March 08, 2003
 

Politics

Much as I'd predicted/wondered earlier this week, Pakistan will almost definitely be abstaining during the Security Council vote on Iraq. I'm sure the Bush administration (what about the Poms? Did someone ask? Hey, I'm sure even Pakistan couldn't give a damn about them !!) isn't going to like this approach. I sense there'll be attempts at some give and take and Pakistan could ultimately suffer in terms of aid and perhaps the US will take a more harder stance against hunting down Al-Qaeda folks in Pakistan. I watched the Security Council proceedings for a while yesterday and I could almost predict that the last bit of the Pakistani representative's speech was certainly going to contain references to Kashmir and Palestine. I am still not sure what the context of raising this was, but that's something the US won't like either, embarassing Israel in the UNSC! After Pakistan, it was Guinea's turn and I thought the representative almost explicitly said that his government would be willing to support the US's stance if there was a substantial financial-aid package. Apparently there is an Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which gives preferential access to US markets for African exporters.

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Cricket

A good win against Kenya yesterday. It was pretty dicey for nearly 75% of the game, with Kenya batting well and bowling & fielding really well until around the 35th over or so. After that Yuvraj and Ganguly opened up the floodgates with some calculated hitting and that seemed to have rattled the Kenyans who thought the batsmen would take a safer approach with a required run-rate of around 6 per over. All's well that ends well. I think it would be another good wake-up call for the Indian team, they definitely did take Kenya lightly, especially while bowling first. The fielding was atrocious. Dinesh Mongia must be wondering how on earth he's still in the side ... and so are a billion others.

Labels: al-qaeda

Rambled @ 1:16 PM

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