Yaxhpal's List: International

• econd largest trading partner for India in the world after China
• t UAE is India’s top partner amongst the GCC countries
• capital flow between the regions has remained miniscule
• India is a major exporter of textiles
• esire of Indian companies to invest in UAE in energy intensive manufacturing, infrastructure, services, tourism and hospitality, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, financial services, agro-based value chain and education

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• After months of threatening to wage a nuclear war, North Korea did an about-face on Sunday
• North Korea’s National Defence Commission
• comes with caveats — No pre-conditions and no demands that Pyongyang give up its prized nuclear assets
• Washington responded by saying that it is open to talks but only if North Korea shows it will comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions and live up to its international obligations
• North Korea fought against U.S.-led United Nations and South Korean troops during the three-year Korean War in the early 1950s, and Pyongyang does not have diplomatic relations with either government. The Korean Peninsula remains divided by a heavily fortified border

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• Tianhe-2", which is capable of performing 33.86 quadrillion operations per second
• Tianhe-2, or Milky Way-2, will be deployed at the National Supercomputer Centre in Guangzho
• Tianhe-2 is capable of operating as fast as 33.86 petaflops per second
• world’s fastest computing system, according to TOP500
• Most of the features of the system were developed in China, and they are only using Intel for the main compute part. That is, the interconnect operating system, front-end processors and software are mainly Chinese

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• Russia’s President Vladimir Putin blocked any mention of the fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a final G8 summit communique
• British sources at the summit said Prime Minister David Cameron had sought to isolate Russia suggesting that seven Western members of the G8 could sign a communique calling for the ouster of the Syrian leader
• Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who called the Group of Eight “G7 plus one”, meaning that Russia’s positions were too far apart from the other members of the exclusive club

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• Egypt and Ethiopia
• tensions over a huge dam Ethiopia is building on the Blue Nile River
• Ethiopia last month started to divert Nile waters as part of the construction of its massive $4.2 billion hydro-electric project dubbed the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
• Egypt and Ethiopia began a sharp exchange of words
• the African Union urged dialogue
• Ethiopia downplays the prospect of military confrontation with Egypt
• The Renaissance Dam has been under construction for two years on the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region near Sudan
• Currently more than 22 per cent complete, the dam is expected to produce 6,000 megawatts, which will make it Africa’s largest hydroelectric power plant

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• India, that has about 137 million Internet users, accounted for 8 per cent of the total phishing attack volume worldwide in April 2013
• after the US, UK and South Africa,
• Phishing is a fraudulent practice of sending e-mails purporting to be from legitimate companies in order to induce individuals to reveal personal information

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• to end the fighting in Afghanistan
• Taliban announced that it was ready to hold peace negotiations with the Afghan government
• between the Taliban and the High Peace Council
• turnaround in the position of the Afghan militant group
• coincided with the opening of its office in Doha
• and the nationwide takeover of security duties by the Afghan forces from NATO
• Mr. Karzai seemed to be on the same page as the Taliban on starting talks
• talks with the Taliban must be Afghan-controlled
• generate calibrated enthusiasm in Washington
• The Taliban’s declaration was apparently timed to bring about internal reconciliation ahead of the withdrawal of U.S.-led NATO forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014

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• thousands of people took to the streets of several Brazilian cities
• over poor public services, high prices and corruption
• protests quickly widened to include corruption and excessive government spending on hosting football tournaments instead of on health, education and other public services

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• Analysts said Mr. Karzai is not happy with the US role in talks with the Taliban
• Mr. Karzai has said in the past that Afghanistan cannot be sidelined during any peace talks with the Taliban
• Mr. Karzai said on Tuesday that he wanted the Taliban to move the talks from Doha to Kabul soon

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• Karzai says he will not pursue peace talks with the Taliban unless the United States steps out of the negotiations and the militant group stops its violent attacks on the ground
• Mr. Karzai’s office, the President’s High Peace Council would “neither attend nor participate in the talks” until the process is “completely” in the hands of Afghans

