***************************************************************** 09/17/06 **** RADIATION BULLETIN(RADBULL) **** VOL 14.220 ***************************************************************** RADBULL IS PRODUCED BY THE ABALONE ALLIANCE CLEARINGHOUSE ***************************************************************** Send News Stories to news@energy-net.org with title on subject line and first line of body NUCLEAR POLICY 1 [NYTr] Liar in Chief: Senate probes 2002 CIA report on No Iraq WMD 2 [southnews] Pressures mount on Bush to bomb Iran 3 IAEA: U.S. Report on Iran 'Outrageous' 4 IRNA: IAEA complains of 'outrageous' inaccuracies in Iran report 5 Reuters: China urges Iran to be flexible on nuclear issue 6 Reuters: Israel says 'a few months' to avoid nuclear Iran 7 AFP: NKorea, Iran nuclear issues in spotlight at Non-Aligned meet in 8 AFP: NKorea, Iran nuclear issues in spotlight at Non-Aligned meet in 9 AFP: Iran gets strong backing from developing-world leaders in nucle 10 IRIB PERSIAN NEWS: IRI-Russia nuclear coop transparent 11 Guardian Unlimited: EU Reports Progress in Iran Nuke Talks 12 AFP: Iran gets strong backing from developing-world leaders in nucle 13 Guardian Unlimited: Iran and Venezuela Strengthen Ties 14 AFP: US calls for G7 offensive on Iran 'terrorist' backing 15 AFP: Allies muted as US wages financial offensive on Iran 16 AFP: Allies muted as US wages financial offensive on Iran 17 UPI: Paulson urges G7 action in Iran 18 UPI: Nonaligned nations support Iran 19 UPI: China seeks Iranian 'flexibility' on nukes 20 [NYTr] N.Korea says no nuclear talks under US sanctions 21 Korea Herald: Businessmen accuse U.S. of indiscriminate sanctions 22 Reuters: North Korea says no nuclear talks under U.S. sanctions 23 AFP: North Korea renews demand for lifting US sanctions 24 Guardian Unlimited: North Korea's No. 2 Leader Blasts U.S 25 US: Raw Story: Frank Rich: As the war drags on, the lies get thicker 26 BBC NEWS: South Asia | South Asia rivals to resume talks 27 WorldNetDaily: Outrageous and dishonest 28 PakTribune: IAEA clears Pakistan of N-material trafficking 29 AFP: Germany calls for an international uranium enrichment centre - 30 AFP: Non-Aligned summit marked by nuclear issues 31 csmonitor.com: UN nuclear watchdog ponders international 'fuel bank' 32 Guardian Unlimited: U.N. Is Back in the Global Spotlight 33 Guardian Unlimited: No more green posturing - the planet can't wait NUCLEAR REACTORS 34 US: newsobserver.com: NC WARN will hold fire safety meeting 35 The Australian: BHP wants public funds for new desal plant 36 London Times: New nuclear power plants win support - NUCLEAR SECURITY 37 Telegraph: 'Dirty' bomb fears over world's most insecure nuclear fac NUCLEAR SAFETY 38 US: ChronicleHerald.ca: Degrading munitions found in over 3,000 site 39 US: Leaf Chronicle: Soldiers deserve to know what factors made them 40 US: NPRI: Dr. Helen Caldicott to Embark on a 12 City Book Tour to Pr NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE 41 US: Deseret News: Uranium mining is reborn 42 Las Vegas SUN: Frustrations over Yucca erupt in Congress 43 reviewjournal.com: EDITORIAL: Frank talk on Yucca Mountain 44 US: Monroenews.com: DTE chief urges feds to take nuclear plant waste 45 Independent: US giant Fluor makes last-ditch bid for £5bn clean-up c 46 US: Salt Lake Tribune: Keillor: Coffee, tea or TATP 47 US: Boston Globe: Mistakes, costs stall nuclear waste project near C PEACE 48 [NYTr] Maguire: A Visit with Mordechai Vanunu 49 Reuters: Germany proposes shared uranium enrichment facilities 50 Sunday Herald: Rally against nuclear bomb replacement - US DEPT. OF ENERGY 51 SF New Mexican: LANL faces possible fine of nearly $800,000 52 KnoxNews: Practice helps emergency responders get terror-ready 53 Hanford News: Hanford vit plant hits work milestone ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** FULL NEWS STORIES ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 1 [NYTr] Liar in Chief: Senate probes 2002 CIA report on No Iraq WMD Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:07:27 -0500 (CDT) X-Sender-Host-Name: chumbly.math.missouri.edu X-Spam-Class: HAM-VERY Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Reuters - Sep 15, 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyid=2006-09-16T023142Z_01_N15401887_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-USA-INTELLIGENCE.xml Senate probes clash over CIA reports on Iraq arms By David Morgan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate panel has begun an inquiry to determine what a top official in Saddam Hussein's government told the CIA about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in late 2002 as the Bush administration made its case for war. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said in a September 8 report that it launched the investigation after the CIA's former chief of European clandestine operations appeared on the CBS' "60 Minutes" news magazine in April. The official, Tyler Drumheller, told CBS that the Iraqi government source had said Iraq had no active unconventional weapons program. Drumheller's disclosure contradicted spy agency documents quoting the same Iraqi source as saying Saddam did have such programs, according to an addendum to the Senate report written by three Republican senators including chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas. "We have differing interpretations, and I think mine's right," Drumheller, who has already testified on the matter before the committee, told Reuters on Friday. Drumheller is preparing to publish a book about his 26-year career that will include material on Iraq and the U.S. war on terrorism. The Iraqi official, identified by CBS as former Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, also told the CIA that Iraq considered al Qaeda a longtime enemy and had "no past, current or anticipated future contact" with Osama bin Laden, the senators said. The CIA did not pass that along to policymakers, the senators said. Nor was it disseminated to intelligence analysts. That was because CIA officials concluded the Iraqi official's comments on al Qaeda were nothing new, the senators said. The CIA gained access to the source in Saddam's inner circle in September 2002, as President George W. Bush warned Americans that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat and that Saddam had ties to the al Qaeda network responsible for the September 11 attacks. The United States invaded Iraq six months later. But U.S. troops have found no such weapons there. The Senate report, echoing earlier findings by the September 11 commission, also concludes that Saddam Hussein had no relationship with al Qaeda. Drumheller's televised comments lent support to allegations that the administration focused on intelligence which backed its case for war with Iraq while ignoring contradictory reports. But in the Senate report, which compares prewar Iraq intelligence with postwar findings, the Republican senators said a CIA operations cable and an intelligence report to high-level policymakers both contradict Drumheller. "The committee has not completed its inquiry," Roberts said in an additional views addendum co-authored with Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia. All three are staunch White House allies. "All of the information about this case so far indicates that the information from this source was that Iraq did have WMD programs," they wrote. Drumheller said Saddam had no fissile material for bomb-making and that chemical munitions posed little danger because they had been dispersed in small numbers to political leaders across the country. "There was no prospect of an immediate attack from any kind of weapon like this," he said. The Iraqi official had told the CIA the only weapons program not fully active was a biological weapons program he described as amateur, the senators said in the report. ) Reuters 2006. * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 2 [southnews] Pressures mount on Bush to bomb Iran Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 14:08:58 -0500 (CDT) X-Sender-Host-Name: chumbly.math.missouri.edu X-Spam-Class: HAM-VERY-WHITELIST President George W Bush is coming under enormous pressure from Israel - and from Israel's neoconservative friends inside and outside the US administration - to harden still further his stance toward Iran. They want the American president to commit himself to bombing Iran if it does not give up its program of uranium enrichment - and to issue a clear ultimatum to Tehran that he is prepared to do so. Pressures mount on Bush to bomb Iran Commentary by Patrick Seale The Daily Star (Lebanon) Saturday, September 16, 2006 President George W Bush is coming under enormous pressure from Israel - and from Israel's neoconservative friends inside and outside the US administration - to harden still further his stance toward Iran. They want the American president to commit himself to bombing Iran if it does not give up its program of uranium enrichment - and to issue a clear ultimatum to Tehran that he is prepared to do so. They argue that mere rhetoric - such as Bush's recent diatribe, in which he compared Iran to al-Qaeda - is not enough, and might even be counter-productive, as it might encourage the Iranians to think that America's bark is worse than its bite. Hard-liners in Israel and the United States believe that only military action, or the credible threat of it, will now prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, with all that this would mean in terms of Israel's security and the balance of power in the strategically vital Middle East. Fears that Bush might succumb to this Israeli and neoconservative pressure is beginning to cause serious alarm in Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, Rome and other world capitals where, as if to urge caution on Washington, political leaders are increasingly speaking out in favor of dialogue with Tehran and against the use of military force. The quickening international debate over Iran's nuclear activities comes at a difficult time for Israel, where Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is fighting for his political life and for that of his ruling Kadima-Labor coalition. The Iran problem is causing particular concern because it raises fundamental questions about the continued validity of the security doctrine Israel has forged over the past half century. A central plank of this doctrine is that, to be safe, Israel must dominate the region militarily and be stronger than any possible Arab or Muslim coalition. The doctrine received a severe knock from Israel's inconclusive war in Lebanon, which demonstrated the country's vulnerability to Hizbullah's missiles and to the challenge of "asymmetric" guerrilla warfare. Israelis - especially those living in the more exposed north of the country where up to a million people took refuge in shelters - were shocked to discover that the war was being waged on Israel's home territory. All previous wars had been waged on Arab territory alone, and this had become something of an axiom for the Israeli military. Another cause of anxiety for Israel's right wing - the settler movement, the nationalist-religious parties, the Likud and the right-dominated Kadima - is that Israel is coming under increasing international pressure to negotiate with the Palestinians, with a view to the creation of a Palestinian state. Influential voices are calling for an international conference - a sort of Madrid II - to re-launch the peace process. Overcoming the crippling conflict between Hamas and Fatah, the Palestinians themselves are forming a national unity government, which will make it more difficult for Israel to claim that it has "no partner" with whom to negotiate. Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom the Israelis believed had been firmly co-opted into the US-Israeli camp, has recently called for the economic boycott of the Palestinians to be lifted once the unity government is in place. This is all very bad news for right-wingers in Israel and their American supporters. They had hoped that the "land-for-peace" formula of UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 had been finally buried. They want to break the Palestinian national movement - hence Olmert's unremitting assault on Gaza and the West Bank - rather than negotiate a political compromise with it. They want to seize more Palestinian land, not to withdraw to anything like the 1967 borders. Such is the background to the outcry over Iran's nuclear activities. An Iranian bomb would end Israel's regional monopoly of nuclear weapons. It would force Israel to accept something like a balance of power, or at least a balance of deterrence. Israelis claim vociferously that an Iranian bomb would pose an "existential threat" to their state. It is not clear whether they really believe that Iran might attack them and risk national suicide - an Armageddon scenario - or simply that they cannot contemplate a Middle East in which they would no longer be overwhelmingly strong, and in which their freedom to attack their neighbors and crush the Palestinians might be circumscribed. When it destroyed Iraq's French-built nuclear reactor in 1981, Israel made clear that it would strike pre-emptively against the nuclear program of any hostile state in the region. The message which it and its friends are now addressing to President Bush is that if the US does not bomb Iran, Israel will have to do so. This was put unambiguously in an article last week by Efraim Inbar, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University and a well-known right-wing Israeli analyst. "Israel," he wrote, "can undertake a limited pre-emptive strike. Israel certainly commands the weaponry, the manpower, and the guts to effectively take out key Iranian nuclear facilities ... While less suited to do the job than the United States, the Israeli military is capable of reaching the appropriate targets in Iran. With more to lose than the US if Iran becomes nuclear, Israel has more incentive to strike." These views are echoed by pro-Israeli writers in the United States, such as Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute. "Offers of dialogue with Iran are a waste of time," she wrote. "Iran has pursued ruthless oppression at home, terrorism abroad and weapons proliferation, largely with impunity ... We have talked about talking for long enough, there must be other options." Ominously she warned Iran: "It is not wise to force American into a choice between doing nothing and doing everything. But it may come to that." Commentators like Inbar and Pletka, and many others in America and Israel who share their hard-line views, are deeply suspicious of what they see as Iran's duplicity, which they fear has seduced the Europeans. They are outraged by the negotiations which Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy chief, is pursuing with Ali Larijani, Iran's principal nuclear negotiator. The reported suggestion that Iran might suspend uranium enrichment for a month or two is seen as a trick to divide the Security Council and remove the threat of sanctions. They suspect that the international community is edging toward a position of allowing Iran to produce nuclear fuel under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. For the hard-liners, this would be one step away from tolerating an Iranian bomb in the not too distant future. The real fear of the hard-liners is that the United States might agree to direct talks with Iran which would legitimize the theocratic regime, vastly increase Iran's stature as the dominant power in the Gulf, and eventually downgrade Israel as America's exclusive regional ally. For Washington's neoconservatives, the battle to shape US policy toward Iran is a crucial test of their dwindling influence. They played a decisive role in persuading the US to make war on Iraq. They clamored for the destruction of the Hamas government in the Palestinian territories. They gave fervent support to Israel's war on Hizbullah, relentlessly portrayed as a "terrorist movement" and as the armed outpost of Iran. But the neoconservatives have lost ground in Washington. The war in Iraq has turned into a strategic catastrophe, with another disaster looming in Afghanistan. Anti-Americanism in the Arab and Muslim worlds is at record levels. Leading neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby have left the administration. For the remaining neoconservatives - and their standard-bearer, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, losing the argument over Iran could be a terminal blow. Their ultimate nightmare is that the United States may have to come to rely on Iran to help stabilize the dangerously chaotic situation in both Afghanistan and Iran. The visit to Tehran this week of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is, from their point of view, a ghastly pointer in that direction. Patrick Seale, a veteran Middle East correspondent, wrote this commentary for The Daily Star. ***************************************************************** 3 IAEA: U.S. Report on Iran 'Outrageous' Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:36:08 -0500 (CDT) X-Sender-Host-Name: chumbly.math.missouri.edu X-Spam-Class: HAM-VERY-WHITELIST Ohmy News (Seoul) September 16, 2006 IAEA: U.S. REPORT ON IRAN 'OUTRAGEOUS' House intelligence document said to be full of errors Ludwig De Braeckeleer An official at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has called an intelligence report put out by a U.S. congressional committee "outrageous and dishonest," filled with "erroneous, misleading and unsubstantiated statements." Vilmos Cserveny, IAEA director for External Relations and Policy Coordination, made his comments in a letter to U.S. House Representative Peter Hoekstra, who chaired the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence which on Aug. 23 issued the 29-page document assessing Iran nuclear activities: " "Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States." Personal attack on ElBaradei The House report accuses Dr. ElBaradei, director of the IAEA and a Nobel Peace Laureate, of preventing the U.N. inspectors from telling the truth about Iran's nuclear program. "While not an instance of Iranian perfidy, the Spring 2006 decision by IAEA Director General ElBaradei to remove Mr. Christopher Charlier, the chief IAEA Iran inspector, for allegedly raising concerns about Iranian deception regarding its nuclear program and concluding that the purpose of Iran's nuclear program is to construct weapons, should give U.S. policymakers great pause," states the Report on page 13. "The United States has entrusted the IAEA with providing a truly objective assessment of Iran's nuclear program. IAEA officials should not hesitate to conclude that the purpose of Iranian nuclear program is to produce weapons if that is where the evidence leads. If Mr. Charlier was removed for not adhering to an unstated IAEA policy barring IAEA officials from telling the whole truth about the Iranian nuclear program, the United States and the international community have a serious problem on their hands," the report concludes. Mr. Charlier, 61, was the head of the inspection team until April, when Iran requested the IAEA to remove him from the team. The story was first reported on July 8 by Bruno Schirra, writing in the German Newspaper Die Welt: "Atomic Secrets: The Man Who Knew Too Much." On