International and Bilateral Issues:

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key won a second term on Saturday
The election followed a turbulent 12 months for New Zealand, which was rocked by February's Christchurch earthquake, in which 181 people died, and buoyed by last month's victory in the Rugby World Cup.
Mr. Key has pledged to partially privatise state assets, including power companies, during his second term, as well as tightening welfare benefits and cutting public sector jobs in a bid to reduce debt in the struggling economy.

This week a group of nations led by the U.S. attempted to do exactly that, seeking to foist on to the world an unprecedentedly lax Protocol on Cluster Munitions, one of the most dangerous conventional weapons in existence.
Unfortunately for the group, which includes China, India, Israel and Russia, their efforts were thwarted by the U.N., with opposition stemming from close U.S. allies such as the U.K., and from the International Committee of the Red Cross and U.N. officials for human rights.
Cluster bombs are usually aimed at stopping the advance of army units and are dropped from an aircraft. The bombs can cruise for approximately 15 km and release around 200 bomblets that spread out across a wide area. Every bomblet contains hundreds of potentially lethal metal shards and “When it explodes, it can cause deadly injuries up to 25m away.”
“Though cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric, the draft is clearly an effort to provide political and legal cover for potential future use of the weapon. That is bad news because cluster munitions are indiscriminate when they are used, causing harm well beyond the target, and leaving unexploded sub-munitions to threaten civilians long afterward.”

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan has ordered an investigation into the helicopter firing that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead and 13 injured in the early hours of Saturday.
Carsten Jacobson told the BBC from Kabul that the incident took place when close air support was sent in on request by ground forces — a combined group drawn from coalition forces and Afghan troops
It is in a part of the country where the borderline is not 100 per cent clear. The Durand Line does not show 100 per cent the border on the ground. The forces were operating in Afghanistan.
Brig. Gen. Jacobson said: “It is important that in this part of the country where terrorists use the border and the uncertainty of the border in their favour that all three sides involved — the Afghan government, the Pakistan government and the international coalition forces — work as closely together as they possibly can to fight terrorism
Last autumn, a similar NATO helicopter firing at a Frontier Corps checkpost had resulted in a prolonged stand-off between Pakistan and the U.S./ISAF during which time trucks ferrying supplies through Pakistani territory to coalition forces in Afghanistan were not allowed to cross over.

Having supplied military hardware to Pakistan, Ukraine now wants to enter into a durable defence relationship with India.
Subjected to competing pulls from Russia and the European Union, Ukraine is looking at Asia, especially India, for collaboration in a large number of areas including civil nuclear energy
Home to niche technologies and having been subjected to a nuclear accident in 1986, Ukraine has lessons in nuclear safety for India because this sector still caters to 45-50 per cent of the country's energy needs.
India and Ukraine are understood to be working on an energy pact which will subsume a memorandum of understanding between the civil nuclear regulators as also cover sectors such as gas and solar energy.
But for the immediate future, it is defence which will gain the most attention.
the two countries did not have political issues that could hinder a comprehensive military-technical relationship.
Ukraine is also hoping for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to include Kiev in his itinerary the next time he heads for Europe.