Political India: Engaging America

From The Hindu

China has substituted liquid-fuelled, nuclear-capable missiles with “more advanced and survivable solid-fuelled” rocket systems, and this has been explicitly aimed at “[strengthening] its deterrent posture relative to India,” according to an annual report on the developments within the Chinese military, authored by the United States Pentagon.

In its report to the U.S. Congress, the Pentagon warned that the People's Liberation Army had replaced the CSS-2 Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles with its CSS-5 Medium Range Ballistic Missile systems. It also emphasised that China was further investing in road development along the Sino-Indian border that could “support PLA border defence operations.”

While the report was principally focused on the rapid step-up in Chinese military investments in recent years, including its aircraft carrier programme, cyber-warfare capabilities, anti-satellite missiles and the top-secret J-20 next-generation stealth fighter, the report also commented on India's concern at some of these regional developments.

Pointing out that India was also improving its infrastructure along its north-eastern border, the report said: “New Delhi remains concerned by China's close military relationship with Pakistan and Beijing's growing footprint in the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and Africa.”

Despite burgeoning defence rapprochement manifested in the Sino-Indian Annual Defence Dialogue established in 2007, India had pulled out of high-level military exchanges following China's denial of a visa to a senior Indian general in 2010, the Pentagon report said.

Although Premier Wen Jiabao attempted to mend fences during his December 2010 visit to New Delhi “he did not address serious irritants... [and] a high degree of mistrust continues to strain the bilateral relationship,” the report added.

Regional tensions
Discussing the main findings of the Pentagon report, Michael Schiffer, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for East Asia, expressed alarm that the pace and scope of China's military investments were, overall, “potentially destabilising to regional military balances, increase the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculation, and may contribute to regional tensions and anxieties.”

The report also warned of maritime implications for regional powers like India. In the context of the continuing tensions in the South China Sea, Mr. Schiffer said, in addition to planning for Taiwan contingencies, China placed a high priority on asserting and strengthening its maritime territorial claims.

“An increased PLA naval presence in the region, including surface, subsurface and airborne platforms and possibly one or more of China's future aircraft carriers, would provide the PLA with an enhanced extended-range power projection capability, with all the implications for regional rivalries and power dynamics that that implies,” Mr. Schiffer added.

From The Hindu

Whatever else Xun Wang (51) might have been, one thing is for sure — she was brazen. The Chinese national and lawful permanent resident in the U.S. actually thought she could get away with exporting 360 gallons of high-performance nuclear reactor paint to Pakistan for use in its Chinese-made Chashma reactor.

And she nearly did get away, at least until the U.S. Department of Commerce's (DOC) Bureau of Industry and Security closed its net around her and her shady trading counterparts including two Chinese companies working on the construction of Chashma, one of which is owned by the Chinese government.

Lifting the veil on a case that has rocked the nuclear establishment, the U.S. District Attorney for the District of Columbia announced charges against Xun on July 8, 2011, including conspiring to export and re-export, and actually exporting and re-exporting, specially designed, epoxy coatings to the Chashma II plant, a nuclear reactor owned and operated by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, which is an entity on the Department of Commerce's Entity List.

The indictment that “raises the question of whether China knowingly conducts illicit nuclear trade in violation of other countries' laws... [and] illustrates that China remains a problem in global efforts to prevent illicit nuclear trade and bears special scrutiny by all concerned about goods being diverted to banned purposes,” according to the Institute for Science and International Security, a think-tank.

How did Xun think she could escape the attention of U.S. export controllers while engaging in such a massive violation of nuclear trading norms? The subterfuge deployed, according to the DOC, was that the company at which she used be the Managing Director, PPG Industries, sought to obtain orders from the two Chinese companies involved in the Chashma reactor.

This was done in order to create the illusion of exports to Chinese nuclear firms, which is permitted under BIS export control restrictions. Thus, from May 2006 until September 2007 Zhongyuan Engineering and Shanghai-based, Chinese-government-owned, Huaxing Construction submitted requests to PPG Paints Trading in Shanghai – a PPG Industries subsidiary – for coatings that Huaxing Construction needed to provide to Chashma.

PPG Paints Trading then placed the orders with PPG Industries in the U.S., an ISI study explained, and then “[Xun] Wang and the companies allegedly conspired to list Dalian Shi Zi Kou nuclear power station in China as the end-user because the U.S. would not require an export license to ship the goods.” Prosecuting authorities said Xun allegedly indicated in her communications, “If [the United States does] not know where the paint [is] going to end up it [is] okay to sell the paint.” Specific illegal acts committed as part of this illicit trade included falsification of export documents, including purchase requests, shipping, and end-user documents, officials noted.

Yet unbeknownst to Xun and company the BIS was monitoring these deals closely and earlier this year they tightened the noose around PPG. While documents do not state this, it is quite possible the authorities struck a deal with one PPG employee, regional sales manager Curtis Hickcox, who agreed to an out-of-court settlement with the BIS on June 8. According to official documents quoted by ISIS, Hickcox allegedly arranged for a February 2006 shipment of 290 gallons of paint coatings to Chashma and “knew the epoxy was headed for the Pakistani [Chashma] reactor but told his bosses it ‘would not be used by PAEC.'”

While Hickcox reportedly agreed to pay a settlement of $500,000, $485,000 of which would be dismissed if $15,000 was paid by June 29, Wang was not so lucky. She was arrested in June in Atlanta and transferred to the Washington, DC DA's office, which is said to be prosecuting the case.

After a court appearance in July she was released to serve house arrest at her home in California and is presently undergoing electronic monitoring until her next court date on September 28. As she is considered a flight risk, until such time as ordered otherwise Wang is not allowed to go within 1,000 feet of an airport.

Additionally her company, PPG Industries, in December 2010 “pled guilty to four counts of export-related violations... [and] was fined $3.75 million in criminal and administrative fines and will pay $32,000 in restitution,” ISIS reported. Further PPG Paints Trading was fined $1 million and faces five years of corporate probation and cannot do business with the United States during that time.

From The Hindu

The sensational sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn (62), former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and potential French presidential candidate, even more sensationally collapsed on Tuesday, after Judge Michael Obus of a State Supreme Court in Manhattan dismissed the criminal case entirely.

The dismissal came a day after the prosecuting District Attorney (DA) recommended that the rape charges brought against Mr. Strauss-Kahn by hotel housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo (33) be dropped, though Ms. Diallo's lawyer Kenneth Thompson had criticised DA Cyrus Vance's decision saying, “He has not only turned his back on this victim but he has also turned his back on the forensic, medical and other physical evidence in this case.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Judge Obus had also issued a written ruling denying a request by Ms. Diallo's lawyers to remove the DA from the case and appoint a Special Prosecutor instead.

Following the dramatic airport arrest of one of the world's most powerful financiers three months ago the plaintiff's side suffered a series of setbacks especially following a major turnaround in Mr. Vance's stance last month.

At the time the DA's office cited a “substantial credibility issue” against Ms. Diallo, whom it accused of lying on her asylum application about having been gang-raped in the past, a letter submitted by prosecutors said. Following that shift in position, Judge Obus lifted Mr. Strauss-Kahn's house arrest and bail.

While the latest decision is tantamount to a clear victory for Mr. Strauss-Kahn's team, their client is not entirely in the clear yet as Ms. Diallo has also launched a civil case against him and he faces a another legal inquiry in France from an writer who has alleged that Mr. Strauss-Kahn “forced himself on her during a 2003 interview in Paris.”

According to reports Ms. Diallo's attorneys also intended to take the case to France “where they had been trying to establish a pattern of sexual abuse by Strauss-Kahn and had tried to contact other women who may have had similar encounters.”

From The Hindu

Deven Sharma (55), Indian-American president of credit rating agency Standard & Poor's, has resigned less than three weeks after his company found itself at the receiving end of the Obama administration's ire following its downgrade of the United States' credit rating from AAA to AA+.

