About 400 guests will dine on White House South Lawn, with Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam likely to attend.
Under protocol, state visits are only for foreign heads of state & not heads of government like PMs. To get around this, US has come up with another category: 'official state visit'.
Modi's first visit to US as PM was in 2014 when he issued joint statement with then president Obama & addressed Indian-Americans at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Washington wants India to be a strategic counterweight to China while Modi is seeking to raise the influence that his country, now the world's most populous, has on the world stage.
US hopes for closer ties with the world's largest democracy, which it sees as a counterweight to China, but rights advocates worry that geopolitics will overshadow human rights issues.
PM Modi's trip starts with celebration of the International Yoga Day at the UN headquarters on 21 June and culminates on 25 June with his first state visit to Egypt.
India wants the American giants’ investments and technologies, but Modi's visit won’t be the 'turning point' of the sort that the Nixon-Kissinger duo envisaged in the 1970s for China.
US already dispatched 600 plus firefighters to Canada to fight wildfires. President Biden, who linked phenomenon to climate change, said US officials were monitoring air quality & aviation delays.
Islamabad-based think-tank PICSS's new report says Pakistan saw 'pronounced escalation' in violence last year, with 3,413 conflict-related deaths compared to 1,950 in previous year.
Many of you might think I got something so wrong in National Interest pieces written this year. I might disagree! But some deserve a Mea Culpa. I’d deal with the most recent this week.
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