• Edward Snowden, the young American who has exposed the expansive cyber espionage activities of the National Security Agency in the United States against its own citizens and the rest of the world
• Americans are calling Snowden a "traitor" and the Chinese media is heralding him as a "hero"
• Snowden has sharpened the terms of the debate on cyber issues within major nations and between them
• The ever expanding flows of information in cyberspace and the determination of states to collect, process and exploit them has raised new questions about the traditional tension between liberty and security within nations
• US has made a big deal out of Chinese spying in the cyber domain
• "Internet freedom" has been a major slogan for the US
• Beijing is now relishing the opportunity to accuse America of double standards
• brings into focus a consequential power play in cyberspace between China and America
• Washington and Beijing are investing massively in building their cyber capabilities, both defensive and offensive
• centrality of cyberspace for future warfare — economic, political and military
• Washington and Beijing might sit down, sooner than later, to work out an agreed set of rules for managing their conflict in the new domain
• process will be similar to the nuclear arms control negotiations in the Cold War between the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union
• terms of mutual deterrence and circumscribed the options for the rest of the world
• Delhi's response
• has been low-key; rightly so
• Spying is central to statecraft
• much that the Indian security establishment will have to do in coping with the new challenges arising from Sino-American confrontation and possible collaboration in cyberspace
• depend entirely on the capabilities it builds
• India's ability to influence the new geopolitics of cyberspace

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• journal of Vasco da Gama’s pioneering voyage to India, during the 15th century, has been included in the list of world’s most prestigious documents by the UNESCO
• The journal handwritten by an anonymous eyewitness
• Da Gama’s voyage to India in the 15th century is considered the first globalisation enterprise in world
• The narrative describes situations of danger, treasons, diseases, contact with people on shore, the arrival of the Portuguese, gifts exchanged and war equipment
• Established by UNESCO in 1992, the Memory of World Register project includes a total of 299 documents and collections from five continents

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• India has invited China to be the principal guest country at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa next year
• An I&B Ministry official said India had entered into co-production agreements with six other countries, including Germany, France and Poland
• Premier Li’s concerted attempt to reach out to different sections of Indian public opinion as a departure from the past
• attempt by China to find ways to expand their public outreach here

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• The 13th Amendment is one of the key points of the 1987 India-Sri Lanka pact brokered by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his Sri Lankan counterpart J. R. Jayawardene
• Sri Lanka is committed to devolving powers to the provinces, including in the Tamil-dominated North and East, to give a sense to the people in these regions that they have a say on most matters related to their governance
• The LLRC was constituted by Mr. Rajapaksa to make recommendations on what should be done to assuage the sentiments of the Tamil community

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• pave the way for billions of dollars of western aid to rebuild the war-torn west African nation
• between the Malian government and the Tuareg-led National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA)
• Tuesday’s agreement, a copy of which was seen by The Hindu, dismisses the possibility of a separate Tuareg nation by reaffirming the territorial integrity of Mali

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• Russians, already at odds with Washington over the situation in Syria and Iran, expressed their stance on the rapidly mutating situation in the heart of the Hindu Kush
• Upholding the principle of sovereignty, Mr. Karzai also asserted that members of the High Peace Council — the body entrusted with peace talks with the Taliban — would “neither attend nor participate in the talks” until the process was “completely” in the hands of Afghans
• The Russian Foreign Ministry stressed that a peace dialogue in Afghanistan could have a positive outcome only if the government in Kabul led the process, and on condition that the Taliban severed ties with al-Qaeda, ended the violence and accepted Afghanistan’s constitution, including its protections of women and minorities.

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• Approval of World Heritage Committee of UNESCO for the inscription of India’s nomination on the Hill Forts of Rajasthan on the World Heritage List
• The 6 forts

• Violence breaks out in more than 10 cities as a million people take to the streets across Brazil
• “Corruption is the central issue, and we are dealing here with a national movement,” historian Francisco Carlos Teixeira said