External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said India will continue to extend all support to the Afghanistan as a contiguous neighbour, in a clear reference that the Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir belongs to India.
Projects worth over $20 billion, ranging from the decade-long Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline to various oil and gas exploration and production projects, are being re-considered, said officials in the Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.
India will pay Iran $900 million in two tranches beginning next week to clear part of the past dues for crude oil it buys from the Persian Gulf nation.
"We hope that India, as well as all other states -- China, Russia, France, Britain and Japan -- will diminish their economic relations with Iran," US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns said.
India also went on an overdrive in expanding its military engagement with like-minded countries in its neighbourhood and beyond in the face of China's relentless attempts to become a regional hegemon and establish its primacy in South Asia.
The directive from 'above' has come to the petroleum ministry on the eve of the departure of the Indian delegation to Tehran for a decisive last round of the trilateral negotiations scheduled to be held there later this week.
India's Iran imports rise to 276,800 bpd vs 195,600 bpd in 2013.
State Bank of India, the nation's largest lender, has stopped processing transactions of Russian entities that have been sanctioned by the West over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, sources said. To effect this, SBI has issued a circular as it fears that any transaction with entities or sectors under sanction will invite sanction on it as well, sources said. No transactions involving entities, banks, ports or vessels appearing on a US, European Union or United Nations sanctions list would be processed irrespective of the currency of the transaction, they said. Payments due to such entities have to be processed by other mechanism rather than through the banking channel, sources added.
If military power is all it would take to finish the menace of an awful terrorist organisation like Hamas, how come five Israeli wars in Gaza since 2003 have failed to do so? asks Shekhar Gupta.
Reiterating that "Iran must not acquire nuclear capability," Mullen after his arrival in Israel on Sunday said that if a regional confrontation were to break out following a strike on Tehran, it 'will be a big, big, big problem for all of us, and I worry a great deal about the unintended consequences of a strike'.
An obscure Indian bank has been an unlikely beneficiary of Western sanctions against Iran, handling billions of dollars from frozen oil payments that boosted its interest margins, but is now having to prepare itself for life after the windfall.
On the eve of the most crucial round of talks between Iran and the world powers, the United States has said that Tehran has a choice to make in the coming weeks to address concerns about its military nuclear programme.
India's solidarity with the Palestinian cause dates back to Mahatma Gandhi's time and its rising global stature and influence over all key players in West Asia make it well-placed to play a crucial role in defusing the crisis arising out of the Israel-Hamas conflict, Palestine Ambassador Adnan Abu Alhaija said on Tuesday.
With India reluctant to pay a higher price for the liquefied natural gas contracted in 2005, Iran has proposed to sell the fuel to the Indian private sector.
India will make another attempt to salvage the $22-billion deal to import LNG from Iran when Petroleum Minister Murli Deora meets the Islamic country's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran on Thursday.
Pro-deal lawmakers like Congressman Gary Ackerman continue to express their angst over the close India-Iran ties. The lawmakers have warned that this could be a spoiler to the envisaged strategic partnership between Washington and New Delhi.
India had included the penalty clause in the $22 billion deal it signed with Iran in June this year for import of five million tonnes of LNG for 25 years so that the fuel reaches its shores as per the committed schedule of 2009-10.
The US president said the summit will be more than a photo-op.
At a joint media briefing with Lavrov, Jaishankar listed issues such as "factors of instability" such as terrorism and its cross-border manifestation and said it remains a "major concern".
Iran has supplied Iraq with fighter jets to help it counter the belligerent offensive by Islamist militants who have taken over large swathes of territory, a media report said in London.
The ongoing Hamas-Israel conflict has disrupted India's efforts to gain from a recent fall in crude oil prices. Since Hamas' invasion of southern Israel on October 7, petroleum has become costlier by around $5 per barrel, threatening to stoke prices and impact growth. Brent crude was trading at $89.8 per barrel on October 9 (9.15 pm IST), up over 4 per cent, thwarting India's anticipation of a period of declining oil prices - after the leading global petroleum benchmark declined by around 11 per cent last week.
His business successes which started with the international distribution rights for the Bollywood blockbuster movie 'Sangam' in 1964 made him one of the richest in Britain but it was the Bofors scam that made Srichand Parmanand Hinduja famous, or rather infamous, back home. SP Hinduja, as he was known, died in London on Wednesday after a prolonged illness. He was 87, a family spokesperson said. Born in a business family in Karachi, British India, he and his two younger brothers were accused of receiving payments totalling Rs 64 crore in illegal commissions to help Swedish gunmaker AB Bofors secure an Indian government contract.
Pakistan spread nuclear weapon technology around the globe in exchange for cash, political influence and help with its own atomic bomb programme, suggest documents obtained by a United States news channel.
Tehran plans to lift exports by 500,000 barrels per day
Trump becomes first sitting US President to pray at the Western Wall.
A quintessential military commander, Gen Bipin Rawat possessed an uncanny understanding of geopolitical upheavals, calibrated a tri-services military doctrine to make India face myriad security challenges, and is largely credited with bringing down militancy in the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir.
Amid warning by the UN nuclear watchdog that Iran could be hiding multiple secret nuclear sites, the UN and Iranian officials have been secretly engaged in negotiating a deal to allow Tehran keep most of its nuclear programme and end sanctions in return for co-operation with International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, a news report said on Tuesday.
The UAE central bank will then make payments in dirhams to Iran.
The deal, the Times said, would have been "bad enough on its own and disastrously ill timed" but the "most immediate damage was done" on Bush's next stop, Pakistan.
MTN suitors are facing a major problem as US bankers have made it clear they cannot fund the acquisition/merger of the South African teleco until it spins off or demerges its businesses located in at least four countries.
State Bank of India (SBI) is willing to work with Russian banks not facing sanctions and remain on the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network to open a special rupee vostro account (SRVA) for invoicing in Indian currency. The country's largest lender in a statement said it has not been identified as the nodal bank for handling Russia-related transactions. In July, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) allowed banks in India, including SBI, to open an SRVA to promote invoicing in Indian rupee, subject to certain safeguards. Accordingly, the bank in a statement said it is "making necessary arrangements and processing requests received from various banks, including Russian banks", following guidelines laid out by the RBI.
The ONGC-Hinduja combine would meet Iranian the authorities around mid-April to finalise 'participating agreement' for the development of Phase-12 of the giant South Pars gas field and South Azadegan oilfield, ONGC Chairman and Managing Director R S Sharma told reporters in New Delhi on Wednesday. The consortia was in Tehran earlier this month to do technical due diligence for the two fields but ended up being shown old data for the Phase-12 and no data of South Azadegan.
US committed to implementing Indo-US nuclear deal: Burns
Simon, who did not specify if he was referring to local organisers or FIFA in his reference to the tournament director, said the other six nations then decided to "show solidarity" and not wear it.
'We are ready to allow transit facilities and also foolproof security but India will have to deal with Kashmir issue in an equitable and peaceful manner,' the Pakistani president said.
One of India's closest friends in the United States Congress, Representative Gary Ackerman, New York Democrat, on Tuesday asked Obama administration's point man for South Asia Robert Blake, as to what would happen if after the nuclear disaster in Japan, India may decide to forego the US-India civilian nuclear deal and rely more heavily on Iran for its energy requirements.
