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cassettes were discovered. The cache soon passed many hands from an Afghan family to a cassette shop and then to a CNN cameraman, finally making its way to the Afghan Media Project at Williams College in Massachusetts, who asked Flagg Miller — an expert in Arabic literature and culture from the University of California, Davis — to unravel them, BBC reported.

More than a decade on, Miller has written a book about his findings, titled 'The Audacious Ascetic', which explores this unique collection. The tapes date back to the late 1960s through to 2001 and feature more than 200 different speakers — Osama among them.

He is first heard in a tape from 1987 — a recording of a battle between Afghan-Arab mujahideen and Soviet Spetsnaz commandos. An unexpected name to make an appearance in the tapes is Mahatma Gandhi, who is cited as an inspiration by Osama in a speech made in September 1993, the report says.

This is also the first speech in the collection in which Osama calls on supporters to take action against the US by boycotting its goods. "Consider the case of Great Britain, an empire so vast that some say the sun never set on it," says Laden. "Britain was forced to withdraw from one of its largest colonies when Gandhi the Hindu declared a boycott against their goods. We must do the same thing today with America," he says.

Laden makes no mention of violence till 1996, according to the tapes. "That changes in 1996, days after he is exiled from Sudan," Miller is quoted as saying. It is only in one of the final recordings found in the collection that there is any allusion to 9/11.

New York: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday participated in a Leaders Summit on UN Peacekeeping, after his summit meeting with US President Barack Obama.

"Partners in Peacekeeping. PM @narendramodi participates in Leaders' Summit on Peacekeeping convened by @BarackObama," tweeted external affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup.

Earlier, Modi held a bilateral meeting with Obama, which was preceded by bilateral meetings with French President Francois Hollande and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Modi said in his statement after meeting Obama: "President and I share an uncompromising commitment on climate change without affecting our ability to meet the development aspirations of humanity."

During the three meetings, Modi mentioned India's ambitious efforts on the climate change front like plans for adding 175 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2022 and innovative programmes like solar panels over canals that would reduce evaporation while generating power and also obviate the need for acquiring land for the projects.

In meetings with both Cameron and Obama, joint efforts on cyber security came up for discussion.

New Delhi and Washington conduct a cyber security dialogue. Modi discussed cooperation on intelligence and cyber security with Cameron.

Asked at the briefing if Pakistan came up in the context of dealing with terrorism, Swarup said there were references to that country and it was recognised that all countries had to fight terrorism.

Answering a question if the Kashmir issue, which Pakistan has been raking up at the UN and in bilateral meetings, figured in the meetings that Modi had with the three leaders, Swarup said there was a broad acknowledgment that it was a bilateral issue and the three leaders would be happy to see India and Pakistan deal with it themselves.

Modi invited both France and Britain to "Make in India" by encouraging businesses to manufacture in India.

The stalled negotiations on European Union-India Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement was mentioned by Modi in his meeting with Hollande.

Success of peacekeeping ops depends on UN's moral force
Pressing for UNSC reforms, Prime Minister Narendra Modi regretted that nations contributing to peacekeeping operations have no say in decision-making as he asserted that success of such mission depends ultimately on the "moral force" of the world body.

Addressing the Leaders' Summit on Peacekeeping hosted by US President Barack Obama here, he said India remains committed to the peacekeeping efforts and announced contribution of one additional battalion of Indian troops comprising 850 soldiers, three police units and higher representation of women peacekeepers to such missions.

"Success of peacekeeping ultimately depends not on the weapons they (soldiers) carry but by the moral force of the UNSC," he told the gathering including Obama, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and leaders from a large number of other countries.

"The problems arise to a large extent because troop contributing countries do not have a role in decision-making process," he added.

India is one of the largest contributors to the peacekeeping having provided 180000 soldiers to 48 of the 69 such missions.

Modi underlined the need for carrying out the "long pending task of reforms" of the UN Security Council to ensure its "relevance and effectiveness".

Modi welcomed holding of the peacekeeping summit at a time when the UN is in the 70th year of its existence. He said the security environment was changing with peacekeepers facing a range of complex challenges as demands are growing and resources are decreasing.

"Mandates are ambitious but resources are limited... Today's peacekeepers are called upon not only to maintain peace and security, but also address a range of challenges," the Prime Minister said.

Asserting that India's commitment to peacekeeping remains strong and will grow, he noted that the country had been contributing to such missions from the beginning and was the first to send its female unit to Liberia.

161 of Indian soldiers have made the supreme sacrifice during peacekeeping missions, he said. Modi pointed out that Indian soldiers had been working on peacekeeping missions since World War II during which it lost more than 24000 troops and nearly half of that went missing.

"This legacy of sacrifice is shared by three nations present here," he said, in an apparent reference to Pakistan and Bangladesh. He said that a memorial wall for the fallen peacekeepers should be erected expeditiously, for which India will contribute financially also.

It seems like no matter how many foreign trips PM Narendra Modi undertakes, no matter how many speeches he makes, no matter how many CEOs he meets, the shadow of the Gujarat riots will always follow him.

On Sunday, PM Modi, who is on a trip across the United States, met up with the co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

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A 'townhall' was organized at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California which concluded with a standing ovation for the Prime Minister as he took questions about everything from social media, women's issues to his mother.

But soon after the meeting, a group of activists called the Alliance for Justice and Accountability, started a campaign called 'Zuck, Wash Your Hands!'. The campaign calls for people to send hundreds of bottles of hand sanitiser to Zuckerberg to help him 'wash the blood off his hands' – reference to Modi's failure to curb the religious riots that left nearly 1,000 people dead in Gujarat in 2002 when he was the chief minister.

"The American public – and in particular, the leaders of Silicon Valley – must remember that Modi is not simply a prime minister making a trade visit, he is a man responsible for genocide," said a spokesperson for the collective.

The website for the campaign reports that 250 packages of hand sanitisers has been sent to Zuckerberg so far, each containing the name of a victim of the Gujarat genocide.

Cape Carneval:  Mars appears to have flowing rivulets of water, at least in the summer, scientists reported Monday in a finding that boosts the odds of life on the red planet.

"Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past," said Jim Green, director of planetary science for Nasa.

Scientists in 2008 confirmed the existence of frozen water on Mars. Now instruments aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have yielded what researchers said is the strongest evidence yet that water in liquid form trickles down certain Martian slopes.

And because liquid water is essential to life, the finding could have major implications for the possibility of microscopic life forms on Earth's next-door neighbor.

"It suggests that it would be possible for there to be life today on Mars," Nasa's science mission chief, John Grunsfeld, said at a Washington news conference.
The rivulets — if that's what they are, since the evidence for their existence is indirect — are about 12 to 15 feet wide and 300 feet or more long, scientists said. They apparently consist of wet soil, not standing water.

The water is believed to contain certain salts — not ordinary table salt, but magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate. Like road salt used to melt ice and snow on Earth, such compounds can prevent water from freezing at extremely low temperatures.
 
That would explain how water could exist in liquid form on Mars, which has an average temperature of minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit.

In addition to supporting life, the presence of liquid water could make things easier for astronauts visiting or living on Mars. Water could be used for drinking and for creating oxygen and rocket fuel. Nasa's goal is to send humans there in the 2030s.

Michael Meyer, lead scientist for Nasa's Mars exploration program, said the only definitive way for now to determine whether there's life on Mars is to collect rocks and soil for analysis on Earth, something a US lander set for liftoff in 2020 will do.

"Water is one of the most precious resources necessary for a human mission to the red planet," Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House science, space and technology committee, said in a statement. "The more evidence we find of it, the more encouraged I am for future Mars missions."

Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona at Tucson, a scientist on the project, said he, for one, believes the possibility of life on Mars to be "very high."
The source of the briny water is a mystery. Scientists said it could be melting ice, an underground aquifer, water vapor from the thin Martian atmosphere, or some combination.

The evidence of flowing water consists largely of dark, narrow streaks on the surface that tend to appear and grow during the warmest Martian months and fade the rest of the year. The streaks are in places where the temperature is as low as 10 below zero.

They were spotted by the Mars orbiter's high-resolution, telescopic camera, and another on-board instrument detected the chemical signature of salt compounds combined with water.

McEwen said that there appears to be a "significant volume" of water, speculating it could fill many Olympic swimming pools, but that it is spread thin.
Present-day Mars is nothing like ancient Mars. Three billion years ago, our most Earthlike neighbor had a huge ocean, but something radical happened, and exactly what remains a mystery.

The notion of water and life on Mars has been irresistible to earthlings for generations.

