Pakistan and India exchanged lists yesterday of their nuclear installations under an accord aimed at protecting the sites in case of war, officials said, amid simmering tensions over the Mumbai attacks.
The South Asian rivals, whose relations have been rocky since the deadly November attacks on India’s financial center Mumbai, have exchanged the lists annually since 1992, under an agreement that came into force the previous year.
“The lists have been exchanged at the foreign ministries in New Delhi and Islamabad,” a spokesman for the foreign office in Islamabad, Mohammad Sadiq, said.
Under the agreement, both sides are to refrain from attacking nuclear facilities in the event of a war. The neighbors have also set up a telephone hotline to prevent accidental nuclear conflict.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which is divided between them but claimed in full by both.
The two countries came close to another war in 2002 after an attack on the Indian parliament that New Delhi blamed on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba — the same group it blames for the carnage in Mumbai.
But after deploying hundreds of thousands of troops to the border, Islamabad and New Delhi retreated following intense international mediation. In 2004, they launched a peace process, but that is now on hold following the Mumbai attacks.
US President George W. Bush on Wednesday spoke with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. The White House said all had agreed on the need to avoid any increase in tensions.
Pakistan on Tuesday asked India to resume dialogue and urged New Delhi to deactivate its forward air bases and redeploy troops to peacetime locations, but India denied it had moved troops into offensive positions on the border.
India conducted nuclear weapons tests in May 1998. Pakistan, in a tit-for-tat response, detonated its own devices a few days later. In October 2005, the two sides formalized an agreement on pre-notification of ballistic missile tests.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
PROBE: Last week, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against presidential candidate Calin Georgescu accusing him of supporting fascist groups Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Romania’s capital on Saturday in the latest anti-government demonstration by far-right groups after a top court canceled a presidential election in the EU country last year. Protesters converged in front of the government building in Bucharest, waving Romania’s tricolor flags and chanting slogans such as “down with the government” and “thieves.” Many expressed support for Calin Georgescu, who emerged as the frontrunner in December’s canceled election, and demanded they be resumed from the second round. George Simion, the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), which organized the protest,
ECONOMIC DISTORTION? The US commerce secretary’s remarks echoed Elon Musk’s arguments that spending by the government does not create value for the economy US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday said that government spending could be separated from GDP reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn. “You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.” Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the US economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because
RSS