BEIJING (TIP): China on Oct 2 opened a 409-km new expressway costing about $5.8 billion linking Tibet’s provincial capital Lhasa with Nyingchi, which is close to Arunachal Pradesh border.

The 409-km toll-free expressway has linked the two major cities which are also tourist attractions in Tibet, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The expressway cuts Lhasa-Nyingchi travel time from eight to five hours at a speed limit of 80 km per hour.

The construction cost 38 billion yuan ($ 5.8 billion), according to the local government.

Most of the expressways in Tibet are also compatible for military equipment, providing advantage for the Chinese military to move its troops and weaponry faster.

The massive infrastructure development in Tibet also prompted India to ramp up infrastructure on its side.

Heavy trucks are temporarily banned from using the Lhasa- Nyingchi expressway, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The India-China border dispute+ covers the 3,488 kmlong Line of Actual Control (LAC). While China claims Arunachal Pradesh as South Tibet, India asserts that the dispute covers the Aksai Chin area, which was occupied by China during the 1962 war. (TIP)

MOSCOW (TIP): The Russian defence ministry on Wednesday suggested the United States was supporting Islamic State jihadists, enabling them to mount counteroffensive attacks in eastern Syria.

“The main thing preventing the final defeat of ISIL in Syria is not the terrorists’ military capability but support and pandering to them by American colleagues,” military spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a statement, using an alternative term for IS.

He said recent attacks on Syrian regime forces were all made “from a 50-kilometre zone around At-Tanf on the Syrian- Jordan border” where the US-led coalition is operating a garrison.

Over the past month Moscow has repeatedly accused the US of hindering the offensive in the east of the country against IS jihadists mounted by Syrian regime forces with the support of Russian airstrikes and special forces on the ground.

The military said the regime forces “neutralised mobile IS groups on the road from Palmyra to Deir-Ezzor” and freed the captured villages.

“If the US side views such operations as unforeseen ‘accidents’, Russian aviation in Syria is ready to begin complete eradication of all such ‘accidents’ in the zone they control,” Konashenkov said.

Russia has been flying a bombing campaign in Syria since 2015, when it stepped in to support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and tipped the conflict in his favour. (AP)

MOSCOW (TIP): Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, on a landmark visit to Russia, and President Vladimir Putin on Thursday signed a slew of arms and energy deals as the key US ally seeks to deepen cooperation with Moscow.

The leaders of the world’s largest energy exporters discussed an extension of an OPEC agreement to cap oil output and oversaw the signing of deals which officials said were worth billions of dollars. Saudi Arabia signed preliminary agreements to buy Russia’s S-400 air defence systems and anti-tank guided missile systems and receive “cutting edge technologies,” said the Sunni state’s military firm, Saudi Arabian Military Industries.

The two countries also signed a series of multi-billion dollar investment deals including one to create a USD 1 billion fund to pursue energy projects. “This is the first visit by a Saudi Arabian monarch

in the history of our relations and that in itself is a landmark event,” Putin said as he welcomed 81-year-old King Salman to Moscow in an ornate gilded Kremlin hall.

“I’m sure your visit will boost the ties between our countries,” Putin added. “We aim to strengthen our relations in the interests of peace and security, in the interests of developing the world economy,” the Saudi king responded.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told journalists that “relations between Russia and Saudi Arabia have reached a historic moment.” “Today we alone as the Russian Direct Investment Fund announced deals worth USD 2.1 billion,” said Kirill Dmitriyev, the head of the fund set up to attract investment.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said agreements came in the fields of “energy – – not only traditional but also nuclear power — and also in cooperation in space exploration (and) agroindustry and infrastructure projects.” Saudi Arabia is the country that buys the most US arms and Washington and Riyadh in May announced a USD 110 billion deal to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia. (AFP)

BAGHDAD (TIP): Iraqi forces have captured the town of Hawija and the surrounding area from Islamic State, the military said in a statement on Oct 6.

With the capture of Hawija, the militants’ last stronghold in northern Iraq, the only area that remains under control of Islamic State in Iraq is a stretch alongside the western border with Syria. Hawija is close to the oil-city of Kirkuk.The offensive on Hawija was carried out by US backed Iraqi government troops and Iranian-trained and armed Shi’ite paramilitary groups known as Popular Mobilisation. “The army’s 9th armoured division, the Federal Police, the Emergency Response division and Popular Mobilisation liberated Hawija,” said a statement from the joint operations commander, Lieutenant-General Abdul Ameer Rasheed Yarallah.

Iraq launched an offensive on September 21 to dislodge Islamic State from the area north of Baghdad where up to 78,000 people were estimated to be trapped, according to the United Nations. The militants continue to control the border town of al-Qaim and the region surrounding it.

They also hold parts of Syrian side of the border, but the area under their control is shrinking as they retreat in the face of two different sets of hostile forces – a US-backed, Kurdish-led coalition and Syrian government troops with foreign Shi’ite militias backed by Iran and Russia. Islamic State’s cross-border “caliphate” effectively collapsed in July, when US-backed Iraqi forces captured Mosul, the group’s de facto capital in Iraq, in a grueling battle which lasted nine months. (Reuters)

MANAGUA, NICARAGUA (TIP): Newly formed Tropical Storm Nate was blamed on Thursday for at least 22 deaths in Central America as it dumped rain across the region on a path that would carry it toward a potential landfall on the US Gulf Coast as a hurricane over the weekend.

Louisiana officials declared a state of emergency and ordered some people to evacuate coastal areas and barrier islands, and evacuations began at some offshore oil platforms in the Gulf.

The US National Hurricane Center said the storm could cause dangerous flooding by dumping as much as 15 to 20 inches (38 to 50 centimeters) of rain as it moved over Honduras, with higher accumulations in a few places.

It had maximum sustained winds of 40 mph (65 kph) by Thursday evening and was likely to strengthen over the northwestern Caribbean Sea Thursday night and Friday before a possible strike on the Cancun region at the tip of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula at near hurricane strength. It could hit the US Gulf coast near New Orleans over the weekend at hurricane strength.

In Nicaragua, Nate’s arrival followed two weeks of near-constant rain that had left the ground saturated and rivers swollen. Authorities placed the whole country on alert and warned of flooding and landslides.

Nicaragua’s vice president and spokeswoman, Rosario Murillo, said that at least 15 people had died in that country due to the storm. She didn’t give details on all the deaths, but said two women and a man who worked for the Health Ministry were swept away by a flooded canal in the central municipality of Juigalpa.

The government closed schools nationwide.

Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Organism blamed seven deaths in that country on the storm and said 15 people were missing. Flooding drove 5,000 residents into emergency shelters. (AP)

STOCKHOLM (TIP): Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author of “Remains of the Day”, has won the Nobel Prize for  Literature, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday, honouring an “exquisite novelist” a year after giving it to singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.

Born in Japan and raised in Britain, Ishiguro, 62, won the Man Booker Prize for the 1989 novel that was made into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Anthony Hopkins as a fastidious and repressed butler in postwar Britain.

“He is an exquisite novelist. I would say if you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka you get Ishiguro in a nutshell, Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told Reuters.

The award of the 9 million crown ($1.1 million) prize marks a return to a more mainstream interpretation of literature after it went to the American troubadour Dylan, a decision that critics said snubbed more deserving writers.

The Academy hailed Ishiguro’s ability to reveal “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world … in novels of great emotional force” that touch on memory, time and self-delusion.

“What I’m interested in is not the actual fact that my characters have done things they later regret. I’m interested in how they come to terms with it,” told the New York Times after “The Remains of the Day” was published.

Ishiguro has also waded into politics, calling a rise in hostility towards immigrants after the British voted to leave the European Union as “a fight over the very soul of Britain”.

Never has there been a better opportunity, at least not since the 1930s, of pushing … xenophobia into neo-Nazi racism,” he wrote in the Financial Times last year, urging “a sharply divided, bewildered, anxious, leaderless nation” to unite around its “essentially decent heart”.

Ishiguro’s latest novel, “The Buried Giant”, in which an elderly couple go on a road trip through an Arthurian England populated by ogres and dragons, “explores … how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality”, the Academy said. (Reuters)