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To: Alighieri who wrote (155224)	11/25/2002 6:06:36 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1579924

YES!!! One for the good guys! ___________________________________________________________ Austria's Haider Sick of Politics After Rout By REUTERS Filed at 12:00 p.m. ET VIENNA (Reuters) - Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider said Monday he was sick of politics and would resign from his regional governor's post after a crushing defeat in Sunday's snap elections left his Freedom Party in shambles. Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, his position boosted by a landslide victory for his conservative People's Party, set out to form a new government. Schuessel, who would clearly call the shots in any new government, has signaled he is ready to revive the almost three-year old center-right coalition with the Freedom Party. The Freedom Party, which former chairman Haider transformed into Europe's most successful far-right party with 27 percent of Austria's vote in 1999, lost almost two thirds of that support. The anti-immigration, Euroskeptic Freedom Party, which caused international outrage when it entered government with Schuessel's party in 2000, this time gathered a mere 10.2 percent of the vote, a quarter of Schuessel's 42.3 percent. Haider, who has dominated Austrian politics for the past 16 years, said he was so stung by the results that he would offer to resign as governor of the southern province of Carinthia. ``I was deeply hurt by the election results and see that there is a great deal of distrust toward me,'' Haider said on Carinthia radio. ``I've absolutely had my fill of politics.'' It was unclear if the Carinthian Freedom Party would accept Haider's resignation, or if Haider was once again playing hard-to-get in an attempt to force his will on the party. He officially resigned as party chief in May 2000, but has since continued to rule the party from behind the scenes. Asked if he could be persuaded to change his mind from what would represent his fifth ``retirement'' from national politics, Haider said: ``It will be very difficult.'' THE WEAKER, THE BETTER Analysts said the weakness of Haider's far-right movement could make them an attractive partner for Schuessel, as he would clearly dominate any coalition. But teaming up with the fractured Freedom Party clearly has its risks. ``He doesn't want a coalition partner who next year throws it all in and there's new elections again, so it's a double-edged sword for him,'' said Melanie Sully, a professor at the Vienna Diplomatic Academy. The leftist Social Democrats, who came second with 36.9 percent of the vote, appeared to rule out a revival of the ``grand coalition'' which governed Austria for much of the post-war period until 2000. A shrewd tactician, Schuessel managed to woo Freedom voters disillusioned at the far-right's in-fighting, policy squabbles and opposition to the EU's eastward expansion in 2004. In his biggest campaign coup, Schuessel recruited the Freedom Party's Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser. But coalition talks with the Freedom Party could be complicated, as party chairman Herbert Haupt said he refused to be in a government with Grasser, whom Haider ousted in September in a dispute over a delay in promised tax cuts. The crisis prompted Schuessel to dissolve parliament and call an election. Ignoring Haupt's opposition, Schuessel said he was duty-bound to keep his popular finance minister, who last year balanced Austria's budget for the first time in decades. ``I owe it to the voters,'' he was quoted as saying by Kurier daily. ``The chancellor and finance minister are one team.'' Investors greeted the victory of Schuessel's pro-privatization conservatives with a sigh of relief. Vienna's benchmark ATX index was last up 0.6 percent and traders said shares of some of the country's major companies which are still partly state-owned were bound to rise in coming days. Outgoing vice chancellor and former Haider protege Susanne Riess-Passer blamed the Freedom Party firebrand, Austria's most colorful politician, for the embarrassing election failure. ``It took 13 years to build it all up and only 13 weeks to destroy it,'' she said in the daily Die Presse, referring to the impact of Haider's September coup which toppled the government and ousted her from the party chair. While Schuessel has hinted at his preference for a renewal of the outgoing center-right coalition with the Freedom Party, he also said he was open to discussions with the other two parties, the Social Democrats and the Greens. Coalition talks could take weeks, and will only start once the president has talked to all party leaders Monday. Copyright Reuters Ltd. \| Privacy Policy

To: Alighieri who wrote (155224)	11/25/2002 6:12:41 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579924

Al, Hmmmmmmmmmm...........isn't Pakistan one of Bush's compadre's in the war on terrorism? ____________________________________________________________ The New York Times ALLIANCES In North Korea and Pakistan, Deep Roots of Nuclear Barter By DAVID E. SANGER SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 21 — Last July, American intelligence agencies tracked a Pakistani cargo aircraft as it landed at a North Korean airfield and took on a secret payload: ballistic missile parts, the chief export of North Korea's military. The shipment was brazen enough, in full view of American spy satellites. But intelligence officials who described the incident say even the mode of transport seemed a subtle slap at Washington: the Pakistani plane was an American-built C-130. It was part of the military force that President Pervez Musharraf had told President Bush last year would be devoted to hunting down the terrorists of Al Qaeda, one reason the administration was hailing its new cooperation with a country that only a year before it had labeled a rogue state. But several times since that new alliance was cemented, American intelligence agencies watched silently as Pakistan's air fleet conducted a deadly barter with North Korea. In transactions intelligence agencies are still unraveling, the North provided General Musharraf with missile parts he needs to build a nuclear arsenal capable of reaching every strategic site in India. In a perfect marriage of interests, Pakistan provided the North with many of the designs for gas centrifuges and much of the machinery it needs to make highly enriched uranium for the country's latest nuclear weapons project, one intended to put at risk South Korea, Japan and 100,000 American troops in Northeast Asia. The Central Intelligence Agency told members of Congress this week that North Korea's uranium enrichment program, which it discovered only this summer, will produce enough material to produce weapons in two to three years. Previously it has estimated that North Korea probably extracted enough plutonium from a nuclear reactor to build one or two weapons, until that program was halted in 1994 in a confrontation with the United States. Yet the C.I.A. report — at least the unclassified version — made no mention of how one of the world's poorest and most isolated nations put together its new, complex uranium project. In interviews over the past three weeks, officials and experts in Washington, Pakistan and here in the capital of South Korea described a relationship between North Korea and Pakistan that now appears much deeper and more dangerous than the United States and its Asian allies first suspected. The accounts raise disturbing questions about the nature of the uneasy American alliance with General Musharraf's government. The officials and experts described how, even after Mr. Musharraf sided with the United States in ousting the Taliban and hunting down Qaeda leaders, Pakistan's secretive A. Q. Khan Nuclear Research Laboratories continued its murky relationship with the North Korean military. It was a partnership linking an insecure Islamic nation and a failing Communist one, each in need of the other's expertise. Pakistan was desperate to counter India's superior military force, but encountered years of American-imposed sanctions, so it turned to North Korea. For its part, North Korea, increasingly cut off from Russia and China, tried to replicate Pakistan's success in developing nuclear weapons based on uranium, one of the few commodities that North Korea has in plentiful supply. Yet while the United States has put tremendous diplomatic pressure on North Korea in the past two months to abandon the project, and has cut off oil supplies to the country, it has never publicly discussed the role of Pakistan or other nations in supplying that effort. American and South Korean officials, when speaking anonymously, say the reason is obvious: the Bush administration has determined that Pakistan's cooperation in the search for Al Qaeda is so critical — especially with new evidence suggesting that Osama bin Laden is still alive, perhaps on Pakistani soil. So far, the White House has ignored federal statutes that require President Bush to impose stiff economic penalties on any country involved in nuclear proliferation or, alternatively, to issue a public waiver of those penalties in the interest of national security. Mr. Bush last year removed penalties that were imposed on Pakistan after it set off a series of nuclear tests in 1998. Continued 1 \| 2 \| 3 \| 4 \| Next>> . Copyright The New York Times Company \| Permissions \| Privacy Policy Reuters, 2000