WASHINGTON: India on Monday warned it would oppose the UN treaty banning nuclear tests, calling it disciminatory, despite President Barack Obama's hopes that the United States will ratify it.Shyam Saran, India's special envoy on nuclear issues, conceded on a visit to Washington that the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) could prove to be a "contentious" issue with the new US administration.The CTBT would ban all nuclear explosions for any purpose. It cannot come into effect as nuclear powers such as the United States and China have not ratified it or, in the case of India and rival Pakistan, even signed it.Saran said India opposed the CTBT because it "was not explicitly linked to the goal of nuclear disarmament.""For India, this was crucial since it was not acceptable to legitimize, in any way, a permanent division between nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states," he said at the Brookings Institution.
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in...
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