UFO Info Week-End

Sensitive sites previously included various ministries Republican Guard facilities and Iraqi intelligence

“Sensitive” sites previously included various ministries, Republican Guard facilities and Iraqi intelligence offices.However, the key test will come when the inspectors are back in the field.Baghdad claimed that Mr Powell’s intervention had been made because the negotiations in Vienna were going well. After an emergency meeting of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council, chaired by Saddam Hussein, the regime issued a belligerent statement accusing the United States of beating the “drums of war”.In New York, there were indications that the US was considering acquiescing to a French demand that the council should take a two-step approach to the issue. This would entail passage of a first resolution demanding unfettered access for inspectors. But the threat of military force would be reserved for a second resolution.While London and Washington continued to state publicly that they wanted a single resolution that would include a clear threat of force, sources said that Britain would accept a compromise along the lines rehearsed by France.George Bush again urged the UN to take his more robust, single-resolution, approach. “The United Nations must show its backbone and we’ll work with members of the Security Council to put a little calcium there,” he said.Britain and the US held their first negotiations on a possible resolution with the other three permanent members of the UN council: France, China and Russia.Mr Blix briefed the Security Council president on the outcome of his talks, which allowed him to nail down mundane but none the less important practical arrangements for his inspections, regarding matters such as visas, accommodation, and transport for his teams..

Elections in Indian-controlled Kashmir limped into the third of four rounds yesterday amid fresh bloodshed that killed 18, adding more names to the hundreds reported dead in two months. For 20 minutes the gunmen – in police uniforms – raked the vehicle, which had been driven from Delhi, with automatic fire and lobbed in grenades. The same group said it was behind the killing last month of the state law minister, Mushtaq Lone, a leader of the pro-India National Conference party. Indian police believe al-Arfeen is an offshoot of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyiba militant group.Since the poll was announced in early August there has been an unremitting tide of deaths, with estimates of more than 600. Voters have cast their ballots behind walls of sandbags and barbed wire; dozens of party workers have been killed.

India hopes the election, which has been boycotted by separatists, will endorse its rule.Although there have been relatively few reports of blatant rigging, some suggestions of skulduggery emerged yesterday. In the village of Akad, 47 miles south of Srinagar, about 30 people surrounded the car of Associated Press journalists and complained that security forces were forcing them out of their houses to vote.”They have retained our identity cards and said that they won’t return them until we show the voting marks,” said Mushtaq Ahmad, referring to the ink mark drawn on fingernails by polling officials after a vote. But India has been portraying the elections as a success, showing high turnout figures in the first two rounds of more than 40 per cent (although in Srinagar, the summer capital, the official figure was a mere 11 per cent).India’s election commission yesterday put the turnout for the third round – which was for 27 seats in the volatile districts of Anantnag, Pulwama, Udhampur and Kathua, at 41 per cent. Pakistani officials dismiss the poll as a farce, saying the Indian turnout figures are false, and the true numbers are significantly lower.India views the level of election violence as a test of Pakistan’s fitness for a possible future dialogue over Kashmir.India’s finance minister, Jaswant Singh, won headlines yesterday after raising the spectre of a pre-emptive strike, saying it was every country’s right to prevent injury to itself.. Election-related violence continued in Indian-controlled Kashmir today when guerrillas mounted a series of attacks which left at least 10 people dead. A prominent critic of Robert Mugabe and a Briton were expected to appear in court yesterday after being arrested trying to film abuse of Zimbabwean council elections.

Mr Bennett’s wife, Heather, “heard loud screaming from the area where Mr Magwaza was being held”, according to the campaign group Save Zimbabwe.Mr Magwaza briefly escaped from the cell but was caught and dragged back before the screaming started again, Mrs Bennett said.Mr Girvin, 40, a naturalised British citizen who was born in Zimbabwe, is a diabetic and was denied medication, according to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).Mr Bennett and the other white opposition MP, David Coltart, have been the target of vociferous attacks by the Mugabe regime. Mr Bennett represents Chimanimani and has refused to leave his farm under Zimbabwe’s land reforms. On his return from the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, President Mugabe said: “The Bennetts and the Coltarts are not part of our society They belong to Britain and let them go there. If they want to stay here, we will say, ‘Stay here, but your place is in jail.’”Mr Coltart, the shadow justice minister, said he expected the three men to be freed yesterday or today, but said it remained unclear what the men would be charged with because they had been denied access to lawyers.