Ordinarily, it would have been easy to dismiss the latest resolution of the International Atomic Energy Agency [PDF] censuring Iran as a text, drafted by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But context is everything. Whether by design or default, the unhelpful resolution comes at a time when the Iranians are still in the process of working out the terms of a landmark agreement on a nuclear fuel swap. If implemented, this would represent the first genuine breakthrough in the nuclear arena since the present standoff between Iran and the West began in 2005. Under the terms of the original proposal made last month by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany (known collectively as the P5+1), Iran is to send to Russia most of its stocks of 3.5 per cent low enriched uranium (LEU) produced under safeguards at Natanz. There, the LEU would be enriched to 20 per cent and sent on to France for fabrication into fuel rods for eventual use at the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR).
The TRR was set up in 1967 with U.S. support and is used by the Iranians for the production of medical isotopes for cancer diagnostics. With the TRR’s fuel set to run out next year, Iran had asked the IAEA for help in procuring new supplies, failing which it would be obliged to up the level of its own enrichment activities so as to fuel the TRR domestically. The IAEA, in consultation with the United States, came up with the 3.5-for-20 per cent fuel swap idea. The proposal was, and remains, win-win as far as the U.S. and Iran are concerned. Washington, which worries about the possibility of Iran using its LEU stocks to bust out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, buys time. And the Iranians, who do not as yet have any domestic use for their LEU stocks, get fuel for the TRR and also reassure the international community about the peaceful nature of their nuclear programme. Most importantly, the TRR fuel deal represents a political victory for Iran because it shows the U.S. and its allies are willing to engage in dialogue and deal-making despite Tehran not suspending enrichment — something Washington has been insisting on since 2005.
Despite these benefits, the proposal ran into trouble in Tehran for two reasons. First, ever since the controversial re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad earlier this year, the Islamic Republic has been buffeted by deep political schisms that have reduced the president’s room for manoeuvre internationally and also, perhaps, his appetite for compromise. Second, Iran’s establishment is distrustful of France and, to a lesser extent, Russia, and fears the deal may not be honoured once its LEU is exported. The fact that IAEA director general Mohammed ElBaradei, who has generally played straight with Iran, retires December 1 is a further source of unease in Tehran. His successor, Yukio Amano, is an unknown quantity. Would he, for example, insist on upholding the Western side of the bargain if France declares, sometime next year, that it will not supply fuel for the TRR after all? No gambling man would be willing to wager a large sum on Mr. Amano defying the West.
In order to cover for all contingencies, Iran modified the original proposal. In an interview to The Hindu earlier this month, Foreign Minister Manochechr Mottaki said the swap should take place on Iranian territory. This condition would not alter the essential structure of the deal. At a certain date, when French fabrication of the TRR fuel starts, the IAEA could take into its custody an equivalent amount of Iranian LEU and hold it, in escrow, inside Iran. When the TRR fuel is ready, the Iranian LEU can be loaded onto a plane, which would take off once the French fuel lands inside Iran. At the end of the day, the outcome for the U.S. from a simultaneous swap would be the same as from a sequential swap: Iranian LEU stocks would have been depleted.
For reasons best known to itself, however, Washington declared the original proposal could not be modified. Rather than using Mr. Mottaki’s comments on a swap inside Iranian territory as a means of swiftly closing the TRR deal, President Barack Obama expressed disappointment in Iran’s response and said the Security Council would soon have to consider fresh sanctions. It is in this context that last week’s IAEA resolution must be seen. According to the Washington Post, the U.S. won Chinese backing for it by sending Dennis Ross, arguably the most pro-Israeli official in the White House, to Beijing with the message that the Zionist state was likely to attack Iran if the IAEA and UNSC did not act against Tehran.
Zbigniew Brzezinski on Iran Pt3
Israel's assassination policy
TRNN interviews relatives of recently assassinated men in Nablus, Occupied Palestinian Territories
The Merchants of Fear: Israel’s Profiting from Homeland Insecurity
In a CNN interview, Chertoff cited the Detroit incident as “a very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery.” One lesson that he hasn’t drawn, however, was about the unreliability of the security firm which allowed the young Nigerian Muslim without a passport to “slip through” Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.
ICTS International N.V., the Dutch-based security firm, was established in 1982 by former members of Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, and El Al security.
