International (Political & Economy)
Content:- U.S.,Russia conclude START pact
- 38 killed in suicide bombings at two Moscow Metro stations
- China jails Rio Tinto executives
- NLD to stay away from polls
- Bid to break Thailand impasse
- Call for nuclear free West Asia
- First gay wedding in U.K. Parliament
- Obama lauds student funding reform
- U.S. Pacific Command focussed on LeT
- Finalists announced for ‘Lost Booker Prize'
- U.S.-Pakistan strategic dialogue: America’s Pakistan strategy
- Rate of deforestation has slowed: U.N. report
- China surges ahead of U.S. in clean energy race
- Pakistan's nuclear reactor likely in operation
- Healthcare bill hits ‘technical snag'
- Last push on Greece
- Russian oil major pulls out of Iran
- Blasphemy laws haunt majority community in Pakistan
- Irish bishop resigns
- Senate panel introduces financial reforms bill
- Biggest cities merging into mega-regions, says U.N. report
- 227 million escaped world's slums: U.N.
- Life term for Nazi hit man
U.S.,Russia conclude START pact
- The United States and Russia have agreed the most “comprehensive arms control agreement in nearly two decades.
- Conceding that his aspiration for a nuclear-free world would not be reached “in the near future”, that a fundamental part of that effort however was the negotiation of a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia.
- The new 10-year pact would replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991, or START, which expired in December, and further extend cuts negotiated in 2002 by Mr. Bush in the Treaty of Moscow.
- These include reduction by about one third the nuclear weapons that the two countries would deploy, “significant” reductions in missiles and launchers and putting in place “a strong and effective verification regime.”
- However the agreement also ensures the maintenance of the “flexibility” that the U.S. and Russia need to “protect and advance our national security, and to guarantee our unwavering commitment to the security of our Allies.
- within seven years each side would have to cut its deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 from the 2,200 now allowed. Each side would cut the total number of launchers to 800 from 1,600 now permitted. The number of nuclear-armed missiles and heavy bombers would be capped at 700 each.
- Richard Burt, a former chief START negotiator who now heads a disarmament advocacy group called Global Zero, said that the two Presidents “took a major step toward achieving their goal of global zero.”
- Thirty-eight people were killed and 65 injured in suicide bombings at two Metro stations.
- The bombings occurred during the morning rush hours on Moscow Metro's oldest Red Line.at the Park Kultury station, just three stations away from Lubyanka, killing 12 people.
- Head of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov said available evidence pointed to terrorists operating in North Caucasus, which includes the restive Chechnya.
- An Australian executive at mining giant Rio Tinto has been sentenced to 10 years in prison by a Shanghai court, on charges of bribery and stealing commercial secrets.
- stern Hu, who headed the British-Australian mining firm's sales in China, had last week pleaded guilty to accepting two bribes worth $935,000, according to prosecutors.
- Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) decided “not to participate” in the general election promised by Myanmar's military rulers. The party did not, however, call for a total boycott.
- With Ms. Suu Kyi still under house arrest, the NLD will “not apply for re-registration” under the junta's new decrees for the polls set for an unspecified date this year.
- These decrees have already sparked adverse reactions in several international circles. And, the NLD, which won a landslide in Myanmar's last general election 20 years ago, was not allowed by the military authorities to form a civilian government then.
- Briefing The Hindu over the telephone from Yangon on Monday, octogenarian leader Tin Oo, who chaired the NLD meeting, said the party would continue to uphold the “democratic spirit [through] strategic non-violence”.
- Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva called in protest leaders for “preliminary talks” to defuse a prolonged political crisis over his continuance in office. Nationally televised, the talks were held in Bangkok.
- The meeting took place after the protesters agreed to withdraw from the vicinity of an infantry regiment. They had moved there early on Sunday from their main protest site in Bangkok to pressure the government which, in their view, was a “proxy” of the military bloc.
- Arab leaders called for a West Asia free of nuclear weapons during a session at the Arab League summit in Libya, said diplomats. Many countries view Israel and Iran's nuclear programmes with alarm, and have repeatedly called for an agreement to ban nuclear weapons from the region.
