President’s punishment

“For me, this long ago ceased to be a political issue or a legal issue and became a personal one and everyday I do my best to put it right personally,” he said.

Insulting Gore
An ally of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad charged that US Vice President Al Gore’s speech supporting reform movements here was a play for the US presidency. “It is so cynically, so blatantly, for the benefit of presidential hopeful Al Gore,” Noordin Sophiee, a former advisor on APEC policy, said in a letter published in several newspapers in Malaysia. “It would seem that nothing less than a specific, calculated insult to Malaysiain terms of word and action would do if Gore is to reap sufficient capital for the US presidency,” he added. At a speech during a dinner hosted by the APEC Business Council and attended by Mahathir, Gore praised `brave’ Malaysians calling for reforms in weeks of protests by supporters of ousted deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim. “The Americans had agreed and given the undertaking that after speaking, Gore would sit and go through the first course before leaving for another appointment,” he said inhis letter. “Instead, he had his say and he rudely left. He was intent on insult.”

Confiscating counterfeits
In an effort to crack down on a flourishing counterfeit industry worth billions of dollars, design houses from Donna Karan to Versace are taking time out to give city cops crash courses in the finest fashion. The office of the Manhattan South Peddler Task Force, located a few blocks from Times Square, is cluttered with boxes of mostly counterfeit goods that a team of 25 plain-clothes officers have confiscated from small shops and street sellers. Fashion lessons have become a key part of efforts to crack down on the trade in fake brand-name goods. To make an arrest, officers must have `probable cause’ and that means knowing that a genuine Tag Heuer watch has two tiny Ts hidden on the plate, that logos on Prada bags are never stapled or glued but screwed on, and that a Rolex watch has the name engraved on the back. Counterfeiting costs the US economy some $200 billion a year, up from about$5.5 billion in 1982, according to official estimates.

Hitler’s nest
German authorities are to allow a resort hotel to be built at Hitler’s mountain retreat, the `Eagle’s Nest,’ where there will also be a museum on Nazi crimes, Bavarian state Finance Minister Kurt Falthauser said. The former Hitler residence, where he was often photographed with his companion Eva Braun, will be levelled and a 200-bed hotel put up in its place, to open in the year 2002. The semi-public Bayerische Landesbank bank is to invest $44 million dollars in the development. Falthauser said a documentation centre on Nazi crimes would also be built on the site, which after the Second World War was used as a rest-and-recuperation resort by US troops.

The Americans left in 1995. The human rights group Simon Wiesenthal Association had protested earlier this year against the project, claiming the site could become a magnet for neo-Nazis. But Bavarian authorities said the documentation centre would set the proper tone and be areminder of the crimes of the Nazi era.