Menachem Atzmon, who holds the controlling shares in the firm, was convicted in 1996 for campaign finance fraud while co-treasurer of the Likud party. The other co-treasurer Ehud Olmert, who was acquitted of those charges, resigned as Israeli Prime Minister in 2008 amid multiple corruption charges.
Google Feud: China Says U.S. Internet Accusations Are ‘Baseless’
Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/google-feud-china-says-us-internet-accusations-are-baseless/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories
Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/google-feud-china-says-us-internet-accusations-are-baseless/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories
China hit back at U.S. criticism of Internet censorship and hacking on Friday, warning that relations between the two global heavyweights were being hurt by a feud centered on web giant Google.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday challenged Beijing and other authoritarian governments to end internet censorship, an issue that has jumped to the heart of U.S.-China ties after Google threatened to quit China due to hacking and web restrictions.
Internet censorship bills currently working their way into law in the UK, Australia and the U.S. legislate for government powers to restrict and filter any website that it deems to be undesirable for public consumption.
In the UK, legislation slated as the “Digital Economy Bill“, currently being debated in the House of Lords, would allow the Home Secretary to place “a technical obligation on internet service providers” to block whichever sites it wishes.
Under clause 11 of the proposed legislation “technical obligation” is defined as follows:
A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.
A “technical measure” is a measure that — (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.
In other words, the government will have the power to force ISPs to downgrade and even block your internet access to certain websites or altogether if it wishes.
The legislation comes in the wake of amplified UK government efforts to seize more power over the internet and those who use it.
Children's Internet Protection Act
( An act to provide a pretext to harass people under cover of protecting children : unless photographs of nude and semi-nude persons provide i.d. showing they are adult, it is alleged this constitutes an offense against morality. Violence - overcoming resistance to someone asserting their independence of another's will - is therefore comparatively sanctioned next to restricting exhibitionism !
China might think the 'West' is chronically proposing 'Do as I say, not as I do' positions...for the simple reason that it does ! )
Trafficking fears as Haiti children go missing
United Nations officials say children have gone missing from hospitals in Haiti since the devastating January 12 earthquake, raising fears of trafficking for adoption abroad.
"We have documented around 15 cases of children disappearing from hospitals and not with their own family at the time," said UNICEF adviser Jean Luc Legrand.
"UNICEF has been working in Haiti for many years and we knew the problem with the trade of children in Haiti that existed already beforehand.
"Unfortunately, many of these trade networks have links with the international adoption market."
The agency said it had warned countries during the past week not to step up adoptions from Haiti in the immediate wake of the quake.
However several are fast-tracking adoption procedures already under way, including Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States.
Mr Legrand said the situation was similar to the aftermath of the tsunami in Asia five years ago.
Trafficking networks were springing into action immediately after the disaster and taking advantage of the weakness of local authorities and relief coordination "to kidnap children and get them out of the country".
The Tyranny of Positivity
Positivity became the reigning attitudinal orthodoxy around the time of the ‘Reagan Revolution’, but it has its roots farther back in Calvinist theology. God rewards piety and hard work with success; failure, perforce, is evidence of sloth. Sidney Blumenthal once ironically summed up the mindset as ‘God takes most pleasure in people who are most pleased’. Reagan turned positivity into the central tenet of American civic religion. This also freed the New Right from the responsibility of caring for the destitute and vulnerable: if they aren’t doing well the fault must necessarily lie with them. It has come to a point, notes Barbara Ehrenreich in this excellent interview on Media Matters, that even people who lose their jobs are expected to be positive about it. Since a negative attitude will merely prove that their dismissal was justified.
Villaraigosa plans to keep hiring cops while cutting civilian jobs
City officials plan to shed 1,000 jobs to patch a nearly $200-million budget gap. But the mayor wants to replace departing LAPD officers.
The Ever-changing Narrative of Guantanamo: Guantanamo Suicides now Guantanamo murders?
1) In Scott Horton’s recent article for Harper’s, the statements of four guards serving at Guantanamo at the time and place of the ‘alleged suicides’ now suggest that when the bodies were taken to the camp’s medical clinic, they had not come from their cell block. Instead, the aforementioned guards state that the men appeared to have been transfered from a “black site” known as Camp No within Guantánamo. According to Horton, who is also a Columbia law professor, Camp No. was operated by either the CIA or a Pentagon intelligence agency.
