Mrs Clinton was to have given her speech at the Kuumba stage (formerly the Huairou No 1 Middle School playground), which could have held about 10,000 of the forum’s 23,500 foreign participants. But the rain washed that out, leaving only the old cinema where the forum’s overcrowded daily plenary sessions are held. Inside the building, packed to double capacity, everyone sang feminist anthems and gospel songs. “People pushing forward, never turning back!” was one refrain.When Mrs Clinton finally appeared, it was to rousing applause. Her speech at the parallel UN World Conference on Women in Peking on Tuesday, which blasted as “indefensible” China’s blocking of visas for some women who wanted to attend the forum and criticised the host country’s human rights record, had gone down well in Huairou. Yesterday she told her audience: “You [the NGOs] will be the key players in determining whether or not this conference goes beyond rhetoric and actually does something to improve the lives of women and families. It will be [the activists] that will hold governments to the commitments they make.”Again she referred to China’s obstacles.

“For many of you who did get here, getting here was far from easy,” she said. “I know that you have had to endure severe frustrations here as you do your work.”So far, Mrs Clinton’s swipes at China have raised no response from her hosts. The Communist Party mouthpiece, People’s Daily, relegated the speech to one line at the end of an inside-page report. “American Mrs Hillary Clinton made a speech,” the last line of the article said, omitting her title.America’s ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, who is the official head of the US delegation, also took a firm line on China in her address yesterday to the main conference “It is unconscionable …

that the right to free expression has been called into question right here at a conference conducted under the auspices of the UN and whose very purpose is the free and open discussion of women’s rights,” she said.China’s family planning policies were also attacked. “No women – whether in Birmingham, Bombay, Beirut or Beijing – should be forcibly sterilised or forced to have an abortion,” Mrs Albright said.In a further embarrassment for her hosts, she quoted from an old Chinese poem, in which a father talks to his daughter:”We keep a dog to watch the house, a pig is useful too,We keep a cat to catch a mouse, but what can we doWith a girl like you?”So many women, Section Two. Tokyo – Japanese police said yesterday that they had found parts of what appeared to be the remains of a lawyer and his wife who disappeared six years ago after he helped defectors from the Aum doomsday cult. Police found the body parts at dusk in the mountains of central Japan after almost 1,000 officers and forensic scientists had searched from dawn, using shovels and power saws to cut through heavy undergrowth. The search began after members of the Aum Shinri Kyo (Supreme Truth Sect) told police during questioning that a cult hit squad had killed the lawyer’s family and had buried their bodies in the mountains, a police official said Reuter. PETER RODGERS

Business Editor
Railtrack has decided not to award share options to directors and senior executives, after strong government pressure to avoid a new “fat cats” row over privatisation next year.Instead of options there is to be a long-term incentive scheme for directors based on performance, in line with the Greenbury Committee’s recommendations on top pay.

There will also be a share savings scheme for all employees.Promising that Railtrack would be ready to go ahead with a flotation before next March, if the Government so decides, Bob Horton, chairman, said he understood the potential pay pitfalls in a privatisation: “We aren’t complete idiots – we have seen what happened with other privatised industries. We don’t intend to repeat that.”The announcement came as Railtrack revealed pre-tax profits of pounds 189m. This was after the pounds 140m cost of the signal staff strike and pounds 46m preparing for privatisation. The annual report showed that the chairman and four executive directors earned a 25 per cent bonus on their basic salaries last year – the year of the rail strike – and that two directors received interest-free mortgages.The bonuses were worth pounds 150,000 in total but have not yet been paid because they have still not been agreed by the Department of Transport. Railtrack said the payments were going through “due process” and denied that there was any dispute with the Government.Jimmy Knapp, leader of the RMT rail union, said: “Despite its problems, Railtrack appears more willing to waste money on obscene bonuses for the bosses rather than invest in industry.” There was a similar attack from Lew Adams, general secretary of Aslef.Mr Horton pledged that directors’ salaries would be set at a level “generally acceptable to the entire company.