INDIA: Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan have agreed to make "sincere" efforts to find a peaceful solution to the 58-year dispute over northern Jammu and Kashmir province which is divided between them, but claimed by both.
A potential nuclear flashpoint, the quarrel over Kashmir has bedevilled relations between the neighbours leading to two wars and an 11-week military skirmish in 1999 in which 1,200 soldiers died.
A joint statement issued in Pakistan's capital Islamabad on Monday, after two days of talks between visiting Indian foreign minister Natwar Singh and his counterpart Khurshid Kasuri, said both countries were committed to their nearly two-year-old peace talks after coming close to war in 2002.
The joint statement came a day after the two sides approved an agreement requiring each country to notify the other of plans ahead of ballistic missile tests and of establishing a hotline between the two Coast Guards.
India said it had also handed over a draft memorandum of understanding on measures to reduce the risks of "accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons". Officials said they planned on setting up another hotline to reduce the possibility of nuclear conflict through misunderstanding.
The neighbours already operate a hotline between the respective director generals of military operations which is activated every Tuesday and whenever tensions mount along the common frontiers.
The two countries also re-established a panel to promote economic co-operation after 16 years. The economic agreement panel, which last met in 1989, will seek to promote co-ordination in health, science and technology, agriculture, education, telecommunications, the environment and tourism.
Kashmir's future, however, remains the most prominent of eight issues included in the two rounds of the "composite dialogue" between the two sides which have not resulted in any significant breakthrough as yet.
India accuses Pakistan of sponsoring a bloody 16-year insurgency in its portion of Kashmir which has claimed more than 65,000 lives. Islamabad has tacitly admitted its role, but pledged to stem all cross-border movement of terrorist groups.
The other issues under discussion include nuclear and conventional military confidence- building measures, cross-border terrorism, narcotics smuggling and resolving territorial disputes over the northern, 21,000-ft Siachen glacier and the marshy Sir Creek region along the western Arabian Sea coast.
They also agreed to find a "common understanding" by January 2006 on the issue of the Siachen glacier adjoining Tibet which is dubbed the world's highest battlefield, where both sides have stationed thousands of troops since the mid-1980s.