N-summit begins in The Hague today
Amsterdam, March 23
Nuclear terrorism is officially the main topic for world leaders at a two-day summit in the Netherlands starting tomorrow. In practice, the Ukraine crisis is likely to overshadow those talks.

ISI sanctioned Indian embassy attack in Kabul: Book
Washington, March 23
The deadly 2008 terror attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul was sanctioned and monitored by senior officials of Pakistan's ISI, claims a new book.

Tibet feels the heat of global warming
Beijing, March 23
Global warming has reached the snow-capped Himalayas in southwest China's Tibet region as the Tibetan plateau is registering rising temperatures and extreme weather, an official climate report said.

Brussels, March 23
NATO's top military commander said on Sunday that Russia had a large force on Ukraine's eastern border and he was worried it could pose a threat to Moldova's separatist Transdniestria region. The warning comes a day after Russian troops, using armoured vehicles, automatic weapons and stun grenades, seized the last military facilities under Ukrainian control in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsular that Russian President Vladimir Putin formally annexed on Friday.

"The (Russian) force that is at the Ukrainian border now to the east is very, very sizeable and very, very ready," NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, US Air Force General Philip Breedlove, told an event held by the German Marshall Fund think-tank.

Breedlove said NATO was very concerned about the threat to Transdniestria, which declared independence from Moldova in 1990 but has not been recognised by any United Nations member state. About 30 percent of its half million population is ethnic Russian, which is the mother tongue of an overall majority.

Russia launched a new military exercise, involving 8,500 artillery men, near Ukraine's border 10 days ago. "There is absolutely sufficient (Russian) force postured on the eastern border of Ukraine to run to Transdniestria if the decision was made to do that, and that is very worrisome," Breedlove said.

The President of ex-Soviet Moldova warned Russia last Tuesday against considering any move to annex Transdniestria, which lies on Ukraine's western border, in the same way that it has taken control of Crimea. The speaker of Transdniestria's parliament had urged Russia earlier to incorporate the region.

Russia's Deputy Defence Minister Anatoly Antonov was quoted by the state's Itar-Tass news agency on Sunday as saying that Russia was complying with international agreements limiting the number of troops near its border with Ukraine.

Moscow's ambassador to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, also told Britain's BBC television on Sunday that Russia did not have any "expansionist views". Asked to give a commitment that Russian troops would not move into other Ukrainian territory outside the Crimea, Chizhov said: "There is no intention of the Russian Federation to do anything like that."

U.S. Senator John McCain, a Republican foreign policy specialist, told the same BBC show that Putin's actions in Ukraine were akin to those of Adolf Hitler in 1930s Germany. "I think he (Putin) is calculating how much he can get away with, just as Adolf Hitler calculated how much he could get away with in the 1930s," McCain said.

McCain criticised the international response and said he supported sending military equipment to Ukraine. He also said he considered Moldova and the Baltic nations, all former Soviet states with sizeable Russian populations, to be under threat.

US President Barack Obama's national security adviser said on Friday that the world was reassessing its relationship with Russia and Washington was sceptical of Russian assurances that troop movements on the Ukraine border were no more than military exercises.

Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russia, accepted on Sunday that Crimea was now "de facto" a part of Russia, but he criticised the annexation as a "bad precedent". Speaking to reporters in Minsk, Lukashenko said Ukraine, which shares a long land border with Belarus, should remain "a single, indivisible, integral, non-bloc state". — Reuters

Male, March 23
Maldives President Abdulla Yameen's party, with the help of its coalition partners, has attained majority in parliament in elections held over the weekend, an official said here Sunday.

The Maldivian parliamentary elections, which were held amidst the controversial removal of the head and deputy of the country's Elections Commission, concluded largely peacefully Saturday.

Vote counting gave the opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), led by former president Mohammad Nasheed, who was controversially ousted from power in 2012, a slim lead initially but it was soon overtaken by Yameen's Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM), Xinhua reported.

Of the 85 constituencies, 34 seats were won by PPM while its coalition partners Jumhoory Party (JP) bagged 15 seats and the Maldives Development Alliance (MDA) five seats. Nasheed's MDP secured only 24 seats and lost its majority in parliament.

There are also five independent seats up for grabs.

"A total of 75 complaints were submitted to the Elections Commission. These include three complaints about the voters' names not being on the list, five about anti-campaigning and four complaints regarding bribery," Elections Commission member Mohammad Manik told reporters.

Yet this was lower than the number of complaints received during the presidential election last year, Manik said.

A total of 302 candidates including 23 women contested the 85 seats in the country's parliament. Capital Male holds the largest number of constituencies at 13, with seven in Addu City, and the remaining 65 constituencies are scattered across the island nation. — PTI

Arlington (US), March 23
About 18 persons are still unaccounted for after a massive mudslide in rural northwest Washington state killed at least three persons and forced evacuations because of fears of flooding, authorities said today.

Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots said at a news briefing that "we suspect that people are out there, but it's far too dangerous to get responders out there on that mudflow."

Searchers in helicopters will be flying over the area of the 2.6-sq-km mudslide today to find people who may have been able to get out on their own, as well as look for other signs of life.

