The coming days

The week ahead

The leaders of Russia and America will sign a new strategic-arms reduction treaty in Prague

• BARACK OBAMA will meet Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, in Prague on Thursday April 8th to sign a strategic-arms reduction treaty. Over ten years this will cut the number deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 on each side. Delivery systems (missiles, bombers and the like) will be reduced to 700 apiece. That is still enough to wipe out whole continents, but it makes the Nobel peace prize sitting on Mr Obama’s mantelpiece look a little less like an invitation to hubris.

• THE foreign ministers of India and China will meet in Beijing on Monday 5th April. Asia’s two rising powers have a polite but tense relationship—thanks to their long-running and lengthy border dispute, and the sense that they are competing for the same slot as Asia’s dominant power. India’s foreign minister, S.M. Krishna, and his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, are expected to hold talks on bilateral, regional and global themes.

• INDIA’S place in the world will also be under discussion when Tim Geitner, America’s Treasury secretary, visits Delhi on Tuesday 6th April. Mr Geitner will launch the US-India Economic and Financial Partnership with India’s finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee. America already has a similar partnership with China. Ties with India are cordial, after America offered support for India’s plans for its civil nuclear sector.

• THE British prime minister, Gordon Brown, is expected to make the short trip from his office in Downing Street to Buckingham Palace, on Tuesday April 6th, to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament, thus triggering a general election. Once the quaint rituals are over, a month of intensive campaigning will follow. The vote itself will probably be on May 6th. Polls suggest that Britain will see the Conservatives in power for the first time since 1997.

• COPYRIGHT law turns 300 on Friday 9th April. During Queen Anne’s reign in Britain an old system of royal warrants that gave control of works to a clique of publishers and printers was replaced with a law that allowed authors ownership of their work for a limited period.