Why is Xi Jinping visiting Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China this week? Former RA&W officer Jayadeva Ranade explains the significance of China's outreach to the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia has severed diplomatic ties with Iran following attacks on the kingdom's embassy and consulate in the Islamic Republic over the execution of a Shiite cleric.

'We will have to wait till the snows melt in June/July 2016 before we can get a clearer idea of whether Pakistan intends to get serious about ending support for cross-border terrorism,' says G Parthasarathy, India's former high commissioner to Pakistan.

Lionel Messi and Sergio Aguero struck two goals apiece in Argentina's 7-0 romp against an out-of-sorts Bolivia while Mexico were held 3-3 by Trinidad & Tobago in friendlies in the United States on Friday.

Chelsea wrapped up their pre-season tour of the United States on a high note by beating Barcelona in a shootout after their International Champions Cup match ended 2-2 on Tuesday.

11th-hour debt restructuring programme offered no concessions to creditors

Rahul Gandhi has taken the fight to the Modi government, feels Milan Vaishnav. Aziz Haniffa/Rediff.com reports from Washington, DC.

'Modi's promise of change during the election campaign was on the domestic front, but his first year in office focused on foreign policy beyond all expectations,' says Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.

Subrahmanyam Jaishankar's worldview sets him apart

President Obama's coming visit to India has created quite a buzz, here is a look at all past visits of American Presidents to the country

US President Barack Obama told Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when the two met on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit in Myanmar in November 2014, how he barely had two years left to his presidential term and so much to do. The wish list included getting his daughters to see a tiger in the wild and the Taj Mahal.

Why are people around the world taking their pants off? Read on! :-)

Many app makers have stopped work on their projects or abandoned them, mostly because of the lack of customers or limitations of the device.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi this month will be undertaking one of the longest ever abroad visits by an Indian head of government in recent times. He is scheduled to be on a nine-day, three-nation visit to Myanmar, Australia and Fiji from November 11 to 19. Later in the month, he will be in Nepal to attend the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit on November 26-27.

Top 21 images of all the events of the week that was.

'If you are a professional journalist, don't ever think that your work is going to bring in revolution or that you are going to change the world. That job is best left to the revolutionaries,' M V Kamath, the legendary journalist who passed away on October 9, told Nitin Gokhale.

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi begins his historic visit of the United States of America, here's a look at some landmark visits by Indian prime ministers to the United States of America.

When Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visits the White House on Wednesday, it will be his first encounter with an American president since that turbulent meeting with Bill Clinton when the Kargil war was raging 14 years ago.

The announcement of the formation of the BRICS bank will have as much an impact about how the non-G7 countries manage their economies and their foreign reserves, as it does on the intellectual discourse. The development priorities and agenda which was hitherto set by western experts responding mostly to western priorities and notions will now have to compete with an intellectual tradition that is and can be very different, says Mohan Guruswamy.

'This is the first of (ideally) many superhero films that will appeal to those who aren't already besotted by the comics and the characters,' says Raja Sen after watching Captain America.

Read the full transcript of President Obama's State of the Union address on Wednesday at the US Capitol in Washington.

'Just how strong were the ties between the world's largest and oldest democracies that an incident involving a diplomat and a maid led to anger threatening the relationship itself? Or had the relationship been weakening in the past few years, masked by the empty symbolism of State dinners, asks Devesh Kapur.

It is easy to foretell that negotiating a comprehensive and final agreement on the Iran nuclear issue is by no means an easy task. It involves hard negotiations, but the hardest step has been taken, says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar, who was among the first group of foreigners to visit the the top-secret Arak plant hidden behind barren mountains south of Tehran.

When Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visits the White House on Wednesday, it will be his first encounter with an American president since that turbulent meeting with Bill Clinton when the Kargil war was raging 14 years ago.

'We have leaders who would rather that we cohabit with the Indian Mujahedeen than fight terror, as long as the payoffs are there in the next polls... Obviously, we are not headed down the best route to keep terror at bay,' says Brigadier S K Chatterji (retd).

The past record of attacks by the Americans has been such that it would take a monumental task for them to get the rest of the world to believe in at attack on Syria. As such, in history books, this would seem another attempt by the US to emboss its unilateralism over the world and nothing else beyond it, says Sriram Balasubramanian.

A very delayed and subdued reaction, at a time when the non-aligned world had expected a big country like India to come out in support of rights and justice. It was yet another example of the mealy mouthed approach that has come to define Indian foreign policy, says Seema Mustafa.

It is a fallacy, which many of our pundits are prone to, to exaggerate the potential for confrontation and conflict between the US and China and to conceive fanciful notions of advantage for India in the downstream, says M K Bhadrakumar.

Oblivion, outside its spectacular, smooth surface, is only a middling effort that borrows liberally in tone and technique from just about every science-fiction movie there is, writes Sukanya Verma.

The draft of a UN treaty to regulate the sale of conventional arms is facing opposition from some countries as it favours the arms exporting nations and remains silent on the illicit trafficking of such weapons to non-state actors, of which India has been a major victim.

Django Unchained is far better a script than it is a film.

Aseem Chhabra is sure that Argo will win the Best Picture at Oscars but he still doesn't like the film. Here's why.

United States President Barack Obama on Wednesday delivered his State of the Union address in which he spelt out the agenda for the second term of his Presidency

Obama is signalling much more than a new leadership style of using more carrots than sticks, more ideas and persuasion than threats and sanctions. The bottom line is that now that he won't be running again, Obama wants to really test a values-based foreign policy approach that relies on negotiations, says M K Bhadrakumar.

Barack Obama was officially reelected to a second term as the American president after votes of the much-discussed Electoral College were counted and certified in a joint session of Congress on Friday.

What came through from both candidates instead, was America's exaggerated sense in seeing itself as arbiter of justice, democracy and safety in the world. And a worrisome dismissal of one major truth -- anti-Americanism as a result of its sometimes ill strategised interventions in the affairs of another country which is perhaps as grave a threat to America today as international terrorism, says Maya Mirchandani.

Neither Obama nor Romney realise that government intervention as it is practiced in the US is not the answer to deliver people out of poverty, writes M R Venkatesh.

India's first NSA Brajesh Mishra's combination of hard-headed realism and outspokenness ensured that he always spoke up for India -- not necessarily for the BJP, notes Jyoti Malhotra.

The prime minister should resign with the admission that he is not fit for the job assigned to him. He and his party must realise that there cannot be a government of any merit, without a prime minister to guide it, says Seema Mustafa.

Despite differences over various foreign policy issues, both President Barack Obama and his Republican rival Mitt Romney share a common ground when it comes to the United States policy of support towards India and Japan, key members of both the campaigns have said.