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UN chief
meets with Arab representatives for talks on
Iraq
UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday met
with Arab countries to hear their views about
the situation in Iraq before starting a series
of meetings this week with the regional
groupings of UN Member States.
Speaking to
reporters after the meeting, Annan said the
Arab Group was concerned about the situation
on the ground, as well as the Iraqi population
and the civilian casualties.
"They are
also anxious that assistance should get to the
cities and to the people as soon as
possible," he said. "But of course
they are worried as to how all this is going
to turn out, which nobody really knows."
As for the
Oil-for-Food program, the UN chief said he
thought the world body was taking steps to be
able to get food to those in need. Some 60
percent of the Iraqi population depends solely
on the program for their daily rations.
"We would
expect the belligerents, we would expect the
Government of Iraq and the coalition forces to
give us humanitarian access and help us create
humanitarian space for us to do our work and
get assistance to the needy," he said.
NBC fires
journalist for giving interview with Iraqi
national TV
NBC, one of
major US television networks, said Monday they
had terminated their relationship with
journalist Peter Arnett after he told
state-run Iraqi TV that the US-led coalition's
initial war plan had failed.
"It was
wrong for Mr. Arnett to grant an interview to
state controlled Iraqi TV -- especially at a
time of war -- and it was wrong for him to
discuss his personal observations and opinions
in that interview," NBC News President
Neal Shapiro said in a statement.
Arnett went to
Iraq this year not as an NBC News reporter but
as an employee of the "National
Geographic Explorer" program made by
MSNBC, an NBC News-Microsoft joint venture.
When other NBC reporters left Baghdad for
safety reasons, NBC began airing his reports.
In the
interview, broadcast by Iraq's satellite
television station Sunday, Arnett said the
United States was reappraising the battlefield
and delaying the war, maybe for a week,
"and rewriting the war plan."
"The first
war plan has failed because of Iraqi
resistance. Now they are trying to write
another war plan," he said.
"Clearly, the American war plans
misjudged the determination of the Iraqi
forces."
He said reports
from Baghdad about civilian casualties and
those about the resistance of the Iraqi
forces, had helped antiwar protesters in the
United States undermine the Bush
administration's strategy.
NBC initially
backed Arnett's interview on Sunday, saying
the "impromptu interview" was done
as a professional courtesy and his remarks
were "analytical in nature."
Arnett, who won
a Pulitzer Prize reporting in Vietnam for The
Associated Press, appeared on NBC's
"Today" show Monday to apologize for
his statements before the network announced
its decision to fire him. "I want to
apologize to the American people for clearly
making a misjudgment," he said.
NBC said Arnett
would not be reporting for "National
Geographic Explorer" either.
Arnett garnered
much of his prominence from covering the 1991
Gulf War for another major television network,
the Cable News Network (CNN). He was among a
few American television reporters left in
Baghdad when the war began then.
The first Bush
administration was unhappy with his reporting,
suggesting that he had become a conveyor of
propaganda. He was once denounced for his
reporting about an allied bombing of a baby
milk factory in Baghdad that the military said
was a biological weapons plant.
In 1998, he was
reprimanded over a CNN report accusing US
forces of using sarin gas on a Laotian village
in 1970 to kill US defectors. Two CNN
employees were sacked.
Nigerian
consul-general's residence robbed in
Johannesburg
The family of
Nigerian Consul-General Charles Onwuagbu were
held up at their residence in Houghton,
central Johannesburg, on Sunday night but the
robbers fled with little when the alarm was
raised.
A spokeswoman
for the consulate, Stella Arah, said on Monday
three armed men broke into Onwuagbu's
residence around 6.15 p.m. (1415 GMT) on
Sunday, the South African Press Association
reported.
One of the
robbers was dressed in the uniform of the
security company guarding the property and he
tricked one of the guards into letting him
inside. He then handcuffed the guard before
letting the other two robbers into the
property.
The robbers
tied up two other guards before making their
way into the building. They held up the
consul's wife Nneka Onwuagbu and their four
children, who are in their late teens and
early 20s. They took cash from the family.
The
consul-general was not at home, having left to
meet a delegation from Nigeria.
Arah said a
bystander outside was then noticed that the
building's power had been switched off and
called across the road to guards at former
president Nelson Mandela's residence. The
alarm was raised.
The fleeing
robbers left behind the electronic equipment
they had gathered, Arah said. "There is a
growing disquiet among the members of the
Nigerian diplomatic community at the
increasing rate of these robbery
incidents," Arah said.
South African
Police Service spokeswoman Superintendent Mary
Martins-Engelbrecht confirmed that a robbery
was reported to police on Sunday night.
South Africa is
known for its high crime rate, and
Johannesburg was nicknamed as the Capital of
Crime.
US, British
soldiers change tactics
US and British
soldiers have changed their tactics in
fighting with Iraqi militia, Iraqi Information
Minister Mohammad Said Al-Sahaf said on
Tuesday.
Coalition
soldiers adopted a new tactic to avoid being
exposed to Iraqi militia by setting up small
hiding places, the Iraqi minister told a press
conference.
Iraqi militia
discovered one such hiding place and destroyed
five tanks and four armored personnel carriers
and killed all enemy soldiers inside the
vehicles along the main road from Nasiriyah
and Baghdad, he said.
Nasiriyah, 375
kilometers south of Baghdad, has been a major
battlefield over the past few days between
Iraqi forces and US troops.
Iraqi forces
killed 43 US and British soldiers and
destroyed 13tanks, eight personnel carriers
and six armored vehicles during the past 24
hours, the Iraqi minister said.
SARS claims 4th
victim in Singapore
The mysterious
respiratory disease claimed the fourth victim
in Singapore on Monday but no new case was
reported on the day, the Ministry of Health (MOH)
said in a press release.
The MOH also
noted that more patients with severe acute
respiratory syndrome (SARS) are recovering and
discharged from hospital.
The latest
death was a woman who had traveled to Sarawak
with her family on 15 March and had developed
fever when she returned to Singapore on March
18.
She presented
at National University Hospital (NUH) with
features of pneumonia on March 24 and was
warded not as a SARS patient because medical
staff were unable to obtain from relatives a
history of her contact with any patient with
SARS and she had not traveled to any SARS-affected
area.
She was too
sick to be transferred to Tan Tock Seng
Hospital (TTSH) chosen for treating SARS
patients and was treated as a potentially
infectious patient in an isolation room at the
NUH.
On March 30,
one of her relatives said that the patient had
visited a non-SARS patient in a ward in TTSH
on 12 March and a patient in the ward was
later found to have SARS. Despite intensive
treatment, her condition worsened and she
passed away on March 31.
The MOH said
that this patient is being considered as a
case of SARS and contact tracing is being
carried out as a precautionary measure.
According to
the MOH, as of March 31, a total of 92
patients with SARS had been reported to the
MOH and the total number of people who have
recovered from SARS and been discharged from
hospital is 41. The remaining 47 patients are
still in hospital.
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