A good page on Mehdi hassan

Washington wants Pak out, India in as Afghanistan mentor

New York: Washington wants India to fill up the post-US vacuum in Afghanistan and play a bigger role training Afghan security forces as a NATO deadline to withdraw all its combat troops from that country by the end of 2014 draws near.

There is irony in the situation as the same US administration wanted India to downsize its footprint in Afghanistan till a couple of years ago for fear of offending Pakistan. Now US criticism of Pakistan is no longer hush- hush. In fact, the mood on Capitol Hill is so rabidly anti-Pakistan that a US Senator held up a Farm Bill in the Senate last week by wanting to tack on a bill to choke aid to Islamabad.

Tired of catering to Pakistan’s sulks about an Indian presence in Afganistan, the US is increasingly looking to India as a partner in developing Afghanistan. New Delhi has provided some $2 billion in assistance  to Afghanistan since 2001. Both the US and India have strategic partnership agreements with Afghanistan. At the cost of sending Pakistan into a paroxysms of rage, US Secretary Hillary Clinton proposed a trilateral engagement between the US, India and Afghanistan.xternal Affairs Minister SM Krishna said, alongside Clinton. AP

Nirupama Rao, India’s ambassador to Washington, made clear this month that India has every intention of preventing “a regression in Afghanistan to the situation it was before 2001.” However, India has sought reassurance that the US and its allies will retain a substantial presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014 because of concerns that a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda might allow Afghanistan to become a haven for Islamic jihadists obsessed with Kashmir.

“Any perception of lack of will on the part of the international community to deal firmly with terrorist groups will risk Afghanistan sliding back to being a safe haven for terrorist and extremist groups that threaten the region and beyond,” External Affairs Minister SM Krishna said, alongside Clinton as India and the US held their annual strategic dialogue in Washington.

Krishna also stressed the necessity to deal with “terrorist sanctuaries and safe havens” beyond Afghanistan’s borders in a veiled reference to Pakistan. The two governments also discussed terrorist safe havens in Pakistan.

Greater cooperation in counter-terrorism also populated the jammed agenda for the strategic talks. The US State Department, through its anti-terrorism assistance programmes, conducted eight courses in India in 2011 and will provide 14 courses in 2012 on topics ranging from bomb blast investigation, critical incident management, to cyber investigations and forensics.

“It’s not enough just to talk about cooperation on issues ranging from civil nuclear energy, attracting US investment to India or defending human rights or promoting women’s empowerment,” said Clinton.

“We have to follow through so that our people, citizens of two, great pluralistic democracies, can see and feel the benefits,” she added.

A day after listening to US industry leaders vent their frustration at the Indian government’s inability to pull off big ticket reforms, Krishna said he was “conscious of the fact that there is a degree of skepticism about the economic content” of the US-India relationship. He promised foreign investors a level playing field and transparency.

He said US companies will be able to participate in plans to invest more than $1 trillion on India’s infrastructure build-out in the next five years.

Two-way trade and investment has grown 40 percent since 2009 and is set to exceed $100 billion this year, but Clinton pointed out that there is “a lot of room for further growth.”

The two sides agreed Wednesday to expedite negotiations on a bilateral investment treaty.

Romney choosing climate skeptic as running mate

By Lisa Hymas<><><><>

Mitt is thinking hard about which boring white man to choose as his running mate. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

OK, alright, Romney hasn’t actually picked his VP candidate yet, but we can already say with near-100 percent certainly that it’ll be someone who’s skeptical about the climate crisis and doubts that it’s significantly driven by human activity.

This is because virtually all high-level Republicans are skeptical about the climate crisis, at least judging by their public statements and actions. To find a Republican who believes that we ought to do even a little something about global warming, Romney would have to wade into the garbage bin of GOP politics and consort with losers and has-beens like Charlie Crist andJon Huntsman. Fat chance.

Here are some of the incredibly boring white guys Romney might actually pick (along with a few outlier options who are non-white, non-boring, and/or non-guys), and some of the illuminating things they’ve said about climate change:

Jeb Bush

Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida

“I’m a skeptic. I’m not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further … It may be only partially man-made. It may not be warming by the way. The last six years we’ve actually had mean temperatures that are cooler.”

