Nirankari sect head Baba Hardev Singh killed in Canada accident: reports

Munich, Feb 16: Iran's foreign minister said Saturday that US President Donald Trump is receiving bad advice if he believes an American "maximum pressure" campaign against his country will cause the government in Tehran to collapse.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a group of top defense officials and diplomats at the Munich Security Conference that the information provided to the president has dissuaded Trump from accepting offers from other leaders to mediate between Washington and Tehran.

"President Trump has been convinced that we are about to collapse so he doesn't want to talk to a collapsing regime," Zarif said.

To support his argument, the Iranian minister cited Trump's decision to pull out unilaterally in 2018 from Iran's nuclear deal with the US and other world powers. Trump said the landmark 2015 accord didn't address Iran's ballistic missile program or regional activities and needed to be renegotiated.

Since then, the Trump administration's re-imposition of US sanctions in a campaign of so-called "maximum pressure" have taken a severe toll on the Iranian economy and sent Iran's currency plunging.

"I believe President Trump, unfortunately, does not have good advisers," Zarif said. "He's been wanting for Iran to collapse since he withdrew from the nuclear deal." Zarif also said the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Iraq on January 3 was a miscalculation by Washington that has galvanized support for Iran instead of increasing pressure on the regime.

The Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, promised Iran economic incentives in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program. It was intended to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb, which Iran insists it does not want to do.

Since the US withdrawal, the deal's other signatories - Germany, France, Britain, Russia and China - have unsuccessfully struggled to come up with ways to offset the effects of the new American sanctions.

Washington has pressured the other countries - so far without success - to abandon the deal entirely US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the Munich Security Conference earlier Saturday that while there may be disagreements on what to do with the JCPOA, "when I talk to my counterparts here in Europe, everybody gets it."

"Everyone understands that these are folks who continue to build out their nuclear program," Pompeo said. "So there's a common understanding about the threat; we have tactical differences on how to proceed."

In recent months, Iran has steadily violated the limitations the deal placed on the amount of enriched uranium and heavy water it can stockpile, the number and type of centrifuges it can operate, and the purity of the uranium it enriches.

Iranian officials insist the moves are intended only to put pressure on the countries that remain part of the deal to provide economic help to Iran and that all the measures taken are fully reversible.

Zarif rejected Trump's suggestion of negotiating a new deal, saying the one negotiated during the Obama administration was the only vehicle for talks on Iran's nuclear program.

"There is no point in talking over something you already talked about. You don't buy a horse twice," he said.

"It's not about opening talks with the United States. It's about bringing the United States to the negotiating table that's already there," Zarif said.

Jul 3: China under President Xi Jinping has stepped up its "aggressive" foreign policy toward India and "resisted" efforts to clarify the Line of Actual Control that prevented a lasting peace from being realised, according to a report released by a US Congress appointed commission.

The armies of India and China have been locked in a bitter standoff at multiple locations in eastern Ladakh for the last seven weeks, and the tension escalated after 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a violent clash in the Galwan Valley on June 15.

“Under General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Xi Jinping, Beijing has stepped up its aggressive foreign policy toward New Delhi. Since 2013, China has engaged in five major altercations with India along the Line of Actual Control (LAC),” said a brief issued by US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

"Beijing and New Delhi have signed a series of agreements and committed to confidence-building measures to stabilise their border, but China has resisted efforts to clarify the LAC, preventing a lasting peace from being realised,” said the report and was prepared at the request of the Commission to support its deliberations.

Authored by Will Green, a Policy Analyst on the Security and Foreign Affairs Team at the Commission, the report says that the Chinese government is particularly fearful of India’s growing relationship with the United States and its allies and partners.

“The latest border clash is part of a broader pattern in which Beijing seeks to warn New Delhi against aligning with Washington,” it said.

After Xi assumed power in 2012, there was a significant increase in clashes, despite the fact that he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi several times and Beijing and New Delhi have agreed to a series of confidence-building mechanisms designed to mitigate tensions.

Prior to 2013, the last major border clash was in 1987. The 1950s and 1960s were a particularly tense period, culminating in 1962 with a war that left thousands of soldiers dead on both sides, according to the records of China's People's Liberation Army, the report said.

“The 2020 skirmish is in line with Beijing’s increasingly assertive foreign policy. The clash came as Beijing was aggressively pressing its other expansive sovereignty claims in the Indo-Pacific region, such as over Taiwan and in the South and East China seas,” it said.

China is engaged in hotly contested territorial disputes in both the South China Sea and the East China Sea. Beijing has built up and militarised many of the islands and reefs it controls in the region. Both areas are stated to be rich in minerals, oil and other natural resources and are vital to global trade.

China claims almost all of the South China Sea. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have counter claims over the area.

Several weeks before the clash in the Galwan Valley, Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe called on Beijing to “use fighting to promote stability” as the country’s external security environment worsened, a potential indication of China’s intent to proactively initiate military tensions with its neighbours to project an image of strength, the report said.

Moscow, Mar 25: An earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale struck off Russia's Kuril Islands on Wednesday, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.

The magnitude of the quake, which occurred at 2:49 am (UTC), was registered at a depth of 56.7 kilometres, about 219 kilometres southeast of the Russian town of Severo-Kuril'sk, the USGS said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage to the property as a result of the quake.
Further details are awaited.