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[1] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Wed Mar 22, 2006 Subject: Pakistan Clamours for the Same (Dangerous and Deplorable) Sop: Dehyphenation Decried Pakistan clamors for same US nuclear deal as India Reuters Tuesday, March 21, 2006 By Zeeshan Haider Stung by U.S. President George Bush's refusal to grant access to American nuclear know-how, Pakistan accused the United States of discriminating against it and of upsetting the balance of power in South Asia. Foreign Minister Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri told the Senate, the upper house of parliament, late on Monday, that any deal to supply technology for civilian nuclear power programs for its rival India should also available to Pakistan. Bush, in a visit to Islamabad earlier this month immediately after concluding a nuclear accord in New Delhi, told President Pervez Musharraf that Pakistan was not being considered for a similar deal because of its different "history" and different needs. "Pakistan will not accept any discriminatory treatment," Kasuri told the upper house. "The U.S. must have a package approach while dealing with India and Pakistan." India and Pakistan almost went to war for a fourth time in 2002, and a two-year old peace process between South Asia's nuclear armed rivals is already flagging. On Tuesday, at a seminar in Islamabad, Pakistani defense analysts aired fears that the U.S.-India deal would sway the balance of power in South Asia even further in India's favor. "This imbalance now gets even worse as a consequence of America's total and all out support to India," said Talat Masood, a former general turned political analyst. Visiting Pakistan last week at Bush's behest, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman gave Pakistani officials short shrift when they floated ideas of creating "nuclear parks" for U.S. companies to develop nuclear energy plants. Despite being told to forget about any deal, Pakistani officials' protestations have become louder in recent days, possibly encouraged, analysts say, by the strong criticism Bush encountered at home over the concession to India, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Pakistan, though a key ally of the United States in a global war on terrorism, remains under a cloud due to the role played by its top scientist in a nuclear black market scandal. The disgraced scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was placed under house arrest over two years ago after admitting selling nuclear parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea, and U.S. investigators have been barred from questioning him. The Pakistani military's past support for Islamist militant groups, some of which latterly forged links with al Qaeda, also does not help Pakistan's case, analysts say. Compared with India's robust democracy, Pakistan has repeatedly switched between civilian and military rule making it hard to predict what kind of government will follow in the post-Musharraf era, analysts said. Bush voiced confidence that Musharraf, who came to power in a military coup in 1999, aimed to fully restore democracy. But so far the general has stifled the mainstream political parties and allowed anti-American Islamists increasing influence, despite his own espousal of policies of "enlightened moderation." The United States meantime has engaged India, seeing opportunities in its growing economic power, and, according to analysts, its potential as regional counterweight to China. Pakistan's hopes that friendship with the United States could give it extra diplomatic muscle in dealing with rival India have been dashed, analysts say. "I don't expect any 180 degree turn in our foreign policy, but we should re-evaluate our reference points with the United States," said Shireen Mazari, head of the Institute of Strategic Studies. "We should put a brake on our open-ended cooperation ... We are not as weak as we think we are." Shifting alliances could see Pakistan turn once more toward its old friend, China. Late last week, Pakistani media reported Musharraf as saying he will seek more support from Beijing. China helped Pakistan build a 300 mw nuclear plant at Chasma town in Pubjab province and is currently helping to build a second facility at the same site. 2006 Reuters -------------------------------------- [2] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Wed Mar 22, 2006 Subject: Global Warming's Impact on the Arctic Inuit alarmed by signs of global warming 'Sentries for the rest of the world' report massive changes to Arctic life http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11951694/ By Doug Struck Updated: 2:41 a.m. ET March 22, 2006 PANGNIRTUNG, Canada - Thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah Metuq feels the Arctic changing. Its frozen grip is loosening; the people and animals who depend on its icy reign are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world. Fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting. Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands to give birth. Robins and barn owls and hornets, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages. The global warming felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here, in the Arctic where the Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit -- described by one of their leaders as "sentries for the rest of the world" -- say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters, replete with alarms of the quickening transformation that many scientists believe will spread from the north to the rest of the globe. The Inuit -- with homelands in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and northern Russia -- saw the signs of change everywhere. Metuq hauled his fishing shack onto the ice of Cumberland Sound last month, as he has every winter, confident it would stay there for three months. Three days later, he was astonished to see the ice break up, sweeping away his shack and $6,000 of turbot fishing gear. In Nain, Labrador, hunter Simon Kohlmeister, 48, drove his snowmobile onto ocean ice where he had hunted safely for 20 years. The ice flexed. The machine started sinking. He said he was "lucky to get off" and grab his rifle as the expensive machine was lost. "Someday we won't have any snow," he said. "We won't be Eskimos." 