S&P's announcement, that Mr. Sharma would be stepping down immediately and leaving the company at the end of the year, also follows reports last week that the U.S. Justice Department had initiated an investigation into the mortgage securities ratings allocation process at the McGraw-Hill subsidiary. In particular, authorities were said to be examining whether S&P “improperly rated dozens of mortgage securities in the years leading up to the financial crisis.”

S&P's downgrade of the U.S.' debt from AAA to AA+ on August 5, based on its perception that the deficit reduction measures agreed by the administration were insufficient to stabilise national debt, saw further market turmoil in its wake as the downgrade triggered a massive global sell-off.

Credit ratings allocation, which yielded enormous profits in the boom years to the major agencies including S&P, Moody's and Fitch, have come under fire from regulators for their role in fuelling the financial markets collapse in 2008. The U.S. Congress and White House have both challenged S&P's “secretive process, its credibility and the competence of its analysts.”

In this week's announcement, S&P said Douglas Peterson (53), chief operating officer of Citibank N.A., would be its next President effective September 12, while Mr. Sharma “will take on a special assignment working on the Company's strategic portfolio review,” until the year's end.

Mr. Sharma's resignation also marks intensifying woes faced by the McGraw-Hill Group internally, with activist investors demanding stridently to break up the media conglomerate into four parts including splitting up the S&P into its indexes operations and ratings and financial business, reports said.

In announcing the change, Harold McGraw III, Chairman, President and CEO of the McGraw-Hill Companies said, “I particularly want to thank Deven for his dedicated leadership of S&P. Four years ago, in one of the most difficult times facing S&P in the midst of the financial crisis, I turned to Deven whose background as head of S&P's Investment Services, head of McGraw-Hill's Global Strategy and as a partner at Booz Allen & Company, brought the right kind of skills to address the situation.”

Mr. Sharma was however known for his outspoken views on imbalances in the market, for example saying last month to members of the House of Representatives Committee On Financial Services that, “The independence of rating agencies to develop their own methodologies, rather than be pushed by regulation toward a common methodology, mitigates the systemic risk that ratings could become indistinguishable from agency to agency.”

He had further warned that it was critical that new regulations preserved the ability of credit rating agencies “to make their own analytical decisions without fear that those decisions will later be second-guessed if the future does not turn out as anticipated or that, in publishing a potentially controversial view, they will expose themselves to regulatory retaliation.”

From The Hindu

Even as rebel forces swept through Tripoli and Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi's whereabouts remained unclear, United States President Barack Obama issued a statement welcoming the rebel advances but implied that the Transitional National Council needed to “demonstrate... leadership” and that the Qadhafi regime had not yet drawn its last breath.

Mr. Obama said while the U.S. recognised the TNC as the legitimate governing authority in Libya, “at this pivotal and historic time, the TNC should continue to demonstrate the leadership that is necessary to steer the country through a transition by respecting the rights of the people of Libya, avoiding civilian casualties, protecting the institutions of the Libyan state, and pursuing a transition to democracy that is just and inclusive for all of the people of Libya.”

Mr. Obama's statement comes in the wake of continuing questions surrounding the composition of the rebel grouping, particularly its links to radical groups. Doubts about such links mounted last month following the death of a senior Libyan military leader, Abdul Fatah Younis.

While the perpetrators are yet to be identified, some analysts warned that rebel-linked extremist groups may have been responsible. However, following its recent recognition of the TNC the U.S. permitted the rebel grouping to open a consulate in Washington.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen echoed some of the uncertainty about the position of various groups involved in the Libyan conflict, calling on “Qadhafi's remaining allies and forces... to end their careers of violence. The world is watching them. This is their opportunity to side with the Libyan people and choose the right side of history.”

In his message Mr. Obama emphasised that rebel advances suggested that “the Qadhafi regime has reached a tipping point... [and] showing signs of collapsing”. However, he stopped short of saying the regime had collapsed entirely.

Calling on Mr. Qadhafi to “acknowledge the reality that he no longer controls Libya”, Mr. Obama reiterated that the future of Libya was now in the hands of the Libyan people but the U.S. would continue to “stay in close coordination with the TNC”.

From The Hindu

In recent years innumerable studies have examined the disadvantages that minority groups in the United States face, particularly the effect of material deprivation on livelihood prospects.

In an unusually self-critical appraisal the National Institutes of Health, the government-run facility that oversees $31.2 billion annually in medical research, announced that a study that it had commissioned found that African-American applicants from 2000-2006 were 10 percentage points less likely than Caucasian applicants to be awarded research project grants from the NIH.

According to a statement by the NIH it had initiated the study in 2008 to determine if researchers of different races and ethnicities with similar research records and affiliations had similar likelihoods of being awarded a new NIH research project grant.

The findings, which have raised a storm over the discriminatory nature of the peer-reviewed funding process at NIH, were part of a study called Race, Ethnicity, and NIH Research Awards.

While the study suggested that Asians faced a less harsh discrimination in this area even they had to contend with being 4 percentage points less likely than Caucasians to receive medical research grants.

Science magazine quoted NIH Director Francis Collins saying, “I was deeply dismayed... This is simply unacceptable that there are differences in success that can't be explained.”

Along with NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, Mr.Collins quickly authored a response in the magazine in which they outlined the steps the agency would take to address such racial disparities.

“As much as the U.S. scientific community may wish to view itself as a single garment of many diverse and colourful threads, an unflinching consideration of actual data reminds us that our nation's biomedical research workforce remains nowhere near as rich as it could be,” they said.

The finding comes on the back of numerous, sometimes troubling, race-relations questions focussing on the negative social and livelihood outcomes for African-Americans under the Obama administration.

Several high-profile incidents over the last two years had raised questions about whether African-Americans had seen any welfare improvements at all since an African American President had entered the White House.

Notably the cases of the Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard University professor wrongfully arrested by the police, and of Shirley Sherrod, who was fired from her job as Director of Rural Development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture over false allegations of racism, suggested that racial harmony in the U.S. has by no means improved since 2009.

From The Hindu

The United States Government has launched a sweeping investigation into the mortgage securities ratings process at Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency that found itself in the eye of a storm less than two weeks ago after it downgraded the U.S.’ cherished AAA rating.

The U.S. Justice Department was said to be looking into the specific question of whether S&P “improperly rated dozens of mortgage securities in the years leading up to the financial crisis... [and] was asking about instances in which the company’s analysts wanted to award lower ratings on mortgage bonds but may have been overruled by other S&P business managers,” according to the New York Times.

Quoting unnamed sources who were reportedly questioned by government officials on the matter ,the report said that the current investigation however began before S&P cut the U.S.’ credit rating.

Nevertheless, news of the latest inquiry comes on the back of sharp criticism of S&P in the U.S. Congress and White House, both of which have challenged the “agency’s secretive process, its credibility and the competence of its analysts”.

While there was no information on whether the other two top credit rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, were also involved in the investigation, the rating agency industry as a whole has been attacked for making record profits during the boom years even as they failed to predict the onset of mortgage security defaults that culminated in the collapse of the financial system.

S&P’s downgrade of the U.S.’ debt from AAA to AA+ earlier this month, based on its perception that the deficit reduction measures agreed by the administration were insufficient to stabilise national debt, saw further market turmoil in its wake as the downgrade triggered a massive global sell-off.

While the Justice Department declined to comment on the reported investigation of S&P, the New York Times quoted S&P spokesman Ed Sweeney as saying, “S&P has received several requests from different government agencies over the last few years. We continue to cooperate with these requests. We do not prevent such agencies from speaking with current or former employees.”

From The Hindu

After months of prevarication United States President Barack Obama on Thursday called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down in the wake of “ferocious brutality” meted out by Syrian forces against peaceful demonstrators, including allegations of killings, torture and imprisonments.

