WASHINGTON, February 22, 2012 The President just couldn’t say no. Mick Jagger held out a microphone almost by way of command, and soon Barack Obama was belting out the blues with the best of them. The East Room of the White House was transformed into an intimate blues club on Tuesday night for a concert featuring blues all-stars of the past, present and future and the President himself. The surprise performance by Obama came at the end of the playlist when the blues ...
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WELLINGTON, February 22, 2012 More than 10,000 New Zealanders stood in silence, some in tears, at a Christchurch park on Wednesday while police officers and firefighters read out the names of all 185 people, who died in a devastating earthquake one year ago. The reading was followed by two minutes of silence at 12.51 p.m., the minute the magnitude 6.1 quake struck. The ceremony at North Hagley Park, which included speeches and songs, was part of a day of remembrances ...
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THRISSUR, February 22, 2012 Some of the earliest and rarest recordings of Veda recitation and chant were made by a foreigner, Frits Staal, during a ride he undertook across south India on an old Royal Enfield. He went on to be one of the most influential Indologists and experts in the Vedas abroad. Staal, who had been Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and South/Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, died on February 19 at his home in Chiangmai, ...
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CHENNAI, February 22, 2012 In a significant breakthrough in the bank robbery cases, the Chennai Police have zeroed in on a suspect whose image was recorded by Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) network installed in a nationalised bank where he allegedly went to conduct a recce, highly placed police sources said on Tuesday. Even as a couple of employees of the Bank of Baroda (BOB) branch in Perungudi, where a robbery took place on January 23, identified the middle-aged ...
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Male, February 20, 2012 Maldives’ ousted President Mohammed Nasheed on Saturday asked the new regime to fulfil its promise to fix an early date for polls under an India-brokered deal, a day after a Commonwealth ministerial team arrived here to probe the circumstances of his resignation. As his MDP party’s mass rally demanding snap elections entered the second day today, 44-year-old Nasheed, who was the first democratically-elected President of the country, said the ...
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Washington, February 20, 2012 Keeping up his tirade against outsourcing, US President Barack Obama said on Saturday that firms shipping jobs off shores should be denied tax breaks if manufacturing is to be brought back to America and employment is to be raised. Speaking in his weekly radio address to the nation, Mr. Obama said all tax benefits should go to companies that produce jobs inside the country. He said such a move is essential to not only bring back jobs ...
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NEWARK, February 20, 2012 After all the testimonials from relatives and friends, the songs from legends and pop stars, the preaching and even laughter, the raw emotion of Whitney Houston’s funeral came down to just one moment- The sound of her own voice. As the strains of her biggest record, “I Will Always Love You,” filled the New Hope Baptist Church at the end of the nearly four-hour service Saturday and her silver-and-gold casket was lifted in the air, the weight of ...
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MOGADISHU, February 20, 2012 Somalia's disparate leaders have agreed on the basic structure of a new Parliament and government to replace the fragile transitional body that has failed to bring peace to the war-torn country. Constant infighting, rampant corruption and bloody attacks by Islamist al-Shebaab insurgents undermined the unelected Transitional Federal Government (TFG), whose Western-backed mandate ends in August. Somalia's President, the Presidents of the breakaway ...
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GENEVA, February 20, 2012 Bird flu experts meeting in Geneva have ruled that controversial research on a mutant form of the virus potentially capable of being spread among humans should be made public. Security assessments must however be carried out first before the two studies can be published and the research can continue, scientists agreed at a two-day meeting at the World Health Organisation. “The consensus was that in the interest of public health the full papers ...
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KAMRA, Pakistan, February 20, 2012 Inside a high-security Air Force complex that builds jet fighters and weapons systems, Pakistan’s military is working on the latest addition to its sprawling commercial empire - a home-grown version of the iPad. It’s a venture that bundles together Pakistani engineering and Chinese hardware, and shines a light on the military’s controversial foothold in the consumer market. It all comes together at an Air Force base in Kamra ...
