分类： bharat

On his first visit to India next week, US President Donald Trump is expected to wade into several domestic controversies, challenging his Indian counterpart on the state of religious freedom in the country, as well as Kashmir.
Trump will raise a number of “concerns” with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the trip, a White House official said on Friday, singling out the “religious freedom issue” as “extremely important” to the US administration.

“Prime Minister Modi in his first speech after winning the election last year, talked about how he would prioritize being inclusive of Indian religious minorities. And certainly the world looks to India to maintain religious liberty and equal treatment for all under the rule of law,” the official told reporters, making every effort to avoid offending the US ally.
With hostilities between New Delhi and Islamabad at a high point – much of it stemming from conflict over the disputed Kashmir territory – the president is also expected to urge detente for the nuclear-armed rivals. Following an attack by Pakistan-based militants that killed 40 Indian police officers in Kashmir last year and ongoing issues with terrorism in the region, New Delhi revoked Kashmir’s autonomy status, arguing the move was necessary to crack down on armed insurgents and develop the region. Pakistan has repeatedly slammed the decision, however, arguing the Indian government is oppressing citizens in its only Muslim-majority state.

“I think what you’ll hear from the President is very much encouraging a reduction in tensions between India and Pakistan, encouraging the two countries to engage in bilateral dialogue with each other to resolve their differences,” the official said, noting the process could only move forward if Islamabad ramped up its efforts against terrorism.

Four Indian astronauts are now training in Russia ahead of their nation’s first manned space mission. Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian in space, shared with RT his memories of braving Russian winters and going into orbit in 1984.
Sharma, a former wing commander in the Indian Air Force, became the first – and so far only – Indian citizen ever to travel to space. He was part of a three-man crew on the Soviet Soyuz T-11, and spent a week on the famous Salyut-7 orbital station – a project that paved the way for modular orbital habitats, including the International Space Station (ISS).

“At a personal level it was life-changing, in sense of beauty one could see and important science one could do,” Sharma told RT, recalling his time in orbit.
However, the Salyut-7 crew that also included Yury Malyshev and Gennady Strekalov had such a tight working schedule that they hardly had a chance to take in the “beautiful scenery” out of the station’s window, or “look down on Earth and see the beauty… of our planet.”

Sleeping in zero gravity
One of the most peculiar parts of space travel to an outside observer is sleeping in orbit. Astronauts and cosmonauts do not actually have beds on orbital stations – instead they have sleeping bags they have to attach to the inside of the hull, so that they do not just float around and bump into things. Orbital station cabins do not have ‘up’ and ‘down’ in the traditional earthly sense, so the astronauts can sleep in any orientation, since they are just literally hanging in the air anyway.

China has heightened prevention and control measures to protect its cropland from desert locusts that have ravaged India and Pakistan, despite assurances that the likelihood of a large-scale attack was marginal.
Locusts, which decimate almost all green vegetation including crops and trees, have swarmed swathes of agricultural land on the India-Pakistan border, an area identified as a global hotspot for the pests by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
The outbreak has raised concerns in neighbouring China, where an economic downturn is already being made worse by the spread of a new coronavirus that has killed more than 2,200 people and ground business to a near halt.
However, officials at the FAO have played down the threat, saying a huge plague of locusts was unlikely.
“There is no threat to China by the desert locust because of a) the wind direction and b) they cannot cross the Himalaya Mountains because they are too tall and the air is too cold – so this is a natural barrier,” said FAO’s senior locust forecasting officer Keith Cressman by email.
China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs agreed the threat was small, but officials are not leaving anything involving national food security to chance.
China’s agriculture sector had a devastating year in 2019, hit by the crop-gobbling fall armyworms, which spread over a million hectares of farmland, as well as African swine fever that has killed about half of the country’s 440 million pigs through culling of disease.