Arguing that Mr. Assad's calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow given the violence inflicted upon the Syrian people, Mr. Obama said in a statement that the U.S. had consistently said Mr. Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way.

“He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” Mr. Obama announced, in a statement that was coordinated with similar condemnation of Mr. al-Assad's regime by other leading nations including France, Britain and Germany, and the United Nations.

Shortly before Mr. Obama's remarks, a U.N. human rights panel said Syria's crackdown, including “summary executions, torturing prisoners and harming children in their crackdown against opposition protesters”, might amount to crimes against humanity and should be referred to the International Criminal Court.

However in a phone call to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday, Mr. Assad said military and police operations against pro-democracy protesters had stopped, according to the U.N. “The Secretary-General emphasised that all military operations and mass arrests must cease immediately. President Assad said that the military and police operations had stopped,” the U.N. statement said.

The U.S. demand for Mr. Assad to step down is the latest among a raft of measures designed to ramp up international diplomatic pressure against the Syrian regime. Included among these is an Executive Order, issued by Mr. Obama along with his demand, aimed at freezing all Syrian government assets under U.S. jurisdiction and blocking all U.S. transactions with the al-Assad government.

In particular U.S. sanctions have targeted the Syrian oil and gas industry, in the context of which the State Department called upon Indian and Chinese companies to halt their trade with Syria.

The call for Mr. al-Assad to step down marks a stronger thrust in the U.S. post-“Arab Spring” Middle East foreign policy. In keeping with this development the rebel faction in Libya also reopened its embassy in Washington this week, after the U.S. recognised the rebel's Transitional National Council in recent months as the “legitimate representatives of the Libyan people.”

From The Hindu

Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann, the winner of Saturday's pre-caucus straw poll in Iowa, is a supporter of the Dominionism sect, “which says Christians should rule the world”. Another frontrunner that joined the race over the weekend, Texas Governor Rick Perry, immediately launched an attack on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, calling him “treasonous” for wanting to print more money during the recession. And establishment-favourite Mitt Romney, a multimillionaire and former head of private equity firm Bain Capital, earlier joked with unemployed people that he too was currently unemployed.

These are some of the credentials of the leading candidates in the still-wide-open field for the nomination of the Republican presidential candidate in 2012.

While the actual caucuses, through which the nomination would be finalised, are not set to occur until early next year, the pre-caucus straw polls such as the one in Iowa are designed to build momentum for the debate and whittle down the range of candidates in the contest.

While Ms. Bachmann, a Republican Party outsider who is considered further to the right than current front runner Mr. Romney, struggled to answer queries about her remark that she was “submissive to her husband,” she outshone former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who later announced that he would retire from the race.


A surprise result was second-place victory of party stalwart Ron Paul, a libertarian who has won approval of his party's mainstream for his “neo-isolationist foreign policy” yet has also been labelled a closet Democrat by some.

Others in the race, including Herman Cain, former CEO of Godfather Pizza Company, and Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania, failed to generate any buzz and face declining prospects as 2011 rolls on.

While the candidates engaged in a debate that was at times fiercely critical, all of them were united in their condemnation of President Barack Obama, attacking all his policies from healthcare reforms described as “Obamacare” to Mr. Obama's purportedly failed plans to create more jobs in the ailing U.S. economy.

The President meanwhile launched some of his own 2012 campaign activities this week, travelling to Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois on a three-day economic bus tour in the Midwest that aimed to discuss “ways to grow the economy, strengthen the middle class and accelerate hiring in communities and towns across the nation and hear directly from Americans including small business owners, local families, private sector leaders, rural organizations, and government officials.”

From The Hindu

Indian government officials can expect heavy diplomatic pressure from their United States counterparts in the coming days on the question of imposing sanctions on the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

In an interview with CBS News, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lashed out against Indian and Chinese involvement in the oil and gas industry in Syria, a key source of revenue for the country. “We want to see India [take steps towards imposing sanctions alongside the U.S.], because India and China have large energy investments inside of Syria,” Ms. Clinton said.

The U.S. has upped the ante on Syria following a brutal crackdown by Mr. Assad's forces on pro-democracy protestors. According to some sources approximately 1,700 demonstrators have died with “tens of thousands” reportedly arrested. On Friday there were reports of a fresh crackdown with troops opening fire on “thousands of protesters” in the north and east of the country.

When asked about the U.S. role in the Syrian oil and gas sector, Ms. Clinton said: “We have such a small stake in what they produce and what they market. The real trick is to convince the Europeans and the Arabs and the Chinese and the Indians and others... We have been upping the sanctions... but we want others to follow, because Syria was not one of our major economic partners.”

While the U.S. has relatively few economic links with Syria and hence lacks any real leverage, this week it tightened its economic noose around Syria slapping the Commercial Bank of Syria, the Syrian Lebanese Commercial Bank and Syriatel, the largest mobile phone operator in Syria, with sanctions.

From The Hindu


Sending best wishes on behalf of U.S. President Barack Obama and the people of the U.S. as India celebrates its sixty-fourth anniversary of Independence on August 15, Ms. Clinton said, “At this time of profound change and hope for millions of people, India’s story stands as a powerful example of what people can achieve through the peaceful pursuit of inalienable rights.”

Recalling her visit to India last month the Secretary said that she that experiencing India’s beauty, vitality, and dynamism, the U.S. believed that its partnership with India will be “one of the defining partnerships of this century.” This partnership was based on people-to-people ties and shared values of democracy, liberty, and respect for religious and cultural diversity, she added.

In a statement Ms. Clinton sent out a message to all Indians saying, “As you celebrate this special day with family, friends and loved ones, in Chennai, New Delhi or anywhere in between, know that the U.S. stands with you as a committed partner and friend.”

From The Hindu


More intriguing, however, is the assessment that while the Bank’s interventions succeeded in promoting sector reforms and private investments for mobile telephony, their effectiveness was “limited in targeted efforts to increase access to the underserved beyond what was commercially attractive.”

This was a key finding of an insightful assessment report titled Capturing Technology for Development, a review of the Bank’s efforts in the ICT sector of numerous developing countries that was released on Thursday by the Independent Evaluation Group.

The IEG, an independent body reporting to the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank rather than Bank management, argued that the Bank supported ICT through lending, policy advice, investments, advisory services, and political risk guarantees in the past decade, committing a total of $4.2 billion in assistance to the sector between fiscal years 2003 and 2010, of which about $2.9 billion was to the poorest countries.

However, the Group said in its report this week, it was the general, non-targeted interventions focused on the enabling environment that were more effective in increasing access for the poor and underserved, rather than targeted strategies.

Speaking to The Hindu Marvin Taylor-Dormond, Director of Private Sector Evaluation at the IEG, described a rural development project in Guatemala as a case in point, saying, “The processing of the application [by the Bank, for the project] took so long that the conditions of the market changed and the private sector was willing to intervene there and provide the services to the population that were originally not [accessible].”

Arguing that for such reasons only 30 per cent of the projects targeting underserved groups succeeded and approximately 70 per cent of them failed, Mr. Taylor-Dormond and IEG Manager Stephan Wegner said to The Hindu that in the case of Guatemala the initial approval process began in 2006 yet only concluded in 2009, by which time conditions on the ground had changed significantly.

Yet given the vital role of the ICT sector in developing countries such as India it was clear that the Bank Group “can continue to play a catalytic role, especially in ensuring access for the poorest... where gaps still exist and the largest development impacts can be made,” said Vinod Thomas, Director-General of IEG.

Component replication

Indeed India itself has been an important example of ICT sector growth, according to Mr. Wegner, who said that in such countries the role of the Bank had shifted, and needed to shift further in the future, away from the pure access and connectivity–oriented focus towards component replication.

In India, for example, developing satellite-based applications may be crucial to fishermen who are seeking information on the best times to go out to sea and maximise their catch. Yet this developing sector continued to be “very risky”, Mr. Wegner explained, and there were “quite a few failures in projects related to the fact that they are venture capital type investments, early companies that face a lot of risks.”

Other areas of involvement by the Bank included mobile banking services that helped deepen financial access in rural areas, and the “huge success story of the Business Process Outsourcing industry,” which, while being a “huge asset going forward that India will have to play with,” could see a very select role of the Bank and IFC in terms of supporting sector development towards more value added services, Mr. Wegner noted.

In terms of response to the IEG’s critical findings, which pertain both to reaching the underserved more effectively, Laurent Besancon, Coordinator for the New ICT Strategy of the World Bank said to The Hindu that the focus going forward would be on policy reform to unlock broadband potential in developing countries; and also a push towards helping operators finance the “public good” aspect of infrastructure, for example setting up telecom towers in remote rural areas. The Bank considered India’s “e-choupal” experience an important source of learning for future investments in other developing nations, Mr. Besancon added.

With a new ICT strategy being rolled out soon, possibly in early 2012, it is quite likely that the Bank will continue to be one of numerous stakeholders who hope to be part of the “unprecedented ICT revolution that has spread to the developing world over the past decade.”

From The Hindu

A second soldier in the United States army has been indicted for planning an attack on a military facility in Fort Hood, Texas, the site of Major Nidal Malik Hasan's deadly shooting spree in 2009 that led to 13 people being killed and 32 injured.

This week a grand jury indicted Army Private Naser Jason Abdo (21), who is accused of plotting to kill more Fort Hood personnel with a “homemade bomb.”

According to the indictment statements, Abdo was said to have possessed “a destructive device, an automatic pistol and 20-gauge shotgun shells while being a fugitive from justice”.

Media reports said Abdo, who joined the Army in March 2009, was granted “conscientious objector” status after he declined to deploy to Afghanistan. In an unrelated development he was charged, in May, with possession of child pornography.

Following this, he disappeared until he was arrested on July 27 in a motel room in Killeen, Texas, reports said, where, besides the weapons in his possession authorities were said to have found an article entitled “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom.”

When he was produced in court last month Abdo “shouted the names of [Nidal] Hasan... and Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, a 14-year-old girl who was raped and murdered by U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2006,” reports added.

Abdo could spend up to 10 years in prison and a face a $250,000 fine per count if convicted, according to legal experts.

The case continues.

From The Hindu

The U.S. Federal Reserve has promised to hold U.S. interest rates at “exceptionally low levels” until the middle of 2013, in the wake of the worst market turmoil last week, since the financial meltdown of 2008.
Walking a tightrope between panicking investors further and appearing unresponsive to the market turbulence that wiped off over a trillion dollars of wealth from the bourses, the Fed said that it anticipated low rates of resource utilisation and a subdued outlook for inflation for the next two years.

“To promote the ongoing economic recovery and to help ensure that inflation, over time, is at levels consistent with its mandate, the Committee decided today [Tuesday] to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 0.25 per cent,” the Fed said in a split decision that was however backed by its Chairman, Ben Bernanke.

Seven members of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee voted for the decision to hold rates at such low levels while three members, including Indian-American Narayana Kocherlakota, dissented.

The dissenters “would have preferred to continue to describe economic conditions as likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate for an extended period,” the Fed said in a statement.

The central bank's unusual statement appeared to achieve the desired short-term effect as stock markets round the world rallied with the U.S. Dow Jones index closing the day up 429 points and London's FTSE 100 climbing 64 points in early trading on Wednesday, following Tuesday's gain of 96 points.

However, the Federal Reserve continued to emphasise that significant downside risks remained.

In a statement it said, “The Committee now expects a somewhat slower pace of recovery over coming quarters than it did at the time of the previous meeting and anticipates that the unemployment rate will decline only gradually”.

While the FOMC said that it expected that inflation would settle over the coming quarters, at levels at or below those consistent with the Committee's dual mandate [to foster maximum employment and price stability], it added that it would “continue to assess the economic outlook in light of incoming information and is prepared to employ [a range of policy] tools as appropriate.”

From The Hindu

Donald Rumsfeld, former United States Defence Secretary, learned this week that he would be sued by not one but three U.S. citizens over allegations of torture by the U.S. military in Iraq.

This week the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld a lower court’s decision that two American men who had filed a civil lawsuit against Mr. Rumsfeld could move forward with the case notwithstanding efforts by the Bush and Obama administrations to block it.

The latest blow for Mr. Rumsfeld came in the wake of last week’s decision by a District Judge to allow an American military contractor to sue Mr. Rumsfeld for the alleged imprisonment and torture that he was subjected to by the U.S. army in Iraq.

According to the decision this week the two men, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, were working with a private security company in Iraq in 2006 when they grew increasingly concerned that their firm was engaging in bribery and other illicit activities.

The court documents suggested that when they notified U.S. authorities in early 2006, they were imprisoned by the U.S. military, taken to Camp Cropper in Baghdad and “subjected to harsh interrogations and physical and emotional abuse.” Specifically they alleged that they were subjected to “sleep and food deprivation, threats of violence, actual violence and prolonged solitary confinement.”

Similarly the first individual permitted to sue Mr. Rumsfeld was an army veteran who worked as a translator for the U.S. marines in the restive Anbar province when he was detained for nine months at Camp Cropper. Allegedly that individual, currently unidentified, was suspected of passing on classified information to the enemy and helping anti-coalition forces enter Iraq.

While he was not charged with any crime, his lawyers “say he was preparing to return to the U.S. on annual leave when he was detained without justification and ... repeatedly abused, then released without explanation in August 2006.”

Both in his case and in the cases of Vance and Ertel, the plaintiffs have argued that Mr. Rumsfeld personally approved torture as an interrogation technique. The appeals court agreed with the plaintiffs that they had sufficiently argued that the decisions were made at the highest levels of government.

“We agree with the district court that the plaintiffs have alleged sufficient facts to show that Secretary Rumsfeld personally established the relevant policies that caused the alleged violations of their constitutional rights during detention,” the court ruled.

Mike Kanovitz, lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, was quoted as saying that the U.S. military seemed to want to hold his client behind bars to prevent him from talking about an important contact he made with a leading Sheik while helping to collect intelligence in Iraq.

“The U.S. government wasn't ready for the rest of the world to know about it, so they basically put him on ice,” Mr. Kanovitz reportedly said, adding, “If you've got unchecked power over the citizens, why not use it?”

From The Hindu

The Taliban has been “exaggerating” about some incidents, according to Eklil Hakimi, Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the United States, who spoke to a group of journalists here in the wake of last weekend’s deadly attack against a helicopter carrying U.S. and Afghan troops.

Thirty U.S. troops, including 22 members of Navy Seal Team Six, which carried out the operation against Osama bin Laden, and eight Afghans were killed in Saturday’s attack in Wardak Province, Afghanistan.

Despite such attacks, the transition of control from international forces to Afghan personnel has been proceeding since July, Ambassador Hakimi said, and “We have confidence in our security forces.”

While the Ambassador admitted that Afghanistan was engaged in a war with a “complicated enemy,” he expressed optimism on the process of reconciliation and reintegration of some Taliban and opposition fighters, pointing out that 1800 such fighters had already laid down arms and entered negotiations.

In response to a question from The Hindu on whether the latest attack was directed against the U.S. or whether countries such as India, whose embassy in Afghanistan was attacked in February 2010, ought to worry about a deteriorating security situation, Mr. Hakimi said that it was difficult to anticipate such incidents given the state of war in the country.

The Ambassador also touched upon the respective roles of India and Pakistan in Afghanistan’s future, arguing that while “Pakistan could play a crucial role in the success of reconciliation,” Afghanistan required a balance between the countries and it was important to work with both of them.

He had positive words, in particular, for India’s assistance in helping develop Afghanistan’s infrastructure including the transport, energy and health sectors, and the symbolically important reconstruction of Afghanistan’s Parliament building.