Mitch Daniels

Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana

“The [climate] debate, so far, has been dominated by ‘experts’ from the University of Hollywood and the P.C. Institute of Technology. … Any dissident voice is likely to be the target of a fatwa issued by one Alatollah [sic] or another of the climate change theocracy, branding the dissenter as a ‘denier’ for refusing to bow down to the ‘scientific consensus.’”

Bobby Jindal

Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana

“President Obama claims to be focusing this election year on the American economy. To make that pledge true, he must make wholesale changes to his energy policy and put energy prices and energy independence ahead of zealous adherence to left-wing environmental theory.”
(He didn’t say the word “climate,” but we can read between the lines.)

Susana Martinez (Photo by Albuquerque Public Schools)

Susana Martinez, governor of New Mexico

“[T]here is disagreement in the science community concerning the causes of global warming.”

Bob McDonnell

Bob McDonnell, governor of Virginia

“Humans might be part of the cause, but too often in the debate it’s missed that the Earth has been warmer in the past and it has been a lot cooler in the past. … So I would say the science is mixed on a lot of those things.”

Tim Pawlenty

Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota

“So there is climate change, but the reality is the science of it indicates that most of it, if not all of it, is caused by natural causes. And as to the potential human contribution to that, there’s a great scientific dispute about that very issue.”

Rob Portman

Rob Portman, senator from Ohio

“When you analyze all the data, there is a warming trend according to science. But the jury is out on the degree of how much is man-made.”

Marco Rubio

Marco Rubio, senator from Florida

“The climate is always changing. The climate is never static. The question is whether it’s caused by man-made activity and whether it justifies economically destructive government regulation.”

Paul Ryan (Photo by Republican Conference)

Paul Ryan, rep from Wisconsin

“Unilateral economic restraint in the name of fighting global warming has been a tough sell in our communities, where much of the state is buried under snow … [E]mail exchangesfrom the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit … undermine confidence in the scientific data driving the climate change debates.”

Chris Christie (Photo by Bob Jagendorf)

Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey

“I’ve always said that climate change is real … we know enough to know that we are at least a part of the problem.”

Hey, wait, that’s not total denial! But Christie said it in a speech announcing that he was pulling New Jersey out of the first mandatory carbon cap-and-trade system in the country, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, so take it with your daily recommended allowance of salt.

Robotic ‘fish’ start hunting pollution in the sea

The robotic fish can avoid obstacles, communicate with each other and

know to return to base when its battery starts running low: 

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Robot “fish” developed by European scientists to improve pollution monitoring moved from the lab to the sea in a test at the northern Spanish port of Gijon on Tuesday.

The developers hope the new technology, which reduces the time it takes to detect a pollutant from weeks to seconds, will sell to port authorities, water companies, aquariums and anyone with an interest in monitoring water quality.

It could also have spin-offs for cleaning up oil spills, underwater security, diver monitoring or search and rescue at sea, they said.

The fish, which are 1.5 metres (5 feet) long and currenly cost 20,000 pounds each, are designed to swim like real fish and are fitted with sensors to pick up pollutants leaking from ships or undersea pipelines.

They swim independently, co-ordinate with each other, and transmit their readings back to a shore station up to a kilometre away.

“Chemical sensors fitted to the fish permit real-time, in-situ analysis, rather than the current method of sample collection and dispatch to a shore based laboratory,” said Luke Speller, a scientist at British consultancy BMT Group who led the project.

The fish can avoid obstacles, communicate with each other, map where they are and know how to return to base when their eight-hour battery life is running low, their makers say.

After the tests this week, the team will look at modifications needed to move the fish into commercial production, which they expect to reduce the cost of each unit.

The development project was part-funded by the EU and drew on expertise from the University of Essex and the University of Strathclyde in Britain, Ireland’s Tyndall National Institute and Thales Safare, a unit of Europe’s largest defence electronics group, Thales (TCFP.PA), which was responsible for the communication technology.