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New Delhi: India and the 10-nation ASEAN body are likely to sign a free trade agreement on services and investment towards the end of 2013. It will be implemented by July 2014.

Just when the Chinese army’s incursions in Arunachal Pradesh have become deeper and more frequent, the people of Arunachal in a rare example of solidarity cutting across party lines, have demanded that New Delhi take up with Peking the question of ‘Reaching a permanent solution that is favourable to the Tibetan people (which) will be most beneficial to India and the security of Asia.’

In West Bengal, 28 months after its comprehensive defeat in the State Assembly polls, the Left Front is yet to find its feet.

In the most murderous attack on what is left of the ever-terrorised Christian population in Pakistan, Islamic terrorists killed at least 85 worshippers at the All Saints Church in Peshawar on 22 September. Inspired suicide bombers were the weapon of choice to target the Christian congregation. The death count is still rising, as more people succumb to their injuries in the hospitals. Outright murder represents the sharpest edge of what Christian and other ‘constitutionally’ non-Muslim people endure in Pakistan. Their daily life in a nation-state that officially considers them unequal in various ways to official Muslims is not pretty. Usurpation of property, blasphemy charges, attacks and destruction of places of worship, rape and subsequent forced conversion (or the reverse order) of womenfolk form the visible tip of a much broader systemic antagonism.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), the powerful ally of the Congress in the United Democratic Front (UDF) coalition Government, is at it again.

The Congress leadership has, at last, committed the bloomer; it cleared the creation of separate state of Telangana by bifurcating Andhra Pradesh. These days the leadership is making mistake after mistake. Whole world, even a child, knew that dividing a prosperous state like Andhra Pradesh would be a mistake; even the Congress General Secretary in charge of party affairs in AP, Digvijaya Singh, had told Sonia Gandhi, in no uncertain terms, that carving of Telangana would be a mistake but his advice was of no avail. Party Vice- President, Rahul Gandhi, deputed his own emissary to undertake an on-the-spot assessment of the situation and he acted on his advice which was, of course, misleading.

New Delhi: India’s commercial export of power to Bangladesh began from Saturday by press of a button jointly by the Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and the Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Re-engineer your idol immersion style, says the Kali temple chief priest in the Capital’s Chittaranjan Park. ‘You can do it, if you are a little innovative and develop eco-friendly cisterns to use for immersion.’ The priest, known to the locality for realistic interpretation of Hindu scriptures without pomp and show, has offered a plausible solution of idol immersion, that makes newspaper headlines every year in the country all for wrong reasons.

LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party national president Mulayam Singh Yadav and his chief minister son Akhilesh Yadav are busy in damage control mode to win over the confidence of Muslims after the notorious Muzaffarnagar riots.

The US Federal Government shutdown continuing into third day on October 3 over a short-term budget dispute unresolved in a broken Congress, seemed headed to drive the world’s super-power into a globally disastrous default, the first ever, by mid-October, when US Treasury runs out of cash to pay its bills.