2) The same four officers have also stated that they were later instructed by a senior officer not to contradict the official media report: that the three men committed suicide by stuffing rags down their throats.
3) Pathologists who conducted postmortem examinations found that when they attempted to determine the cause of death, “each man’s larynx, hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage had been removed and retained by US authorities.”
4) Despite the missing internal organs, the bodies revealed other signs of mistreatment, including bruising and needle marks. In particular, the report noted that al-Salami’s jaw was broken and several of his teeth were missing. A previous US pathologist’s report attributed these injuries to ‘resuscitation’ attempts (please ask yourselves what kind of resuscitation attempt results in a broken jaw and the loss of teeth…
Tellingly, after the ‘alleged suicides’ took place in 2006, US navy investigators seized all of the paperwork possessed by other inmates. When the US Justice Department went to court to defend the seizure of correspondences between inmates and their lawyers, one of the judges presiding over the case took note of the fact that all of the citations “supporting the fact of the suicides” were based on media accounts.
Prime minister says terror suspects will no longer benefit from sentencing laws
( Harper himself is a 'Terror Suspect' for War Crimes after conspiring to mass torture in Afghanistan. Pity he won't experience ' reorientation' himself : something called for in international treaties. )
Our Canada
We Stand On Guard For Thee...
The auditor general visited several Canadian bases and flew over the Dahla dam - Canada's $50-million "signature" rehabilitation project that has largely stalled, in part because of security concerns.
( Degradation of the dam poses a hazard of catastrophic failure : the reason for repair. Now suddenly flood risk is not the security problem to be concerned about. )
Corruption rampant in Afghanistan: UN
Afghans paid more than $2.5 billion US in bribes between the fall of 2008 and the fall of 2009, or about one quarter the value of the country's gross domestic product
Do the Taliban represent the Pashtuns?
Muhammad Junaid: Pashtun traditional code conflicts with Taliban law, but US attacks creating support
Hope and Obama: One Year Later
John Pilger, New Statesmen:
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”
…
The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and his general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.
“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same – everywhere, all over the world . . . people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same – people who . . . were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”
UK opposition warms to Obama's bank plan
The Obama proposals, which need congressional approval, would stop banks investing in hedge funds or private equity funds and bar institutions from proprietary trading operations, unrelated to customer needs, for their own profit.
A new cap on the size of banks is also on the cards.
"It's directionally something the prime minister is very comfortable with," a spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters. "We are going to study the proposals. Each country will have a particular set of circumstances."
Financial services minister Paul Myners told Reuters Insider TV Obama's plan was tailor made for the "idiosyncratic problems" in the U.S., arguing that proprietary trading, hedge funds and private equity were not at the heart of the UK crisis.
However, Conservative officials said Obama's move would put similar ideas on the table at global meetings and could open the door to similar moves elsewhere, including Britain, especially the proposed ban on the most risky trading techniques.
"We think there is a case for it," an aide to the Conservative leadership told Reuters
A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.
A “technical measure” is a measure that — (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.
Trafficking fears as Haiti children go missing
United Nations officials say children have gone missing from hospitals in Haiti since the devastating January 12 earthquake, raising fears of trafficking for adoption abroad.
"We have documented around 15 cases of children disappearing from hospitals and not with their own family at the time," said UNICEF adviser Jean Luc Legrand.
"UNICEF has been working in Haiti for many years and we knew the problem with the trade of children in Haiti that existed already beforehand.
"Unfortunately, many of these trade networks have links with the international adoption market."
The agency said it had warned countries during the past week not to step up adoptions from Haiti in the immediate wake of the quake.
However several are fast-tracking adoption procedures already under way, including Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States.
Mr Legrand said the situation was similar to the aftermath of the tsunami in Asia five years ago.
Trafficking networks were springing into action immediately after the disaster and taking advantage of the weakness of local authorities and relief coordination "to kidnap children and get them out of the country".
