Global pressure can end years of nuclear brinkmanship. THE standoff over Iran’s nuclear program is close to spiralling out of control. Israel, which sees Iran as the worst threat to its existence, has canvassed the attitudes of US military and intelligence leaders to a military strike. Israel is reportedly ready to attack Iran as early as April. On Wednesday, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda urged visiting Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak not to take such ”extremely dangerous” action. That is an understatement; a military strike carries huge risks. For the past decade, the US and its allies have paid a terribly high price for attacking Iraq…
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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An angry Afghan President Hamid Karzai confronted the Pakistani leadership Thursday, demanding that it produce Taliban officials for peace talks and underscoring the distrust between Kabul and Islamabad, which stands in the way of a deal to end the decade-long Afghan conflict. As Mr. Karzai’s frustration with Pakistan, which he accuses of harboring the Taliban, boiled over, the mercurial Afghan leader’s language and tone flared to…
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GENEVA/LONDON – Two studies showing how scientists mutated the H5N1 bird flu virus into a form that could cause a deadly human pandemic will be published only after experts fully assess the risks, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday. Speaking after a high-level meeting of flu experts and U.S. security officials in Geneva, a WHO official said an agreement had been reached in principle to keep details of the controversial work secret until deeper risk analyses have been carried out. “There is a preference from a public health perspective for full disclosure of the information in these two studies. However there are significant public concerns surrounding this research that…
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Riot police in Senegal have fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters, after the country’s opposition defied a government ban to go ahead with a demonstration calling for President Abdoulaye Wade to stand down. Wade is running for a third term in office in next week’s presidential election. Police used grenade launchers to throw volleys of tear gas down a main boulevard during Friday’s demonstration in Dakar, at one point hitting a mosque full of worshippers. Small groups of young demonstrators attempted to defy them, with about a dozen holding their arms up in an ‘X’, the symbol used by the opposition to show the bound hands of Senegal’s 12 million people, and braving a police cordon….
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Syrian government forces have continued a crackdown on protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s government, despite the arrival of a Chinese diplomat for talks on the unrest. Zhai Jun, China’s vice foreign minister, arrived in Damascus late on Friday, and is due to hold talks with the Syrian president on resolving the country’s crisis. Protests against Assad’s government began in March last year, and unrest has so far claimed more than 5,000 lives, according to UN estimates, as the government continues to supress protests and the armed opposition has taken to carrying out attacks on Syrian security forces. China joined Russia in vetoing a recent United Nations Security Council resolution…
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WASHINGTON – The United States and the European Union signaled Friday that negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program could soon resume for the first time in more than a year, even as a telecommunications network vital to the global banking industry prepared to expel Iranian banks. While senior U.S. and European officials stopped short of declaring a diplomatic breakthrough, Iran dropped previously unacceptable preconditions for talks in a letter this week from its senior nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, who declared…
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Ankara: NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the Western alliance had no intention of intervening in Syria even in the event of a UN mandate to protect civilians, and urged Middle East countries to find a way to end the spiralling violence. Rasmussen said on Friday he also rejected the possibility of providing logistical support for proposed “humanitarian corridors” to ferry relief to towns and cities bearing the brunt of President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. “We have no intention…
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Iran’s nuclear ambitions could plunge the world into “a new Cold War” with the Middle East, Foreign Secretary William Hague warned today. He predicted a nuclear arms race among rival Middle Eastern states that would carry the dangers without the safety mechanisms of the old rivalry between the West and the USSR. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he…
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Sunday, 19 February 2012, 3:16 pm Press Release: United Nations UN Relief Chief Voices Alarm At Humanitarian Situation In Sudanese States The United Nations relief chief has expressed deep concern at the deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Sudan’s states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile, where…
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WASHINGTON – Within the last week, authorities say, Amine El Khalifi’s plan was proceeding as hoped: An al-Qaida associate handed him an automatic weapon to kill security officers inside the U.S. Capitol. A bomb-laden vest would detonate the building. He’d die as a martyr. But there was a problem: The explosives were inert, the gun inoperable and the man who provided them was an undercover officer – not, as he thought, an al-Qaida associate, according to court documents. El Khalifi was arrested in a parking garage Friday on his way to carry out an attack the FBI says had been kicked around for months – in apartments, inside a restaurant and at a quarry used for bomb practice…
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