Washington, December 11
President Barack Obama today roped in former President Bill Clinton as part of his effort to support his tax-cut compromise with Republican lawmakers, which is now being opposed by his own Democratic Congressmen.

Clinton along with Obama made a surprise appearance at the press room of the White House after the two had a long meeting at the Oval Office.

Noting that while the deal is far from perfect, Clinton said lawmakers should approve the deal proposed by Obama to extend all income tax rates for two years in exchange for an extension in unemployment benefits and other middle- class tax breaks. “The extension of unemployment, which gives people a percentage of the income they were previously making, that money will be spent and it will bolster the economy for the next couple of years,” he said.

“This agreement will really help America over the long term, because it continues the credits for manufacturing jobs related to energy coming in to America,” Clinton said. “So in my opinion, this is a good bill. And I hope that my fellow Democrats will support it. I thank the Republican leaders for agreeing to include things that were important to the President," he said.

“An embattled president, fresh off an electoral shellacking and struggling to sell a controversial tax deal to members of his own party, turned to a former president who, exactly 16 years ago, was struggling to right his own presidency after a defeat of almost similar magnitude," reported The Washington Post.

Obama had invited Clinton to the White House for a private talk, but their public appearance will long be remembered, the daily said.

“Obama's move is extraordinary -- essentially handing over control of the briefing room to the former Democratic president, with whom Obama had clashed when running for president against former first lady Hillary Clinton. — PTI

Ashgabat, December 11
India today signed agreements to import natural gas from Turkmenistan through an ADB-based $7.6 billion gas pipeline passing through Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Oil Minister Murli Deora signed the Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) and the Gas Pipeline Framework Agreement for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline here.

“Today is a very important day, not just for India, but for all the countries (in the TAPI project),” he said at the signing ceremony attended by Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov.

The agreements are commitments of the four nations to building of the project even as New Delhi voiced concerns over safe delivery of gas through the pipeline that would pass Taliban stronghold Kandahar province and then into Pakistan's restive tribal areas.

“There are issues that need to be addressed. We have to come to a decision regarding the price of gas, security of the pipeline, certainty of the gas supply, transit fee and setting up of the consortium (to build the pipeline),” Deora said. The rival Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline has been on drawing boards for more than a decade mostly because of security concern over safe passage of gas in Pakistani territory.

“Quite obviously, our goal is not merely the construction of the pipeline, but also continuous and uninterrupted flow of Turkmen natural gas over several decades,” he said. — PTI

Washington, December 11
Post-26/11, a section of the Congress leadership was seen playing religious politics after one of its leaders, A R Antulay, implied that Hindutva forces may have been involved in the Mumbai terror attacks, according to a confidential memo by the then US ambassador to India, David Mulford, released by WikiLeaks.

"The Congress Party, after first distancing itself from the comments (of Antulay, the then minority affairs minister), two days later issued a contradictory statement which implicitly endorsed the conspiracy. During this time, Antulay's completely unsubstantiated claims gained support in ... Indian-Muslim community," Mulford wrote in his secret cable to the State Department on December 23, 2008. "Hoping to foster that support for upcoming national elections, the Congress Party cynically 
pulled back from its original dismissal and lent credence to the conspiracy," Mulford wrote.

Regardless of Home Minister P Chidambaram's dismissal of Antulay's comments, the Indian-Muslim community "will continue to believe they are unfairly targeted by law enforcement and that those who investigate the truth are silenced," he said in the cable.

"The entire episode demonstrates that the Congress Party will readily stoop to the old caste/religious-based politics if it feels it is in its interest," Mulford alleged, according to the cable posted by WikiLeaks on its website yesterday.

The United States has neither confirmed or denied the authenticity of these cables, but said that some 250,000 papers have been stolen from its system and demanded that WikiLeaks - the whistle blower website - return them back to the State Department.

According to WikiLeaks, there are some 1,300 cables from the US embassy in New Delhi.

However, only half a dozen of them have been posted by it on its website. Mulford said while the killing of three high-level law enforcement officers during the Mumbai attacks, including ATS chief Hemant Karkare, "is a remarkable coincidence, the Congress Party's initial reaction to Antulay's outrageous comments was correct." "But as support seemed to swell among Muslims for Antulay's unsubstantiated claims, crass political opportunism swayed the thinking of some Congress Party leaders," he wrote. — PTI

Tehran, December 11
An Iranian woman whose case drew international attention will not face death by stoning for adultery, Iran’s state-run news broadcaster Press TV reported. In a report about Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, who has become a cause celebre among international human rights groups, the woman also confessed that she not only committed adultery but also had helped her lover, Issa T, to murder her husband five years ago.

The Press TV confirmed that the stoning sentence had been considered for the adultery charges by Iranian judges but was later dropped as part of a readjustment of Iran’s legal code.

“The sentencing in 2006 was a symbolic judgment, which had not been confirmed by all of the judges,” the English-language broadcast said. Iran's state justice system had in 2005 banned any further deaths by stoning, the channel reported. But by 2006, that ruling was still waiting to be integrated into Islamic law. In the judgment against Mohammadi-Ashtiani, death by stoning had been considered but not implemented, the TV report said. In the confession part of the broadcast, Ashtiani explained that she had an attack of bad conscience after the killing, and turned herself in to the police and admitted to the crime. Ashtiani was also arrested, and confessed to murdering her husband, Ibrahim Ghadersadeh.

Meanwhile, when Ashtiani was taken home for a television reconstruction of a plot to murder her husband in 2006, the Human rights groups celebrated. They saw it as a reprieve for her. A statement on state-controlled television described reports of her release as a “publicity campaign by the Western media”.

It said that the images were from a documentary made in association with the Iranian judiciary in which the mother-of-two was taken to the house to describe her husband's murder.

In a statement, the Press TV said that “contrary to a vast publicity campaign by Western media that confessed murderer Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani has been released”, she was still in custody. The documentary is believed to show Ashtiani guiding a camera crew around the home where she and an accomplice allegedly plotted to murder her husband in 2006. In a short video clip, she is heard to say: "We planned to kill my husband."

Ashtiani is also said to have been under pressure from the authorities to say the international community is using her against Iran and, in the film, she is expected to reiterate that: "They are taking my side unnecessarily; I do not consider them legitimate at all." — Agencies