Digest of international news for the week

Saturday

Beirut: Syrian President Bashar Assad issued a decree forming a new government but it will be headed by a key loyalist and the foreign, defence and interior ministers kept their jobs.

Islamabad: Hina Rabbani Khar and Naveed Qamar retained their portfolios of Foreign and Defence respectively in the new cabinet, announced by Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf, which has some new faces.

Washington: US President Barack Obama attacked his presumptive Republican challenger Mitt Romney for shipping jobs to countries like India and China, saying Americans don't need pioneers of outsourcing in the Oval Office.

Rio de Janeiro: Reflecting the concerns of India, the Rio+20 Summit has said that developing countries needed additional resources for sustainable development and that unwarranted conditionalities on Official Development Assistance (ODA) and finance should be avoided.

Sunday

Cairo: Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood wins Egypt's hotly-contested presidential run-off beating former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, as the Arab Spring that ousted strongman Hosni Mubarak finally bore fruit, giving the country its first non-military president.

Beijing: China successfully achieves its first-ever manual docking, a great leap forward in setting up of a space lab by 2020, even as it offered to send foreign astronauts, possibly a Pakistani, into space in the future.

Monday

Antwerp: India assures global investors that the country will move forward with its decision to open multi-brand retail to foreign investment and it has not pressed the "reverse button" on the proposal.

Islamabad: About 100 Taliban fighters sneak in from Afghanistan and attacked military posts in northwest Pakistan, killing at least 13 soldiers, seven of whom were beheaded, drawing strong protest from Islamabad.

Tuesday

Islamabad: Hours after reports emerged that Pakistan was to free Indian death row prisoner Sarabjit Singh, the presidential spokesman clarifies that authorities had taken steps for the release of another Indian prisoner named Surjeet Singh who has been jailed for three decades.

Washington: Hours after the arrest of LeT terrorist and key handler of 2008 Mumbai attackers, Abu Jundal, the US says it has "strong interest" in bringing the perpetrators of 26/11 to justice.

Wednesday

Islamabad: At least five persons are killed and 18 others injurd when a powerful bomb went off at a railway station in the restive Balochistan province of southwest Pakistan.

Islamabad: Pakistan's new Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf directs Commerce Minister Makhdoom Amin Fahim to "pro- actively pursue the promotion of trade relations" with neighbours like India, China, Afghanistan and Iran.

Thursday

London: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange dismisses the extradition notice served on him earlier in the day by Scotland Yard, saying he "almost certainly  will not" attend a police station after breaching bail conditions.

United Nations: India calls for rooting out al-Qaeda, Taliban and LeT from Afghanistan charging them of running a "syndicate of terrorism" that gets support from beyond the war-ravaged country's borders.

Moscow: India and Russia could be one of the first nations in the world to flight test hypersonic missiles, which fly at five to seven times the speed of sound.

Friday

Cairo: Egypt's Islamist Mohammed Mursi symbolically swore himself in as the country's first elected civilian president before tens of thousands of supporters in the iconic Tahrir Square and vowed to fight for authority, defying country's ruling generals.

Colombo: Sri Lanka briefs India about steps being taken towards political reconciliation with ethnic Tamils, amid a growing unease over the slow pace of reforms to enable devolution of power to the war ravaged north.

Beijing: China's astronaut trio, including its first woman cosmonaut, returns to Earth safely after accomplishing the country's first-ever manual docking that helped it join the exclusive US-Russia club and took it a step closer to setting up a space station by 2020.