'It's getting very strange up here' In Resolute Bay, Inuit people insisted that the dark arctic night was lighter. Wayne Davidson, a longtime weather station operator, finally figured out that a warmer layer of air was reflecting light from the sun over the horizon. "It's getting very strange up here," he said. "There's more warm air, more massive and more uniform." Villagers say the shrinking ice floes mean they see hungry polar bears more frequently. In the Hudson Bay village of Ivujivik, Lydia Angyiou, a slight woman of 41, was walking in front of her 7-year-old boy last month when she turned to see a polar bear stalking the child. To save him, she charged with her fists into the 700-pound bear, which slapped her twice to the ground before a hunter shot it, according to the Nunatsiaq News. In the Russian northernmost territory of Chukotka, the Inuit have drilled wells for water because there is so little snow to melt. Reykjavik, Iceland, had its warmest February in 41 years. In Alaska, water normally sealed by ice is now open, brewing winter storms that lash coastal and river villages. Federal officials say two dozen native villages are threatened. In Pangnirtung, residents were startled by thunder, rain showers and a temperature of 48 degrees in February, a time when their world normally is locked and silent at minus-20 degrees. "We were just standing around in our shorts, stunned and amazed, trying to make sense of it," said one resident, Donald Mearns. Confirmed by science "These are things that all of our old oral history has never mentioned," said Enosik Nashalik, 87, the eldest of male elders in this Inuit village. "We cannot pass on our traditional knowledge, because it is no longer reliable. Before, I could look at cloud patterns, or the wind or even what stars are twinkling, and predict the weather. Now, everything is changed." The Inuit alarms, once passed off as odd stories, are earning confirmation from science. Canada's federal weather service said this month that the country had experienced its warmest winter since measurements began in 1948. Some of the larger temperature increases were in the arctic north. That is entirely consistent with the long-range forecasts that indicate the effects of global warming will be most felt in the north," said Douglas Bancroft, director of Oceanography and Climate Science for Canada's federal fisheries department. "What we see is very clear. We are going to see a reduction in the overall arctic ice. It doesn't mean it goes away. But it brings profound changes," he said by telephone from Ottawa, the Canadian capital. "Weather will get stormier because the more open water you have, the easier it is for storms to brew up." Bancroft said there would also be significant changes in the region's ecosystems. You have species that adapted over 40,000 years to a certain regime," he said. "Some will make it, and some won't." Animals in peril Satellites at NASA have measured a meltdown of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica in the past decade. With other NASA data, scientists in Boulder, Colo., say the retreat of the ice caps in 2006 may be as large as last year's, which they say was likely the biggest in a century. Earth's average surface temperatures last year tied those of 1998, the highest in more than a century, NASA says. In this month's issue of the journal Science, a team of U.S. and Canadian researchers said the Bering Sea was warming so much it was experiencing "a change from arctic to subarctic conditions." Gray whales are heading north and walruses are starving, adrift on ice floes in water too deep for feeding. Warmer-water fish such as pollock and salmon are coming in, the researchers reported. Off the coast of Nova Scotia, ice on Northumberland Strait was so thin and unstable this winter that thousands of gray seals crawled on unaccustomed islands to give birth. Storms and high tides washed 1,500 newborn seal pups out to sea, said Jerry Conway, a marine mammal expert for the federal fisheries department in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. "We are seeing dramatic changes in the weather systems," Conway said. "To be honest, we don't really understand what are the potential impacts. If you look back in history, there have been warming periods that have gotten back to normal. But we don't know if that will happen this time." 'The world is slowly disintegrating' Metuq, the hunter, fears the worst. "The world is slowly disintegrating," he said, inside his heated house in Pangnirtung, a community of 1,200 perched on a dramatic union of mountain and fjord on Baffin Island. Seal skins stretched on canvas dried outside his home. The town remained treacherous. Rain in February had frozen solid, and there had been almost no snow to cover it. "They call it climate change," he said. "But we just call it breaking up." The troubles for the Inuit are ominous for everyone, says Sheila Watt-Cloutier, head of the International Circumpolar Conference, an organization for the 155,000 Inuit worldwide. "People have become disconnected from their environment. But the Inuit have remained through this whole dilemma, remained extremely connected to its environment and wildlife," she said. "They are the early warning. They see what's happening to the planet, and give the message to the rest of the world." 2006 The Washington Post Company --------------- [3] Prof.D.N.Jha's article "Looking for a Hindu identity' is available as a .pdf file (only 251 kb) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indiathinkersnet/files/Jha.pdf For easier reading of .pdf files you can use the small,simple and safe FOXIT READER http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php -------------------- [4] |
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