8 DECEMBER 2015

Ø  In the first visit by a Cabinet Minister of the Modi Government to Pakistan, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will travel to Islamabad on Tuesday to attend an Afghanistan conference, and meet Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and her counterpart Sartaj Aziz. The announcement of the visit, that had been speculated on for days, and was confirmed by The Hindu last week, was made by the Ministry of External Affairs in a tweet on Monday morning. Officials said the announcement was delayed because they were awaiting the completion of talks between the National Security Advisers in Bangkok on Sunday.

Ø  India and Russia are exploring the possibility of setting up a joint venture in India to improve supply of spares for the Sukhoi-30 frontline fighter aircraft. The two sides are also in advance negotiations for a long term agreement for spares for the fleet, of which just over 50 per cent are operational at any given point of time.

Ø  India on Monday announced a programme to open eight more long-term ecological observatories to study the effects of climate change. The new facilities under the Indian Long Term Ecological Observatories (I-LTEO) would assess the health of eight different biomes (types of habitat) and come up with long-term research findings on the changes there that were happening due to climate change. It will cover the Western Himalayas to Western Ghats, Eastern Himalayas to Andaman and Nicobar islands, central India to the Sundarbans, and from Jammu and Kashmir to Rajasthan and Gujarat. Launching the programme at the climate conference CoP21, Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Prakash Javadekar said the research facility of the Indian Institute of Science at Mudumalai in the Western Ghats had been monitoring a 50-hectare plot for 30 years and mapping observations to climate change. The I-LTEO would scientifically monitor flora and fauna to assess how climate change is affecting “natural and closely associated human systems in agriculture and pastoralism,” a Ministry publication released on the occasion said.