Authorities are also trying to determine how to get responders on the ground safely, Hots said, describing mudflow as "like quicksand." Officials described the deadly slide as "a big wall of mud and debris" that blocked about 1.6 km of State Route 530 near the town of Oso, about 90 km north of Seattle. It was reported about 18m deep in some areas.

Several people, including an infant, were critically injured and as many as 30 houses were destroyed. —AP

Amsterdam, March 23
Nuclear terrorism is officially the main topic for world leaders at a two-day summit in the Netherlands starting tomorrow. In practice, the Ukraine crisis is likely to overshadow those talks.

The Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague will form the backdrop for an emergency meeting of Group of Seven leaders on Russia's annexation of Crimea. It is a confrontation between Russia and the West reminiscent of the Cold War.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is not attending, instead sending Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who is expected to hold talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry.

But experts say frantic diplomacy focused on Ukraine should not divert from the goal of better security of nuclear material.

"International attention can turn in a moment," said Deepti Choubey, a senior director at the non-government Nuclear Threat Initiative. "The attentions of terrorists do not." Delegations from 53 countries, including the leaders of the US, China and Japan, have started to arrive in the Hague. They will meet to negotiate on reducing and securing supplies, and keeping them out of terrorists' hands. — PTI

Washington, March 23
The deadly 2008 terror attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul was sanctioned and monitored by senior officials of Pakistan's ISI, claims a new book.

The suicide car bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008 left 58 persons, including two top Indian officials, killed and over 140 injured.

"The embassy bombing was no operation by rogue ISI agents acting on their own. It was sanctioned and monitored by the most senior officials in Pakistani intelligence," wrote senior journalist Carlotta Gall in her latest book 'The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001-2004', to be out next month.

The then Bush administration, that received advance intelligence information, mainly through intercepts of phone calls, could not prevent the deadly attack, wrote Gall, one of the only women western reporters on the ground in Afghanistan after 9/11 and covered the AfPak conflict for 10 years.

The bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul "revealed the clearest evidence of ISI complicity in its planning and execution", according to excerpts from the book.

"American and Afghan surveillance intercepted phone calls from ISI officials in Pakistan and heard them planning the attack with the militants in Kabul in the days leading up to the bombing. At the time, intelligence officials monitoring the calls did not know what was being planned, but the involvement of a high-level official in promoting a terrorist attack was clear.

"The evidence was so damning that the Bush administration dispatched the deputy chief of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, to Islamabad to remonstrate with the Pakistanis. The bomber struck, however, before Kappes reached Pakistan," she said.

"Investigators found the bomber's cell phone in the wreckage of his exploded car. They tracked down his collaborator in Kabul, the man who had provided the logistics for the attack. That facilitator, an Afghan, had been in direct contact with Pakistan by telephone," Gall wrote.

"The number he had called belonged to a high-level ISI official in Peshawar. The official had sufficient seniority that he reported directly to ISI headquarters in Islamabad. The embassy bombing was no operation by rogue ISI agents acting on their own. It was sanctioned and monitored by the most senior officials in Pakistani intelligence," she claimed in her book, running into more than 300 pages.

While Pakistan has repeatedly denied its involvement in the Indian embassy attack, several mainstream US newspapers, including The New York Times, and the governments of India and Afghanistan have accused the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of being behind the attack. In her book, Gall said the choice of attack was revealing.

She wrote: "An attack on the Indian embassy and the military attache, longtime foes of Pakistan, could be explained by Pakistan as stemming from 60 years of antagonistic relations.

"But this was not a subtle attack needling an old foe. It was a massive car bomb detonated in the centre of a capital city; designed to cause maximum injury and terror. The plan was also to terrify and undermine the confidence of the Afghans and their government, sending a message not just to India but to the forty-two countries that were contributing to the Nato-led international force to rebuild Afghanistan." "The aim was to make the cost too high for everyone to continue backing the (Afghan President Hamid) Karzai government. The ISI wanted them all to go home," she wrote.

According to Gall, as the Afghan government investigated the attack on the Indian Embassy, they became convinced that the "ISI was working with al Qaida, the Taliban, the Haqqanis, and Pakistani groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba," which was behind most of the attacks on Indian targets. — PTI

Beijing, March 23
Global warming has reached the snow-capped Himalayas in southwest China's Tibet region as the Tibetan plateau is registering rising temperatures and extreme weather, an official climate report said.

The report on climate change and environmental monitoring in Tibet was published by the Tibet Climate Centre said the average temperature in Tibet has been rising by 0.31 °C every decade. The report is based on analysis of climate data collected between 1961 and 2013.

Tibet is the highest region in the mid-latitudes and is seen as a barometer of global warming, Du Jun, deputy director of the centre, said.

Rising temperatures have been accompanied by increased precipitation, up by 6.6 millimetres every 10 years for the past five decades, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying. There is also a trend of more severe extreme weather as the record low temperature of -36.7 °C and the record high temperature of 32.3 °C were logged in Tibet last year.

Du said with the pace of global warming, the average temperature in Tibet would rise by 1.96 °C from 2011 to 2100, which would be mainly through a rise of winter temperatures.

Warmer temperatures and increased precipitation are likely to add greenery to the plateau region, he said. — PTI