Highlighting the $2 billion in assistance supplied to Afghanistan by India Mr. Hakimi said his country was “grateful” to India for such support over the last ten years. He said that although India’s role continued to be limited to sectors such as infrastructure, if Afghanistan needed support in strategic areas such as training of police and army staff, “we can ask our friendly countries for support.”

From The Hindu

Although Democrats and Republicans were no closer to agreeing on a deal to extend the United States’ debt limit at the end of this week, political leaders across the board appeared to acknowledge the severity of the radioactive fallout of the potential sovereign default that could occur on August 2.

In particular Governors of numerous states lamented the almost certain federal expenditure cuts that would come out of the ongoing negotiations in Washington, arguing that such any such funding shortfall could further cripple the recovery at the state level and hobble job creation.

Martin O’Malley, Governor of Maryland and a Democrat, was quoted saying, “If I can use a whitewater analogy here, the two rocks we need to shoot between is, on the one side, being needlessly driven into default, which will kill the jobs recovery... The other rock is massive public sector cuts, by whatever name, that would also kill the jobs recovery.”

Mr. O’Malley was speaking at the National Governors Association in Salt Lake City, along with others such as Republican Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a Republican, who described the prospect of the U.S. defaulting on its debts as “terrible” for states. “No matter what happens, states are going to get less money from the federal government,” Mr. Barbour reportedly said.

After a series of week-long, intense negotiations, President Barack Obama on Friday reiterated his message calling for a “balanced approach” that would include not only spending cuts but also higher revenues from taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

If a deal was not reached, he warned, another serious consequence of default would be that all American households would anyway face higher borrowing costs that were tantamount to a tax. “We could end up with a situation... where interest rates rise for everybody all throughout the country, effectively a tax increase on everybody...” he said.

While Republicans have advanced numerous proposals to agree a debt limit hike Mr. Obama argued that such short-term solutions were not as desirable as a deeper reform of the U.S. deficit-accumulating tendencies.

Even as rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s put the U.S. on notice this week, warning that the failure to break the negotiations logjam would lead to a credit rating downgrade, Mr. Obama appeared to reject proposals by House Republicans Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell to pass an emergency measure allowing three short-term increases in the debt ceiling.

Distancing the White House from Republican calls for a balanced budget amendment, or a change to the constitutional debt limit rule, Mr. Obama said that the U.S. was not the same as Greece or Portugal.

He said, “Our problem is we cut taxes without paying for them over the last decade; we ended up instituting new programmes like a prescription drug program for seniors that was not paid for; we fought two wars, we didn’t pay for them; we had a bad recession that required a Recovery Act and stimulus spending and helping states — and all that accumulated and there’s interest on top of that.”

From The Hindu

Barack Obama is all set to create a new record — for being the first incumbent Democrat President of the United States to get re-elected primarily by Republican voters. During his time in office, which began with high hopes for a strong, liberal-Democratic policy agenda, Mr. Obama has steadily drifted to the right, nudged along by a series of drastic compromises with a truculent opposition party and a stalemated Congress.

After reneging on campaign promises to close the legally-dubious Guantanamo Bay prison, after soft-peddling on comprehensive immigration reform, and after prevaricating on the U.S. troop drawdown in Afghanistan, the President's latest compromise poses a grave threat to the country's largest social welfare programmes, Social Security and Medicare.

After secret negotiations with Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, the President, last week, delivered the unkindest cut of all to the liberal base of the Democratic Party. In his much vaunted “Twitter Townhall,” the President took no more than 140 characters to reveal that he had buckled under Republican pressure to put cuts to Social Security and Medicare back on the table.


Some context is necessary here. Social Security and Medicare, along with Medicaid, are among the largest so-called “entitlement programmes” — a term that Republicans and Tea Partiers now use in a pejorative sense. Yet these programmes have, since their inception in 1935 and 1965 respectively, comprised the “centrepiece of the nation's social contract, an intergenerational commitment to provide at least a subsistence income to the most vulnerable of citizens.”

Certainly, their Leviathan-like magnitude today has made them a tempting target for public expenditure cuts, especially as the August 2 deadline for raising the U.S. debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion approaches. Social Security accounts for more than 20 per cent of the federal budget, and, according to its operator, it handed out close to $672 billion in benefits to around 51 million Americans in 2009. Medicare is similarly massive.

The ongoing discussions between Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner reflect a genuine effort to forestall the nightmare scenario of sovereign default. Mr. Obama was not exaggerating when he warned that if no agreement on the debt limit was reached, then “our credit could be downgraded, interest rates could go drastically up, and it could cause a whole new spiral into a second recession, or worse.”

Yet at the heart of these negotiations lies a gun that is aimed squarely at the head of the poor, the elderly, the infirm and those who have watched what savings and assets they had at the start of the 2000s wiped out by eight years of unbridled free-market policies under George W. Bush.

The threat that Republicans now hold out to Mr. Obama, to compromise on cuts to welfare programmes or else face the prospect of plunging the nation into a debt crisis, is both opportunistic and, ultimately, internecine. The fallout of a sovereign default will be electorally catastrophic for both sides. A second recession would push American middle class families, already struggling with a sinking housing market and rampant joblessness, into a tailspin of economic despair. They will not forget to punish those responsible.

So far as Republicans' political incentives are concerned, their leadership is still highly contested and struggling to throw up a candidate who might have a realistic chance of defeating Mr. Obama in November 2012. For the Grand Old Party then, it makes no sense to do anything but try and discredit Mr. Obama and Democrats, especially in such high-profile negotiations.

Ironically it would appear that GOP and fiscally conservative Tea Partiers are succeeding in their efforts and the President seems to be walking these policies to the fiscal guillotine. If he permits free-market forces to whittle them down into a shadow of their current form then no longer will those born in this country with fewer than average opportunities rise to become the great entrepreneurial successes, the school-dropout billionaires of the future.


Yet to the consternation of top Democrats, last week Washington was abuzz with news that Mr. Obama was considering a “back-door” reform to cut Social Security spending. This reform would see the current methodology for cost-of-living adjustments substituted with a chain-weighted version of the Consumer Price Index.

The problem with using such chain-weighted indexes, as Max Richtman of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare explained in the New York Times, is that “Social Security beneficiaries did not receive a cost-of-living adjustment this year or in 2010 because inflation, as measured by the standard Consumer Price Index (CPI), was so low.”

It is certain, then, that in the current low-inflation, slow-growth U.S. economy, the hard-to-reverse inclusion of the chain-weighted CPI could have devastating consequences for senior citizens and the poor. The fact is there would be no need to resort to such obscure definitional manipulations if the President had not allowed Republicans to block all negotiations on one vital component of the public accounts — tax revenue.

Some background is in order here too. During the last few months of 2010 — by which time the House was already lost to Democrats and Republicans had the numbers to hold the legislative process hostage on a whim — there was a negotiation between the two parties that was similar to the present one. The discussion focussed on whether to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest one per cent of Americans, those earning above $250,000 per year, or let them expire per deadline.

As it played out, Republicans demanded that the tax breaks that these wealthy sections enjoyed be retained in exchange for which they would permit tax breaks for ordinary, middle-class families to also continue. As a consequence the federal income tax rate for the top income bracket is 35 per cent today, far less than the 70 per cent that it was under Republican President Richard Nixon in the 1970s and certainly less than the 91 per cent that it was under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s.

What Mr. Obama was hoping to achieve in the last round of negotiations was merely to knock the tax rate for the wealthiest back up a few points to the 39 per cent-level that it was under President Bill Clinton — and that too only on income in excess of $250,000. Extrapolating from estimates by the non-partisan Pew Charitable Trusts, this could have netted the exchequer an additional $1.1 trillion over the next decade, a not-inconsiderable proportion of the $2 trillion that both sides are hoping to agree in cuts.

Yet the fiscal hawks who are effectively holding the nation hostage have insisted that the very mention of tax cuts being withdrawn is unacceptable. In late June, Republican negotiator Eric Cantor walked out, in an almost impetuous fashion, from meetings convened by Vice-President Joe Biden as part of a serious effort to find a common ground. In the face of such truculence, White House officials were reduced to pleading for no more than “positive revenue increases.”

While Mr. Obama has acquired a reputation for carefully hedging his bets in various policy dealings, the debt negotiation may well be the one situation where he cannot please all parties concerned. This zero-sum game may require him to call the Republican bluff. The President should not fear this outcome but have faith that Americans believe that their nation was built on firm social justice foundations.

From The Hindu

United States President Barack Obama on Wednesday said that he strongly condemned the “outrageous attacks in Mumbai,” and his thoughts and prayers were with the wounded and those who had lost loved ones.


In a statement Mr. Obama added that the U.S. government continued to “monitor the situation, including the safety and security of our citizens.” “India is a close friend and partner of the U.S.,” the President added, underscoring that “the American people will stand with the Indian people in times of trial, and we will offer support to India's efforts to bring the perpetrators of these terrible crimes to justice.”

From The Hindu

With a few days left before the India-United States Strategic Dialogue kicks off in New Delhi, a top Indian official here said India had conveyed to the U.S its “concern” at the changes made to Nuclear Suppliers Group's guidelines for sale of Enrichment and Reprocessing technology.

While there is still an open question on whether the U.S.' subsequent reassurances that the “clean waiver” granted to India for ENR sales will supersede the wording of the new guidelines restrictive passed by the NSG, the Indian official nevertheless reiterated that ENR technology continued to be “an important issue for India.”

The official added that both in this context as well as regarding foreign partners in India's civilian nuclear energy programme India was not only holding discussions with the U.S., but also with Russia and France in parallel.

Confirming that the Indian nuclear operator, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited, and U.S. companies were nevertheless currently involved in detailed discussions on legal and design aspects of prospective joint nuclear projects, the official however expressed optimism that Strategic Dialogue would lead to progress on this front.

In particular the official noted that new regulations relating to the implementation of the nuclear liability bill would be finalised in the months ahead.

Official sources here also added that for the first time the India-U.S. discussions would directly focus upon West Asia, including a discussion of recent developments in West Asia.

Similarly while India's and the U.S.' engagements in East Asia and the United Nations have already been a subject of discussion even before U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to New Delhi last year, that will again be an agenda item next week, an official added.

Mirroring the broad structure of the first round of the Dialogue that was held in Washington last summer, the second round will also consider the entire gamut of cooperative efforts in five key areas including defence and counter-terrorism cooperation; energy and climate; economics, trade and agriculture; science, technology, health and innovation; and education, development and empowerment.

“New legislation” to implement India's nuclear liability law is expected to form part of the discussions during the United States-India Strategic Dialogue in New Delhi next week, according to a top administration official here.

Speaking at a pre-Dialogue briefing, Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Robert Blake said it would, however, be up to the Indian government to explain what this new legislation would contain.

He reiterated the Obama administration's view that the U.S. did “expect that [India] will ratify the Convention on Supplementary Compensation [CSC] before the end of the year as they committed.”

Indian Ambassador here Meera Shankar underscored, during a briefing a few weeks ago, that while India had said publicly that it would ratify the CSC this year, “It is for the U.S. companies now to proceed with commercial negotiations ... and we would hope that the companies would move forward quickly in this regard.” She had added that the nuclear companies “have been in touch,” and held discussions and workshops with India's nuclear power apparatus.

Yet, Mr. Blake implied that in parallel to any talks that nuclear power companies may be having, the two governments' leaders meeting on July 19 in New Delhi would also take up the issue in their discussions. In particular, Mr. Blake said he hoped the new legislation would be consistent with the CSC.

From The Hindu

“Damn right” — with those two words the former United States President, George W. Bush, implicated his entire administration for condoning the use of “water-boarding” and similar torture techniques to extract information from prisoners, according to a human rights group here.

The group, Human Rights Watch, noted in its 107-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” that Mr. Bush had uttered these words to erstwhile CIA Director George Tenet, when Mr. Tenet requested permission to water-board Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of masterminding the 9/11 terror attacks.

The “overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration,” according to HRW, “obliges President Barack Obama to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse” authorised by Mr. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Mr. Tenet.

Arguing that there was a solid basis on which to investigate the Bush regime for both torture and war crimes, Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of HRW sought to make a subtle point on the failure of the Obama government to view the case in such terms.

Mr. Roth said, “President Obama has treated torture as an unfortunate policy choice rather than a crime. His decision to end abusive interrogation practices will remain easily reversible unless the legal prohibition against torture is clearly re-established.”

Speaking to The Hindu Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Director of HRW said, while the question of the Bush administration using coercive interrogation techniques had been flagged “there is overwhelming amount of information now publically available on Bush administration detention and interrogation practices which the Obama government can no longer ignore.”

In particular Ms. Ganguly cited “very public admissions” by Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld in their memoirs about their roles in alleged human rights abuses. A year ago Karl Rove, Senior Advisor to Mr. Bush, said after publishing his memoir called Courage And Consequence, that he was “proud” of the fact that the U.S. had used water-boarding as it “broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information” about various terror plots.

In an interview at the time Mr. Rove said, “I'm proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques. They're appropriate; they're in conformity with our international requirements and with U.S. law.”

Despite this and further such evidence that had emerged, Ms. Ganguly told The Hindu, instead of launching a criminal prosecution case, it was evident from Wikileaks documents that in November 2010 the Obama administration had attempted to quash an investigation into the matter in Spain. Further, in May 2011 “the latest in a long line of cases alleging torture and other ill-treatment, including rendition to torture, was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court... because litigation could reveal state secrets,” Ms. Ganguly said.

The HRW report also goes far beyond even the central actors at the very top of the administration; rather it suggests that numerous other senior officials who were said to have devised “justifications” and constructed the institutional edifice for the torture regime be investigated.

These include, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales, Head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee, Acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, Counsel to the Vice President David Addington, Department of Defence General Counsel William Haynes, and Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the OLC John Yoo.

From The Hindu

From The Hindu

Marking a potentially worrisome trend in the United States economy, the United States Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) on Friday revealed that for the month of June the unemployment rate ticked up by one percentage point to 9.2 per cent, and over 14 million people still remained without a job.

The only spot of good news was that private sector payrolls continued their plodding upward march, increasing by 57,000 in June having added 2.2 million jobs over the past 16 months.

Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, admitted cause for concern when he said, “This month’s report reflects the recent slowdown of economic growth due to headwinds faced in the first half of this year. The unemployment rate remains unacceptably high and faster growth is needed to replace the jobs lost in the downturn.”

Shifting the focus from some of the political barriers to job-creating policies, Mr. Goolsbee added that the grim news on unemployment underscored the need for bipartisan action, for example, through measures such as extending payroll tax cut, passing pending free trade agreements, and creating an infrastructure bank.

With the looming August 2 deadline for raising the constitutionally-mandated debt limit of $14.3 trillion, Mr. Goolsbee stressed that faster job creation also required “a balanced approach to deficit reduction that instills confidence and allows us to live within our means without short-changing future growth.”

Currently negotiations between President Barack Obama and Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress have come down to a tussle between the Republican push for expenditure cuts to major programmes such as Social Security and the Democrats’ focus on tax revenues.

Regarding the June unemployment results, the BLS noted that among the sectors with employment increases were leisure and hospitality, health care, and manufacturing. Sectors with employment declines included government, financial activities, and construction, the BLS added. Local governments, many reeling under the pressure of large deficits at the state level, were said to have lost 18,000 jobs in June and have shed 355,000 jobs since the start of 2010.

From The Hindu

The new Nuclear Suppliers Group guidelines on enrichment and reprocessing technology will not in any way detract from the existing United States-India nuclear cooperation and the Obama administration fully supported the so-called clean NSG exception for India, according to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake.

With less than three weeks to go before the second round of the India-United States Strategic Dialogue in New Delhi, Mr. Blake, in a web briefing with select media, also denied that the U.S. had any concerns about losing out to potential rivals Russia and France in the bid to supply civilian nuclear products to India.

‘Opportunities for U.S. companies’
Responding to a question from The Hindu on this subject Mr. Blake said, “We think there are really quite important opportunities for American companies still,” pointing out that two reactor parks had been set aside for U.S. corporations in Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. The U.S. was also looking forward, he said, to India ratifying the Convention on Supplementary Compensation.

Above and beyond that there were also some further technical aspects to address, such as the Part 810 non-proliferation assurances that India is required to supply to the U.S. Department of Energy. “As far as we know, those remain on track and again, that these will be a subject of discussion when the Secretary [of State Hillary Clinton] visits,” the Assistant Secretary noted.

Clinton to visit Chennai
Meanwhile, the State Department announced on Friday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be visiting Chennai during her trip to India. This would mark the first visit by a serving U.S. Secretary of State to the city, said State Department Spokesperson Victoria Nuland, noting that Chennai had "emerged as a hub for the trade, investment, and people-to-people engagement that is driving the U.S.-India relationship.”

According to sources, Ms. Clinton is expected to visit the Ford factory in Chennai and also hold a town hall meeting in the city.


Mr. Blake also responded to a query from The Hindu on areas of the Indian economy where the U.S. hoped to get more market access for U.S. companies.

“Our countries are hoping that the Indian Parliament and the Indian government will take actions to reduce some of the limits on foreign direct investment in areas such as retail that will provide huge new opportunities for our companies and help India to increase the level of foreign investment... and jobs in India and also lower the prices of food [which] is of increasing concern to Indian consumers.”

Sources here had earlier indicated that a key announcement on liberalising the multi-brand retail sector towards more foreign investment was likely during the Strategic Dialogue.

Troop withdrawals from Afghan
Speaking to a query on what assurances the U.S. could give India about the safety of its personnel and assets in Afghanistan, Mr. Blake said that there may be a misunderstanding about the planned level of U.S. troop withdrawals, which were “relatively modest.”

Noting that the U.S. would closely consult with India on this process going forward, he added, “I expect that this will be a very important part of our strategic dialogue consultations.”

Mr. Blake also reiterated the U.S.’ “tremendous respect and admiration” for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s pledge to raise the total amount of assistance to Afghanistan to $2 billion.

From The Hindu

Body cavity bombs, a terror “technology” that al-Qaeda first tried out on a member of Saudi royal family in 2009, may soon be deployed in terror attacks in the United States, authorities warned this week.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Service issued a bulletin to several airlines, reports said, in which it cautioned that it had “identified a potential threat from terrorists who could surgically implant explosives or explosive components in humans.”

According to some reports bombs could be concealed within “abdomens, buttocks and breasts, allowing suicide bombers to pass undetected.” The latest threat is believed to be linked principally to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has a strong base of operations in Yemen.

In August 2009, Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who was also the Saudi Deputy Interior Minister in charge of counter-terrorism, survived an assassination attempt by an al-Qaeda operative Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri, who concealed explosives within his anal cavity. When al-Asiri triggered the explosion he was killed but Prince bin Nayef escaped with minimal injury as al-Asiri’s body was said to have shielded him from the blast impact.

Yet authorities here indicated that they expected al-Qaeda to have moved up the ladder to more sophisticated attacks using the “belly bombs” technique. Kawika Riley, Spokesman for the DHS’ Transportation Security Administration said, “Due to the significant advances in global aviation security in recent years, terrorist groups have repeatedly and publicly indicated interest in pursuing ways to further conceal explosives.”

One consequence of this development for the aviation sector is that the busy travel season this summer may be hobbled by a slew of additional security protocols at airports. Mr. Riley indicated that this was likely, adding, “As a precaution, passengers flying from international locations to U.S. destinations may notice additional security measures.”

While numerous U.S. airports have already introduced the controversial “naked body scanner” and advanced passenger pat-down procedures that raised a furore over intimate body contact, even these methods may be insufficient to pick up explosive elements surgically inserted into the body, experts said.

In a statement the TSA hinted that a major ramp-up in security protocols was likely and also that these procedures would be deployed to deliberately heighten uncertainty. “These measures are designed to be unpredictable,” the TSA said, “so passengers should not expect to see the same activity at every international airport.”

In particular the measures introduced may include “interaction with passengers, in addition to ... pat-downs and the use of enhanced tools and technologies,” the TSA said, which may suggest a heavier reliance on “behaviour-detection officers and airport interviews.” Skin- and clothes-swabbing for explosive element traces are already in vogue at several U.S. airports including Washington’s Dulles International.

From The Hindu

The Obama administration came under fire from both liberal and conservative quarters for its treatment of Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Somali man that it held prisoner on a United States naval vessel for two months and now proposes to try in a U.S. civilian court.

While liberals have raised serious questions about why Mr. Warsame was denied a lawyer and possibly not assured of the right to remain silent during questioning, Republicans asked why, similar to the case of the Guantanamo-Bay trials, the White House was considering ruling out military instead of civilian courts.

The capture, confinement and questioning of Mr. Warsame, who has been formally charged on nine counts relating to the alleged support he gave to and received from the al-Shabaab insurgent group in Somalia and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, harkens back to the Bush-era “extraordinary renditions” controversy.

During that episode the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was alleged to have captured and transported 3,000 people world over, since 2001. The European Union, especially, became embroiled in the controversy after a June 2006 report from the Council of Europe reportedly said that 100 people had been kidnapped within the EU and extra-judicially rendered to other nations, “often after having transited through secret detention centres called “black sites,” located in Europe.

This week the charges against Mr. Warsarme, who appeared in a Southern District of New York court on Tuesday and pleaded not guilty, included specific allegations of possessing, carrying, and using a firearm and destructive device, conspiracy to teach and demonstrate the making of explosives, receiving military-type training from a foreign terrorist organisation, and providing other material support to an FTO. Typically, such charges would attract a mandatory term of life in prison if convicted, reports said.

Yet senior Republican leaders criticised Mr. Obama’s treatment of Mr. Warsame for entirely different reasons with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saying, “Warsame is a foreign enemy combatant... He should be treated as one; he should be sitting in a cell in Guantanamo Bay, and eventually be tried before a military commission.”

His comments reflected the continuing tensions around a top policy priority of the Obama government last year, to eventually shut down Guantanamo Bay prison and possibly try its inmates in civilian courts.

That plan was hastily shelved after a storm of protest against bringing the so-called “enemy combatants” into New York City for trial and subsequently the administration has entirely backed off from the goal of closing down the prison, contrary to an Obama campaign promise in 2008.

Lamar Alexander, Republican of Texas raised another point of obvious inconsistency in the Obama White House’s counter-terrorism strategy. He said, “The Obama administration won't detain terrorists at a military facility in Guantanamo Bay, but they have no problem with a naval ship off the coast of Africa. Their policy toward detainees lacks common sense.”

From The Hindu

Tim Geithner (49), the United States Treasury Secretary, has reportedly said he would leave his job after the looming debt ceiling issue is resolved, to spend more time with his family.

Mr. Geithner, who took up the top economic job in the Obama administration in January 2009, has faced a non-stop cascade of economic problems since entering office, initially with the financial and housing markets turmoil of 2008-09 and then difficult negotiations between the White House and Congress to reduce U.S. debt and boost job creation.

The need to break the negotiations logjam over the U.S. debt limit, currently at $14.3 trillion until the August 2 deadline, was clearly on the Secretary’s mind when he spoke of his possible retirement.

