By Meena Kar
Moscow, Feb 1, (THAINDIAN NEWS) The fifth generation fighter plane of Russia, Sukhoi T-50 had been successful in completing its maiden flight this Friday. Russian experts have planned to launch several high profile weapons for revamping their artillery but have not been successful and so the test flight of this fighter plane had immense significance for them. According to the reports, the Russians, thrilled by the result of the test flight, consider that their Sukhoi T-50 would be able to challenge F-22, the fighter plane of United States. The success of the maiden flight also gave them the hope that it can be put to service in 2015.

Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister of Russia was excited after the new fighter plane completed its maiden flight and referred to it as one of the ‘remarkable’ events. He said that the flight of the new Sukhoi T-50 is a great achievement for them but they have to improve on its engine. The spokesperson of Sukhoi said that the first flight had met their expectations. Everyone was satisfied with the performance of Sukhoi T-50, which was originally scheduled to embark on its maiden flight in 2007.

Several technical problems had earlier prevented the test flight of the fighter plane. However, it had finally made the flight last week. The news of the test flight made people curious about its feature but the officials did not provide much details of its designs and specifications. However, there were reports indicating that Russia had collaborated with Indian experts for making the new fighter plane that was in the sky for around forty-seven minutes.

SHANGHAI: China’s banking regulator has asked banks to be cautious on their lending strategies this year, as Beijing seeks to avoid high

inflation and overheating the world’s third-largest economy.

In a statement issued late on Friday, China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) said banks should ensure that banking credit is entering the real economy and to control lending to high-polluting industries and industries with overcapacity.

It also called on banks to monitor the property sector.

“Banks should pay high attention to the changes in the property market and strictly implement relevant credit policies to enhance supervision and window guidance of property loans,” CBRC said in a statement posted on their website.

Banks were also told to control risks with “greater efforts”.

Last week, China took its strongest step towards tightening monetary policy by increasing the banks’ reserve requirement ratios (RRR) by 50 basis points as of Jan 18.

The move was the first time the central bank had adjusted the ratio since a cut in December 2008, when it was loosening policy to cushion the economy from the global financial crisis.

source: TOI

NEW DELHI: The Australian government should take “strict action” to prevent unabated attacks on Indians, which are hurting the image of that

country, Union Tourism Minister Kumari Selja said today.

“These attacks are condemnable and the government there should see that such incidents do not happen,” she told reporters here after flagging off a special Hazrat Nizamuddin- Thiruvanathapuram ‘Go Kerala’ Rajdhani Express.

“Due to such kind of incidents, the image of a country changes. Australia and India have very good ties but such attacks raise questions in the minds of people. The government should take strict action to prevent such incidents so that everybody feels secure there,” she said.

When asked about reports that Indian students are coming back to the country from Australia, the Minister said, “We want the government to take effective steps for safety of tourists, students or others”.

To a question whether special safety measures should be taken for Australian visitors during the coming Commonwealth Games, Selja said the government always takes steps to ensure security for tourists.

“We always discuss the issue with states and say that safety measures should be taken for any foreign tourist or domestic travellers going from one part of the country to another. The inter-state regional conference of tourism ministers of southern states yesterday also discussed the issue. We will take the necessary steps,” she said.

About Shiv Sena threat not to allow Australian cricketers in IPL to play in Mumbai, the minister said, “The Sena issues such statements from time to time. They do not have a positive attitude. They do not work to integrate the country.”

source: TOI

India said it looked forward to cooperation from Nepal in addressing its security concerns as the two sides explored ways to control cross-border crimes, such as smuggling of fake Indian currency and human trafficking, and agreed to combat terrorism jointly.

“I brought to notice of Nepalese leadership that the territory of Nepal is being used for anti-India activities, fake note smuggling and drug trafficking and we want government of Nepal to prevent such unhealthy activities,” External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna said on Sunday, wrapping up his three-day visit here.

