Month: November 2009

Toronto, November 29: Canada has concluded negotiations on a nuclear cooperation agreement with India to sell nuclear technology and materials to the energy-starved South Asian nation, Canada’s prime minister said Saturday.

Conservative leader Stephen Harper said the agreement would allow Canadian firms to export and import controlled nuclear materials, equipment and technology to and from India.

Washington, November 29: Barack Obama is set to make the boldest strategic move of his presidency on Tuesday and order a surge of tens of thousands more US troops into an increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan.

In front of cadets at the prestigious West Point military academy, Obama is expected to announce between 30,000 and 35,000 reinforcements as part of a new Afghan strategy intended in his own words to “finish the job” there.

Caracas, November 29: Hugo Chavez says he is starting to “bombard” clouds now that Cuba has provided Venezuela with cloud-seeding help in an effort to produce rain and alleviate the effects of a severe drought.

The Venezuelan president said Saturday night that specialized equipment, sent by Fidel Castro and Cuban President Raul Castro, is starting to be used to seed clouds from planes.

“We’re bombarding clouds,” Chavez said during a televised speech. “We have some planes there, and some equipment that Fidel and Raul sent us.”

Beijing, November 29: Two dogs in Beijing have tested positive for swine flu in the second case of animals catching the disease in China along with pigs in the northeast, Chinese media said Sunday.

The A(H1N1) virus detected in the dogs was 99 percent identical to the one circulating in humans, the state-run Beijing Times reported, quoting China’s agriculture ministry.

The news comes 10 days after four pigs in China’s Heilongjiang province were diagnosed with the virus, which specialists said might have been caught from humans, the report said.

Dhaka, November 29: A triple-deck ferry packed with hundreds of travelers heading home capsized as they disembarked in southern Bangladesh, leaving at least 37 dead and scores missing, authorities said.

M.V. Coco, traveling from the capital Dhaka, went down late Friday as it arrived at Nazirhat town in the coastal district of Bhola, 64 miles (104 kilometers) to the south. Some survivors said the boat hit a river shoal as it approached the terminal, breaking the hull and allowing water in. As passengers scrambled to disembark, the vessel then tipped and partially sank in the Tetulia River.

Dhaka, November 29: Bangladeshi rescue workers on Sunday pulled more bodies from a capsized ferry as police said at least 37 people had died and warned that “scores” more corpses remained in the vessel.

Local police chief Zakir Hossain told AFP that four more victims were retrieved from one of the cabins that was locked when the crowded MV Coco 4 overturned late on Friday.

“Scores more bodies are still trapped underwater. There is no chance that they have survived,” Hossain said, adding that a specialist rescue boat had joined the salvage operation.

November 29: Global climate talks to be held in Copenhagen got a big boost on the weekend when leaders representing a third of the planet’s population put their full weight behind sealing a deal.

The heads of government of the 53-nation Commonwealth announced Saturday that a legally binding climate accord was “essential” and they backed the December 7-18 Copenhagen negotiations called to draft a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol.

Bangalore, November 29: Indian officials are investigating the leak of a radioactive substance into drinking water at an atomic power plant in the south of the country, they said on Sunday.

Local police have been asked to help probe how tritium seeped into a water cooler, after which 55 workers underwent medical treatment for excessive exposure to radiation.

Officials at the highly protected plant in Kaiga on the west coast, 450 km (280 miles) from Bangalore, said the leak may have been deliberate.

Beijing, November 29: Police in southern China have captured a man suspected of hacking to death his parents, wife, sons and sister in Beijing, media reported Sunday.

Li Lei confessed to fleeing China’s capital on Monday after murdering his family members, the state-run Beijing Youth Daily reported, quoting the police.

Li was captured on Saturday in Sanya, a resort city in the southern tropical island of Hainan, Beijing police said, according to the report.

The newspaper did not give any more details, and police in Beijing were unavailable for comment.

Brussels, November 29: The United States’ partners could deploy some 5,000 extra troops under a new strategy to combat the Afghan insurgency but lack the means or the will to do much more, according to analysts.

Plagued by economic problems, overstretched armies deployed in Iraq or the Balkans and growing military and civilian casualties, European nations are losing appetite for a fight that has dragged on for eight years.