the following day, George Jahn wrote a column about it in the Washington Post: "Iran Asks IAEA to Remove Chief Inspector." Mr. Charlier had publicly complained about the constraints imposed by Tehran on the inspectors. According to the German newspaper, he is convinced that Iran runs a parallel program aiming at the fabrication of nuclear weapons. "The IAEA Secretariat takes strong exception to the incorrect and misleading assertion in the staff reports ... that the Director General of the IAEA decided to remove Mr. Charlier for allegedly raising concerns about Iranian deception regarding its nuclear program and concluding that that the purpose of Iran nuclear programme is to construct weapons," Cserveny writes. "In addition the report contains an outrageous and dishonest suggestion that such removal might have been for not having adhered to an unstated IAEA policy bearing IAEA officials from telling the whole truth about the Iranian Nuclear Program," he continues. There is however no doubt that Iran has only exercised its right and ElBaradei his obligations which are clearly stated in the Agreements Between the Agency and States Required in Connection with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Article 85 of the text reads: "The Agreement should provide that: a) The Director General shall inform the State in writing of the name, qualifications, nationality, grade and such other particulars as may be relevant, of each Agency official he proposes for designation as an inspector for the State; b) The State shall inform the Director General within 30 days of the receipt of such a proposal whether it accepts the proposal; c) The Director General may designate each official who has been accepted by the State as one of the inspectors for the State, and shall inform the State of such designations; and d) The Director General, acting in response to a request by the State or on his own initiative, shall immediately inform the State of the withdrawal of the designation of any official as an inspector for the State..." Iran has accepted more than 200 U.N. inspectors, a number that is similar to other countries having signed the agreement under the Non Proliferation Treaty. Allegations of weapons-grade uranium The report alleged incorrectly that Iranians have produced weapons-grade uranium in Natanz. Under a satellite picture of the Natanz site, one reads "Iran is currently enriching uranium to weapons grade using a 164-machine centrifuge cascade at this facility in Natanz. Iran claims it will have 3,000 centrifuges at this site by next spring." Weapons-grade Uranium is a term used to describe uranium enriched to 90 percent or more in the uranium 235 isotope. However, Iranian have enriched their uranium to a low level of only a few percent, compatible with enrichment required for fuelling their nuclear reactors. Moreover their work was described in a report provided to the IAEA board of governors by Dr. ElBaradei. On September 14, the IAEA Board derestricted the latest report on the implementation of safeguards in Iran. Polonium-210 The report alleges that Iran has covertly produced Polonium-210, an isotope which in conjunction with Beryllium provides the neutron flux needed to initiate a chain reaction. This statement is misleading because, as pointed out by Cserveny, Iran has no legal obligation to declare its activity related to Polonium-210 production to the IAEA. Spent fuel from light-water reactors The House Report alleges that Iranians could use the plutonium contained in the spent fuel of their reactors in construction at Busher to fabricate nukes. "Extracting plutonium from a light water reactor's (LWR) spent fuel rods would produce weapons-grade fuel in less time than spinning unenriched UF6 in centrifuges. Spent fuel from the LWR Russia is building for Iran in the c ity of Bushehr could produce enough weapons-grade plutonium for 30 weapons per year if the fuel rods were diverted and reprocessed. Spent fuel from the LWRs that EU-3 states are proposing to give Iran as part of a new diplomatic agreement probably could be used to produce a similar amount of plutonium," states the report on pages 10 and 11. The statement is simply false. The capture of a single neutron by an uranium-238 nucleus leads eventually to the formation of a plutonium-239 nucleus, an isotope suitable for the construction of nuclear weapon. However, in a light-water reactor operated for electricity production, a significant percentage of plutonium-239 absorb a neutron and transmute into plutonium-240, the presence of which complicates the fabrication of nukes because of high radiation and more importantly because it may lead to premature fission. A clandestine enrichment program "Iran has conducted a clandestine uranium enrichment program for nearly two decades in violation of its International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards agreement, and despite its claims to the contrary, Iran is seeking nuclear weapons," alleges the Report. In his series of articles published in The Hindu, "The Persian Puzzle: Iran and the invention of a nuclear crisis," Siddharth Varadarajan has shown how the idea of a clandestine program is an invention without legal basis. "First, the NPT allows uranium conversion and other processes central to enrichment. Secondly, the Esfahan facility is under IAEA safeguards... nearly a month after Iran resumed uranium conversion there, the Director-General of the Agency, Mohammad El-Baradei, certified that all the declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for and, therefore, such material is not diverted to prohibited activities. "Thirdly, the agreement to suspend enrichment, which Iran reached with the EU-3 at Paris last November, clearly states that the E3/EU recognize that this suspension is a voluntary confidence building measure and not a legal obligation. In other words, if the voluntary suspension was not a legal obligation, the ending of that suspension can hardly be made the grounds for legal action by either the IAEA or the UN," Varadarajan argued. Dubious claims and explanations for Iran's nuclear activities "Aside from Iran's lack of uranium deposits, Iran's claim that its nuclear program is for electricity production appears doubtful in light of its large oil and natural gas reserves. Iran's natural gas reserves are the second largest in the world and the energy industry estimates that Iran flares enough natural gas annually to generate electricity equivalent to the output of four Bushehr reactors," the Report claims. "Lacking direct evidence, Bush administration officials argue that Iran's nuclear program must be a cover for bomb-making. Vice President Cheney recently said: They're already sitting on an awful lot of oil and gas. Nobody can figure why they need nuclear as well to generate energy." "Yet Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and outgoing Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz held key national security posts when the Ford administration made the opposite argument 30 years ago," wrote Dafna Linzer in The Washington Post. In 1975, Kissinger, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld approved National Security Decision Memorandum 292 "US-Iran Nuclear Cooperation," which approves the transfer of full-cycle nuclear technology. The deal was worth US$6 billion. "It is absolutely incredible that the very same players who made those statements then are making completely the opposite ones now. Do they remember that they said this? Because the Iranians sure remember that they said it," said Joseph Cirincione, a non-proliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "This is like prewar Iraq all over again. You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that's cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors," said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector and current president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. "This is a very troubling instance here, this report, of U.S. policymakers in my view trying to push the intelligence community to find evidence that they believe supports their suspicions and their end policy goals," said Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association in Washington. ***************************************************************** 4 IRNA: IAEA complains of 'outrageous' inaccuracies in Iran report to House Intelligence Committee - Irna New York, Sept 16, IRNA Iran-US-IAEA A recent U.S. House of Representatives committee report on Iran's nuclear capability is "outrageous and dishonest" in trying to make a case that Tehran's program is geared toward making weapons, a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency said. IAEA said in a letter outside a meeting of the 35-nation IAEA Board of Governors in Vienna that the US report is false in saying Iran is making weapons-grade uranium at an experimental enrichment site, when it has in fact produced material only in small quantities that is far below the level that can be used in nuclear arms. The letter, which was first reported by The Washington Post, also says the report erroneously says that IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei removed a senior nuclear inspector from the team investigating Iran's nuclear program "for concluding that the purpose of Iran's nuclear program is to construct weapons." In fact, the inspector was sidelined on Tehran's request, and the Islamic Republic had a right to ask for a replacement under agreements that govern all states relationships with the agency, said the letter, calling the report's version "incorrect and misleading." "In addition," says the letter, "the report contains an outrageous and dishonest suggestion that such removal might have been for 'not having adhered to an unstated IAEA policy barring IAEA officials from telling the whole truth about the Iranian nuclear program."' Dated August 12, the letter was addressed to Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. It was signed by Vilmos Cserveny, a senior director of the Vienna-based agency. An IAEA official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the letter, said it was written "to set the record straight." The dispute was reminiscent of the clashes between the Vienna-based agency and the U.S. administration over whether Iraq's Saddam Hussein was trying to make weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear arms. American arguments that Saddam had such covert arms programs were given as the chief reason for the US invasion of Iraq. ElBaradei's criticism of the U.S. standpoint on Iraq and subsequent perceptions that he was soft on Iran in his staff's investigation of Tehran's nuclear activities may be a cover for a weapons program led to a failed attempt last year by Washington to prevent his re-election. ***************************************************************** 5 Reuters: China urges Iran to be flexible on nuclear issue Saturday September 16, 12:10 PM BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has urged Iran to show more flexibility on its nuclear programme but said there was still hope for a negotiated settlement to the standoff, state media reported on Saturday. Wen made the comments in a Friday meeting with Iranian Vice-President Ali Saidlu on the sidelines of a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a regional security forum, in Tajikistan's capital, Dushanbe. Iran is an observer to the SCO. "The Chinese premier said Iran's flexibility will help create conditions for an early resumption of the talks and the final settlement of the Iranian nuclear issue," the official Xinhua news agency reported. "He said the Iranian nuclear issue is in a critical period." Tehran ignored an Aug. 31 U.N. Security Council deadline to halt uranium enrichment, which Iran says is for civilian energy use but which Western powers fear will be used for making nuclear bombs. European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana has been negotiating with Iran on behalf of the world's major powers, but Washington is pushing for a move toward sanctions if there is no breakthrough soon. China, which wields veto power on the Security Council, is wary of sanctions and has long urged a diplomatic solution. During the meeting with Wen, Saidlu said Iran's nuclear activity was transparent and for peaceful purposes. Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 6 Reuters: Israel says 'a few months' to avoid nuclear Iran Monday September 18, 2:28 AM WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Sunday that the world may have as little as "a few months" to avoid a nuclear Iran and called for sanctions. "The crucial moment is not the day of the bomb. The crucial moment is the day in which Iran will master the enrichment, the knowledge of enrichment," she said on CNN's "Late Edition." Livni, whose country is the only Middle East power possessing nuclear weapons, said she did not want to identify a point of "no return" in the controversy over Iran's nuclear program. The Iranians, she said, "are trying to send a message that it's too late, you can stop your attempts because it's too late. It's not too late. They have a few more months," she said. "The world cannot afford a nuclear Iran," Livni said. "I believe that this is time for sanctions." Iran, whose president last year called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," denies it is seeking nuclear weapons. Livni said Israel would like to help strengthen the more moderate elements within the Palestinian Authority -- such as President Mahmoud Abbas -- at the expense of the militant Hamas movement, which swept to power after winning January elections. Livni called on the international community to unite to make Hamas take certain steps as a prelude to talks. She did not specify the steps, but did mention Israel's demand that Hamas release an Israeli soldier captured in June. "If the international community show determination in the next few weeks, maybe this is the moment in which Abu Mazen can be strengthened and Hamas will have to do something," she said, referring Abbas. Abbas and Hamas, which seeks Israel's destruction, accused each other on Sunday of trying to derail a planned unity government that Palestinian officials hope will lift Western sanctions imposed after Hamas' election victory. Abbas and Livni will both be in New York to attend the U.N. General Assembly in the coming week. charging US threats drove it to acquire deterrent atomic weapons, and Iran" /> winning solid support in its nuclear row. On the sidelines, nuclear powers India and Pakistan held historic talks. "Our countries have the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes," Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque told reporters at the Non-Aligned Movement summit in which the ailing Fidel Castro" /> , 80, did not play a public role. North Korea charged that the United States left it no option but to secure deterrent nuclear weapons, and pledged that as long as it was hit by US sanctions it would not be back in talks. "Our country will never return to the talks under US sanctions," Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, told NAM leaders and delegates. "The United States, far from complying with the six-party commission's agreements, has continued to impose unilateral sanctions sending the talks to a standstill and dragging the situation into an unpredictable point," he charged. Complaining that Washington was "threatening Korea using all sorts of maneuvers, accusing it of being part of an 'Axis of Evil,'" he said: "Korea has nuclear arms as a deterrent to firmly guarantee the peace and security of the Korean peninsula and the region." NAM heads of state and government from 56 countries and delegates from 118 countries were due to adopt a voluminous final declaration backing Iran's right to nuclear energy; urging UN reform to give greater weight to poor countries; opposing terrorism and what they see as US interventionism. A draft NAM document also condemns what it terms Israel" /> 's "unlawful" policies in the Palestinian territories and its recent military intervention in Lebanon. There was widespread speculation about the health of Fidel Castro, whose convalescence kept him out of the spotlight he has enjoyed for five decades. "Doctors insisted that he continues his rest," Perez Roque said at the opening of the summit, adding that Castro's brother Raul would represent Cuba at the gathering. Raul Castro, 75, long Cuba's defense chief, officially heads Cuba while his bearded sibling recovers from gastrointestinal surgery he underwent in July. "Once he is fully capable of resuming his duties, Fidel will be the chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement," Perez Roque said. Among the prominent leaders speaking at the two-day summit was Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who insisted Tehran's controversial atomic program had strictly peaceful objectives, and claimed the United States was the real nuclear threat. Raul Castro, and Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, also delivered harsh condemnations of US policies, while Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for "moderation, harmony and reason." Perez Roque slammed the United States for putting Cuba on its list of nations supporting terrorism "for defending itself," he said, while not including Israel which he said had killed many civilians. "That is the hypocritical act of a superpower," the top Cuban diplomat said. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf started bilateral talks in Havana Saturday, a Pakistani official said. The hour-long breakthrough talks, largely on the Kashmir" /> dispute, were the first high-level meeting between the nuclear-armed neighbors since deadly bombings in Mumbai on July 11. India accused its neighbor of not reining in "terrorists." The ailing Fidel Castro late Friday greeted Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in a hospital-like room at an undisclosed location as well as Argentine lawmaker Miguel Bonasso, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan" /> , state media say. The next NAM summit will be held in 2009 in Egypt, Raul Castro announced. Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 8 AFP: NKorea, Iran nuclear issues in spotlight at Non-Aligned meet in Cuba - by Michael Langan Sun Sep 17, 4:41 AM ET HAVANA (AFP) - North Korea" /> North Koreacharged that US threats drove it to acquire deterrent atomic weapons, and Iran" /> Iranwon solid support in its nuclear row at a summit that concluded in Havana early Sunday. On the sidelines, nuclear powers India and Pakistan held historic talks, deciding to relaunch peace negotiations that had been frozen since deadly bombings in Mumbai in July. National leaders agreed on the need to counter overwhelming US influence, and several leaders launched blistering attacks on the United States during the summit, which Cuba's ailing President Fidel Castro" /> Fidel Castrosat out But Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi insisted the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was not "anti-any country." "I do not see this summit as anti-US," he said, stressing there were differences of opinion within the 118-state movement. North Korea charged that the United States left it no option but to secure deterrent nuclear weapons, and pledged that as long as it was hit by US sanctions it would not be back in talks. "The United States, far from complying with the six-party commission's agreements, has continued to impose unilateral sanctions, sending the talks to a standstill," said Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly. He claimed Washington was "threatening Korea using all sorts of maneuvers, accusing it of being part of an 'Axis of Evil'," and added: "Korea has nuclear arms as a deterrent to firmly guarantee the peace and security of the Korean peninsula and the region." Heads of state and government from 56 countries and delegates from the other member states adopted a voluminous final declaration backing Iran's right to nuclear energy; urging UN reform to give greater weight to poor countries; opposing terrorism and what they see as US interventionism. "Our countries have the right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes," Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said. Meanwhile, Cuban Interim President Raul Castro met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to express "Cuba's support for the right of Iran -- or any other country -- for peaceful use of nuclear energy." At the opening of the summit, the minister had told the national leaders Castro was not well enough to attend the gathering. But the communist strongman did receive several of the dignitaries in a hospital-like room, clad in pajamas and looking gaunt. Raul Castro, 75, long Cuba's defense chief, officially heads Cuba while his bearded sibling recovers from gastrointestinal surgery he underwent in July, and chaired the summit. "Once he is fully capable of resuming his duties, Fidel will be the chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement," Perez Roque said. Among the prominent leaders speaking at the two-day summit was Ahmadinejad, who insisted Tehran's controversial atomic program had strictly peaceful objectives, and claimed the United States was the real nuclear threat. Raul Castro, and Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, also delivered harsh condemnations of US policies, while Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for "moderation, harmony and reason." Perez Roque slammed the United States for putting Cuba on its list of nations supporting terrorism "for defending itself," he said, while not including Israel" /> Israelwhich he said had killed many civilians. "That is the hypocritical act of a superpower," the top Cuban diplomat said. The NAM document also condemned what it terms Israel's "unlawful" policies in the Palestinian territories and its recent military intervention in Lebanon. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf agreed at their breakthrough talks to resume negotiations on the disputed Kashmir" /> Kashmirregion and to jointly battle terrorism. The next NAM summit will be held in 2009 in Egypt. Many of the summit participants headed from here to New York, where they will take part next week in the UN General Assembly. The Iranian president, meanwhile, headed first to Venezuela for talks with Chavez. Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 9 AFP: Iran gets strong backing from developing-world leaders in nuclear row - by Patrick Moser Sat Sep 16, 10:30 PM ET HAVANA (AFP) - Iran" /> drew strong backing in the tense dispute over its nuclear program, as developing-world leaders agreed at a summit in Havana that Tehran had the right to use atomic energy. National leaders of the 118-state Non Aligned Movement (NAM) adopted a statement in which they "reaffirmed the basic and inalienable right of all states to develop research, production and use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes." They also said "the only way to resolve the issue is to resume negotiations without any preconditions." "They recognized the need for a comprehensive multilaterally negotiated instrument, prohibiting attacks, or threat of attacks on nuclear facilities devoted to peaceful uses of nuclear energy." The statement was an updated version of a document adopted at a NAM ministerial meeting in Malaysia in May. The heads of state and government pointed out that the International Atomic Energy Agency" /> found that all nuclear material declared by Iran had been accounted for, and urged Iran to continue cooperating fully with the IAEA. They warned that any attack or threat against a nuclear facility used for peaceful purposes posed serious risks and was a violation of international law. The United States is pushing for sanctions to force Tehran to stop producing enriched uranium, which can be used both for both nuclear power and atomic weapons. The NAM leaders called for a negotiated settlement to the dispute. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who attended the summit, had suggested direct talks with George W. Bush, but the US president dismissed the idea. "No, I'm not going to meet with him," Bush said on Friday. "I have made it clear to the Iranian regime that we will sit down with the Iranians once they verifiably suspend their enrichment program, and I meant what I said." At the Havana meeting, Ahmadinejad appealed to his counterparts to help "counter attempts to prevent Iran from developing its peaceful nuclear activity." He said the real danger came from Washington. "Why should people live under the nuclear threat of the United States?" he asked Friday at the two-day summit, which brought together more than 55 national leaders and dozens of ministers. The statement adopted on Saturday reiterates calls for the establishment of a zone free of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, and demands that Israel" /> accede to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty until that can be achieved. Several leaders spoke out in defense of Iran at the summit, including including Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a staunch foe of the United States. Following the gathering, Ahmadinejad was to travel to oil-rich Venezuela, a fellow member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries ( OPEC" /> ). Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 10 IRIB PERSIAN NEWS: IRI-Russia nuclear coop transparent 2006/09/16 Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov on Friday stressed that Tehran-Moscow nuclear cooperation is quite transparent and in accordance with international laws and related regulations. Speaking at Russian parliament, Dumas, Lavrov added, "our nuclear cooperation with IRI is conducted under the direct supervision of the International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA) and in full accordance with the articles of its nuclear NPT. Voicing Moscow's strong opposition against imposing international sanctions against IRI, he said, "Russia resorts to imposing sanctions against another country only under emergency conditions, that do not exist in IRI's nuclear activities." M/D Copyright 2004, All Rights Reserved By Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting News Network Sponsored By IRIB News Computer Center. E-Mail: Info@IRIBNEWS.ir ***************************************************************** 11 Guardian Unlimited: EU Reports Progress in Iran Nuke Talks From the Associated Press [UP] Saturday September 16, 2006 2:16 AM AP Photo XHAV147 By PAUL AMES Associated Press Writer BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana was optimistic Friday about progress in talks to persuade Iran to bring its nuclear program into line with international demands. Solana is trying to persuade Iran to accept an offer of economic and political rewards if it agrees to consider a long-term moratorium on uranium enrichment and commits to an enrichment freeze before talks on details of the incentives package. ``We are really making progress,'' Solana said. ``Never before have we had the level of engagement, and a level of discussion of issues which are difficult.'' Iran insists it has a right to develop its enrichment program to generate electricity. But there is increased concern it wants to make weapons-grade uranium for nuclear warheads. Its defiance of a Security Council demand that it stop enrichment activities has prompted U.S. calls for a quick move to impose sanctions. The Europeans are hoping the talks by Solana's team can bring a negotiated end to the nuclear standoff with Iran. Solana said he hoped for a new meeting with Iran's top negotiator, Ali Larijani, in the coming days. Lower level talks had been going on daily since Sunday, when he and Larijani last met in Vienna, Austria, he said. ``The atmosphere is good,'' Solana told a news conference. ``We don't want to lose the momentum that was created in Vienna.'' Officials in delegations familiar with the outcome of Sunday's talks said this week that Larijani had suggested his country was ready to consider an enrichment freeze for up to two months. Solana did not confirm that. He said a planned meeting with Larijani was postponed Thursday because ``a little bit more time was needed in order (for Larijani) to find consensus in his own country, among his own leadership.'' Instead the two men spoke by phone and Solana said he hoped the delay in face-to-face talks would allow Larijani to return with a ``possible positive answer'' to ideas the European negotiator put forward last weekend. Iran has balked at a demand issued by the U.N. Security Council's five permanent members and Germany for an enrichment freeze before any talks begin on further de-escalation of the nuclear standoff. Solana suggested one solution could be to start negotiations at the same time as Iran announces a suspension. ``But we will not negotiate formally with activity on enrichment,'' Solana said. ``That is understood also by the Iranians.'' The permanent members of the U.N. Security Council - Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain - along with Germany, have been leading efforts to end the standoff. However the six have not been able to agree on what to do if Iran does not fall into line. China and Russia have refused to follow the tough line sought by Washington. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 ***************************************************************** 12 AFP: Iran gets strong backing from developing-world leaders in nuclear row - By Patrick Moser [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] HAVANA (AFP) - Iran drew strong backing in the tense dispute over its nuclear program, as developing-country leaders insisted it had the right to use atomic energy. National leaders of the 118-state Non-Aligned Movement concluding their Havana summit approved a statement on Iran that "reaffirmed the basic and inalienable right of all states to develop research, production and use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes." "They recognized the need for a comprehensive multilaterally negotiated instrument, prohibiting attacks, or threat of attacks on nuclear facilities devoted to peaceful uses of nuclear energy." The statement was an updated version of a document adopted at a NAM ministerial meeting in Malaysia in May. The heads of state and government stressed that the International Atomic Energy Agency found that all nuclear material declared by Iran had been accounted for, and warned that any attack or threat against any nuclear facility used for peaceful purposes posed serious risks and was a violation of international law. The United States is pushing for sanctions to force Tehran to stop producing enriched uranium, which can be used both for both nuclear power and atomic weapons. The NAM leaders called for a negotiated settlement to the dispute. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who attended the summit, had suggested direct talks with George W. Bush, but the US president dismissed the idea. "No, I'm not going to meet with him," Bush said on Friday. "I have made it clear to the Iranian regime that we will sit down with the Iranians once they verifiably suspend their enrichment program, and I meant what I said." At the Havana meeting, Ahmedinejad appealed to his counterparts to help "counter attempts to prevent Iran from developing its peaceful nuclear activity." He said the real danger came from Washington. "Why should people live under the nuclear threat of the United States?" he asked at the summit, which brought together more than 55 national leaders and dozens of ministers. The statement adopted on Saturday reiterates calls for the establishment of a zone free of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, and demand that Israel accede to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty until that can be achieved. Several leaders spoke out in defense of Iran at the summit, including including Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a staunch foe of the United States. Following the gathering, Ahmedinejad was to travel to oil-rich Venezuela, a fellow member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! UK Limited. All rights reserved. AFP ***************************************************************** 13 Guardian Unlimited: Iran and Venezuela Strengthen Ties From the Associated Press [UP] Saturday September 16, 2006 10:31 PM AP Photo CAR101 By ELIZABETH M. NUNEZ Associated Press Writer CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Iran's president makes his first visit to Venezuela on Sunday, seeking to strengthen ties with a government that also opposes the U.S. and has become a leading defender of his nation's nuclear ambitions. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that he and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez are like ``brothers'' in a great global struggle. Chavez has promised to argue for Iran's nuclear program if he wins a rotating seat on the U.N. Security Council in a vote next month. Chavez has said Venezuela ``will stand together with Iran at all times and under any conditions,'' accusing the U.S. of planning to invade Iran. The two leaders are united by deep-seated opposition to Washington and to Iran's archenemy Israel, which Chavez accused of committing a new ``Holocaust'' in its bombardments in Lebanon. Iran insists its nuclear program is aimed solely at generating electricity despite concerns among U.S. and European governments that it could be trying to develop atomic weapons. Chavez accuses Washington of using the nuclear issue as a pretext to justify an attack on a regime it opposes. In the past few days, Chavez has sought to drum up support for Iran at the Nonaligned Movement summit in Cuba. ``I ask for full support for the government and the people of Iran in developing their sovereign right to move forward with (nuclear) research,'' Chavez told fellow leaders Thursday in Havana. ``It's part of the formula of the future - nuclear energy. We aren't talking about atomic bombs.'' The United States, meanwhile, has been lobbying against Venezuela's bid for a Security Council seat, supporting Guatemala instead. Together with Iran, Cuba and Syria, Chavez is seeking to form ``a new world order'' opposing traditional U.S. dominance, said Venezuelan political analyst Alberto Garrido, who writes in a new book, ``Las Guerras de Chavez'' or ``Chavez's Wars,'' about the Venezuelan leader's growing ties to the Middle East. Garrido said the secret-ballot vote in the U.N. General Assembly in mid-October should measure which government has been more successful on the international stage: Venezuela or the United States. ``It will decide how anti-U.S. the posture of countries in the U.N. is,'' Garrido said. ``If the political situation has changed so much that the vote leans toward the radical position represented by Venezuela, it would be a warning for the United States.'' Venezuela and Iran, both major oil-producing countries, have proposed pricing their oil in euros rather than U.S. dollars, a move that Garrido said likely would disrupt the U.S. economy by decreasing reliance on dollars. The U.S. remains the No. 1 buyer of oil from Venezuela, despite increasing political tensions. Meanwhile, Iran and Venezuela have signed a series of accords for their state oil companies to explore for and extract oil and natural gas here. After initial talks Sunday in Caracas, Chavez and Ahmadinejad will visit an oil field on Monday for a ceremony marking the start of joint drilling. They also plan a tour to a joint-venture tractor-assembly factory. The two presidents will conclude 20 commercial accords, including plans to set up a joint petrochemical company, produce surgical tools and help train Venezuelan iron foundry workers, said Jose Khan, Venezuela's basic industries minister. The two countries already have signed more than 80 cooperation pledges since early last year, said Alcides Rondon, former deputy foreign minister for the Middle East. Venezuela and Iran have agreed to set up a $200 million investment fund and Iran has agreed to build 10,000 homes in Venezuela. The two governments plan to set up factories to produce bricks, cement and bicycles, and Chavez says they will even manufacture cars together. After Ahmadinejad's two-day visit, both leaders will head to New York for the U.N. General Assembly. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 ***************************************************************** 14 AFP: US calls for G7 offensive on Iran 'terrorist' backing Sat Sep 16, 9:15 AM ET SINGAPORE (AFP) - The United States sought to mobilize its Group of Seven partners in a campaign to stamp out what it said was Iran" /> 's financial backing for terrorists. "Iran is ... quite actively involved in financing terrorists," US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told a press conference Saturday after a meeting with counterparts from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. Paulson said the United States had evidence that some "blue-chip" banks had become inadvertently implicated in financing terrorism, and that US authorities were therefore engaged in an "educational" campaign so that banks can be "vigilant and identify risks." But there were signs here that at least some of Washington's G7 allies were not prepared to sign on fully to the US effort. Paulson said in a statement issued after the talks that G7 ministers and central bankers had "discussed the need to take action to disrupt terrorist and illicit finance related to specific threats from North Korea" /> and Iran," but the official communique made no mention of either country. The G7 said simply that "we agreed to intensify our efforts to combat money laundering, proliferation networks as well as terrorist and illicit financing by addressing global financial vulnerabilities, particularly those associated with jurisdictions that have failed to recognise international standards." Japanese Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki said the ministerial statement did not necessarily target Iran, in which several G7 participants such as Japan, France and Germany have major commercial interests. "We are talking about these matters in general," he told reporters. Paulson denied that any G7 country was "resistant" to the idea of educating banks about the risks of doing business with suspect companies from Iran or anywhere else. The US Treasury Department" /> this month froze Bank Saderat, one of Iran's largest lenders, from doing any business with US-owned banks on the grounds that it supports terrorism. It has been waging a long-running campaign of financial sanctions against North Korea, which Washington accuses of forging dollars and laundering money to fund its weapons development. Paulson said it was "crucial that we improve upon the safety, soundness and security of the international financial system" by combating terrorist financing, money laundering and networks supporting weapons proliferation. He said that Iran had used more than 35 front companies to channel funds to extremist groups, identified by US officials as including the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Washington's financial offensive coincides with efforts by the United States and its European partners to push Iran into scrapping its uranium enrichment, which they suspect is being used to make nuclear weapons. But US officials denied any link to the nuclear dispute, insisting that their clampdown on extremist financing was an ongoing priority. Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 15 AFP: Allies muted as US wages financial offensive on Iran by Jitendra Joshi Sun Sep 17, 3:50 PM ET SINGAPORE (AFP) - The United States is taking the financial fight to Iran" /> Iranas it turns up pressure on its allies to get tough over the Islamic republic's nuclear ambitions. But are its partners listening? Washington, perhaps coincidentally, has intensified sanctions over Iran's backing for "terrorist" groups in the fortnight since the country ignored a UN deadline to suspend its uranium enrichment by August 31. On September 8, the Treasury Department" /> Treasury Departmentfroze Bank Saderat, one of Iran's largest lenders with some 3,400 branches, from doing any business with US-owned banks on the grounds that it supports terrorism. Treasury officials accused Saderat and Iran's central bank of channelling hundreds of millions of dollars -- often through unwitting, "blue-chip" Western banks -- to extremist groups and to the country's missile programme. They said the outfits include the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and the Palestinian groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Iran's central bank chief Ibrahim Sheibany has reportedly vowed to take legal action to challenge the US sanctions on Bank Saderat, and threatened to shift some of Iran's currency reserves out of the dollar. But Treasury officials have been fanning out around the world to ram home the message, especially in Europe and Gulf nations such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was briefed on the issue after he took office in July. The former boss of Goldman Sachs was said by aides to be shocked at "extensive intelligence" allegedly revealing that Iran was using dozens of front companies to abuse the banking system. "Protecting the financial system from abuse by terrorists and illicit financiers is integral to international financial stability and global security," he told an International Monetary Fund" /> International Monetary Fundmeeting here Sunday. After the latest Group of Seven gathering Saturday, Paulson announced an "educational" campaign so that multinational banks can be "vigilant and identify risks". "We discussed the need to take action to disrupt terrorist and illicit finance related to specific threats from North Korea" /> North Koreaand Iran," he said. The US government accuses Stalinist North Korea of bankrolling its crippled economy through money-laundering and sophisticated forgeries of US dollars. However, the G7 nations mentioned neither North Korea nor Iran in their post-meeting communique Saturday, speaking more generally of the need for cooperation against illicit financing. Meanwhile, the United States has acknowledged that it faces tough resistance as it presses for UN sanctions against Iran over the nuclear issue. Britain, France and Germany are optimistic that their talks with Iran are making progress towards defusing the standoff. But on Friday, President George W. Bush" /> President George W. Bushsternly warned US partners not to take pressure off Iran. Ahead of his address to the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, Bush said US allies should not permit Iran to "stall" for time. In line with the US sanctions on Iran, three major Japanese banks will refrain from doing business with Bank Saderat, reports in Tokyo said. But Japanese Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki said the G7 statement did not necessarily target Iran, which supplies much of Japan's oil. And top European Union" /> European Unionofficials have made no mention of the Iran issue in public here. One Gulf delegate at the Singapore meetings said Dubai and other regional financial hubs had shown no reaction to the US clampdown. "They see it as more of a US-generated fuss, as the Europeans aren't getting excited," he said on condition of anonymity. Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 16 AFP: Allies muted as US wages financial offensive on Iran by Jitendra Joshi Sun Sep 17, 6:17 AM ET SINGAPORE (AFP) - The United States is taking the financial fight to Iran" /> as it turns up pressure on its allies to get tough over the Islamic republic's nuclear ambitions. But are its partners listening? Washington, perhaps coincidentally, has intensified sanctions over Iran's backing for "terrorist" groups in the fortnight since the country ignored a UN deadline to suspend its uranium enrichment by August 31. On September 8, the Treasury Department" /> froze Bank Saderat, one of Iran's largest lenders with some 3,400 branches, from doing any business with US-owned banks on the grounds that it supports terrorism. Treasury officials accused Saderat and Iran's central bank of channelling hundreds of millions of dollars -- often through unwitting, "blue-chip" Western banks -- to extremist groups and to the country's missile programme. They said the outfits include the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and the Palestinian groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Iran's central bank chief Ibrahim Sheibany has reportedly vowed to take legal action to challenge the US sanctions on Bank Saderat, and threatened to shift some of Iran's currency reserves out of the dollar. But Treasury officials have been fanning out around the world to ram home the message, especially in Europe and Gulf nations such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was briefed on the issue after he took office in July. The former boss of Goldman Sachs was said by aides to be shocked at "extensive intelligence" allegedly revealing that Iran was using dozens of front companies to abuse the banking system. "Protecting the financial system from abuse by terrorists and illicit financiers is integral to international financial stability and global security," he told an International Monetary Fund" /> meeting here Sunday. After the latest Group of Seven gathering Saturday, Paulson announced an "educational" campaign so that multinational banks can be "vigilant and identify risks". "We discussed the need to take action to disrupt terrorist and illicit finance related to specific threats from North Korea" /> and Iran," he said. The US government accuses Stalinist North Korea of bankrolling its crippled economy through money-laundering and sophisticated forgeries of US dollars. However, the G7 nations mentioned neither North Korea nor Iran in their post-meeting communique Saturday, speaking more generally of the need for cooperation against illicit financing. Meanwhile, the United States has acknowledged that it faces tough resistance as it presses for UN sanctions against Iran over the nuclear issue. Britain, France and Germany are optimistic that their talks with Iran are making progress towards defusing the standoff. But on Friday, President George W. Bush" /> sternly warned US partners not to take pressure off Iran. Ahead of his address to the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, Bush said US allies should not permit Iran to "stall" for time. In line with the US sanctions on Iran, three major Japanese banks will refrain from doing business with Bank Saderat, reports in Tokyo said. But Japanese Finance Minister Sadakazu Tanigaki said the G7 statement did not necessarily target Iran, which supplies much of Japan's oil. And top European Union" /> officials have made no mention of the Iran issue in public here. One Gulf delegate at the Singapore meetings said Dubai and other regional financial hubs had shown no reaction to the US clampdown. "They see it as more of a US-generated fuss, as the Europeans aren't getting excited," he said on condition of anonymity. Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 17 UPI: Paulson urges G7 action in Iran United Press International - NewsTrack - 9/16/2006 11:33:00 PM -0400 SINGAPORE, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson urged Group of Seven members meeting in Singapore to take action against Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology. At a news conference after the meeting, Paulson said he urged the other industrialized countries to make efforts to keep Iran from using businesses and financial institutions to support organizations like Hezbollah, and to acquire the technology it wants, the Washington Post reported. "There's a broad network of front companies, and these are not front companies that say 'Nuclear Acquisition Corp.' or 'Weapons Production Corp.,'" Paulson said. "These are mundane-sounding companies that do many legitimate activities, but in addition, do some of these untoward and illicit activities." After the meeting, the finance ministers issued a general statement pledging to fight money laundering, nuclear proliferation and the financing of terrorism. In addition to the United States, the G7 includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. © Copyright 2006 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved ***************************************************************** 18 UPI: Nonaligned nations support Iran United Press International - NewsTrack - 9/17/2006 9:16:00 AM -0400 HAVANA, Sept. 17 (UPI) -- The summit of 118 Nonaligned Movement nations meeting in Havana urged unconditional talks with Iran to solve the U.S.-Iran nuclear dispute. In a 92-page final declaration issued Saturday night, delegates also condemned Israel's attacks on Lebanon and denounced terrorism. In supporting a peaceful resolution to the nuclear dispute, the declaration affirmed Iran's right to develop atomic energy "for peaceful purposes" and urged the resumption of negotiations "without any preconditions," Iran's official IRNA news agency reported. The resolution also encouraged Iran to continue cooperating with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog. North Korea defended its nuclear weapons program and Sudan's leader rejected a U.N. peacekeeping mission for Darfur. The Nonaligned Movement considers itself not formally aligned with any major power bloc. It was formed in 1961. © Copyright 2006 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved ***************************************************************** 19 UPI: China seeks Iranian 'flexibility' on nukes United Press International - NewsTrack - 9/16/2006 11:09:00 AM -0400 BEIJING, Sept. 16 (UPI) -- Iran should pay more attention to concerns of the international community and show flexibility on its uranium-enrichment program, China's prime minister says. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said Iranian flexibility will create conditions for an early resumption of talks on a package of economic and other incentives aimed at persuading Iran to abandon production of nuclear fuel, the official Xinhua news agency reported Saturday. The Chinese premier said China believed all parties concerned should increase contact and enhance mutual trust and respect to solve the nuclear issue through diplomatic negotiations. Reports of progress made in talks between Iran and the European Union this week demonstrated there is still hope for a peaceful settlement of this issue, Wen said. He added China was willing to continue discussion with Iran. President Bush, who will travel to New York next week for meetings at the United Nations, raised concerns Friday that Iran was playing for time in a dispute over its nuclear program. © Copyright 2006 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved ***************************************************************** 20 [NYTr] N.Korea says no nuclear talks under US sanctions Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:07:26 -0500 (CDT) X-Sender-Host-Name: chumbly.math.missouri.edu X-Spam-Class: HAM-VERY Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Reuters - Sep 16, 2006 http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyid=2006-09-16T151741Z_01_N16187596_RTRUKOC_0_US-NONALIGNED-NUCLEAR-KOREA.xml N.Korea says no nuclear talks under U.S. sanctions HAVANA (Reuters) - North Korea said on Saturday it will never return to talks on ending its nuclear weapons programs under a U.S. crackdown on firms suspected of aiding Pyongyang's counterfeiting and other illicit activities. "The DPRK will never go back to the talks under the U.S. sanctions," the North's second-ranking leader, Kim Yong-nam, told a summit of Non-Aligned Movement nations in Cuba. Under U.S. measures, such as the freezing of North Korean bank accounts and warnings on financial institutions helping the North, "there is no justification whatsoever to urge the DPRK to return to the talks unconditionally," Kim said. Communist North Korea, whose official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, has boycotted talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States since November. Kim, who heads North Korea's parliament, is the first senior Pyongyang official to make public comments since President Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun met in Washington on Thursday and called on the North to return to talks. The United States has repeatedly called on the North to return to the table and implement a deal reached in September 2005 under which Pyongyang agreed to scrap its nuclear weapons programs in return for aid and security assurances. The United States has led efforts to impose tougher U.N. sanctions on North Korea, which defied international warnings by test-firing seven ballistic missiles in July and may be preparing a nuclear test. North Korea is believed to have enough nuclear material to build as many as a dozen nuclear bombs, but it has never tested one. ) Reuters 2006. * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 21 Korea Herald: Businessmen accuse U.S. of indiscriminate sanctions The United States and Japan are expected to ratchet up financial sanctions against North Korea this week. The move is in line with a United Nations resolution condemning Pyongyang for its missile test launches in July, and comes a year after Washington ordered American banks to stop dealing with the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia. The U.S. Treasury accused the bank of acting as a money-laundering conduit for North Korea, and of other illegal activities. The bank denied the charges, but froze more than $20 million in North Korean accounts. Pyongyang responded by withdrawing from the six-party talks on its nuclear development programs, a process that only days before had reached what participants described as a landmark breakthrough. In recent weeks the United States has been piling on the pressure, urging financial institutions around the world to curb any financial activity with the North. Scores of banks in Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Mongolia have stopped doing business with North Korea, according to the U.S. Treasury's Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Stuart Levey. The United States has insisted that there be no link between efforts to restart the stalled six-party talks on the one hand, and punishing North Korea for its alleged economic crimes on the other. However, businessmen intimately familiar with the situation think this is the wrong policy. "Proper banking channels remain key to providing assurances to larger companies that 'normal' business can be conducted," said Roger Barrett, managing director of Beijing-based Korea Business Consultants. "The threat that the U.S. may act against a bank or a company's U.S. business interests if they deal with the North is indeed a deterrent to market entry," Barrett told The Korea Herald. "It is worth noting that encouraging and providing for more legitimate business does actually provide a practical alternative to dependence on missile sales and other alleged financial malpractices,' he said. For foreign businesses already established in the North, it has been a difficult year and many see their options narrowing. Felix Abt from the Pyongyang-based European Business Association says they are considering various strategies, but would prefer to keep details confidential. "Essentially, those who can afford a longer term business vision think they can still weather the latest U.S. attacks on their legitimate business," he said, "But those who cannot are more worried." The fact that the United States does not distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate business, and that it tends to criminalize foreign and Korean businesses, said Abt, "Is a challenge to us." He accused Washington of simply making wholesale accusations. "This is more convenient for them than offering specific proof on specific wrongdoings, and quite understandable in the absence of any serious evidence," he said. KBC's Barrett said the accusations still remain unsubstantiated allegations, "Both the Russian Foreign Minister and officials in South Korea have recently stated clearly that these allegations may have been valid in the 1980's and early 90's - but where is the contemporary evidence?" Barrett said "the continuous castigation and condemnation of legitimate business" is obviously a deterrent to companies wishing to take advantage of the opportunities in North Korea. "Even respected senior statesmen, former President Jimmy Carter for example, are saying that such a policy is 'evil' and that it is a step in the wrong direction," he said. Abt added that it isn't only legitimate business which is suffering. "In the case of PyongSu Pharmaceutical, there are now difficulties in transferring money to foreign suppliers which is causing substantial delays in the launch of new and effective medicines that are so badly needed," he told The Korea Herald. And in a statement reminiscent of the situation in Iraq in the 1990's, Abt said, "Thus it is the ordinary and the needy North Korean patients that have to suffer from the consequences of these U.S. sanctions." Abt, Managing Director of the PyongSu Pharma J.V., will open a bank account abroad on behalf of that company. This will allow donors to transfer money to have pharmaceuticals produced or imported by PyongSu and distributed to needy patients all over the DPRK, bypassing U.S.