Mr. Krishna, who met President Ram Baran Yadav, Premier Madhav Kumar Nepal and Deputy Premier and Foreign Minister Sujata Koirala among others, said “they have assured me that Nepalese territory will not be allowed to be used for anti-India activities and that they will be vigilant.”

“We look forward to their cooperation,” he said.

A joint statement issued at the end of his visit here said Mr. Krishna and Ms. Koirala discussed security concerns of their respective countries and agreed that terrorism and extremism were a threat to both sides. “They agreed to cooperate closely to end this menace.”

They discussed ways to enhance bilateral security cooperation to control cross-border crimes such as smuggling of fake Indian currency, human trafficking and arms smuggling.

Mr. Krishna assured Nepal that India was willing to provide all possible assistance to it, including to its security organisations, as per its request.

During the bilateral meeting, Ms. Koirala assured Mr. Krishna that her government will not allow the Nepalese territory to be used for any activity directed against India and both sides agreed to take necessary steps to preserve law and order situation and peace and tranquility along the Indo-Nepal border, the statement said.

“Nepalese side has assured that its territory will not be used for activities hostile to India by controlling fake Indian currency racket and drug smuggling and we will see how Nepalese side will keep its assurances,” Krishna told reporters before his departure for New Delhi.

Asked about the delay in signing of the extradition treaty between the two countries, Mr. Krishna said that India would certainly like to move fast on it but is willing to wait till the Nepalese side is ready.

India has been keen on this treaty, but lack of consensus among political parties in Nepal is delaying its signing.

“There is some time delay… India has enormous patience,” Mr. Krishna said.

He also said that India was willing to “re-visit” the 1950 Peace and Friendship treaty but the initiative should come from Nepal as more clarity was required. “We are open to it,” he said.

Justifying the need for revising the 1950 treaty, he said 60 years have past since it was signed. The world has changed since then and the Cold War has ended, he added.

“We are entirely willing to re-visit this treaty but the initiative has to come from Nepal. There has to be enough clarity (from Nepal),” Mr. Krishna said. “There has to be enough thought of what they want.”

This issue was flagged by all Nepalese leaders who met Mr. Krishna during his visit here. The Maoists, in particular, were pressing for scrapping the treaty, saying it was unequal.

Mr. Krishna — who also met Deputy Premier Bijaya Kumar Gachhadar, Nepali Congress leader G.P. Koirala, Maoist chief Prachanda and ex-premiers Sher Bahadur Deuba and Surya Bahadur Thapa — said the Nepalese government expressed its commitment to take necessary measures for promotion of an investor-friendly business environment to encourage Indian public and private sector investments here.

Summing up his visit, Mr. Krishna said, “there was a lot of goodwill among the political leadership of Nepal and the majority wants good relations with India, which is justified considering the historical, civilisation and geographical links between the two countries.”

Rejecting allegations by Mr. Prachanda about India’s interference in Nepal’s internal affairs, he said he conveyed to the former prime minister “unhappiness over his virulent anti-India statements in recent days.”

Mr. Krishna told Mr. Prachanda that India was not interfering in the internal affairs of Nepal. “We want bilateral relations at even keel.”

The joint statement said that India expressed its commitment to assist Nepal in strengthening its peace, stability and democratic institutions and for its economic development.

source: the hindu

The mistress-rich Tiger Woods is a very smart guy, because during his regular visits to the strip-clubs, he pretended to be naïve and an innocent virgin. He pretended that he had never seen a stripper before in his entire visit, despite being a regular visitor to strip-clubs.

According to Tony Lombardi, former manager of strip hotspot Scores, the golf ace came to the club whenever he was in New York. He revealed that the ace golfer Tiger Woods appeared like a shy “virgin to strip clubs”.

He was able to keep his numerous trysts with porn stars, mistresses and waitresses hidden from the public eye, with the help of his loyal band of friends, agents, and caddies.