- In their closing statements, leaders stressed that the development of nuclear weapons threatened peace and security, diplomats who attended the closed-door session told the German Press Agency dpa.
- They called for a review of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to create a definitive plan for eliminating nuclear weapons development.
- The Palace of Westminster, which houses the British Parliament, was on Saturday the venue of an unprecedented event: its first gay wedding.
- The groom was Europe Minister Christ Bryant who married his partner Jared Cranney, a company secretary, in a ceremony attended among others by the Commons Speaker John Bercow.
- Until now, gay MPs were not allowed to hold weddings within Parliament building but Mr. Bercow obtained a special licence from the Westminster City council to break that tradition paving the way for gay members of the general public also to hold similar ceremonies there.
- U.S. President Barack Obama said “bold reforms to the higher education system passed by Congress this week... [will save] taxpayers $68 billion over the next decade by ending the subsidies given to banks and middlemen who handle student loans.”
- Mr. Obama said the money saved through these reforms would expand and strengthen the federal Pell Grant programme; it would also cap college graduates' annual student loan repayments at 10 per cent of their income, revitalise community colleges, and increase support for Minority Serving Institutions.
- Highlighting his recent travels to India, Thailand and Indonesia, Admiral Robert Willard, Commander of the United States Pacific Command noted that he was “focused in and around India, specifically with regard to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group that attacked into Mumbai some months ago.”
- Six writers have a second shot at literary glory, 40 years after they missed out on Britain's top book prize.
- Finalists were announced for the “lost” Booker Prize, created to correct a quirk that saw books from 1970 excluded from contention for the prestigious award.
- The Booker was originally awarded for books published the previous year.But in 1971, it became a prize for the best novel published that year.
- The six are Patrick White's The Vivisector, J.G. Farrell's Troubles, Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven, Nina Bawden's The Birds on the Trees, Shirley Hazzard's The Bay of Noon and Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat.
- Of the finalists, only Hazzard and Bawden are still alive, but all the books are still in print.
- Farrell won the Booker in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur, while Spark and Bawden have been finalists. The winner will be decided by public vote on the Booker website and announced on May 19.
- The Booker Prize was first handed out in 1969, and is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth.
- The Lost Booker is the third special prize to be created by the organisation.
- U.S.-Pakistan strategic dialogue: America’s Pakistan strategy
- There is no reason for India to be alarmed over the newly launched U.S.-Pakistan strategic dialogue.
- The well-publicised wish list the Pakistanis, The demands included American mediation over the Kashmir dispute with India as well as a civil nuclear energy agreement to allow the country to access global nuclear technology and fuel.
- In the context of the high decibel campaign (within Pakistan) of water theft by India, U.S. intervention was solicited to help effect a better water-sharing arrangement.
- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who led the U.S. side in the strategic dialogue, promised help in increasing the efficiency of Pakistani energy and water utilisation; but she was clear and forthright in emphasising the importance of bilateral dialogue between India and Pakistan in the quest for solutions to outstanding issues.
- As for nuclear energy, Pakistan was told that a deal of the kind India got in 2005 is not on the table.
- Ambitious planting programmes in Asia and the United States have helped slow the global rate of deforestation but farmers are still cutting trees to clear land at an alarmingly high rate, a U.N. survey released shows.
- Planting programmes, notably in China, India and Vietnam, helped dramatically slow the rate of forest loss, from 8.3 million hectares a year in the 1990s, to 5.2 million hectares per year from 2000 to 2010, said forestry experts presenting the study at the Rome headquarters of the U.N. agency.
- China spent almost twice as much as the United States on clean energy investments last year, and is now set to take the lead as the world's premier green energy power, according to a report.
- In 2009, China invested $34.6 billion on expanding its renewable energy capacity, out of $162 billion invested globally, said a study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which measured the growth of clean energy investments in the world's major economies.
- Pakistan may be operating a second nuclear reactor under the country's nuclear weapons programme, according to an expert at the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
- According to Mr. Brannan's report, in February 2010 Zia Mian of the International Panel on Fissile Materials said that Pakistan had completed construction of the second Khushab reactor.
