Bush, Putin sign N-deal

Russian leader Vladimir Putin and US President George W Bush have signed a landmark treaty to slash their long-range nuclear warheads by two-thirds with both men hailing the event as historic. "We are going to cast aside all doubts and suspicions and welcome a new era of relations," Bush said in a televised face-to-face meeting with Putin shortly before the signing ceremony in the elegant Kremlin fortress. "Today we may say we are creating qualitatively new relations," Putin told Bush. The Treaty of Moscow will liquidate the cold waronce and for all, it was claimed

- Hindustan times May 25, 2002

MORI - an opinion poll on Kashmir

In Kashmir, just as surely as one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, one man's concern is another's conspiracy. Conspiracy theories have come rushing in, how would they not, after a MORI (Market and Opinion Research) an organisation based at U K. poll showed that 10 times as many Kashmiris would rather be with India than with Pakistan.

The survey in Kashmir Valley, Jammu and Leh showed that 61 per cent would rather see Kashmir as a part of India than of Pakistan.

MORI, perhaps the world's most respected agency for conducting opinion polls, insists its Kashmir survey wasn't rigged. "It was done with absolute integrity and honesty," Peter Hutton, deputy managing director of MORI in London, told Outlook. The poll was conducted "by professional researchers from our representatives in India Facts Worldwide", he said, adding that the questions were designed at their offices in London to be fair and objective and weren't very complimentary about either the Indian or the Pakistani role. Hutton says they did their sampling "as fairly as we could" and used "Muslim interviewers in Muslim areas and Hindu interviewers in Hindu areas to minimise any bias from that point of view". The poll, he said, was "a sincere, objective attempt to measure the views of the public"

-Outlook June 17