Countdown Begins: You can't go to Vienna, says Left, leaving UPA with only two options: either go for broke or give in, last a full term; next meeting June 25 What the Congress kept delaying finally happened today: its moment of reckoning has come, after the Left made it clear it would not let the Government go to Vienna to confirm the safeguards agreement, the key first piece in the operationalisation of the Indo-US nuclear deal. Related Stories
The Manmohan Singh government reckons it is make or break time for its civilian nuclear deal with the Bush administration. The bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement (the
A businessman of Indian origin was sentenced to 35 months in a US federal prison on Monday for allegedly exporting ballistic missile technology to India in a case that calls into question talk of a strategic relationship between the two countries and the salience of American nonproliferation laws.
CPM general secretary Prakash Karat, who said that his party's efforts would be at disentangling India from the US and Israel, ruled out any concession to the government at the meeting of the nuclear deal on Wednesday. "We will not allow the government to wrap up the safeguards agreement with the IAEA,' he said.
If the Left parties could successfully block the Indo-US nuclear deal by threatening in all seriousness to withdraw their outside support to the UPA goverment, why can't they adopt the same tactic to force the Centre to rollback the steep hike in the prices of petroleum products, including LPG? Is the worsening plight of the majority of the country's people, already reeling under the skyrocketing prices of essential commodities and whose miseries are now compounded by the rise in petroleum prices not as serious an issue for the Left as the nuke deal?
PM must give a final push to nuclear deal There are media reports that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will make a last effort to rescue the nuclear deal from limbo and call an all-party conference to seek the understanding and support of political leaders. If this report is correct, it is a welcome move and he ought to have done it much earlier. Now he has only a very narrow window of opportunity to get the deal through while President George Bush is in office. There is no doubt that a deal on such favourable terms is extremely unlikely with any other US administration.
For four years, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, has lived in the shadows, confined to his Islamabad home since a tearful televised confession in which he admitted selling nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya. On Thursday, the 76-year-old scientist returned to the spotlight with a bold new twist: that he had not meant a word of his earlier admission.
IN what could further dampen the spirits of the nuclear deal enthusiasts, the government has put off the meeting of the Left-UPA panel on the Indo-US nuclear agreement to June 18. This is the second shocker for the pro-deal quarters in the past two days. Their hopes about the government going ahead with the deal were revived when the media came out reports about the prime minister planning a meeting of senior officials involved with the nuclear agreement. Government leaders have already denied any plans for such an exercise.
Iran may be withholding information needed to establish whether it tried to make nuclear arms, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Monday in an unusually strongly worded report. The tone of the language suggesting that Tehran continues to stonewall the IAEA revealed a glimpse of the frustration felt by agency investigators stymied in their attempts to gain full answers to suspicious aspects of Iran's past nuclear activities.