Tiger Woods is not only a good golfer but a great manager and liar too. He managed to conceal his affairs from all, in deep secrecy and used all sort of tricks and treats to play upon the emotions of his lovers. He used his clout, money power and loyal friends to great use and kept the lovers quiet, until now.

Tiger Woods used his enormous money-power and his loyal friends to keep his adulterous lifestyle under wraps. He seduced his numerous mistresses with expensive gifts and supposedly confessions of love to keep them quiet and waiting to be the next Mrs. Tiger Woods.

Tiger Woods bodyguards approached women to whom he had taken a fancy in nightclubs on his behalf. And later his childhood friends esp. Byron Bell would arrange clandestine meetings with them and keep it all under wraps too.

Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband had singled out China for vetoing an agreement on limiting emissions.

Beijing said his comments were part of a political scheme to “provoke discord among developing countries”.

The Copenhagen summit ended without the 192 countries present reaching a firm agreement on climate change.

The delegates simply committed to “taking note” of a deal recognising the need to limit temperature rises to 2C.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu did not mention Mr Miliband by name, but in comments reported by the Xinhua state news agency, she said statements from “certain British politicians” were “plainly a political scheme”.

The aim, she said, was “to shirk responsibilities that should be assumed towards developing countries, and to provoke discord among developing countries”.

“This scheme will come to nothing,” said Ms Jiang.

‘New beginning’

Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper on Sunday, Mr Miliband said the vast majority of countries wanted a legally-binding treaty to protect the planet but it appeared four or five countries at the summit had been keen to “shelve the accord”.
He said China had vetoed two proposed agreements on emissions cuts, “despite the support of a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries”.

Ms Jiang said Mr Milband and others behind the editorial should “correct their mistakes, fulfil their obligations to developing countries in an earnest way, and stay away from activities that hinder the international community’s cooperation in coping with climate change”.

The BBC’s Michael Bristow in Beijing says China believes it went to the talks in good faith and offering significant proposals, so does not want to be seen to be the cause of the failure to reach a more solid agreement.

On Monday, China’s Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, praised the summit, saying it had been “not a destination but a new beginning”.

The final accord was reached between the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, but is not legally binding.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says the agreement must be made legally binding next year.

Passenger demand in October rose 0.5% from a year ago, while air freight fell 0.5%, International Air Transport Association data showed on Monday.

“Passenger demand is now 6% better than the low point reached in March 2009, but 5% below the peak recorded in early 2008,” IATA said.

Air freight, a key barometer of the strength of world trade, tends to pick up early in the economic recovery cycle when businesses start to replenish their inventories.

IATA represents 230 airlines including British Airways, Qantas, United Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Emirates. It forecasts the sector will lose USD 11 billion on a net basis this year and USD 4 billion in 2010.

WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) – Although U.S. President Barack Obama has never set foot there, China cast a long shadow in the Pacific region where he grew up.

Obama, who will visit Shanghai and Beijing for the first time on November 15-18, spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, five time zones away from Washington, D.C.; and beginning in 1967, when he was six years old, he lived in Jakarta for four years.

At the time, China was in the throes of Chairman Mao Zedong’s bloody Cultural Revolution. Abroad, the nation was less interested in selling widgets than in promoting Mao’s brand of radical communism — a force the U.S. saw behind communist movements and political upheaval in Vietnam, Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

In 1979, Obama’s senior year at Punahou school in Honolulu, China and the United States normalized diplomatic relations, launching a three-decade period in which ties between the two grew inexorably tighter and deeper — and complicated.

“Think of what China was in 1979: It was an autarkic, insular, inward-looking country that was preoccupied with its own internal things,” said a senior U.S. official. “Even 10 years ago … there was still a sort of sense of ‘We’re not a part of these global rules, we’re not doing this stuff.’ Now they see themselves as sitting at the table.”

If there were any doubts that China would have a seat at the table from now on, Obama dispelled those when he sent Secretary of State Hillary Clinton there on her first official trip abroad — not Pakistan, Afghanistan or any other foreign policy hot spot.