-policies. But Abt said, "I will have to carry the money from abroad in my luggage all the way to the factory in Pyongyang." Given Washington's position, businessmen are urging the European Union to be more proactive, and say the situation could provide opportunities for European-centric companies. "If the dollar is causing problems for our customers, as it has clearly done," Barrett said, "then we encourage businesses to take advantage of the North's move into the 'Euro-Zone' back in November 2002." Unfortunately, Barrett said, Washington reacted by cutting off correspondent banking links. A positive development, Abt and Barrett both agree, is the recent takeover of the Daedong Credit Bank, a majority foreign owned bank in Pyongyang, by London-based Koryo Asia Limited. Daedong's general manager, Nigel Cowie, said he is very pleased with the purchase of Daedong by Koryo, which also acts as financial advisor to the Chosun Development and Investment Fund. Chosun, also based in London, plans to raise more than $50 million for investments in North Korea. "We see it as a vote of confidence in our bank, and I'm looking forward to a successful future," Cowie told The Korea Herald. Barrett added that having Koryo challenge the blanket sanctions is a welcome move that should serve to provide assurances that businesses can operate free from interference. "It will highlight the fact that there is a legitimate and important market in a country to feed and clothe 23 million people, simultaneously providing more manufacturing employment opportunities." Barrett said the way forward is to remain confident, and simply be more creative and innovative, "just as you would be in any other market." One such creative initiative, he said, is a plan to mix business and the ever popular sport of golf. "The Business Golf Challenge will offer a three day overview combination of business, golf, and sightseeing at the beautiful Lake Taesong course," he said. "Let business and trade drive understanding and create a platform for positive progress," Barrett said, "and get it out of this sand bunker." (chrisgelken@heraldm.com) By Chris Gelken 2006.09.18 ***************************************************************** 22 Reuters: North Korea says no nuclear talks under U.S. sanctions Sunday September 17, 2:19 AM Photo: Reuters HAVANA (Reuters) - North Korea said on Saturday it will never return to talks on ending its nuclear weapons programs under a U.S. crackdown on firms suspected of aiding Pyongyang's counterfeiting and other illicit activities. "The DPRK will never go back to the talks under the U.S. sanctions," the North's second-ranking leader, Kim Yong-nam, told a summit of Non-Aligned Movement nations in Cuba. Under U.S. measures, such as the freezing of North Korean bank accounts and warnings on financial institutions helping the North, "there is no justification whatsoever to urge the DPRK to return to the talks unconditionally," Kim said. Communist North Korea, whose official name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, has boycotted talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States since November. Kim, who heads North Korea's parliament, is the first senior Pyongyang official to make public comments since U.S. President George W. Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun met in Washington on Thursday and called on the North to return to talks. The United States has repeatedly called on the North to return to the table and implement a deal reached in September 2005 under which Pyongyang agreed to scrap its nuclear weapons programs in return for aid and security assurances. The United States has led efforts to impose tougher U.N. sanctions on North Korea, which defied international warnings by test-firing seven ballistic missiles in July and may be preparing a nuclear test. North Korea is believed to have enough nuclear material to build as many as a dozen nuclear bombs, but it has never tested one. Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 23 AFP: North Korea renews demand for lifting US sanctions Sun Sep 17, 1:41 AM ET SEOUL (AFP) - North Korea" /> North Koreahas renewed demands for a lifting of US financial sanctions on the communist country, refuting Washington's claims that it is counterfeiting the US currency. The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) claimed in a dispatch late Saturday that the world's biggest US dollar counterfeiter was the United States itself, not the communist state. "The US should immediately give up its anachronistic hostile policy toward the DPRK (North Korea) and lift its unreasonable financial sanction on it," it said, while rejecting US charges against North Korea. "It is known to the world that the US itself tops the list of those countries of counterfeit," the KCNA said, citing 46.5 million fake US dollars and some 500 counterfeiting places detected in the United States in 2004. "The US is now raising a hue and cry over someone's 'counterfeit' like a thief crying 'stop the thief!'." Pyongyang has boycotted six-way nuclear disarmament negotiations since November, to protest the US move to freeze North Korean funds which Washington says were also earned from drug trafficking and money laundering. "Our country will never return to the talks under US sanctions," North Korea's number two Kim Yong Nam told the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana, Cuba, on Saturday. As the United States is tightening its noose around North Korea's bank accounts overseas, the communist state has threatened to bolster its defenses. North Korea declared in February 2005 that it had built nuclear weapons. The United States and South Korea" /> South Korea-- both parties to stalled nuclear disarmament talks with North Korea, along with China, Japan and Russia -- have warned Pyongyang against any nuclear tests. Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 24 Guardian Unlimited: North Korea's No. 2 Leader Blasts U.S From the Associated Press [UP] Sunday September 17, 2006 1:16 AM AP Photo XHAV112 By VANESSA ARRINGTON Associated Press Writer HAVANA (AP) - North Korea's No. 2 leader blamed the lack of world peace on the United States at the Nonaligned Summit on Saturday, saying its failure to respect the sovereignty of other nations has destroyed ``the international order.'' Parliament leader Kim Yong Nam said desires for peace by the 118 countries in the Nonaligned Movement were ``confronted with grave challenges owing to the high-handed acts and unilateralism of the superpower, which denies countries and nations the independent choice of development.'' The resulting imbalance in global politics constitutes ``grave threats to world peace and security,'' he said. It was the latest anti-American statement at a meeting that has brought together some of the staunchest U.S. foes, including the presidents of Iran, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. The summit opened Friday when Cuba took over the three-year leadership of the group from Malaysia. Cuba's Defense Minister Raul Castro stood in place of his ailing brother, Fidel Castro, who is recovering from intestinal surgery. The United States has declined an invitation to attend the summit in Havana and said it would have no comment on any of the proceedings. Fidel Castro has yet to make an appearance at the summit, but has met with individual leaders in private, including U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Photos and video of the one-on-one encounters in Cuban state media show Castro in his pajamas - an unusual sight. Kim also defended the North's nuclear program amid concerns the communist country may be preparing to carry out an atomic weapons test. North Korea ``has been left with no other option but to possess nuclear weapons as a self-defensive deterrent,'' he said. ``The DPRK would not need even a single nuclear weapon if there no longer existed a U.S. threat.'' DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North's official name. Kim said U.S. financial restrictions aimed at Pyongyang have created a deadlock in six-nation talks on its nuclear program, pushing the issue into ``an unpredictable phase.'' Recently, the United States has moved to sever North Korea's connections to outside banks, alleging any transactions conducted by the Pyongyang regime are suspect and could be connected to illegal activity - including money laundering and counterfeiting U.S. dollars. Nuclear talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States were last held in November, when negotiators failed to make progress on implementing an agreement in which the North pledged to give up its nuclear programs in exchange for aid and security guarantees. ``The DPRK will never go back to the talks under U.S. sanctions,'' Kim said. Iraq's vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, asked the movement for a statement calling on all countries to stop interfering in Iraq and to recognize the sovereignty of his nation's land and airspace. He complained that ``life has degenerated'' in his country and Iraqi's are suffering because ``a war machine has destroyed the infrastructure.'' Despite the Iraqi government's dependence on U.S.-led forces in Iraq, he said other Nonaligned nations can count on Iraq's membership in the movement. ``Our presence here is an indication of our choice international relations,'' he said. Also Saturday, Pakistan and India agreed to restart peace talks that were suspended after train bombings killed more than 200 people in Mumbai in July - part of a wave of attacks India blames on Pakistan-based militants. Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed to Cabinet-level talks by their foreign secretaries after meeting on the sidelines of the summit. Singh also accepted an invitation to travel to Pakistan to further the peace process. ``I look forward to a purposeful visit at a time to be determined through diplomatic channels,'' Singh said after the meeting with Musharraf. The Pakistani leader added: ``We had a cordial, frank exchange of views on all aspects of India and Pakistan relations. It was agreed that the peace process must be obtained.'' New Delhi blames Pakistan's support of the militants for stalling the peace process between the nuclear-armed neighbors, which have fought three wars since gaining independence from Britain in 1947, two over the Himalayan region of Kashmir. More than a dozen militant groups are fighting to make Kashmir independent from Hindu-majority India or merge it with Muslim-dominated Pakistan. The insurgency has claimed 65,000 lives. The Nonaligned Movement was formed during the Cold War to establish a neutral third path in a world divided by the United States and the Soviet Union. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 ***************************************************************** 25 Raw Story: Frank Rich: As the war drags on, the lies get thicker Published: Saturday September 16, 2006 Until recently, the mainstream media has been loathe to call out the Bush administration on false statements. And even when a reporter or commentator did so, he or she would would not characterize the misstatements as deliberate lies. That may be changing. Frank Rich's column in Sunday's New York Times trots out the "L" word in matter-of-fact fashion. He also suggests that if what Bush says really were true -- that the safety of Americans depends on the success of the Iraq war -- then Americans are in trouble, given the course of the war so far. Excerpts from Rich's column: # The untruths are flying so fast that untangling them can be a full-time job. Maybe that's why I am beginning to find Dick Cheney almost refreshing. As we saw on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, these days he helpfully signals when he's about to lie. One dead giveaway is the word "context," as in "the context in which I made that statement last year." The vice president invoked "context" to try to explain away both his bogus predictions: that Americans would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and that the insurgency (some 15 months ago) was in its "last throes." The other instant tip-off to a Cheney lie is any variation on the phrase "I haven't read the story." He told Tim Russert he hadn't read The Washington Post's front-page report that the bin Laden trail had gone "stone cold" or the new Senate Intelligence Committee report contradicting the White House's prewar hype about nonexistent links between al-Qaida and Saddam. Nor had he read a New York Times front-page article about his declining clout. Or the finding by Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war that there was "no evidence of resumed nuclear activities" in Iraq. "I haven't looked at it; I'd have to go back and look at it again," he said, however nonsensically. Rather than tune this bluster out, as the country now does, let's try a thought experiment. Let's pretend everything Bush said is actually true and then hold him to his word. If the safety of America really depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad, then our safety is in grave peril because we are losing that battle... # ***************************************************************** 26 BBC NEWS: South Asia | South Asia rivals to resume talks Last Updated: Saturday, 16 September 2006, 20:13 GMT 21:13 [Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh] India and Pakistan say they will work together against terrorism Nuclear rivals Pakistan and India have agreed to resume formal peace talks, after the leaders of the two countries met for the fourth time in two years. The long-disputed Kashmir and Jammu regions, as well as other matters, will be on the agenda. Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf and India's Manmohan Singh said they hoped for a "peaceful negotiated settlement". Mr Musharraf and Mr Singh met on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Summit in the Cuban capital, Havana. "It was agreed the peace process must be maintained and respected, and success is important for both countries and the future of the entire region," said Mr Singh, as he stood alongside the Pakistani president. 'Frank exchange' The two leaders said they had instructed their foreign ministers to resume a formal dialogue. The first meeting is due to take place soon in the Indian capital, Delhi. Our correspondent in Havana, Shahzeb Jillani, says there had been a sense of cautious optimism about the much anticipated India-Pakistan talks. Mr Musharraf said he was "very happy" at the outcome of the meeting. "We had a cordial, frank exchange of views on all aspects of India and Pakistan relations." The talks between the two leaders were the first to take place since the Mumbai train bombings of 11 July which killed at least 180 people. India had blamed the attacks on Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba. The two leaders also announced that they would be co-operating on terrorism by setting up a joint agency to tackle the problem. Mr Singh announced that he had accepted an invitation to travel to Pakistan at some stage in the future to further the peace process. + BBC Copyright Notice ***************************************************************** 27 WorldNetDaily: Outrageous and dishonest [Supercritical Thoughts] [Gordon Prather] Posted: September 16, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern Last year our intelligence community produced – at the request of Congress – a National Intelligence Estimate which, inter allia, addressed Iran's nuclear programs. Although that 2005 NIE was highly classified, Dafna Linzer reported: A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years, according to government sources with firsthand knowledge of the new analysis. The carefully hedged assessments, which represent consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies, contrast with forceful public statements by the White House. Administration officials have asserted, but have not offered proof, that Tehran is moving determinedly toward a nuclear arsenal. Linzer didn't say whether the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear programs was based – as it should have been – on the quarterly reports the International Atomic Energy Agency had been making to the IAEA Board of Governors and to the U.N. Security Council. Notwithstanding Linzer's devastating report of the 2005 NIE "assessments," coupled with the "null" findings included in IAEA quarterly reports, members of the Cheney Cabal have continued to forcefully assert – without offering any proof whatsoever – that Iran has a nuclear weapons program that has already "reached a point of no return." Then, last month, Linzer told us: A key House committee issued a stinging critique of U.S. intelligence on Iranyesterday, charging that the CIA and other agencies lack "the ability to acquire essential information necessary to make judgments" on Tehran's nuclear program, its intentions or even its ties to terrorism. The 29-page report, principally written by a Republican staff member on the House intelligence committee who holds a hard-line view on Iran, fully backs the White House position that the Islamic republic is moving forward with a nuclear weapons program and that it poses a significant danger to the United States. But it chides the intelligence community for not providing enough direct evidence to support that assertion. That "critique" was soon made public. In his cover letter, Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy Chairman Mike Rogers noted that "the authors could not discuss in an unclassified document the specifics of the significant gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the various areas of concern about Iran," but assured us that the report reflected "committee staff" reviews of "classified and unclassified material" and consultations "with experts both in the United States and abroad." If that is the case, how could the committee staff have possibly led off with a statement that "America's intelligence agencies" have "assessed" that "Iran has conducted a clandestine uranium enrichment program for nearly two decades in violation of its IAEA safeguards agreement" and that "despite its claims to the contrary, Iran is seeking nuclear weapons"? If "America's intelligence agencies" have actually made such assessments in highly classified reports to which committee staff had access, then America and its intelligence community really are in a heap of trouble. In the first place, it is not up to America to assess whether Iran's safeguarded programs are being conducted in consonance with Iran's Safeguards Agreement. That is up to the IAEA Secretariat, and some disputes between the Iranians and IAEA inspectors about the conduct of such programs have been decided in Iran's favor. In any case, the American assessment is wrong, because the Iranians were under no obligation to inform the IAEA of its attempt to achieve a uranium-enrichment capability – including the acquisition, however clandestinely, of gas-centrifuges – until six months before actually introducing "special nuclear materials" into those centrifuges. As the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons makes clear, a "violation" of the NPT-IAEA Safeguards Agreement could only occur if the IAEA verifies the "diversion" of "source or special nuclear materials" to the "furtherance of a military purpose." For years, now, the IAEA has been reporting there is not even an "indication" that Iran has ever done that. Now comes Linzer to report: U.N. inspectors investigating Iran's nuclear program angrily complainedto the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran's capabilities, calling parts of the document "outrageous and dishonest" and offering evidence to refute its central claims. In particular, the IAEA formal complaint refutes the report's assertion that Iran is producing "weapons-grade" enriched uranium. The IAEA also charges the report's description of certain of Iran's activities – in particular, the reported "covert" production of polonium-210 – are misleading since Iran was under no obligation under its Safeguards Agreement to report such activities. "Outrageous and dishonest"? You bet! Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. He also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. Copyright 1997-2006 All Rights Reserved. WorldNetDaily.com Inc. ***************************************************************** 28 PakTribune: IAEA clears Pakistan of N-material trafficking Pakistan News Service - Sha'aban 25, 1427 Hijri September 18, 2006 Sunday September 17, 2006 (0236 PST) VIENNA : The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has cleared Pakistan of nuclear material trafficking. In its recent report on illicit trafficking and other unauthorized activities involving nuclear and radioactively contaminated material, the IAEA has cleared Islamabad of nuclear material trafficking within the last decade as it is reported to have taken stringent measures to secure its nuclear material and is continuously pushing to meet the international standards, kUNA reported said Saturday. The report said that from 1993 to 2005 a total of 827 confirmed incidents were reported by the participating member states of the IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database (ITDB). None of these incidents, happened mostly in Western and Eastern European countries or USA and Russia, were attributed to Pakistan. IAEA has been maintaining ITDB since 1995 to facilitate the exchange of information among member states, who voluntarily report such incident. Pakistan also subscribes to it through Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA). Pakistan News Service © PakTribune.com Pvt Ltd 2003-2004 ***************************************************************** 29 AFP: Germany calls for an international uranium enrichment centre - Sun Sep 17, 10:19 AM ET BERLIN (AFP) - German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has proposed setting up uranium enrichment centres under UN control to end nuclear disputes like the one over Iran" /> Iran. Steinmeier said such centres could be used by several nations and placed under control of the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency" /> International Atomic Energy Agency, the daily Handelsblatt said in an advance extract of its Monday edition. "Interested countries like Iran could in this way obtain nuclear fuel for civilian use under strict control," Steinmeier told the newspaper. "It could be financed by countries that claim the right to buy nuclear fuel," he added. "We need to have an international supply of nuclear fuel to stop countries feeling the need to build their own installations." Steinmeier said the Vienna-based IAEA had the right to build and run nuclear installations. According to the Handelsblatt, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has been informed of the proposal and Germany is planning to promote it when the country takes over the rotating presidency of the European Union" /> European Unionin January 2007. In a bid to resolve the standoff over Iran's suspect nuclear actitivities, Russia has offered to provide the Islamic Republic with enriched uranium. Tehran, which denies Western allegations that it is seeking to produce nuclear weapons, has turned down the offer and violated a UN deadline to stop enriching uranium by the end of August. The IAEA starts a general conference on Monday that will be dominated by the Iranian crisis and will consider a proposal, backed by Russia and the United States, for an international fuel bank. "I want to make sure that every country that is a bona fide user of nuclear energy and that is fulfilling its non-proliferation obligations is getting fuel," ElBaradei said at the weekend. Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The ***************************************************************** 30 AFP: Non-Aligned summit marked by nuclear issues By Isabel Sanchez HAVANA (AFP) - The Non-Aligned Movement concluded a summit in Havana, issuing a final declaration backing Iran's right to nuclear energy and urging UN reform to give greater weight to poor countries. The event was also marked by North Korea's defense of its nuclear weapons program, historic talks between India and Pakistan, and the absence of convalescing Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Leaders of the developing world agreed on the need to counter overwhelming US influence, and several launched (Advertisement) [Click Here] [ src=] blistering attacks on the United States. Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi however insisted the NAM was not "anti-any country." "I do not see this summit as anti-US," he said, stressing there were differences of opinion within the 118-state movement. The two-day summit highlighted the rows between the United States and two countries that US President George W. Bush has accused of being part of an "axis of evil," Iran and North Korea. Bush first used the phrase in the January 2002 state of the union speech in reference to Iran, North Korea, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. North Korea charged that Washington left it no option but to secure deterrent nuclear weapons, and pledged that as long as it was hit by US sanctions it would not return to six-party talks. "Korea has nuclear arms as a deterrent to firmly guarantee the peace and security of the Korean peninsula and the region," said Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, on Saturday. The summit's 100-page final declaration backed Iran's right to nuclear energy. Washington and European powers fear that Tehran wants to use its nuclear program to build an atomic bomb. Cuban Interim President Raul Castro, who chaired the summit, met Saturday with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to express "Cuba's support for the right of Iran -- or any other country -- for peaceful use of nuclear energy." Ahmadinejad, who insisted Tehran's atomic program is strictly peaceful, claimed the United States was the real nuclear threat, traveled to Venezuela Sunday. In the declaration, heads of state and government from 56 countries and delegates from the other NAM member states urged UN reform to give greater weight to poor countries, and expressed their opposition to terrorism and what they see as US interventionism. The document condemned what it terms Israel's "unlawful" policies in the Palestinian territories and its recent military intervention in Lebanon. It also "roundly rejected" the "axis of evil" terminology, stating that it "stigmatizes other nations using the pretext of the war on terror." Before leaving Havana, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a harsh Washington critic, said that the United States was the "epicenter of evil" and an empire in decline. The text also rejects drawing up "a unilateral list that accuses states of alleged support to terrorism, which is incompatible with international laws and constitute a form of psychological and political terrorism." On the sidelines of the summit, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf agreed at their breakthrough talks Saturday to resume negotiations on the disputed Kashmir region and to jointly battle terrorism. The summit's big absentee, Fidel Castro, 80, still met with foreign dignitaries in a hospital-like room, clad in pajamas and looking gaunt. Castro met with Iran's Ahmadinejad, India's Singh and Ecuadoran President Alfredo Palacio on Sunday. He earlier met with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; presidents Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela; Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and Argentine legislator Miguel Bonasso. Many of the summit participants headed from here to New York, where they will take part this week in the UN General Assembly. The next NAM summit will be held in 2009 in Egypt. Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! UK Limited. All rights reserved. AFP ***************************************************************** 31 csmonitor.com: UN nuclear watchdog ponders international 'fuel bank' from the September 18, 2006 edition As the IAEA meets, advocates argue for a nuclear-fuel bank as a safeguard against terrorism. By Michael J. Jordan | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor VIENNA As the International Atomic Energy Agency meets this week for its 50th congress, a key focus will be a vision even older than the UN nuclear watchdog itself: the creation of a world nuclear-fuel "bank." Such a bank would store enriched uranium vital for nuclear energy - fissile material that, if enriched further, could make an atomic bomb. The bank would then disburse it to member states that have agreed not to produce the material. [(Photograph)] POWER PELLETS: A Kazakhstan plant produces uranium pellets to fuel nuclear-power plants. SHAMIL ZHUMATOV/REUTERS IAEA officials say they hope a "road map" emerges from several proposals. Forty-plus states possess the advanced technology to produce nuclear fuel - but not all of them do so. The notion of multilateral control of fuel supply has been revived by states under pressure from both higher oil prices and post-9/11 concerns that highly enriched fuel could get into terrorists' hands and be weaponized. "This idea has been discussed for awhile, and I can understand when people say they're skeptical," says Vitaly Fedchenko, a nuclear-security researcher with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. "But it looks like the current state of play makes it a little closer to reality than ever before." But some analysts have expressed concern that a US proposal could trigger a nuclear-fuel "race," as it aims to limit the number of states that could produce fuel, possibly spurring some states to move to join the club before the door closes. And, they say, economic incentives may not be enough to overcome longstanding hurdles of complex logistics and perceived infringement on sovereignty. "The idea that you're going to get everyone to hold hands and internationalize the ownership and operations of what is essentially a process that brings you within days - or at most, weeks - of the bomb, strikes me as fanciful," says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington. Steps of enrichment Uranium, when mined in its natural state, contains just 0.7 percent of uranium-235 and uranium-238 - key ingredients for nuclear fuel. Billions of dollars and decades of effort later, the original nuclear states - the US, Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China - were able to enrich the uranium to the 3 to 5 percent needed for nuclear energy. From there, analysts say, it's more or less a matter of "leaving the switch on" to enrich the uranium up to the 90 percent-plus for a bomb. President Eisenhower first broached the idea of an international uranium bank in 1953. But as the cold war intensified, no country wanted outside control. In 1970, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) assured the "inalienable right ... to develop research, production, and use of nuclear energy." Countries had to submit to IAEA safeguards and forgo developing nuclear weapons. This "right," though, has sometimes been interpreted as a carte-blanche sovereignty issue, as Iran is doing today. The fuel-bank idea made little headway over the next two decades, despite a flurry of initiatives. But in 1991, after the Gulf War, the IAEA discovered the secret nuclear-weapons program of NPT signatory Iraq. In 2004, Pakistan's nuclear-program chief, A.Q. Khan, admitted to illicitly transferring technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. In recent years, NPT signatory Iran has divulged some details of its once-secret nuclear program. Better security, barriers to transfers Multilateral control of the fuel supply is no silver bullet, experts say, but only one prong of what ought to be a multifront campaign. They argue as well for greater barriers and restrictions on transfers and technologies, enhanced security and political commitment, and production of "proliferation-resistant technology." A fuel bank wouldn't be "a cure-all, but an added layer of oversight," says Tariq Rauf, the IAEA head of verification and security-policy coordination. "None of these steps reduces the risk to zero, but we can build in more protective measures that decrease the chances of misuse." IAEA, Russian, US proposals The IAEA proposal in play this week emphasizes economic incentives: a "guaranteed" supply at below-market prices. A Russian proposal would create international centers, starting in Russia, in which nuclear fuel would be produced under IAEA safeguards - and sold "nondiscriminatorily" to any state, regardless of whether they are under a cloud of suspicion. The US proposal would forbid technology transfer to countries that don't already have an advanced system. To garner support, US envoys have reportedly been encouraging countries that had frozen their programs to get inside the tent of what could be a lucrative business. The media have cited Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Canada as making noises about getting back into the game. "Any arbitrary system that creates a new set of 'haves' and 'have-nots' is unsustainable, because nobody wants to be a have-not," says Jon Wolfsthal, a nonproliferation fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "But if there are clear economic benefits to buying in, you'll get a majority of countries to go along." A central challenge will be to convince those who argue for sovereignty on such decisions to consider a new system. "It will require leadership, and preferably a multiheaded leadership, involving leading suppliers and important consumers," says Lawrence Scheinman, who wrote fuel-bank proposals for the Carter Administration and now teaches at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. "Where will that leadership come from? Would the international community feel comfortable with US leadership? The US has in the past led constructively - and still can." www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2006 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 32 Guardian Unlimited: U.N. Is Back in the Global Spotlight From the Associated Press [UP] Sunday September 17, 2006 11:31 PM AP Photo XGB105 By EDITH M. LEDERER Associated Press Writer UNITED NATIONS (AP) - World leaders gathering for their annual meeting this week will find a new buzz: The United Nations is back in the global spotlight after securing a cease-fire in Lebanon, trying to revive the Middle East peace process and pressing Sudan to allow U.N. peacekeepers into conflict-wracked Darfur. Plenty of other hot-button issues are on the agenda as well, including Iran's nuclear program, the presidential runoff in Congo, reuniting war-divided Ivory Coast and Cyprus, and deciding the future of Kosovo. After several years of unrelenting attacks on the United Nations - for corruption, mismanagement and inaction - recent events have helped the world body make a comeback. France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere said it's obvious the United Nations is needed. ``You can do something, but it's easier to do it through the United Nations,'' he said. ``Now, the question for the U.N. is, since we have these requests coming, this need, is the United Nations ready, or efficient, or able to answer that? And this is why the (U.N.) reforms are important.'' When the General Assembly meeting opens Tuesday, the nearly 90 presidents and prime ministers and dozens of foreign ministers expected to attend the session will certainly be focusing on the U.N.'s unfinished reform agenda - including the highly contentious issue of expanding the Security Council, the U.N.'s most powerful body. At last year's U.N. summit, Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose second five-year term ends on Dec. 31, urged global leaders to respond to mounting criticism and restore the organization's credibility by adopting broad reforms needed for nations to act together to tackle poverty, terrorism and conflict. The record 151 world leaders who attended the summit adopted a 35-page document that commits governments to achieving U.N. development goals that include cutting extreme poverty by half by 2015. But it fell far short of the bold changes Annan wanted. Nonetheless, the past year has seen the creation of a new U.N. Peacebuilding Commission to help move countries from war to peace, a Human Rights Council to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission and a new fund to provide emergency humanitarian aid. But members decided to put off many of Annan's most important management reform proposals, which especially angered the United States, the U.N.'s biggest financier. While questions about whether the U.N. is up to dealing with its increasingly important agenda will bubble in the background, the headlines are certain to go to the standoff over Iran's disputed nuclear program as the U.N. Security Council has demanded that Tehran stop uranium enrichment. Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinajad, is to address the General Assembly on Tuesday, hours after President Bush. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because no decision has been made, said European and Iranian diplomats could meet on the sidelines of the General Assembly in hopes of de-escalating the nuclear standoff. Annan, who just returned from a two-week trip to the Middle East, said regional leaders were very concerned about Iran and told him: ``We cannot afford another crisis in this region.'' ``I appeal to the Iranians to really work with the international community and lift the cloud of uncertainty surrounding their program, so hopefully this will be done,'' Annan said Wednesday at a news conference. The Arab League also has asked for a ministerial meeting of the Security Council on Thursday to relaunch the Mideast peace process, but it still isn't set, primarily because of U.S. concerns about the outcome. Ministers from the Quartet that drafted the stalled road map to Mideast peace - the U.S., the U.N., the European Union and Russia - will meet on Wednesday. ``We have to try everything which is in our power to relaunch a peace process in the Middle East,'' said Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis, whose country holds the Security Council presidency this month. ``We cannot live with the situation in the Middle East any more,'' she said in an interview. ``War cannot be the answer, and after the Lebanon crisis, if anybody ever had any doubts ... we know now that there cannot be any military answer to these problems.'' Mideast issues are certain to be on Bush's agenda when he addresses the General Assembly on Tuesday morning. With the war in Iraq in its fourth year, analysts say the United States will be relying more readily on international institutions including the U.N. and its alliances for help in Iran, Lebanon, North Korea, Sudan and other issues. U.N. Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs Ibrahim Gambari also noted the increasing reliance on the United Nations. ``Multilateralism and the U.N. have taken their hits in the past few years,'' he said. ``But events of late have shown just how much this kind of organization is needed in today's world. This General Assembly will certainly underscore that point.'' Gambari said no issue needs more urgent attention than Darfur - and Annan warned that if the 7,000 African Union troops leave and a U.N. force can't replace them ``we are heading for a disaster.'' Behind the scenes, one of the hot topics is certain to be the race to succeed Annan. There are now six candidates and more could emerge. When a reporter noted that in three months, Annan would be referred to as the former secretary-general, he quipped: ``Fortunately!'' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 ***************************************************************** 33 Guardian Unlimited: No more green posturing - the planet can't wait Comment | Sunday September 17, 2006 The Observer Climate change sceptics, once a thriving species, will soon be extinct. The overwhelming majority of scientific opinion recognises that global warming is a reality and that humankind is responsible. As a result of carbon compounds emitted into the atmosphere the world, on its current trajectory, will get up to six degrees hotter this century, with drastic consequences. One example: the Arctic ice sheet receded by 280,000 square miles between 2004-2005. At that rate the North Pole will be ice-free in the lifetime of many of us. The oceans will rise faster than even pessimistic environmental campaigners have feared. Apocalyptic pictures can sap the will to take urgent action. But there are grounds for optimism. First, we know what the problem is. Global warming has not been visited upon us like a biblical plague. We are able to cut the amount of carbon we produce. It may be politically complex, but it is scientifically possible. Second, the political obstacles are fewer than they were even a year ago. In Britain, environmental debate is mainstream. The Liberal Democrats, whose conference runs this week, deserve the most credit for a long-standing commitment to the environment. They have detailed green policies and deserve credit for their honesty in identifying the most effective instrument for bringing about change - the tax regime. David Cameron has made the Tory party a late but zealous convert to the environmental cause and for this he, too, deserves credit. His photogenic Arctic explorations and enthusiasm for cycling have been dismissed by rivals as stunts, but the net effect has been to up the ante among all parties in the competition to be greenest. This is no bad thing. Labour's record is mixed. Britain is on track to meet its targets on carbon emission under the Kyoto Protocol, but the government has abandoned the more stringent targets it set itself. Tony Blair fought to put environmental issues on the agenda when he chaired the G8 summit last year, but international accord to cut emissions is barely closer as a result. There is no denying the awkwardness of decisions governments have to make on energy provision. They often reflect tangled arguments within the environmental movement. Nuclear power stations, for example, may not contribute as much as coal burning to global warming, but the waste is still toxic. However, complexity is not an excuse for inaction. Devising realistic policies always requires a trade-off between lesser and greater evils. Britain needs new nuclear power stations. This is the only way to provide the volume of power that the country needs at an environmental cost that is, relatively speaking, manageable. Similarly, stifling the cheap flight boom will hit tourism. But the effect of carbon emitted at altitude by thousands of planes criss-crossing the globe is too great to ignore. Aviation fuel, currently untaxed, must have a green levy put on it. Only when airlines come under financial pressure will they look in earnest for alternative ways to fuel flying. Meanwhile, major investment is needed in alternative energies such as tidal and wind power and in carbon capture and storage. Planning regulations need to be completely rewritten so that new houses and businesses are developed to emit less carbon. Such steps have already been taken in Northern Ireland, as Secretary of State Peter Hain writes in today's Observer Road use can no longer be free. While some rural drivers depend on their cars, many journeys are not necessary. Their environmental impact should be recognised in tolls. These are not perfect policies, but they could make a positive difference to all of us. And that, surely, is what the political parties drawing up plans in conferences over the next three weeks, should be trying to do. Useful links IPCC UN framework convention on climate change [UP] Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 ***************************************************************** 34 newsobserver.com: NC WARN will hold fire safety meeting Sunday, September 17, 2006 Raleigh · Durham · Cary · Chapel Hill From Staff Reports PITTSBORO - The group NC WARN will hold a meeting for elected officials and the public this week on fire safety at the Shearon Harris nuclear plant. The meeting will be at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the multipurpose room of Central Carolina Community College on U.S. 64 West in Pittsboro. Speakers will include nuclear safety engineer David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.; Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, D.C.; and John Runkle, attorney for NC WARN. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be published, broadcast or redistributed in any manner. © Copyright 2006, The News & Observer Publishing Company A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company ***************************************************************** 35 The Australian: BHP wants public funds for new desal plant + September 18, 2006 Michelle Wiese Bockmann September 18, 2006 BHP Billiton has proposed that commonwealth water grants be used to fund a desalination plant for its planned $7 billion uranium mine expansion at Roxby Downs. The public funding plans were revealed in a joint BHP Billiton and South Australian government study, obtained under Freedom of Information legislation, only a few weeks after the mining company posted Australia's largest corporate profit of $14 billion. BHP Billiton wants to "identify public and private sources of funding, including government grants and funds set up for the purpose of sustaining the River Murray, Great Artesian Basin and the environment generally", the document revealed. National Water Commission representatives have already visited the Olympic Dam uranium site and Roxby Downs township, 570km north of Adelaide. The South Australian Government has forwarded a proposal to the commission about qualifying for grants under the $2 billion Australian Government Water Fund. The coastal desalination plant, proposed for Port Bonython on the upper Spencer Gulf, has a price tag of $300million, with BHP Billiton prepared to spend a further $400 million to build a 330km pipeline to Olympic Dam. The proposal said the desalination plant would supply Roxby Downs as well as about 100,000 residents on the upper Spencer Gulf and the Eyre Peninsula. It is understood the total project cost could top as much as $1 billion. The study said BHP Billiton extracted about 37 megalitres daily from the Great Artesian Basin and that it needed an additional 26 megalitres daily from elsewhere, once the mine expansion went ahead. © The Australian ***************************************************************** 36 London Times: New nuclear power plants win support - Sunday Times - Times Online September 17, 2006 Jason Allardyce and Kathleen Nutt MORE Scots now favour building nuclear power stations north of the border than relying solely on alternative sources of energy, according to a new survey. A YouGov poll commissioned by The Sunday Times reveals that 45% of Scots believe existing stations should be replaced at the end of their working lives compared with 37% who think they should not be replaced. The poll shows support for nuclear has risen since the start of the year when an ICM poll for the BBC found that 51% of Scots were against building new nuclear power stations north of the border, compared with just 33% in favour. In July, Tony Blair made a powerful case for nuclear when the government’s energy review concluded that it was necessary if future energy shortages were to be avoided. Earlier this month The Sunday Times revealed that Jack McConnell, the first minister, had abandoned his hardline opposition to nuclear and was now prepared to consider each application for a power station “on its merits”. The poll findings will encourage him to go further, even if it means alienating his Lib Dem coalition partners. Nicol Stephen, the Scottish Lib Dem leader and deputy first minister, will be underlining his opposition to new nuclear power stations and his commitment to green energy sources when he addresses the national party conference in Brighton on Tuesday with this appeal: “Say no to nuclear. Say yes to the green switch. Scotland can become the green energy powerhouse of Europe. The Liberal Democrats are determined to support this vital investment — and reject new nuclear power in Scotland.” Nuclear power currently provides more than a third of Scotland’s electricity and there are doubts that wind and wave power will be sufficient to take its place when existing stations at Torness and Hunterston close. Labour’s manifesto position on nuclear power is likely to be agreed in November, proposing a balanced energy policy in which nuclear, fossil fuels and renewables all play a part. While McConnell’s change of heart over nuclear appears to chime with public opinion, other aspects of the YouGov poll of nearly 1,200 Scots, reveal that many of his other policy initiatives have failed to capture the public mood. Only 36% support his Fresh Talent policy that encourages skilled immigrants to live in Scotland to boost the economy, while 45% disapprove. Voters are even more sceptical about McConnell’s plan to make Scotland the only part of the UK to welcome workers from Romania and Bulgaria when they join the EU next year. England will impose tough restrictions on migrants from the two countries. While 28% of Scots would welcome citizens from Bulgaria and Romania if they have specific skills that employers need, 47% said that in addition to a skills requirement, a strict limit should be placed on the number allowed to work here. It follows complaints from the BMA that an increase in immigrants in Scotland has swamped medical services. A quarter of Scots also believe anti-Englishness has risen since devolution began in 1999, a view that may have hardened following tensions around this year’s World Cup. The number of anti-English incidents in Scotland rose substantially during the tournament in which McConnell refused to support the England team, pledging his support for Trinidad and Tobago. At the time the Commission for Racial Equality called on Scottish politicians to show restraint. Only 15% felt anti-English sentiment had fallen, while 55% thought it had remained the same. Many politicians hoped devolution would reduce the problem as Scots could no longer blame English politicians for the country’s ills. Last week The Sunday Times revealed that more Scots favour independence than devolution and a large majority want the parliament to be given more powers. + The Ramblers’ Association is to publish a brochure of Scottish landscapes blighted by giant wind turbines as part of a campaign to block hundreds of planned windfarms in the Highlands. The organisation, which has 140,000 members in the UK, believes the turbines will blight swathes of Scotland’s most picturesque countryside. The booklet, containing pictures of windfarms and their effect on views from vantage points such as Doune Castle, in Perthshire, and the Cairngorms, will be handed out to members of the public. The Association wants ministers to impose a moratorium on turbines, to limit their height and to scrap a controversial incentive scheme which they claim is fuelling a green “gold rush”. They also intend to target shareholders of major windfarm developers, such as Scottish Power, to pressure senior executives to rethink their policy on renewable energy. Ministers, however, deny Scotland’s natural heritage is being sacrificed in the rush for renewables. Earlier this month, they rejected proposals to install 24 wind turbines at Abercairny, near Crieff in Perthshire, after a public inquiry concluded it would have an adverse impact on the local environment. Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd. ***************************************************************** 37 Telegraph: 'Dirty' bomb fears over world's most insecure nuclear facility [telegraph.co.uk] By Bojan Pancevski in Vienna (Filed: 17/09/2006) More than two tons of radioactive material stored in a rundown research facility in Serbia is an easy target for terrorists seeking to build a "dirty" bomb, according the United Nations' nuclear watchdog. Nuclear inspectors have branded the lightly-guarded store of highly enriched uranium, from a Communist-era reactor which closed 22 years ago, the world's most dangerous disused nuclear site  because of the potency of the material present, and because some is prone to leaking. [Person in radioactive clothing] Experts warn that the facility could be targeted by terrorists intent on stealing material The outdated storage facility is on a 48-acre site at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences in Vinca, 10 miles outside the capital, Belgrade, surrounded by a rusty barbed-wire fence and secured only by a small number of armed guards. Michael Durst, the special programme manager at the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the Vinca site topped the global priority list of unsecured uranium sources because it combined the threats of nuclear proliferation and environmental disaster. He said: "Vinca is unique in the amount of uranium stored within its facility  at least 2.5 metric tonnes  and the fact that about 30 per cent of it is leaking. It would be easily accessible to an organised group. "There are other sites in Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, as well as elsewhere in the world, but the amount of nuclear material, the accessibility and the leakage makes Vinca the most dangerous. It requires immediate action." Much of the uranium is said by officials to be stored in a 75ft pool, filled with murky water, in the institute's reactor building. Other nuclear material stored at the site includes plutonium and highly radioactive spent fuel by-products. This week, the IAEA will appeal to international donors for funds to pay for decommissioning the site and moving the most dangerous material to Russia for disposal. A joint project by the IAEA, the Vinca institute and the Serbian authorities to secure the material has stalled for lack of funds. "The Vinca staff are highly professional and very co-operative," said Mr Durst, "But the budgets of the institute, and of the whole country, are very limited. They are keeping the whole thing together with gum and tape." [Map] The institute was founded in what was Communist Yugoslavia in 1948, with the help of Soviet scientists. Its nuclear reactor was shut down in 1984, but there are still more than 800 workers at the site, 400 of them scientific staff. IAEA officials are concerned that low-paid employees might be tempted to sell some of the material themselves, or allow terrorists access to it. Mr Durst said: "It would need a well-organised operation to transport it without endangering the lives of those involved. But if someone were willing to risk their life, it could be done." Obrad Sotic, a former operations manager at the site, said: "For terrorists ready to commit suicide it wouldn't be a problem to steal a lot of these fuel elements, which are very light, and use them as a dirty bomb." Thousands of spent fuel rods, made of the highly radioactive mixture of uranium and plutonium, are stored at the site. While making a nuclear bomb out of the material would be a complex process, requiring special facilities and expertise, a single fuel rod tied to conventional explosives would be enough to create a dirty bomb, which would scatter radioactive debris across a wide area, said Mr Durst. The IAEA estimates that the cost of disposing of the nuclear material could be as much as £50 million. The material would be taken to a Russian disposal facility as, according to international agreements, spent nuclear fuel is disposed of in its country of origin, in this case the former Soviet Union. Aleksandar Popovic, the Serbian science minister, said: "We need to close the financial gap to remove the fuel. We need to ensure Vinca is safe." More than 100lb of highly enriched uranium fuel has previously been removed from Vinca by the IAEA and the American Russian and Serbian governments. It was transported to a disposal facility near Dimitrovgrad, in Russia. But 4,000 people living in the village next to the complex are under constant threat of radiation leakage. Predrag Milic, 43, a villager, said: "People that live in the area are scared of being so close to the institute." © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2006. | Terms & ***************************************************************** 38 ChronicleHerald.ca: Degrading munitions found in over 3,000 sites off N.S. [TheChronicleHerald.ca] HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA | Sunday September 17, 2006 Terry Long of Decommissioning Consulting Services shows Eskasoni Coun. Bertram Bernard weapons he recovered near some of Halifax highways last year. His company has since detonated or dismantled the weapons. (TERA CAMUS / Cape Breton Bureau) By TERA CAMUS Cape Breton Bureau It could happen any day. Unexploded munitions have accidentally detonated in Nova Scotia, and Terry Long, a United Nations expert on ordnance and munitions disposal, says its just a matter of time before it happens again. "We have munitions out there that are degrading," he said in a recent interview, noting the corrosive sea has compromised the metal casings of some of the naval shells, bombs and artillery that have been dumped in Nova Scotias waters since the First World War. Some of those bombs are known to contain wartime chemicals such as mustard gas, choking agents and blistering agents, and they have begun to leak. Canada and other nations commonly dumped unused weapons at sea or in harbours as they approached home base, but the practice stopped in 1975 after NATO studies presented in Helsinki in 1972 showed chemicals will likely leak, potentially harming marine life and human health. Some of the most cluttered and dangerous deposits of bombs in these parts are corroding in soft silt at the bottom of the Bedford Basin and Halifax Harbour, in the centre of the provinces most densely populated region. But thousands of tonnes of other bombs and chemicals are in shallow waters of Sydney Harbour, in Bras dOr Lake off Eskasoni and off Yarmouth, where a nuclear submarine, rusting in the water, still contains five vertical launch tubes and three live torpedoes. There are more than 3,000 military munitions sites off Nova Scotia, in rich fishing areas or near Sable Island, where explorations for natural gas are ongoing. There are also sites between Cape Breton and Newfoundland at which the United States, under a $100-million deal, dumped an unknown amount of weapons and other