US denies reports of snooping on French citizens
Washington, October 23
The US has described the reports of collecting more than 70 million recordings of French citizens telephone records as "false" and subsequently the news reports published in a French newspaper as inaccurate regarding foreign intelligence activities.

CHOGM summit
UK to quiz Lanka on rights record
Colombo, October 23
The British government considers its participation in the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) here next month as an opportunity to shine a light on Sri Lanka and to question it about its commitment to improve its human rights record, a UK minister has said.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is likely to leave his meeting with US President Barack Obama at the White House on Wednesday a disappointed man.Obama will meet Sharif at the White House on Wednesday afternoon. US Vice President Joe Biden will also attend the meeting.

“The meeting will highlight the importance and resilience of the US-Pakistan relationship and provide an opportunity for us to strengthen cooperation on issues of mutual concern, such as energy, trade and economic development, regional stability, and countering violent extremism,” the White House said ahead of the meeting.

Sharif is expected to urge Obama to end drone strikes on suspected terrorists in Pakistan and seek US mediation on Kashmir. White House officials and analysts said Obama will not agree to either demand.

“Our policy on Kashmir has not changed,” said Laura Lucas Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council. “We still believe that the pace, scope, and character of India and Pakistan’s dialogue on Kashmir is for those two countries to determine.”

Daniel Markey, senior fellow for South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said it was not constructive for Sharif to raise the Kashmir issue with Obama.

“I do think that it is politically expedient, that it is important for him to show his countrymen that Kashmir has not disappeared from the agenda and that he will raise it in international fora, including with the United States,” said Markey. “However, I think there is a very strong and probably durable consensus in Washington that Kashmir is not an area where the United States wants to wade in deeply.”

“The United States doesn’t want to pursue a role as a mediator,” said Markey. The US would prefer that India and Pakistan resolve this on their own,” and that is not going to change, regardless of what Nawaz Sharif suggests to the White House,” he added.

Sharif told an audience at the US Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington on Tuesday that the US has the capacity to “do more to help the two sides resolve their core disputes, including Kashmir.” India opposes the third-party mediation on Kashmir, which it considers a bilateral issue.

In his speech at USIP, Sharif urged the Obama administration to stop drone strikes inside Pakistan. US drone strikes have become a “major irritant” in the US-Pakistan relationship,” he said. The Obama administration is unlikely to halt the drone strikes as long as insurgents given sanctuary in Pakistan kill US troops in Afghanistan, said Robert Hathaway, director of the Asia programmme at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. U.S. officials say the drone strikes have significantly degraded Al-Qaida’s capacity. Pakistani officials say the strikes violate Pakistan’s sovereignty.

Sharif argued that Pakistan is “neither a source of nor the epicenter of terrorism, as has sometimes been alleged.”

In his meeting with Obama in Washington in September, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described Pakistan as the epicenter of terrorism.

The US-Pakistan relationship has been bogged down by what officials in Washington and Islamabad describe as a trust deficit. The relationship was stretched to breaking point in 2011 by the arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis for killing two Pakistanis in January; a US commando raid that resulted in the death of Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistani town of Abbottabad in May; and a NATO attack on Pakistani border posts that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November that year.

Sharif said he hoped to approach the US-Pakistan relationship with an “open and fresh mind, leaving behind the baggage of trust deficit and mutual suspicions”.

Islamabad, October 23
Records of the cross-examination of Indian witnesses by a Pakistani judicial commission in connection with the Mumbai attacks case are likely to be received by Pakistani authorities tomorrow, a prosecutor said today.

An anti-terrorism court here conducting the trial of seven Pakistani suspects charged with involvement in the Mumbai attacks had on October 3 postponed proceedings till tomorrow because of the lack of the Indian court records.

“The records were supposed to reach us in a week but this has been delayed. Our Foreign Office has told me that it might come by tomorrow afternoon,” special public prosecutor Chaudhury Mohammed Azhar told PTI.

Asked about the delay, Indian diplomatic sources said the records were sent to the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi last week.

The Mumbai attacks case was adjourned for three weeks after the prosecution informed the judge that India had not submitted court records of the cross-examination of key witnesses in Mumbai by the Pakistani judicial commission. — PTI

Berlin, October 23
The German government has obtained information that the US may have monitored the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel and she called President Barack Obama on Wednesday to demand an immediate clarification, her spokesman said.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama had assured Merkel that the US was not monitoring the communications of the Chancellor. But the strongly worded statement by Merkel's spokesman suggested that Germany was not fully satisfied. It demanded an "immediate and comprehensive" clarification on US surveillance practices.

"She made clear that she views such practices, if proven true, as completely unacceptable and condemns them unequivocally," the statement read.

"Between close friends and partners, as Germany and the US have been for decades, there should not be such monitoring of the communications of a government leader. This would be a grave breach of trust. Such practices should be immediately stopped."

The news broke as Secretary of State John Kerry, on a visit to Rome, faced fresh questions about mass spying on European allies. — Reuters

Colombo, October 23
The British government considers its participation in the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) here next month as an opportunity to shine a light on Sri Lanka and to question it about its commitment to improve its human rights record, a UK minister has said.

Sayeeda Warsi, the senior minister of state in the British foreign office, made the remarks while answering a question in the House of Lords yesterday on whether a UK boycott of the Colombo summit would send a strong message to the government of Sri Lanka over its deteriorating record of human rights.

Warsi said the UK government believed that "CHOGM will, among other things, provide an opportunity to shine a light on Sri Lanka and to question it in relation to the many commitments that were given as part of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war that ended in 2009." — PTI