According to media reports quoting three people familiar with the matter, Mr. Geithner “signalled to White House officials that he is considering leaving the administration after President Barack Obama reaches an agreement with Congress to raise the national debt limit... Geithner hasn't made a final decision and won't do so until the debt ceiling issue has been resolved.”

While news wires in Washington were abuzz with the development Mr. Geithner sought to downplay any notion that he had made any official decisions on the subject. Speaking at an event he said, “I live for this work, it’s the only work I’ve done, and I believe in it... I’m going to be doing it for the foreseeable future.”

One reason Mr. Geithner is said to be considering leaving the job is that his son would be attending high school in New York, “which meant that he would be commuting between Washington and New York for a while,” reports said.

The latter half of 2011 might also be considered an opportune moment for him to break with his role, it was noted, if an agreement on the debt ceiling was reached by that time and the expected frenetic campaign for the 2012 presidential elections had not kicked off yet.

Yet, if in fact, Mr. Geithner quits his job it would leave a vacuum, albeit temporarily, in an area that Mr. Obama is intensely focused on leading to his 2012 re-election bid. Jobs, in particular are said to be a top concern for voters in that election, and unless the currently slow but positive trend in unemployment reduction picks up, this could be the President’s undoing next year.

Mr. Obama and whoever he chooses to appoint to fill Mr. Geithner’s shoes will also have to contend with a truculent Republican Congress that is set to continue fiercely opposing tax increases and authorising a debt ceiling hike without further concessions on public expenditure levels and other Democratic Party priorities.

Mr. Geithner, who spent a number of his childhood years in New Delhi, India, has also played a key role in driving forward the India-U.S. Financial and Economic Partnership with his Indian counterpart, Pranab Mukherjee.

Last week he and Mr. Mukherjee held a series of meetings here to press on with the blossoming economic partnership between the two countries, ahead of the Strategic Dialogue to be held in New Delhi later this month.

From The Hindu

A Danish producer of pentobarbital, an animal euthanasia drug that prisons in the United States have recently started using in lethal injections, has said it would henceforth stop its product from reaching executioners.

Lundbeck, which came under enormous pressure from campaign groups and investors last year after a slew of U.S. correctional facilities switched to its barbiturate, said on Friday, “Going forward, Nembutal [the commercial name for pentobarbital] will be supplied exclusively through a specialty pharmacy drop ship program that will deny distribution of the product to prisons in U.S. states currently active in carrying out the death penalty by lethal injection.”

The company added that it had notified its distributors of the plan in late June and under its new distribution programme hospitals and treatment centres would continue to have access to Nembutal for therapeutic purposes but it would “review all Nembutal orders before providing clearance for shipping the product and deny orders from prisons located in States currently active in carrying out death penalty sentences.”

This development is a serious setback to U.S. correctional facilities, many of which switched to the pentobarbital after the drug earlier used became scarce in the country. The supply of that drug, sodium thiopental, dried up after the sole company producing it, Hospira, announced last year that it would halt production owing to raw materials concerns.

This week Maya Foa of a United Kingdom-based anti-death-penalty campaign group Reprieve however welcomed the steps taken by Lundbeck, which she said showed that it was possible to take action to stop the supply of drugs for use in executions. “Other pharmaceutical companies should now follow Lundbeck’s example... We also need to see action from the European Commission to block the export of execution drugs from the EU to the U.S.,” she said.

The action by Lundbeck followed from Reprieve and other groups pressing the company to commit to a concrete strategy to prevent U.S. prisons from diverting their product from legitimate medical use toward executions.

Spelling out some of the details on the proposed distribution changes, Lundbeck said that prior to receiving Nembutal, it would require the purchaser to sign a form stating that the purchase of Nembutal was for its own use and that it would not redistribute any purchased product without express written authorisation from Lundbeck. “By signing the form, the purchaser agrees that the product will not be made available for use in capital punishment,” the company said.

"Lundbeck adamantly opposes the distressing misuse of our product in capital punishment... While the company has never sold the product directly to prisons and therefore cannot make guarantees, we are confident that our new distribution program will play a substantial role in restricting prisons' access to Nembutal for misuse as part of lethal injection,” said Ulf Wiinberg, Chief Executive Officer of Lundbeck, in a statement.

However the company reiterated that its pentobarbital met “important medical need” and it had chosen not to withdraw the product from the market because “the product continues to meet an important medical need in the U.S. Nembutal is used to treat serious conditions such as a severe and life threatening emergency epilepsy.”

From The Hindu

Despite evidence of agonising deaths caused, and in possible violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, numerous prisons in the United States have continued to use an untested drug, pentobarbital, in their lethal injection cocktail for executions.

Most recently the state of Georgia used the animal euthanasia barbiturate to put to death Roy Blankenship (55) who, according to leading U.S. anaesthesiologist David Waisel, “was inadequately anesthetized and was conscious for approximately the first three minutes of the execution and that he suffered greatly.”

Dr. Waisel in particular cited eyewitness accounts stating that Mr. Blankenship’s eyes “were open throughout,” and he added that that should not have occurred after the injection of the anaesthetic component of the lethal injection.

Mr. Blankenship, who was executed on June 23, was the first inmate in Georgia who was killed with pentobarbital, also known as Nembutal. Many U.S. states have switched to the drug, commonly used to put to dogs, after the drug earlier used, sodium thiopental, became scarce in the country.

The supply of sodium thiopental dried up after the sole company producing it, Hospira, announced last year that it would halt production owing to raw materials concerns. Following this development numerous correctional facilities attempted to obtain sodium thiopental from other countries such as India and the United Kingdom.

However since none of the imported sodium thiopental has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug administration, the Drug Enforcement Agency seized some the UK-made drug from prisons in Kentucky and Tennessee earlier this year.

Yet in January an Indian generic drug company, Kayem Pharma of Mumbai, however managed to export enough sodium thiopental to kill 166 men, to the Nebraska Department of Corrections. South Dakota is also believed to possess the Indian-made drug and it is unclear whether these supplies may also be seized by federal authorities.

With such concerns mounting, however, the list of states turning to pentobarbital, which has been approved by the FDA – though not for use in executions – is growing daily. This trend has intensified despite experts such as Dr. Waisel warning that “the use of pentobarbital as an agent to induce anaesthesia has no clinical history... [and] puts the inmate at risk for serious undue pain and suffering.”

Dr. Waisel’s words would appear to now be grimly prophetic as accounts of botched executions are beginning to trickle in ever more rapidly. In Alabama the execution of Eddie Duval Powell on June 16 “show that his behaviour during the process was similar to that of Mr Blankenship, including the jerking of the head and expressions of apparent surprise and discomfort,” according to a statement by Reprieve, a UK-based anti-death penalty campaign group.

Media eyewitness accounts of Mr. Powell’s death said that “Seemingly confused and startled, he jerked his head to one side and began breathing heavily, his chest rose and contracted. The execution cocktail drugs had begun to be administered.”

Commenting on the use of pentobarbital in U.S. executions Reprieve investigator Maya Foa said, “The new drug protocol was rushed through against the advice of medical professionals, and in many States, against the law. The growing evidence that the protocol doesn’t work, and that prisoners are experiencing extraordinary pain and suffering as a result, makes one seriously wonder about the... justice of the U.S. capital punishment system.”

In the state of Texas, which executes more prisoners than any other U.S. state, the question of cruel and unusual punishment from the use of pentobarbital was compounded by the fact the drug was recently administered to two inmates who were, according to experts “mentally deficient.”

Milton Mathis (32) was said to have an IQ of 62, and Gayland Bradford (42) an IQ of 68, yet Mr. Mathis was executed on June 21 and Mr. Bradford on June 1.

After the Danish company producing pentobarbital for the U.S., Lundbeck, came under enormous pressure from campaign groups and investors to stop allowing its products to be used in executions, it said that it would look into how it could achieve that. However it is yet to commit to a course of action to prevent its pentobarbital from reaching U.S. executioners.