A busy day in India, Afghanistan, Iran and in fact, the rest of the world, as presented by the BBC World Service on December 20,2000
Starting with a surprise announcement; Pakistan on Wednesday ordered a partial withdrawal of its troops from the war-torn border dividing disputed Kashmir with its longtime rival India. The withdrawal order followed an Indian offer to extend by one month a cease-fire with Islamic militants waging a bitter insurgency in the Himalayan region, seeking independence or unity with Pakistan. Pakistan’s military rulers urged India to respond by withdrawing some of its soldiers from the border.
And from Afghanistan – The U.N. Security Council voted to impose broad sanctions on Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers unless they close “terrorist” training camps and surrender U.S. embassy bombing suspect Osama bin Laden. The resolution, sponsored by the United States and Russia, won approval despite opposition from U.N. Secretary-General 1 Kofi Annan and aid groups. China and Malaysia abstained, saying the new measures would further harm the Afghan people, already suffering from a 20-year war, poverty and drought.
And from America: MOBILE phones have been given a clean bill of health links with brain tumors. A study of 891 mobile users revealed no link between the time spent on calls and the risk of cancer. But the American research team said more work was needed before it could be assumed that mobiles were safe in the long term. Despite the health scares of recent years, there is no scientific evidence that mobiles pose any health risk. scientists from the American Health Foundation and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York interviewed 469 men and women diagnosed with primary brain cancer and 422 without between 1994 and 1998.
And while the India ceasefire in Kashmir is being closely monitored, that’s just a small slice of the news, as it happened around the world, for this December 20, 2000 as reported by the BBC World Service.
Getting the bigger picture of life on Earth, twenty-four years ago.
