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.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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