International and Bilateral Issues

At least 300 prisoners have been killed after a massive fire swept through a jail in Honduras, officials say.
Many victims were burned or suffocated to death in their cells in Comayagua, north of the capital Tegucigalpa.
Honduran President Lobo pledged a "full and transparent" investigation into the "lamentable and unacceptable" tragedy.
"We couldn't get them out because we didn't have the keys and couldn't find the guards who had them," he said.
"We have two hypotheses. One is that a prisoner set fire to a mattress and the other one is that there was a short-circuit in the electrical system,"
Prisons in Honduras, which has the world's highest murder rate, are often seriously overcrowded and hold many gang members.

The U.S.-led military coalition said on Wednesday that it regretted the killing of eight civilians in a NATO airstrike this month in eastern Afghanistan.
“The aircraft dropped two bombs on the group that we believed to be an imminent threat to our people,” Brigadier-General Boone told reporters in Kabul.

Maldivian President Waheed Hasan Manik named a resort owner of no claimed political affiliation, Mohamed Waheeduddin, as his Vice-President, even as Foreign Secretary Ranjan K. Mathai rushed to Male to hold urgent consultation with all stakeholders to find a way forward.
President Dr. Waheed had made it clear to all parties in the coalition that he wanted to pick a Vice-President of his choice to steer clear of the mistakes the former President, Mohamed Nasheed, made

Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir is tipped to become the next High Commissioner to India after he retires in early March.
The government had named Pakistan's Ambassador to the European Union, Belgium and Luxembourg Jalil Abbas Jilani as the next Foreign Secretary. Mr. Jilani — who had served in India between 1999 and 2003 — was expelled by New Delhi along with four other officials of the Pakistan High Commission for allegedly funding the Hurriyat Conference.

Syria's President has decreed to hold a referendum later this month for a new Constitution that would effectively end nearly 50 years of single party rule, said state media
Under the new charter, freedom is “a sacred right” and “the people will govern the people” in a multi-party democratic system based on Islamic law
The proposed Constitution does away with Article 8 of the old charter which declared the Baath party, in power since 1963, as the “leader of the state and society”.

A month after India and China held the fifteenth round of border talks, a commentary in a Chinese newspaper has questioned India's claims on Kashmir and asserted that the only dispute was over the status of Arunachal Pradesh.
In New Delhi last month, National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and Chinese State Councillor Dai Bingguo, the two Special Representatives, discussed a framework for the settlement of disputes in all three sectors — western, middle and eastern. This was in keeping with the 2005 agreement on Political Parameters and Guiding Principles, which marked the ending of the first of three stages of negotiations.
According to Article III of the agreement, the boundary settlement would be “final, covering all sectors of the India-China boundary.”
There were two different disputes in the western sector — Aksai Chin and the territory from a 1963 Chinese-Pakistani agreement
Under the 1963 Sino-Pakistan treaty, which, he said, “contrary to the conventional wisdom in India” favoured Pakistan, China kept around 5,300 sq km of land that Pakistan claimed, but transferred to Pakistan 1,942 sq km of land in the Oprang Valley and dropped claims to an additional 1,554 sq km of land.
So, China acknowledges a dispute with India in the Western sector of Aksai Chin, but does not acknowledge a dispute with India over its border with Pakistan adjacent to Kashmir.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled on state television what was said to be Iran's first domestically produced, 20-per-cent enriched nuclear fuel for Tehran's research reactor.
Iran portrayed the advances as evidence it was only interested in peaceful nuclear goals, under the slogan “nuclear energy for all, nuclear weapons for none”.
But the steps challenged the basis of four sets of U.N. sanctions and a raft of unilateral U.S. and EU sanctions designed to halt a programme much of the West fears masks a drive for atomic weapons.
Iran welcomes the readiness of the P5+1 group to return to negotiations in order to take fundamental steps toward further cooperation
The P5+1 consists of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — and Germany.
Russia and China have stood by Iran, criticising the Western sanctions
But there were indications that the support was weakening, at least from Russia.

In what could prove to be a historic step in removing the atmosphere of animosity between India and Pakistan and promoting peace and people-to-people exchange, both countries have agreed to completely revise the 1974 Bilateral Visa Agreement and put in place a liberal visa regime shortly for all categories of people, especially businessmen, as part of the Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) aimed to promote peace in the region.
Both countries had exchanged drafts on the new visa regime which were now pending necessary approvals from the respective governments. These drafts have been prepared after the report of the Joint Working Group set up in March 2011

It will also explore ways of cooperation in fighting piracy in the Indian Ocean region.
India and Saudi Arabia have decided to set up a joint panel on defence ties.