16 SEPTEMBER 2016

Ø  After a gap of 45 years, a fighter plane landed at an airport in Tripura on Thursday. An Indian Air Force Sukhoi landed at the Agartala airport of World War II fame at around 10 a.m. and flew back after two hours.

Ø  Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar has written to his Pakistani counterpart suggesting ways to expedite trial in the 2008 Mumbai terror attack case in the neighbouring country but is yet to get a response. Mr. Jaishankar wrote the letter on September 6 which was hand-delivered by the Indian High Commissioner in Islamabad on September 9, MEA spokesperson Vikas Swarup said.

Ø  The United States is confident that India will be able to ratify the Paris Agreement on climate change before the end of the year, a senior Obama administration official has said. The Obama administration is actively persuading members of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to admit India into the 48-member club, the official told The Hindu. However, these issues are not linked and both countries are pursuing these on the individual merits of each, he said. “There is a lot of activity around that,” he said of the U.S. efforts to push India’s NSG membership.

Ø  In his first visit abroad since being sworn in, Nepal’s Prime Minister Pushpa Kumar Dahal ‘Prachanda’ will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday for a visit expected to see a big push for Indian infrastructure projects in Nepal and the post-earthquake reconstruction.

Ø  The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)’s National Physical Laboratory, the organisation that defines the Indian Standard Time (IST), has formally proposed to the Central government that all Indian computers be “legally required” to synchronise their clocks to the IST. NPL Director Dinesh Aswal told The Hindu that the time displayed on laptops or smartphones — being derived from multiple American servers — would be a few seconds off from the actual Indian time. The frequent mismatches in the time stamps make it harder for Indian cyber security experts to investigate Internet-perpetrated frauds. “All countries require their computer infrastructure to synchronise to their local times,” Mr. Aswal said. “It would be a landmark service if Indian computers were also mandated to do so.” The CSIR has sent its proposal to the government but Aswal said it was up to “higher authorities” to consider it. The NPL is the Indian organisation that maintains the clocks, weights and other apparatus that conform to globally agreed standards on measuring units such as metre, kilogram and second. In recent months, India has stepped up efforts to become self-reliant in its communication networks. This month, the Indian Space Research Organisation is expected to operationalise the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (its operational name is NAVIC). Mr. Aswal said the Indian Air Force had recently teamed up with NPL to improve the accuracy of their time-keeping systems and reduce error to the range of “microseconds.”