where she is
under house arrest, apparently to meet with visiting UN envoy
Ibrahim Gambari, witnesses said.She was taken to the State
Guesthouse, a military facility near her home, where Gambari has
conducted most of his meetings since he arrived here on Thursday.
Myanmar officials could not immediately confirm that she would meet
Gambari, who earlier held talks with top officials from her National
League for Democracy (NLD) party.
-- AFP
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