News Headlines
Tuesday 9/3/2010
*Regional and International Affairs:
Political Headlines:
- Israel, Palestinians to start U.S.-brokered talks. (The Washington Times)
- Israel: Plans for 3rd Nuclear Reactor. (The New York Times)
- For Iran, Enriching Uranium Only Gets Easier. (The New York Times)
- Candidates Speculate on Results of Iraq Vote. (The New York Times)
- Gates meets with troops in southern Afghanistan. (The Huston Chronicle)
- Sudan and JEM rebels to start talks for peace in Darfur today. (The Sudan Tribune)
- Toll From Religious and Ethnic Violence in Nigeria Rises to 500. (The New York Times)
- Japan confirms Cold War-era 'secret' pacts with US. (The San Francisco Chronicle)
- Report: N.Korea has medium-range missile division. (The San Francisco Chronicle)
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*Regional and International Affairs:
Political Headlines:
- Israel, Palestinians to start U.S.-brokered talks. (The Washington Times)
Israel and the Palestinians agreed to begin indirect, American-brokered talks, the U.S. Mideast envoy announced Monday ending a 14-month deadlock in peacemaking and representing the Obama administration's first substantive diplomatic achievement here.
The announcement, however, came just hours after Israel enraged Palestinians by announcing new West Bank settlement construction on the same day Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. landed in the region to promote negotiations.
Israel's decision to build 112 new housing units on lands Palestinians claim for a future state highlighted the tough road ahead for those seeking peace in the region.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/09/israel-palestinians-to-start-us-brokered-talks/
- Israel: Plans for 3rd Nuclear Reactor. (The New York Times)
Israel will announce plans this week to build a new nuclear reactor to diversify its energy sector, officials said Monday. Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau has discussed the possibility of cooperating on building a nuclear plant with France and Jordan, the ministry said. The project would be overseen by France and use French technology. Israel already has two reactors, the Dimona reactor in the Negev desert, which is widely assumed to have produced nuclear weapons, and a research reactor at Nahal Soreq near Tel Aviv.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/world/middleeast/09briefs-Israel.html?ref=middleeast
- For Iran, Enriching Uranium Only Gets Easier. (The New York Times)
In the Iranian desert, at a sprawling industrial site ringed by barbed wire and antiaircraft guns, a shift in the enrichment of uranium is producing global jitters because it could shorten Iran’s path to the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
It is also illustrating one of the peculiarities of uranium enrichment, a version of the rich getting richer, really fast. The tricky process accelerates as it moves ahead. “The higher the concentration, the easier it gets,” said Houston G. Wood III, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Virginia who specializes in nuclear enrichment. The process is, as scientists like to say, nonlinear.
Four years ago, Iran began enriching uranium on an industrial scale with centrifuges, machines that spin extraordinarily fast to separate uranium 235 from the more common form of the element, uranium 238. Uranium 235 is a natural rarity that splits easily in two, or fissions, in bursts of atomic energy, either in a reactor or a bomb. Reactor-grade fuel is usually defined as uranium 235 of about 4 or 5 percent, and bomb-grade as 90 percent or higher.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/science/09enrich.html?ref=middleeast
- Candidates Speculate on Results of Iraq Vote. (The New York Times)
Even before the votes were tallied, Iraq’s candidates and coalitions began positioning themselves in an evolving political landscape on Monday. Some claimed victory, and a few conceded defeat in an election on Sunday that the top American officials here called a milestone that kept the withdrawal of American troops on pace.
Iraq’s election commission announced that 62 percent of Iraqis voted, though only 53 percent cast ballots in Baghdad, which was struck by a wave of violence as polls opened.
While lower than the 76 percent that turned out in the country’s last parliamentary election in December 2005, the national turnout was higher than last year’s showing in provincial elections, suggesting higher stakes. Some of the largest turnout occurred in regions, like Kirkuk and Nineveh, which include disputed territories.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/world/middleeast/09iraq.html?ref=middleeast
- Gates meets with troops in southern Afghanistan. (The Huston Chronicle)
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates got a closer view of the Afghanistan war Tuesday, with a visit to troops fighting the Taliban in the country's rugged south.
