28 MAY 2016

Ø  U.S. President Barack Obama bids farewell to Japanese PM Shinzo Abe after laying a wreath in front of a cenotaph for the victims of the 1945 atom bomb attack in Hiroshima.

Ø  The Indian Air Force on Friday successfully test-fired a land-attack version of the supersonic cruise missile, BrahMos, in the western sector. The flight-trial which took place in a firing range in the western sector, met its mission parameters, a BrahMos press release said. The missile destroyed a designated target. This brings to light that the IAF too has been equipped with the land-attack version of BrahMos, which flies at a supersonic speed of Mach 3 (that is, three times the speed of sound). The Navy and the Army have already deployed the two-stage missile, which has a range of 290 km.

Ø  The U.S. Senate is likely to pass an amendment to the 2017 National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) that seeks to ease defence trade with India to the level of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies and close partners of the U.S. such as Australia and Israel next week, ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit on June 7 and 8. The House of Representatives has already passed amendments similar to the proposed Senate Bill, but the details vary between the two. U.S. legislative process requires both Chambers to reconcile their individual versions of similar Bills, and pass a combined version before sending for the approval of the President. Once the President signs them into law, the amendments will enable defence trade between the U.S. and India on automatic route for a range of equipment, bypassing the bureaucratic and legislative hurdles in the existing case by case approval process.

Ø  Former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao had proposed to confer Bharat Ratna on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose posthumously, declassified files on Netaji released on Friday have revealed. This is an indication that the government at that time had accepted the death of the freedom fighter.

Ø  Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar said the indigenously developed Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas would be the mainstay of the Indian Air Force and would likely replace the entire MIG-21 fleet of almost 250 fighters. The Minister’s statement is significant given the recent noises emanating from the Ministry, hinting at the possibility of another single-engine fighter being considered to make up for the shortfall of fighters. In the past, the IAF had been reluctant to fully back the domestic Tejas programme.