United States Barack President Obama during his visit to India -- and preferably during his address to India's Parliament -- should do something big, like declaring 'forthrightly' Washington's support for India's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, another report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has said.
Obama, who called Zardari on Tuesday evening, held a "detailed conversation covering several important subjects," said an official statement.
In the report titled Toward Realistic US-India relations, authored by George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he cites an exchange between a senior White House official and an Indian businessman on Iran, which shows how poorly American officials understood India for all the talk of a strategic partnership.
Notwithstanding India's protests, the Obama administration is readying itself to provide Pakistan with even more massive doses of military largesse, as senior United States officials acknowledged that Pakistan's request for additional security assistance would be a top priority on the agenda of the US-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue that begins on Wednesday.
"I believe it would a great thing if the president were to do this during his visit," Karl Inderfurth, professor of international relations at George Washington University, told Rediff India Abroad
US officials want President Barack Obama to support India as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, telling him it could make his India visit truly historic, reveals Aziz Haniffa.
During his November visit to India, Barack Obama will be paying a visit to Amritsar's Golden Temple, a first for a United States president. This stopover may be unusual for a head of the state and has many thinking. Is this visit being made especially for First Lady Michelle Obama, who will be accompanying her husband to India? May be, for not many know of the Obamas Punjab connection.
With quintessential diplomatic astuteness, the Congress party's master trouble-shooter for decades, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, shrugged off the irritants that loom large in US-India relations -- including the outsourcing controversy -- preceding the visit next month to India of President Barack Obama, saying all of these problems can be resolved through dialogue.
Notwithstanding the demise of the mercurial leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Velupillai Prabakharan, who was killed by the Sri Lankan security forces over a year ago, , the pro-LTTE lobby in the United States has remained active, particularly in the US Congress.
Former United States President Bill Clinton has invited Ruchira Gupta, an activist who has fought against sex trafficking for two decades, to join his CGI Lead Task Force -- a high level group within the Clinton Global Initiative.Gupta is the founder president of Apne Aap Women Worldwide and winner of the 2009 Clinton Global Citizen Award for Leadership in Civil Society.
The actor has become the goodwill ambassador of Pratham Education Foundation.
United States Senator Carl Levin, the influential and much respected chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, has blasted the Pakistani government for its hypocrisy in privately condoning the US predator drone attacks to eliminate the terrorists in meetings with American officials, and then publicly condemning them as a violation of that country's sovereignty.He argued that these public protestations were a bigger problem.
The newly formed Republican Indian Committee in the United States has appointed Armeane M Choksi -- former World Bank official and venture capitalist and now real estate developer, adjunct professor and community activist -- as its first national president.
The irritants that have cropped up in recent weeks in relations between India and the United States figured in the meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and External Affairs Minister S M Krishna on the sidelines of the 65th United Nations General Assembly sessions in New York. But a senior US official said the 'superb cooperation and goodwill' between Washington and New Delhi would eclipse these hiccups and would not be a dampener on President Obama's visit.
United States Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Robert Blake, while briefing reporters on the meeting between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and External Affairs Minister S M Krishna on the sidelines of the 65th United Nations General Assembly in New York, said the issue of direct and complete access to Pakistani American and Lashkar operative David Coleman had not come up at all at these talks.
United States Representative Ed Royce, California Republican and the ranking GOP member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has slammed the alleged ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Bhutan and said Hindus have been discriminated much more than any other ethnic group in these countries.
Yale University cosmologist Priyamvada Natarajan was part of an international team of astronomers that used a massive galaxy cluster as a cosmic magnifying lens to study the nature of elusive dark energy for the first time. Their findings appeared in August's issue of the prestigious journal Science.Astronomers employ a variety of methods to study the geometry of the universe in order to study the nature of dark energy.
With just over a month to go for the general election, the three top-tier Democratic Indian American candidates -- Manan Trivedi, Ami Bera and Raj Goyle -- have upped the ante against their Republican opponents with a chutzpah unprecedented in the annals of Indian-American Congressional campaigns.All three candidates are flush with campaign war chests in excess of $1 million and are strongly backed by the Democratic establishment.
The position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs with responsibilities to work specifically on the India portfolio -- which has remained vacant for nearly a year since the controversial Christine Fair declined the offer of the job -- has finally been filled with longtime South Asian expert Alyssa Ayres
In controversial remarks more than likely to raise New Delhi's ire less than two months before President Barack Obama India tour, a top United States' State Department official strongly defended a greater Chinese role in South Asia even as he acknowledged India's sensitivities over such a Beijing role.