Foreign minister says Australia won’t sell uranium to India

CANBERRA, Australia: Australia will keep its ban on selling uranium to India because of New Delhi’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said Monday.

Smith restated his government’s position ahead of meeting Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee in Canberra later Monday.

“We’ve had as a party a long standing policy position of only exporting uranium to countries who are party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,” Smith told Sky News television.

“India for its own reasons is not a party to that,” he added.

High fuel costs lead to reduced B.C.-Asia service

VANCOUVER – The masterminds behind B.C.’s efforts to boost trade with the Asia-Pacific have long identified the need for more airlines offering more seats between Vancouver and Asia’s major cities.

This is still the overarching strategy. But, for the time being, high fuel costs have several carriers publicly – or sometimes discreetly – dropping flights, merging schedules and substituting planes to reduce capacity.

Last week, after Air Canada announced that it was axing its Vancouver-to-Osaka service, Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airways said it will reduce weekly flights to Vancouver because of escalating global fuel costs. Just a few months ago, Cathay chief executive Tony Tyler had bumped weekly flights up from 17 to 21 “in response to growing demand for travel to Hong Kong, China and other parts of Asia.”

Facebook just a directory, MySpace owner Murdoch says

Rupert Murdoch has dismissed Facebook as the “flavour of the month” and little more than a “directory” after new figures revealed the site had overtaken MySpace as the most popular social network for the first time.

The outspoken chief executive of News Corp, which bought MySpace for the now bargain price of $US580 million in 2005, said Facebook had “done a great job of being flavour of the month the last six months of last year” but it was not a real social network.

MySpace made more money and its heavy focus on entertainment meant people stayed on the site for longer than Facebook, which was used as more of a directory, he said in a withering critique of the site at an advertising festival in Cannes.

Mugabe’s rival bows out of race

HARARE — President Robert Mugabe’s iron-fisted reign over Zimbabwe looks set to continue into the foreseeable future after opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai dropped his bid for the presidency Sunday, saying a campaign of violence waged by Mr. Mugabe’s supporters makes it impossible to continue.

Mr. Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, stunned the country in March by winning more votes than Mr. Mugabe in the first round of the presidential election. He said Sunday, however, that he was pulling out of the second round run-off because he could not ask his supporters to risk their lives to vote for him another time. The run-off was to have taken place this Friday.

The move almost certainly means another five-year term in office for the 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe, the former guerrilla leader who has ruled the country since it won independence in 1980.

More than 70 people – almost all of them believed to be MDC backers – have been killed since Mr. Tsvangirai won the election’s first round on March 29. Tens of thousands of others who lived in areas that voted for the MDC in that round have been driven from their homes.