“That the first major visit (was) to China, and to Asia as well, is symbolic of where the locus of international economic activity — and to some degree the locus of international activity, period — is going to be in the coming years,” said economist and author Zachary Karabell, whose new book “Superfusion” posits that the U.S. and Chinese economies have effectively merged.

Beijing, once considered a wallflower on global affairs, is in turn warming to its more prominent role, though it’s unclear that will translate into greater cooperation with Washington on issues like climate change and the nuclear disputes with Iran and North Korea — not to mention human rights differences.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg highlighted the tension at the heart of the relationship in a speech in September. “Given China’s growing capabilities and influence, we have an especially compelling need to work with China to meet global challenges,” he said.

But Steinberg added that there was a tacit bargain in which the United States expects China to reassure the rest of the world that its growing role “will not come at the expense of security and wellbeing of others.”

That of course includes America’s.

“The big challenge there is going to be to maintain a competitive U.S. economy, and at the same time to maintain a high degree of stability and equanimity in the U.S.-China relationship,” said Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute think tank.

Indeed, even as the United States and China have grown closer diplomatically, their economic and trade ties have deepened to the point of mutual dependence. Not only does China depend on the U.S. export market to fuel its highflying economic growth rates, the United States relies on China’s vast savings to help finance its burgeoning budget deficits.

“It is clearly unsustainable. This relationship helped give rise to global economic imbalances,” said Ben Simpfendorfer, an economist with Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong. “If we are ever going to free ourselves of these imbalances, we need to reverse this relationship, get China to buy things in the U.S. and the U.S. to invest in China.”

By Parisa Hafezi

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iranian police warned the opposition on Tuesday to avoid using the 30th anniversary of the U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran to revive protests against the clerical establishment, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Opposition leaders Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi have urged their supporters to take to the streets on November 4, when rallies mark the seizure of the U.S. embassy after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution by radical students who took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

To prevent a repeat of the mass street protests that erupted after Iran’s disputed presidential election in June, officials said security forces would confront any “illegal” gatherings.

“We are announcing that only anti-American rallies in front of the former American embassy in Tehran are legal. Other gatherings or rallies on Wednesday are illegal and will be strongly confronted by the police,” Tehran police said in a statement, IRNA reported.

Anti-U.S. rallies will take place outside the former embassy, now called the “den of espionage” in Iran.

Some reformist websites have called on people to gather outside the Russian embassy instead, in an apparent protest at Moscow’s recognition of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election on June 12.

A reformist website said Karoubi would attend the rally outside the former U.S. embassy.

The vote, which moderate defeated candidates Mousavi and Karoubi say was rigged to secure Ahmadinejad’s re-election, sparked Iran’s worst unrest in the past three decades and exposed deep divisions among the ruling elite.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has accused the United States and its European allies of trying to overthrow the clerical establishment by fomenting post-election unrest.

“Americans should not lay hope on some post-election events in Iran because our system is more well-rooted than they think it is,” Khamenei told a group of students, state radio reported.

“HIDDEN DAGGER”

Ultimate authority in Iran lies not with Ahmadinejad, who often rails against the West, but with Khamenei. He again ruled out a resumption of ties until Washington “abandons its arrogant behavior” toward Iran.

“Every time they (U.S.) smile at the Iranian officials it comes with a dagger hidden behind them. They have not stopped intimidating Iran,” said Khamenei.

“Tactical smiles and cheerful expressions of Americans would only deceive children and not the officials of the great Iranian nation.”

U.S. President Barack Obama has said he is ready to deal directly with Iran, something his predecessor largely rejected. Washington cut diplomatic ties with Tehran shortly after the 1979 revolution.

Nov 3 – The re-elected Afghan President Hamid Karzai vows to root out corruption following stern warnings from Western supporters on the issue.

Kirsty Basset reports.

Reuters