In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli spied what he called "canali" on Mars — Italian for "channels" — but the word was mistranslated as "canals" in English, causing imaginations to run wild. In the early 1900s, amateur astronomer Percival Lowell claimed to have spotted irrigation canals and theorized they were built by Martians.

In 2008, Nasa's Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars and confirmed the long-suspected presence of ice in the soil. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the planet since 2006.

The latest findings were published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The lead author, Lujendra Ojha, a doctoral candidate at Georgia Institute of Technology, first noticed the streaks on Mars in 2010. Ojha and colleagues speculated at the time that they were seeing flowing water.

For Nasa, at least, the timing couldn't be better. This Friday, the Nasa-approved movie The Martian has its premiere.

A look at what happened on the first day of prime minister Narendra Modi's visit to New York on Thursday provides a rather clear idea about what his top priority is – he means business.

On the Day 1, he met CEOs of 47 Fortune 500 companies, media companies and key financial sector players and made strong pitch for making investments in India, according to media report.

It is significant that Modi’s appeal to invest in India comes at a time when the global economy is passing through a difficult phase with a looming threat of a crippling economic slowdown in China.

Here’s an explainer on whom he met and what he said on his first day in New York:

Whom did Modi meet?

Many top honchos of US business. Among the chief executives of the financial world were Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, Charles Kaye of Warburg Pincus, Henry Kravis of KKR, Bill Ford of General Atlantic, Peter Hancock of AIG Insurance, Chase Coleman of Tiger Global and Vicki Fuller of NY State Common Retirement Fund.

The prime minister later met US-India Business Council chair Ajay Banga, industrialist and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, Lockheed Martin chief Marillyn A. Hewson and Aecom chief executive Mike Burke.

At the meeting with the theme "Media, Technology and Communications - Growth Story for India", top bosses of companies like News Corp, 21st Century Fox, Sony, Discovery, Time Warner, A&E and VICE Media met Modi. They represented 40 percent of global industry in this space, said an IANS report.

What did Modi say in these meetings?

For the Prime Minister, it was all about attracting capital and investment. At the meeting with 47 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, Modi assured continuity in economic reforms while pitching for more foreign investments into India. He said prompt decision-making was a priority for the government.

"Foreign direct investment all over the world has fallen. But in India, it increased by 40 percent. This reflects confidence in the Indian economy…. Reform in governance is my Number One priority. We are for simplified procedures, speedy decision-making, transparency and accountability," he has been quoted as saying.

In his meeting with media CEOs, Modi discussed the contentious issue of intellectual property rights. This is one area where the US and India have not been on the same page.

"We are committed to protecting IPR (intellectual property rights), that's essential to fostering creativity…. This is a technology driven era. We are a technology driven society," Modi reportedly told the CEOs.

In his meeting with top financial sector CEOs, Madi made he the biggest pitch yet to woo US investments. He assured them their concerns will be resolved and bottlenecks removed. He outlined efforts made during the last 15 months to increase investment in key areas like infrastructure.

According to the MEA spokesperson, the Prime Minister said: "...Any bottlenecks which should not be there, will not be there."

He also rolled out statistics about the GDP growth (7.3% last year; and one that's sparked debate back home) and also cited the World Bank and IMF’s expectations about the Indian economy. Terming startups a "personal sector" on the lines of private and public sectors, the Prime Minister outlined his vision for "Start-Up India, Stand-Up India" at the meeting.

All in all, as Kalpana Morparia, the India CEO of JP Morgan, said: "It was not a political discussion, it was about investing in India."

What the CEOs said? Will investments flow?

CEOs did share their concerns as well as experiences of doing business in India, says the PTI report. And Swarup is confident that investments will flow.

When asked if the government had given any assurances on investments, Swarup said: "Yes, all of them."

"They talked about their figures. Somebody has a $5 billion investment, somebody has a $10 billion. They all, as I said, were very bullish on India especially on insurance sector where cap (on foreign equity) has now gone up to 49 percent….So, they were all, as I said, fairly bullish on future prospects in India," he was quoted as saying in an IANS report.

Even Morparia of JP Morgan, said she was "absolutely" certain about investments flowing into India.

“The difference that we see is that Mr. Modi not merely understands the issues, but responds when they are raised and promises action. That is reassuring,” a report in The Hindu quoted a senior executive part of the meetings as saying.