- Mr. Brannan said that Pakistan had started constructing the Khushab-II reactor back in 2002 and in 2007 construction activity for a third reactor was noticed in satellite images. “We have been following the construction of the second reactor in particular,” Mr. Brannan said, adding that “they had been expecting it to begin operation around this time.”
- The healthcare reform bill that President Obama signed into law on has hit a “technical snag,” owing to Republican-sponsored amendments.
- According to reports, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the changes made to the original bill, now an Act, would have to go back to the House of Representatives for final Congressional approval.
- The leaders of France and Spain headed a last-ditch diplomatic push on Thursday to get German Chancellor Angela Merkel to back a financial safety net for Greece as a European Union summit opened in Brussels.
- Ms. Merkel has emerged as the make-or-break player in the EU's debate on whether and how to offer Greece support, clashing head-on with France, Spain and the European Commission. The row has eclipsed the summit's official agenda of economic reform.
- Russia's largest private oil major said it was suspending an oil project in Iran because of U.S. pressure.
- The LUKoil company issued a statement on Wednesday saying it had stopped further work on the Anaran project “because of the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. government.” It blamed the sanctions for a loss of some $63 million last year and said it feared more losses if it continued to carry on the project.
- The Anaran field, with estimated oil reserves of 2 billion barrels, was operated by a consortium of Norwegian StatoilHydro (75 per cent) and LUKoil Overseas (25 per cent). LUKoil Overseas head Stanislav Kuzyev has clarified that his company retains its rights in the project and would be ready to return “under more favourable economic situation.”
- The blasphemy laws have come to haunt the majority community in Pakistan with rival sects of Islam increasingly using Sections 295-B and C of the Pakistan Penal Code against each other.
- While minority groups continue to face action under this legacy of the Zia-ul-Haq regime, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) in its report released numerous cases of Muslims being booked under the blasphemy laws.
- Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation on Wednesday of Bishop John Magee, a former papal aide who stands accused of endangering children by failing to follow the Irish church's own rules on reporting suspected paedophile priests to police.
- Bishop Magee (73) apologised to victims of any paedophile priests who were kept in parish posts since he took charge of the southwest Irish diocese of Cloyne in 1987.
- Sweeping financial reforms were introduced by the U.S. Senate Banking Committee paving the way for the reform bill to be taken up on the floor of the Senate later this year.
- The committee, chaired by Democrat Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, passed the reforms by a vote of 13-10, strictly along party lines.
- After the introduction of the bill, President Barack Obama was quoted as saying, “We are now one step closer to passing real financial reform that will bring oversight and accountability to our financial system and help ensure that the American taxpayer never again pays the price for the irresponsibility of our largest banks and financial institutions.”
- The world's mega—cities are merging to form vast “mega—regions” which may stretch hundreds of miles across countries and be home to more than 100 million people, a major UN report says.
- The phenomenon of the “endless city” could be one of the most significant developments — and problems — in the way people live and economies grow in the next 50 years, says U.N.-Habitat, the agency for human settlements, which identifies the trend of developing mega-regions in its twice-yearly State of World Cities report.
- The largest of these, says the report, which was launched on Monday at the World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro, is the Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou region in China, home to about 120 million people. Other mega-regions have formed in Japan and Brazil and are developing in India, west Africa and elsewhere.
- China and India, the world's most populous countries, have together lifted 125 million people out of slums in the last decade, while a further 112 million escaped poor conditions in the rest of the world, according to a new report from U.N.-Habitat, the U.N. agency for human settlements.
- But increasing urbanisation has led to many more new slum-dwellers, meaning the total number now living in crowded, substandard housing — often without safe drinking water and sanitation — has increased by nearly 55 million people since 2000. The worldwide number of slum-dwellers now stands at 827 million and is on course to grow to 889 million by 2020.
- Two-thirds of the world's slum-dwellers now live in Africa, the report found, the only continent to have made little progress in reducing slum numbers in the last decade.
- A German court convicted an 88-year-old of murdering three Dutch civilians as part of a Nazi hit squad during World War II, capping six decades of efforts to bring the former Waffen SS man to justice.
- Heinrich Boere, number six on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted Nazis, was given the maximum sentence of life in prison for the 1944 killings.
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