Gates flew to Kandahar early Tuesday for meetings with U.S. and British generals overseeing the current military campaign in Marjah.
Gates presented Silver Stars for valor to two Army aviators before scheduled visits with U.S. forces at small forward operating bases elsewhere in the south.
On Monday, the Pentagon chief said the progress made in the Marjah offensive, launched last month, is encouraging, but he stopped short of saying the war is at a turning point. The Marjah campaign routed most Taliban fighters from a town they once controlled, without a high casualty toll for U.S. troops and the Afghan security forces fighting alongside them.
"People still need to understand there is some very hard fighting, very hard days ahead," Gates told reporters.
Gates met Monday in Kabul with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal said preparations have begun for a crucial campaign to assert Afghan government control over Kandahar, spiritual home of the Taliban.
Gates traveled to Afghanistan to check on the progress of the war's expansion, directed late last year by President Barack Obama.
The 30,000 additional U.S. forces Obama ordered are now arriving and most will be in place by summer. Without being specific, McChrystal suggested that any heavy fighting in Kandahar will wait until more U.S. and NATO troops are ready.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/top/all/6903770.html
- Sudan and JEM rebels to start talks for peace in Darfur today. (The Sudan Tribune)
The Sudanese government and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) will start direct peace talks to end the seven year conflict in Doha, for the first time since the signing of the Doha framework agreement on February 23, a top rebel negotiator told Sudan Tribune.
The deal secretly negotiated in Ndjamena and signed last month in Doha by the two warring parties includes a ceasefire agreement, the release of JEM members detained in Khartoum, and the commitment to sign a final peace agreement before March 15 as well as political partnership between the two signatories.
Another related development occurred the same day, February 23, when two rebel groups (SLM-RF and Addis Ababa group) supported by Libya and the US envoy for Sudan declared their merger as the Liberation and Justice Movement (LJM) and said they are ready for separate talks with the Sudanese government. The two rebel groups refuse to merge with JEM saying they accept only coordination.
http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article34365
- Toll From Religious and Ethnic Violence in Nigeria Rises to 500. (The New York Times)
Officials and human rights groups in Nigeria sharply increased the count of the dead after a weekend of vicious ethnic violence, saying Monday that as many as 500 people — many of them women and children — may have been killed near the city of Jos, long a center of tensions between Christians and Muslims.
The dead were Christians and members of an ethnic group that had been feuding with the Hausa-Fulani, Muslim herders whom witnesses and police officials identified as the attackers. Officials said the attack was in reprisal for violence in January, when dozens of Muslims were slaughtered in and around Jos, including more than 150 in one village.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/world/africa/09nigeria.html?ref=africa
- Japan confirms Cold War-era 'secret' pacts with US. (The San Francisco Chronicle)
A government-mandated panel has confirmed the existence of once-secret Cold War-era pacts between Japan and U.S. on nuclear arms and other issues, ending decades of official denial by Tokyo.
While declassified U.S. documents have already confirmed such agreements, Tuesday's revelation was the first from the Japanese government.
Among the secret pacts the panel acknowledged was a tacit agreement that allowed U.S. nuclear-armed warships into Japanese ports in violation of Japan's non-nuclear principles.
The investigation is part of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's campaign to make government more open than under the long-ruling conservatives, who repeatedly denied the existence of such pacts
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/03/08/international/i233542S40.DTL
- Report: N.Korea has medium-range missile division. (The San Francisco Chronicle)
North Korea has recently created an army division in charge of newly developed intermediate-range missiles capable of striking U.S. forces in Japan and Guam, a South Korean news agency said Tuesday.
The report came as North Korea stepped up its war rhetoric against the U.S. and South Korea after the allies started their annual drills aimed at improving their defense capabilities.
The North's People's Army recently launched a division supervising operational deployment of missiles with a range of more than 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) that it had developed in recent years, Yonhap news agency reported citing an unidentified South Korean government source
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/03/08/international/i200348S34.DTL