Skip to main content

Nancy Powell likely to meet Mamata on February 21 or 22

U.S. Ambassador to India Nancy Powell is likely to meet West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chairperson Mamata Banerjee later this month.

The party website said on Friday that Ms. Powell “has sought a meeting with Ms. Banerjee. A letter from her office reached Nabanna, the State Secretariat. The West Bengal government has sought a formal clearance from the Union Ministry of External Affairs.”

The meeting is likely to take place on either February 21 or 22.

The Ambassador met BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi on Thursday.

Ms. Powell had earlier met Ms. Banerjee on September 23, 2012, at Writers’ Buildings, four months after the former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, met her at the same venue.

Though the meeting with the Ambassador was termed “routine,” it came just days after the Trinamool Congress withdrew support to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government against foreign direct investment in retail. Ms. Powell had invited Ms. Banerjee to visit the U.S.

The meeting between the two, if held as per schedule, is significant as it comes ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, and after Ms. Banerjee has called for establishing a “federal front” to remove the UPA government.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, too, held a meeting with Ms. Banerjee in November last and invited her to London. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SC asks Centre to strike a balance on Rohingya issue (.hindu)

Supreme Court orally indicates that the government should not deport Rohingya “now” as the Centre prevails over it to not record any such views in its formal order, citing “international ramifications”. The Supreme Court on Friday came close to ordering the government not to deport the Rohingya. It finally settled on merely observing that a balance should be struck between humanitarian concern for the community and the country's national security and economic interests. The court was hearing a bunch of petitions, one filed by persons within the Rohingya community, against a proposed move to deport over 40,000 Rohingya refugees. A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, began by orally indicating that the government should not deport Rohingya “now”, but the government prevailed on the court to not pass any formal order, citing “international ramifications”. With this, the status quo continues even though the court gave the community liberty to approach i...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »