Hoping to attract new capital, Russia will take its first step into the world of Islamic finance this month by issuing sukuk, Islamic bonds which comply with Muslim religious rules.
The bonds are to be issued by the majority Muslim Russian republic of Tatarstan in the Volga region, which has embarked on an ambitious drive to attract foreign investment.
"Russia will show that it can be interesting for Muslim countries," one of the project's backers, Linar Yakupov told Agence France-Presse. "Right now Islamic banks cannot work in Russia, because our legislation does not take into account the Koran's restrictions."
Islam forbids borrowing or paying with interest, and sukuk (the plural of the Arabic word for a financial deed) are not based on debt-like traditional bonds. Instead, buying the bonds secures partial ownership in a concrete asset like land or a building, and investors are guaranteed a part of the profits generated by this underlying asset.
The first sukuk to be issued in Tatarstan's capital Kazan on June 20 will be going toward financing a major business center in the city whose construction will cost $200 million.
"Sukuk are guaranteed by the Tatarstan government, the operator will be based in Luxembourg, and we know that the international market is ready to buy," Yakupov said.
Among the interested investors are the Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank, and various banks in the Middle East, Malaysia, and Russia, he said.
Bringing Islamic banks to Russia is "possible and even necessary", Tatarstan's leader Rustam Minnikhanov told investors in Dubai in early May, according to the RIA Novosti agency.
In Moscow, however, federal authorities are showing greater caution.
Daily News
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The Chinese military accused the U.S. on Friday of launching a global "Internet war" to bring down Arab and other governments, redirecting the spotlight away from allegations of major online attacks on Western targets originating in China.
The accusations Friday by Chinese military academy scholars, and their urging of tougher policing of the Internet, followed allegations this week that computer hackers in China had compromised the personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including government officials, military personnel and political activists.
Google traced the origin of the attacks to the city of Jinan that is home to a military vocational school whose computers were linked to a more sophisticated assault on Google's systems 17 months ago. China has denied responsibility for the two attacks.
Writing in the Communist Party-controlled China Youth Daily newspaper, the scholars did not mention Google's claims, but said recent computer attacks and incidents employing the Internet to promote regime change in Arab nations appeared to have originated with the U.S. government.
"Of late, an Internet tornado has swept across the world ... massively impacting and shocking the globe. Behind all this lies the shadow of America," said the article, signed by Ye Zheng and Zhao Baoxian, identified as scholars with the Academy of Military Sciences.
"Faced with this warmup for an Internet war, every nation and military can't be passive but is making preparations to fight the Internet war," it said.
While nuclear war was a strategy of the industrial era, Internet war is a product of the information age, the article said. Such conflicts stand to be hugely destructive, threatening national security and the very existence of the state, it said.
China needs to "express to the world its principled stance of maintaining an 'Internet border' and protecting its 'Internet sovereignty,' unite all advanced forces to dive into the raging torrent of the age of peaceful use of the Internet, and return to the Internet world a healthy, orderly environment," the article said.
The central Spanish region of Castilla-La Mancha is “totally bankrupt”, according to the incoming administration of the rightwing Popular party (PP), an accusation that will deepen concerns about Spain’s budget deficit.
The claim has prompted angry denials from the Socialist government.
Spain’s 17 autonomous regions and its more than 8,000 municipalities, with €150bn ($220bn) of accumulated debt between them, have become the latest worry for investors in Spain and its sovereign bonds.
Catalonia, an economy the size of Portugal, says its deficit will be double the target.
Vicente Tirado, a senior PP politician in Castilla-La Mancha, said the region was “totally bankrupt”; owed suppliers such as pharmaceutical companies that provide drugs for hospitals a total of €2bn in unpaid bills; and would have trouble finding the money to pay the region’s 76,000 civil servants next month.
FT
Serving as keynote speaker at the 34th annual Ateret Cohanim/Jerusalem Chai dinner on June 1st, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Danny Danon assumed an obdurate posture on the recent dramatic shift in US foreign policy as it pertains to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In a direct reference to President Obama’s controversial address to the State Department on May 19th, in which he called on Israel to retreat to the ‘1967 boundaries’ [the 1949 armistice lines –ed.] in a gesture towards the creation of an independent Palestinian state, Mr. Danon declared, “President Obama: Take your hands off Jerusalem, take your hands off of Israel.”
Speaking from the dias at the Terrace On the Park hall in Flushing, New York, Mr. Danon’s remarks were enthusiastically received by his audience of over 500, as he said that “President Obama is ignoring reality when he attempts to make a distinction between the objectives of Hamas and al-Qaeda. They are one and the same and we in Israel know very well that you cannot appease terrorists, but rather, you must fight terrorists.”
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http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/144771
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NEW DELHI: India is now deploying spy drones or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) and light observation helicopters along the borders withChina to keep a hawk-eye on the stepped-up activities of People's Liberation Army.
The construction of over 5,500 "permanent defences and bunkers" along the borders is now being speeded up to ensure their completion within four to five years, under the Rs 9,243 crore military infrastructure development project approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security for the Eastern Army Command.
"Sukhoi-30MKI fighters are already being based in IAF airbases like Tezpur and Chabua. Army Aviation bases in Assam are also now being upgraded, with seven helicopters and four Israeli Searcher-II UAVs already been deployed there," a defence ministry source said.
The Army is also pushing for a mountain strike corps after having raised two new mountain infantry divisions. The new divisions, with 1,260 officers and 35,011 soldiers, have their HQs in Zakama (56 Div) in Nagaland and Missamari (71 Div) in Assam.
Though quite belated, all these plans are meant to strategically counter China's massive build-up of military infrastructure all along the 4,057-km Line of Actual Control (LAC) over the last two decades.
A flurry of high-level meetings in the last two-three months, which included a top military briefing to PM Manmohan Singh, have dealt on the dire need to boost India's military infrastructure, strike capabilities and operational logistics along the LAC.
Incidentally, with five fully-operational airbases, an extensive rail network and over 58,000-km of roads in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), China can now move more than 30 divisions (each with over 15,000 soldiers) at their "launch pads" on LAC in double-quick time, outnumbering Indian forces by at least three-is-to-one.
China's rapidly-expanding footprint in infrastructure projects in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, in the backdrop of the Beijing-Islamabad military nexus which targets India, has served to further heighten concerns in the defence establishment here.
Times of India
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LONDON, June 2, 2011 (Reuters) — British scientists have found a new strain of the "superbug" MRSA in milk from cows and in swab samples from humans and say it cannot be detected with standard tests.
Researchers said the find was "worrying" but added it was unlikely that the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bug, which is resistant to some antibiotics, could cause infections by getting into the food chain via milk.
Mark Holmes and a team of scientists from Cambridge University, found the new MRSA bug while researching S. aureus, a bug known to cause a potentially lethal disease in dairy cows called bovine mastitis. The discovery was published on Friday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.
"To find the same new strain in both humans and cows is certainly worrying. However, pasteurization of milk will prevent any risk of infection via the food chain," said Laura Garcia-Alvarez, who worked on Holmes' team.
MRSA is estimated to kill 19,000 people each year in the United States -- far more than HIV and AIDS -- and a similar number in Europe.
The overuse and misuse of antibiotics in recent decades have fueled a rise in drug-resistant "superbug" infections such as MRSA and C-difficile.
Last year, scientists warned that a new so-called superbug from India known as New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1) was rapidly spreading around the world.
And on Thursday, the World Health Organization said an E.coli bacteria that is causing a severe disease outbreak in Germany is a new and highly toxic strain.
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