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OSLO: As India went ahead with attending the ceremony to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo in Oslo on Friday, resisting last minute efforts from Beijing, an irate China said it was "unfortunate" and "weird" that India joined a "China-bashing chorus." With Premier Wen Jiabao slated to visit to India from December 15-17, officials here have been maintaining that that the Oslo ceremony is not a "bilateral one" and India attending a multilateral event should cause no concern to China. "I merely regard this vicious handout of the prize an allied effort to demonise China; unfortunately India joined...

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has declined an Indian offer of $5 million aid for flood victims directly and wants it to be routed through the United Nations, Dunya TV reported on Saturday. "We have conveyed to India that they can send their aid to us through UN," Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit told Dunya TV by via telephone. He said the UN was the flagship organisation for all foreign aid pouring into the country from different parts of the world for flood-hit people. India offered the aid to assist the rehabilitation of over 20 million displaced people in Pakistan following flash floods...

NEW DELHI: The furore over the validity of data used by UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has taken some of the sheen off the Nobel prize-winning institution's reputation. A day after it emerged that IPCC's dire prediction that climate change would melt most Himalyan glaciers by 2035 was based on mere "speculation", environment minister Jairam Ramesh slammed the processes of the celebrated body saying "due diligence had not been followed by the Nobel peace prize winning body". "The health of glaciers is a cause of grave concern but the IPCC's alarmist position that they would melt by 2035...

With Pakistan dithering over the global call to act against terror groups involved in the Mumbai terror strikes, a US-based intelligence think-tank has projected that the South Asian state can very well turn into a "failed country" soon. "Pakistan already is a country in crisis, and in some ways it is hard to imagine it getting much worse. But if Pakistan continues to destabilize, it could very well turn into a failed country...albeit a failed country with a nuclear arsenal," security think-tank Stratfor said in its annual forecast on 'Jihadism'. The report, titled 'Jihadism in 2009: The trends continue' and...

Video conferencing is speeding up a slow judicial system, connecting judges, lawyers, and the accused while enhancing savings and security. India has undertaken a nationwide project to connect jails and district courts across the country via a tele-justice or video conferencing system. With tele-justice, the accused can now be present in a court through a video link, established on ISDN lines, between the prison and the court. Today, Indian states including Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Bihar have already introduced tele-justice. In Maharashtra, for instance, over 40 jails in and around Mumbai are connected to district level courts...

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