Pakistan halts $25bn GDF Suez contract By Syed Fazl-e-Haider KARACHI – The Pakistan government has delayed an energy deal, due to be signed on April 15, with French company GDF Suez after the Supreme Court took a suo moto notice (that is, on its own initiative) of irregularities in the award of a multi-billion-dollar contract to the foreign firm. The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources in February awarded a contract worth up to US$25 billion to GDF Suez, the highest bidder, to import 3.75 million tonnes per annum of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for up to 20 years. The … Continue reading Pakistan halts $25bn GDF Suez contract due to possible $1billion scam

Terrorism: The nuclear summit’s ‘straw man’ By Shibil Siddiqi American President Barack Obama gathered 47 national delegations for the first Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) in Washington on April 12 and 13. It was the largest gathering of world leaders in Washington since the close of World War II. The scale of the summit was meant to impress the gravity of the subject matter. In Obama’s words, “This is an unprecedented gathering to address an unprecedented threat”: the prevention of nuclear terrorism. In trademark style, Obama offered rhetorical flourishes to fit the occasion: “Two decades after the Cold War we face … Continue reading Terrorism: The nuclear summit’s ‘straw man’

Kyrgyz leaders start treasure hunt By Asyl Osmonalieva Of the challenges for Kyrgyzstan’s new leadership in the wake of the overthrow of president Kurmanbek Bakiyev last week, the country’s dire economic situation surely tops the list. As it struggles to meet the expectations of those who brought it to power, the interim government is trying to identify what money it has available and is asking Russia for emergency funding. Soon after taking over following the popular unrest of April 6-7 that swept president Bakiyev from power, the new administration began getting to grips with the numerous urgent problems facing the … Continue reading Treasure hunt in Kyrgyz!

By Peter J Brown Last September, China announced that it had finished what it described as the most accurate and highest resolution 3-D map ever created of the lunar surface. A seemingly unrelated event invited close scrutiny of this accomplishment. Enter a missing Russian moon rover. Lunokhod-2 slipped out of sight 37 years ago, and then sat quietly on the surface of the moon waiting to be found. Lunokhod-2 was a remarkable machine, and it is most famous for its 35 kilometer trip across the lunar surface in 1973. This was a great achievement at the time, and it remains … Continue reading China’s map leaps over the moon

By Richard S Ehrlich BANGKOK – When Country Joe and The Fish performed their famous satirical protest song I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die during the 1960s, they influenced many people’s decision to oppose America’s disastrous Vietnam War. Today, Barry “The Fish” Melton – still a self-proclaimed “leftist” – grimly predicts that the US is doomed to also lose its war in Afghanistan. “I don’t think we should be involved in Afghanistan, I think it is a waste of time and energy,” Melton said in an interview on April 3, when he arrived in Bangkok for his first visit to Southeast Asia. “I’ve got to … Continue reading ‘The Fish’ talks Afghanistan and acid trips

THE ROVING EYE Nuclear Obama By Pepe Escobar United States President Barack Obama’s 47-nation nuclear security summit, a sort of Group of 20 meeting on steroids, may have been the biggest schmooze-in of global leaders hosted by an American president since the 1945 San Francisco conference that founded the United Nations. There’s hardly any need for a monster, Washington-gridlock, public relations exercise to convince global politicians of the threat of highly enriched uranium or plutonium being grabbed by an al-Qaeda-style jihadi group, or some terror freelancers for that matter. Yet US analysts such as Steve Clemons of the New America … Continue reading Nuclear Obama

Israel evades ‘ambush’ at nuclear summit By Victor Kotsev When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided at the last moment to cancel his attendance at this week’s 47-nation nuclear security summit in Washington, a great deal of speculation ensued about the bad blood between him and Barack Obama and about whether the United States president might allow the conference to turn into a forum for criticism of Israel’s nuclear program. That possibility was alarmingly real for the Israelis. “I think that the sense amongst the Israeli delegation coming back from [Washington] DC right now is that they fell into a … Continue reading Israel evades ‘ambush’ at nuclear summit

Not all religious explanations of tragic events are harmless Instead of searching for such meanings, we humanists accept that the universe is unjust David Flint The Guardian Madeleine Bunting accuses the “New Atheists” of mistakenly claiming “that religion started out as a clumsy stab at science – trying to explain how the world worked” (My stuffed bookcase shows that God is attracting more debate than ever, 5 April). But this mistake, if mistake it be, was made first by believers who composed accounts of how the world was made. It is a mistake that continues to be made by Christian and … Continue reading Instead of searching for such meanings – accept that the universe is unjust?