The Tyranny of Positivity
Positivity became the reigning attitudinal orthodoxy around the time of the ‘Reagan Revolution’, but it has its roots farther back in Calvinist theology. God rewards piety and hard work with success; failure, perforce, is evidence of sloth. Sidney Blumenthal once ironically summed up the mindset as ‘God takes most pleasure in people who are most pleased’. Reagan turned positivity into the central tenet of American civic religion. This also freed the New Right from the responsibility of caring for the destitute and vulnerable: if they aren’t doing well the fault must necessarily lie with them. It has come to a point, notes Barbara Ehrenreich in this excellent interview on Media Matters, that even people who lose their jobs are expected to be positive about it. Since a negative attitude will merely prove that their dismissal was justified.
Villaraigosa plans to keep hiring cops while cutting civilian jobs
City officials plan to shed 1,000 jobs to patch a nearly $200-million budget gap. But the mayor wants to replace departing LAPD officers.
The Ever-changing Narrative of Guantanamo: Guantanamo Suicides now Guantanamo murders?
1) In Scott Horton’s recent article for Harper’s, the statements of four guards serving at Guantanamo at the time and place of the ‘alleged suicides’ now suggest that when the bodies were taken to the camp’s medical clinic, they had not come from their cell block. Instead, the aforementioned guards state that the men appeared to have been transfered from a “black site” known as Camp No within Guantánamo. According to Horton, who is also a Columbia law professor, Camp No. was operated by either the CIA or a Pentagon intelligence agency.
2) The same four officers have also stated that they were later instructed by a senior officer not to contradict the official media report: that the three men committed suicide by stuffing rags down their throats.
3) Pathologists who conducted postmortem examinations found that when they attempted to determine the cause of death, “each man’s larynx, hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage had been removed and retained by US authorities.”
4) Despite the missing internal organs, the bodies revealed other signs of mistreatment, including bruising and needle marks. In particular, the report noted that al-Salami’s jaw was broken and several of his teeth were missing. A previous US pathologist’s report attributed these injuries to ‘resuscitation’ attempts (please ask yourselves what kind of resuscitation attempt results in a broken jaw and the loss of teeth…
Tellingly, after the ‘alleged suicides’ took place in 2006, US navy investigators seized all of the paperwork possessed by other inmates. When the US Justice Department went to court to defend the seizure of correspondences between inmates and their lawyers, one of the judges presiding over the case took note of the fact that all of the citations “supporting the fact of the suicides” were based on media accounts.
Prime minister says terror suspects will no longer benefit from sentencing laws
( Harper himself is a 'Terror Suspect' for War Crimes after conspiring to mass torture in Afghanistan. Pity he won't experience ' reorientation' himself : something called for in international treaties. )
Our Canada
Our Canada
We Stand On Guard For Thee...
The auditor general visited several Canadian bases and flew over the Dahla dam - Canada's $50-million "signature" rehabilitation project that has largely stalled, in part because of security concerns.
( Degradation of the dam poses a hazard of catastrophic failure : the reason for repair. Now suddenly flood risk is not the security problem to be concerned about. )
Corruption rampant in Afghanistan: UN
Afghans paid more than $2.5 billion US in bribes between the fall of 2008 and the fall of 2009, or about one quarter the value of the country's gross domestic product
Afghans paid more than $2.5 billion US in bribes between the fall of 2008 and the fall of 2009, or about one quarter the value of the country's gross domestic product
Do the Taliban represent the Pashtuns?
Muhammad Junaid: Pashtun traditional code conflicts with Taliban law, but US attacks creating support
Hope and Obama: One Year Later
John Pilger, New Statesmen:
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”
…
The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and his general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.
“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same – everywhere, all over the world . . . people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same – people who . . . were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”
UK opposition warms to Obama's bank plan
The Obama proposals, which need congressional approval, would stop banks investing in hedge funds or private equity funds and bar institutions from proprietary trading operations, unrelated to customer needs, for their own profit.
A new cap on the size of banks is also on the cards.
"It's directionally something the prime minister is very comfortable with," a spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters. "We are going to study the proposals. Each country will have a particular set of circumstances."
Financial services minister Paul Myners told Reuters Insider TV Obama's plan was tailor made for the "idiosyncratic problems" in the U.S., arguing that proprietary trading, hedge funds and private equity were not at the heart of the UK crisis.
However, Conservative officials said Obama's move would put similar ideas on the table at global meetings and could open the door to similar moves elsewhere, including Britain, especially the proposed ban on the most risky trading techniques.
"We think there is a case for it," an aide to the Conservative leadership told Reuters
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