Come 2011, Portugal will unveil the world’s first nationwide electric vehicle charging network that will enable people to travel without having to worry about charging them. In an interview to this newspaper, Portugal’s vice-minister for energy and innovation Carlos Zorrinho said consumers of electric vehicles will be given a bouquet of incentives to switch over from fossil fuels to green energy. The motorists will stand to gain by way of tax breaks or discounts.

Democracy, or the lack of it, in Burma may wade into Barack Obama’s address to the joint session of Parliament on November 8, the day after the Burmese military junta would have conducted an election which has been dismissed as a sham by the international community. Any adverse comment about Burma by a foreign dignitary

“It’s the economy, stupid!” may be a hark back to Bill Clinton’s presidency but the slogan can be expected to weigh on Barack Obama’s mind when he visits India and other Asian nations next month.

Will Barack Obama go beyond George W. Bush and support India for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) when he visits New Delhi next month?

The mood in the temple town of Ayodhya changed from expectation to uncertainty to concern, all in a matter of hours as news filtered in Thursday afternoon of the Supreme Court deferring the verdict in the Ayodhya title suit by one week.

In an exclusive interview, Sri Lankan defence secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa says that his country’s military victory over the LTTE offers lessons for the international community. Excerpts:

Jason Kenney, the immigration minister of Canada, describes his country as being at war with unscrupulous Indian immigration consultants who do not shy away from employing every trick in the trade, in

American companies will not be able to enter the multi-billion-dollar Indian nuclear energy market even if Parliament hurriedly passes the nuclear liability bill because two major US firms in the business, General Electric and Westinghouse, are either partly or wholly owned by Japanese companies. So the US-Japanese consortium of GE-Hitachi or the Toshiba-owned Westinghouse will need to wait for Tokyo to conclude a bilateral nuclear pact with New Delhi before they can begin supplying equipment or technology for reactors in India.

Will Barack Obama do a Jimmy Carter? The question is uppermost in the minds of many in India and Japan, but for entirely different reasons.
As the 44th President of the US gets ready for an Asian tour in November which will take him to India, South Korea and Japan, Indians are asking whether Mr Obama will, like Mr Carter before him, skip Pakistan altogether, or will he go the way of Mr Bill Clinton, who spent five days here and five hours in Islamabad?

US President Barack Obama’s itinerary includes back-to-back visits to India, South Korea and Japan. He is scheduled to visit Seoul for the G-20 Summit on November 11 and 12. He then travels to Japan for the Apec summit on November 13 and 14.