US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a proposed US-India nuclear energy deal is good for both countries and for global efforts to reduce the spread of atomic technology and greenhouse gas emissions.
In her first public comments on the agreement since India’s government won a confidence vote that paves its way forward, Rice said on Thursday the administration of US President George W. Bush would press US lawmakers to approve the agreement in the coming months.
“I think we can make a very good case that this is not just a landmark deal but a positive landmark deal,” she told reporters aboard her plane as she flew from an Asian security conference in Singapore to Australia.
“It’s certainly our hope that we can get through all the processes and get this done in the Congress, and we are going to work very expeditiously toward that goal,” Rice said.
Bush called Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday and both leaders expressed a desire to see the nuclear issue move forward as quickly as possible, Gordon Johndroe said, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House.
The pact would end more than three decades of nuclear isolation for India by opening its civilian reactors to international inspections in exchange for the nuclear fuel and technology.
In the past, India had been denied such outside help because of its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and its testing of atomic weapons.
Rice said India has a good record of not spreading its nuclear technology and that safeguards are built into the deal. She said its approval would help India meet its demand for energy without using oil or coal.
“India is a country that has tremendously growing demand for energy,” she said. “It is a country that, if it tries to meet that demand through carbon-based sources for energy, is going to contribute dramatically to the continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions.”
India imports about 75 percent of its oil, and Singh has argued the country needs the nuclear deal to power its financial growth and lift hundreds of millions of its 1.1 billion citizens out of poverty.
On Tuesday, Singh was forced to call a confidence vote after communist political parties withdrew their support for his government this month to protest the agreement, fearing it would draw India closer to the US.
Though Singh made enemies in his bid to push ahead with the nuclear deal, he had the backing of India’s powerful business community and won the vote.
In addition to congressional approval, the deal requires India to strike separate agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group of countries that export nuclear material.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS