THAAD Missile Intercepts IRBM Target During Test | FTT-18 | 7/12/2017

JAPANESE ShinMaywa US-2 STOL Amphibious Aircraft Touch-and-go Landing at...

Boeing 737 MAX Conducts First Flight

French Army Contingent During Republic Day Parade 2016 - New Delhi, India

India successfully launches canister version of Agni V "China Killer" ICBM

  

Marking another technological milestone in the country’s missile programme, the maiden canister-based trial of India’s most potent strategic missile, Agni-V was successfully carried out for its full range of more than 5,000 km from the Wheeler Island, off the Odisha coast on Saturday.

  A DRDO missile technologist who was associated with the launch described it as a grand success and said it was a perfect launch. Another missile technologist said it would be the footprint for future configuration of Agni-V.

Will Chinese View US President Obama As A Diminished Figure?

     

    The last time President Barack Obama went to China, five years ago, he was a political supernova from a nation with a depleted, debt-ridden economy. When he returns to Beijing on Monday, he will be a political casualty from a country with a resurgent economy. 

White House officials hope the later distinction will outweigh the earlier one when Obama meets with President Xi Jinping before traveling on to Myanmar and Australia. But they are likely to be disappointed: China, analysts say, is likely to dwell more on Obama's electoral reversals than on the comparatively robust American recovery. 


"Politics trumps economics, at the end of the day," said Nicholas R. Lardy, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 

That is not to understate the shift in economic fortunes between China and the United States since 2009. At that time, in the depths of the financial crisis, visiting Americans were lectured by Chinese officials about the need for the United States to put its fiscal house in order. Now, Obama has cut the deficit in half while the Chinese economy is the one slowing sharply, weighed down by a sea of bad loans. 

But Lardy said the Chinese economy was not as troubled as some in Washington believe. The government, he said, was orchestrating a slowdown in growth to squeeze out excesses in housing and other markets - a difficult process that he said Beijing was managing fairly well. 

Obama, meanwhile, has been preoccupied by other crises, from the Ebola outbreak to the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The Republican takeover of the Senate has added to doubts that the president will have either the time or the political influence to push forward his much-promoted strategic pivot to Asia. 

China's state media has been unforgiving about Obama's political travails. 

"Obama always utters 'Yes, we can,' which led to the high expectations people had for him," The Global Times, an English-language website affiliated with the People's Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, said in a postelection editorial. "But he has done an insipid job, offering nearly nothing to his supporters. U.S. society has grown tired of his banality." 

The timing of the editorial, just a few days before Obama's arrival in Beijing, was unusual. But it reflects a broader nationalist strain in China, embodied by Xi, who has consolidated his power and displayed few signs of conciliation toward Obama on thorny issues like Chinese cyberattacks on U.S. companies. 

Obama's best bet to counter doubts about his standing, analysts said, will be to move quickly on projects that reinforce America's presence in the region, like a proposed trade deal, and in areas where China and the United States can work together, like climate change. 

"It's a matter of, in part, communicating through your body language, through your ambitions, and through what you commit to," said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China adviser in the Clinton administration who is now at the Brookings Institution. "That's an important part of what he'll do, but I certainly think that the election does not help him in that." 

One of the areas where a Republican-controlled Congress might actually help rather than hinder Obama is in passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious trade pact involving 12 countries that is a centerpiece of the president's pivot to Asia. 

Negotiations for a deal have bogged down in the last year, in part because Japan and other Asian countries are reluctant to make big concessions without knowing whether Obama will have "fast-track" authority to pass a treaty in Congress. The White House held off asking for such authority before the midterm elections, at the request of Democrats. 

Now, though, a free-trade-friendly Congress is more likely to grant Obama fast-track authority. That could give the administration a genuine window to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2015 before the next presidential election. While in Beijing, Obama is expected to meet with leaders of the countries involved in the negotiation. They will be there for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, an annual meeting of Pacific Rim countries being held in China. 

The U.S. trade representative, Michael B. Froman, has played down expectations for any breakthrough in Beijing. And China, which has not been invited to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, will be watching the U.S. efforts with some skepticism. 

Still, Xi and Obama could find common ground on climate change. As the world's two largest carbon emitters, China and the United States are trying to develop a common position on new targets for emissions reductions in advance of climate talks in Paris next year. The thinking is that they could then pull the rest of the world into a treaty. 

While the Chinese may view Obama as a diminished figure, analysts say they are well aware that his successor - whether Hillary Rodham Clinton or a Republican - could end up taking a tougher line toward China. That means they will keep looking for ways to work with him. 

Administration officials reject the contention that Obama's focus on Asia has been impeded by events elsewhere in the world. Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, noted that it was his second visit to the region this year - a "substantial investment of time and attention," she said, given "all the issues that we are all facing." 

On the eve of the trip, the White House got good news from unlikely sources: Japan and China, which agreed to set aside a longstanding dispute over islands in the East China Sea. The United States has fretted about being drawn into an increasingly dangerous confrontation. 

"The tensions between Japan and China have been overshadowing the whole region, and the relationship between the United States and China," said Jeffrey A. Bader, a former China adviser to Obama. "When relations between China and its neighbors are stable, that helps us."

China, Pakistan Ink 20 Pacts, Boost Ties

"Iron friends" China and Pakistan today inked 20 agreements amounting to Chinese investment reportedly worth about $46 billion, as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif held wide-ranging talks with the leadership here. 

Sharif, who is here to take part in the neighbourhood leaders conference being organised by China on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders meeting, held talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. 


Terming China and Pakistan as "iron friends", Xi, who cancelled his to visit to Islamabad during his South Asia tour in September due to tense confrontation between the government and the opposition parties in Islamabad, told Sharif that the two countries will continue to support each other and strengthen cooperation. 

"Iron friends" is a term frequently used in China to mean trustworthy friends whose friendship is as solid as iron. 

Some Chinese netizens have coined the phrase of "Iron Paks" to refer to Pakistanis, Xi was quoted as telling Sharif. 

Besides issues related to China's concerns over terrorist attacks in Xinjiang with militants infiltration from across the border in Pakistan, the two leaders discussed the emerging situation in Afghanistan in view of the US plans to pullout its troops from the war-torn country, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. 

China looks to play a bigger role in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the US troops withdrawal. 

Sharif said Pakistan will strengthen cooperation with China in building infrastructure and crackdown on terrorist forces such as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which is blamed for terrorist attacks in Xinjiang bordering Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK). 

China has been pressing Pakistan to crackdown on ETIM militants. During Sharif's meeting with Li, the two sides signed 20 agreements, the report said. 

The agreements signed during Sharif's visit according to Pakistan's Minister for Planning, Development and Reform Ahsan Iqbal are worth about $46 billion.