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MONTERREY, Mexico, February 20, 2012 An inmate riot that may have been staged to cover a breakout killed 44 prisoners on Sunday, and the jail’s director and all guards on duty at the time have been detained, a security official said. Nuevo Leon state public security spokesman Jorge Domene Zambrano said the riot broke out at about 2 a.m. in a high-security section of a state prison in the city of Apodaca outside the northern industrial city of Monterrey. The fight ...
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DUBAI, February 19, 2012 China on Saturday reaffirmed that it continues to reject the western-backed Arab plan that calls for the exit of President Bashar Al Assad as the first step towards achieving a political transition in the strife-torn nation. Visiting Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhai Jun made it plain to the media after talks with Syrian leadership, that contrary to western exhortations, China would unambiguously support the roadmap scripted by Mr. Assad for ...
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Washington, February 19, 2012 The FBI has been working overtime on sting operations, it was evident, when it announced on Friday that it had arrested Moroccan Amine El Khalifi (29), an illegal resident in the United States, for plotting to detonate a bomb in a suicide attack on the United States Capitol Building. Khalifi's arrest, which occurred as he walked from a parking unit towards the main building wearing an inert bomb vest earlier supplied to him by an undercover FBI ...
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Patna, February 18, 2012 Nepalese Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai said on Friday that economic integration was the key to the progress of the backward South Asian countries, and pointed out that in spite of abundant natural resources, the Himalayan nation remained among the most backward regions in the world today. Delivering the inaugural address at the second edition of the Global Bihar Summit — a meeting designed to showcase a resurgent Bihar — here, Dr. Bhattarai ...
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ISLAMABAD, February 18, 2012 Amid reports that Afghan President Hamid Karzai minced no words in his deliberations with the Pakistani leadership vis-à-vis facilitating immediate contact with senior leaders of the Taliban including Mullah Omar, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar on Friday dismissed the demand as preposterous and unrealistic. In a brief interaction with the media after the joint press conference by the Presidents of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran following their ...
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Washington, February 18, 2012 India-born biologist Kamal Bawa has bagged the world’s first international award for outstanding scientific work that promotes sustainable development globally. Dr. Bawa, distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, will receive the Gunnerus Sustainability Award from the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (DKNVS) at a function in Trondheim, Norway on April 17, an official announcement said. ...
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BERLIN, February 17, 2012 German President Christian Wulff has announced his resignation in a scandal over favours he allegedly received before becoming head of state creating a new problem for Chancellor Angela Merkel. Mr. Wulff announced his immediate resignation on Friday, a day after the slow-burning affair escalated dramatically with a request by prosecutors for Parliament to lift his immunity from prosecution. Mr. Wulff is stepping down after less than two years ...
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New York, February 17, 2012 New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who strove to capture untold stories in Middle East conflicts from Libya to Iraq, has died in eastern Syria after slipping into the country to report on the uprising against its president. Shadid, shot in the West Bank in 2002 and kidnapped for six days in Libya last year, apparently died of an asthma attack yesterday, the Times said. Times photographer Tyler Hicks ...
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United Nations, February 17, 2012 India was among 137 members of the U.N. General Assembly that voted on Friday to approve a resolution, which “strongly” condemns all violence and human rights violations in Syria and supports Arab League efforts to resolve the nearly year long crisis in the country. The resolution, adopted by a vote of 137 in favour to 12 against with 17 abstentions, also called on Syria “to immediately put an end to all human rights violations and ...
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MOSCOW, February 16, 2012 As tensions continue to build up over Iran’s nuclear programme, the Russian military is bracing for a possible spill over of a large-scale conflict into Russia’s southern regions. Russia’s highest ranking military officer has warned of a possible attack against Iran in the next few months. “Iran, of course, is a sore spot. I think some kind of decision [to attack it] will be made probably closer to summer,” General Nikolai Makarov, ...
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