military material, including vehicles, from its bases in Stephenville and Argentia after the Second World War. Mr. Long, a principal in Decommissioning Consulting Services of Ontario, says a cleanup will be unavoidable in the near future. "Its a worldwide epidemic," he said of the dangers lurking in most oceans. Aging bombs can be easily triggered by minor underwater pressure the "equivalent to the tap of a pencil," he said, noting that seismic blasts used by companies exploring for gas generate much greater pressure than that. "Weve been lucky," he said. "Blindly conducting seismic has the potential to damage soft-skinned chemical weapons that could leach out into the environment. Most likely, these agents are releasing into the environment already from seismic research being conducted off Nova Scotia." An accidental drop of an anchor by an unsuspecting boater in the Bedford Basin, for example, could also set off a series of explosions like the one in 1945, when a munitions depot caught fire in the area. Boaters are still not permitted to drop anchor due to the vast amount of unexploded munitions. But Mr. Long says a fishing net could also easily pull triggers off unexploded bombs, something many snow-crab fishermen fear happening off the coast of Cape Breton. In 2003, the Department of National Defence began a five-year, $10-million study to explore 50 munitions sites, some on land, to determine risks. Once that study is completed, the military is expected to develop an action plan if needed. Until thats done, Mr. Long doesnt expect any cleanup to be ordered, given Canadas priorities in the ongoing war on terror overseas, but its not stopping him and others from getting locals trained for future demolition. Just last Wednesday, Eskasoni First Nation signed an agreement to train local people to use Department of Defence bomb-disposal methods, because theres a large munitions site immediately off the reserve in Bras dOr Lake. The pilot project will include environmental and hazardous materials management and methods to clean up unexploded ordnance on land and at sea. Tuma Young, the bands chief executive officer, said Eskasoni signed a partnership with Mr. Longs company in hopes of providing new skills and, eventually, jobs. "We can clean up these sites and provide our people with employment," Mr. Young said. "Eskasoni used to be a bombing range. . . . They used to test bombs here. We found a few munitions. "We have to take a long term view on this . . . but these areas, were already fishing in them. Theres a danger of nets hooking, so we got to keep one eye on the problem and one eye on the future." In 1999, two bombs, one weighing 110 kilograms, were pulled out of silt in shallow waters during a construction project in Bedford. The Canadian navy determined that alloy plugs on the bomb had corroded and the explosives had dropped out, but 400 people still had to be evacuated. Explosives were scattered all over the harbour after the Halifax Explosion in 1917 and again when a munitions depot caught fire and exploded in 1945. As well, Second World War munitions have been washing ashore for years at the mouth of the harbour from the Clare Lilly, a British ship that ran aground in 1942 just off Portuguese Cove. "In the last couple of years were really starting to see a lot of different-coloured lobsters blue ones, red ones coming out of the water. In a lot of areas of the world where chemical weapons are found, you find different colours of species of animals," said Mr. Long, who now lives in Sydney. "Its also been in our experience that these different sites are where some of the highest rates of cancer are as well." A NATO study presented at the Helsinki Convention in 1992 showed underwater discharge of chemical weapons at sea can attack the photosynthesis of plankton and affect the hatching rates of crustaceans. But dangers are not limited to the sea. Mr. Longs de-mining company, using a high powered metal detector, found dozens of unexploded munitions some partly buried metres away from several Halifax highways last year. He retrieved and detonated or dismantled them all. "We have to clean up these sites," he said, but he acknowledged that politics and military priorities will play a factor in deciding when that will happen. His company has extensively de-mined areas of Bosnia and Afghanistan and helped India restore fresh-water supplies when the 2004 tsunami in Asia lifted landmines out of the ground near wells. Halifax served as a main launching point for Allied convoys headed overseas during both world wars, and the harbour contains more unexploded bombs than any other place in North America, according to the military. Explosives were never cleaned up, but because the harbour is so deep the military has said they dont pose a big threat unless they are disturbed. Sonar and remote submersibles are being used in the federal study to determine the types of bombs involved and what should be done with them. Its unknown when the results will be released. ( tcamus@herald.ca) © 2006 The Halifax Herald Limited ***************************************************************** 39 Leaf Chronicle: Soldiers deserve to know what factors made them sick. www.theleafchronicle.com - Clarksville, TN OUR OPINIONS Mysteries surround illnesses The latest report authorized by the federal government says that Gulf War syndrome doesn't exist. Even if it's true that there's not a single illness that has made soldiers who served in the 1991 war sick, the report does acknowledge that those veterans who are sick are sicker than other veterans who did not serve in the Persian Gulf but who have the same illness. The report, prepared by an Institute of Medicine committee, also found an elevated risk for the rare nerve disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, and for anxiety disorders, depression and substance abuse. While the latest study doesn't point to one illness causing the many symptoms — including fatigue, memory loss, muscle and joint pain, rashes and sleep problems — at least it doesn't revert back to a position held for far too long by the government. That is, that the symptoms were due to psychological problems. It wasn't until 2001 that the government finally stopped telling the sick vets that their problem was all in their heads and started offering disability and survivor benefits to those with Lou Gehrig's disease. It's known, and the latest report recognizes, that while in the Gulf region, soldiers were exposed to a toxic brew of substances, including smoke from oil well fires, pesticides, depleted uranium ammunition and possibly the nerve agent sarin. The next step is for further studies as to what kind of illnesses these substances could spawn, both separately and in combinations. The government owes these soldiers explanations, and medical treatment and financial assistance where necessary. It also needs to learn from this experience so that any mistakes made the past are not repeated into the future in other military engagements. Originally published September 17, 2006 Copyright ©2006 The Leaf Chronicle. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 40 NPRI: Dr. Helen Caldicott to Embark on a 12 City Book Tour to Promote Nuclear Power is Not the Answer Nuclear Policy Research Institute :: COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- On Sunday, 17 September 2006, Dr. Helen Caldicott will begin a 12 city book tour promoting her new book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. About Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, Booklist says, "Never one to mince words, renowned physician and activist Caldicott presents exhaustive evidence to refute the now resurgent claim that nuclear power is the solution to global warming. Eschewing hyperbole and speculation, Caldicott diligently presents the facts about the grave problems attendant on nuclear power." During her national speaking tour, Dr. Caldicott will engage people to work together to end the nuclear renaissance that threatens the United States -- and the world. Her speaking engagements include: White Plains, New York -- September 17, 2006 at 2:30 p.m. -- Community Unitarian Church Cambridge, MA -- September 21, 2006 at 10 a.m. -- Harvard Divinity School Boston, MA -- September 21, 2006 at 7:00 p.m. -- Boston Public Library Washington, DC -- September 26, 2006 at 7 p.m. -- Politics & Prose Washington, DC -- September 27, 2006 at 7 p.m. -- Busboys & Poets Washington, DC -- September 28, 2006 at 5 p.m. -- Georgetown University's Center for the environment Atlanta, GA -- October 2, 2006 at 7 p.m. -- Charis Books Nashville, TN -- October 3, 2006 at 7 p.m. -- Vanderbilt University San Diego, CA -- October 4, 2006 at 7 p.m. -- Joan Kroc Center for Peace and Justice, San Diego University San Diego, CA -- October 7, 2006 at 2 p.m. -- Earthside Charter Pasadena, CA -- October 8, 2006 at 10 a.m. -- All Saints Church Santa Monica, CA -- October 9, 2006 at 8 p.m. -- Laemmle Theatre Claremont, CA -- October 10 at 7 p.m. -- Scripps College San Rafael, CA -- October 11 at 7 p.m. -- Marin County Jewish Community Center Sacramento, CA -- October 12 at 12 noon -- California State University San Francisco, CA -- October 12 at 7:30 p.m. -- Castro Theatre More information about all of Dr. Caldicott's engagements is available at http://www.nuclearpolicy.org/ or by calling 202/822-9800. Nuclear Power is Not the Answer is being published on September 20th by the New Press in New York. It retails for $23.95. To arrange an interview Dr. Caldicott in conjunction with these events or her new book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, contact Julie R. Enszer, Executive Director of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, at 202-822-9800. Contact: Julie R. Enszer, (202) 822-9800 or Julie@nuclearpolicy.org Or Jeany Wolf, (917) 655-2555 or jeanywolf@earthlink.net Website: http://www.nuclearpolicy.org/ Copyright © 1996-2003 PR Newswire Association LLC. All Rights Reserved. ***************************************************************** 41 Deseret News: Uranium mining is reborn [deseretnews.com] Sunday, September 17, 2006 Uranium producers on hold Nuclear power boom could reinvigorate idled Utah plant By Paul Foy Associated Press TICABOO, Garfield County — The last U.S. uranium mill ever built, in this parched landscape near Lake Powell, shut down almost as quickly as it started operating as nuclear power fell into disfavor about two decades ago. Douglas C. Pizac, Associated PressThe Shootaring Mill in Ticaboo, Garfield County, will be sold to Toronto-based SXR Uranium One Inc. by the end of the year. SXR plans to reopen the plant in 2010. Keith Larsen, chief executive for U.S. Energy Corp., picked up the mill 10 years later for practically nothing, banking it for better days. His patience paid off, making Larsen's company one of the few already taking profits out of a new uranium boom. Larsen's mothballed mill, once a liability, became a $90 million asset with mining claims — the deal he made to sell the package to Toronto-based SXR Uranium One Inc. by the end of the year. Suddenly, nuclear power is back in demand as a relatively cheap, reliable and emissions-free solution to the world's insatiable demand for energy. Even some leading environmentalists have endorsed nuclear power as an antidote to global warming. More than 50 nuclear plants are planned or under construction in a dozen countries, according to U.S. and international nuclear agencies. The nuclear comeback has reinvigorated a Western mining industry that, during the 1950s and again in the 1970s, was the stuff of legends. Uranium claims — which grant an exclusive right to mine a piece of federal land — were bought and sold like stock. The successive booms made millionaires and losers and overnight towns. It also left some environmental damage, including a huge pile of radioactive uranium tailings the government has promised to move from a bank of the Colorado River near Moab. Today's boom doesn't have people running around with Geiger counters. For the most part, the West's uranium deposits are known, mapped and claimed. Douglas C. Pizac, Associated PressU.S. Energy Corp. resident project manager Daryl Winters locks the Shootaring Mill gate. The plant was the last U.S. uranium mill ever built, and it shut down almost as quickly as it began operating. "It's nothing like it used to be," said Moab Mayor David Sakrison, whose town has been transformed into a recreational playground. "It's a different community. We're more tourist-oriented. A lot of the people who lived here in the 1970s have moved away. It's a new cast of characters." The first Western uranium boom answered a call in 1948 for domestic uranium stockpiles for atomic bombs. By the 1970s, demand from nuclear power plants was picking up, until the partial meltdown of a Three Mile Island reactor in 1979 signaled a shift in public acceptance. The Ticaboo mill here opened in 1982 just in time to watch the bottom fall out of the uranium market. Utilities were canceling orders for new nuclear plants. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Russia further tarnished nuclear power. Two decades later, the spot price for milled uranium yellowcake has jumped sharply to $52 a pound after bottoming out at $7 in 2001. Higher prices have motivated thousands to snatch up expired uranium claims and wildcatters to sink test drills in places where it's a good bet. "If you find one of those ore bodies, it's a valuable asset," said geologist Richard Dorman, exploration manager for British Columbia-based Universal Uranium Ltd. Dorman started a second round of drilling this month on a largely unexplored side of fabled Lisbon Valley near Moab in the southeastern part of Utah. Over 40 years, more than 80 million pounds of uranium ore were taken from Lisbon Valley. The area was the setting of a Hollywood movie that chronicled the rags-to-riches story of Charlie Steen, a geologist who launched Utah's first uranium rush with the discovery July 6, 1952, of one of the richest ore bodies mined in the United States. Douglas C. Pizac, Associated PressCovered conveyor belt takes uranium ore to the processing building at the Ticaboo plant. Dorman is certain the fault that created Lisbon Valley hides a continuation of that ore body. Another British Columbia exploration company, Mesa Uranium, says it's closing in on the same uranium-speckled sandstone deposits. Not far away, International Uranium Corp. operates the only working U.S. uranium mill, near Blanding, which has been surviving for years on "alternate feeds," processing contaminated soil or radioactive ore from others trying to get rid of it. Ron Hochstein, president and chief executive officer, says the company plans to resume mining uranium ore at a dozen locations in northern Arizona. Uranium production has a future again, though the nation hasn't solved the disposal problem for spent fuel rods, said John D. Parkyn, chairman and chief executive of Private Fuel Storage, a group of nuclear-power utilities blocked by federal authorities from opening a temporary repository at an American Indian reservation in Utah's western desert. A more permanent repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, not scheduled to open until 2017 — 19 years late — may never open, he says, adding, "Presidents come and go, and some of them slowed it down." That hasn't stopped utilities from making plans to open or add nuclear plants, however. The nuclear Regulatory Commission says U.S. utilities are looking at building as many as 27 reactors, and it just licensed a $1.5 billion uranium enrichment plant near Eunice, N.M., where a groundbreaking was held Aug. 29. Louisiana Energy Services, a subsidiary of Urenco Ltd., is building the first U.S. installation that will use modern centrifuge technology. USEC, formerly the United States Enrichment Corp. and an arm of the federal government until 1998, operates a gaseous diffusion plant in Paducah, Ky., where pumps and filters separate lighter uranium atoms from heavier atoms in a slower, more power-intensive process. The nation's 103 operating nuclear power plants already are operating on dwindling stockpiles of uranium — some of it converted from Russian bombs — while energy-hungry China and India are rushing to build their own nuclear power plants. Larsen sees no let-up in the world demand for uranium fuel, even as his company leaves behind a large part of the business for molybdenum prospects in Colorado. U.S. Energy Corp. will keep a small royalty in the Ticaboo mill, take about 5 percent of SXR's stock and hold onto a uranium deposit in Wyoming. It also will keep a small royalty on Wyoming's Sweetwater uranium mill, on standby for years. Mining multinational Rio Tinto is selling that mill to SXR, which plans to open the Sweetwater and Ticaboo mills by 2010. In New Mexico, Strathmore Minerals Corp. is looking at opening a third mill and making use of its extensive uranium claims there. Uranium concentrate is in short supply, with world consumption of 180 million pounds outpacing annual production of 100 million pounds, according to industry and government estimates. For now, the difference is being made up by dwindling stockpiles — and the shortage is expected to get worse as new plants come online. "Bottom line, we'll probably have five new nuclear plants in the U.S. by 2015," Larsen said. "Now we're in a pinch. It's emergency time. We don't have enough energy." U.S. utilities looking at building or adding reactors are being motivated partly by the escalating cost of natural gas, and partly by fears the government may tax coal-fired plants for the carbon emissions they release into the air. Outside of the United States, the nuclear Energy Institute says 27 nuclear plants are under construction in 11 other countries, adding to the world's 442 nuclear plants. The uranium boom has met only tepid resistance here from the environmental movement. The Southern Utah Wilderness says the largely worked-over uranium deposits fall outside vast areas of redrock canyons it has proposed for wilderness protection. Federal policy, meanwhile, is changing to expedite development of nuclear power. The nuclear Regulatory Commission is streamlining licensing and operating approvals for a standardized — and vastly improved — new generation of reactors. The Energy Act of 2005 offered loan guarantees, production tax credits and partial reimbursement against regulatory delays for builders of nuclear plants. Larsen, 47, recalls when the federal government dumped its uranium stocks on the market, depressing the price of uranium yellowcake in the early 1980s. Even though the price has rebounded to $52, Larsen said it can move a lot higher. By his measure, the price can double again and still make uranium as economical as coal for producing electricity. "Our nation needs nuclear power," Larsen said. "It's the cleanest, the cheapest and it's advanced so much we're not going to have another Chernobyl. Three Mile Island is still in operation, and it's one of the most efficient plants in the U.S. The new designs have vastly improved since the 1970s." © 2006 Deseret News Publishing Company ***************************************************************** 42 Las Vegas SUN: Frustrations over Yucca erupt in Congress Today: September 17, 2006 at 7:25:43 PDT By Lisa Mascaro Las Vegas Sun WASHINGTON - National security and border security continued to take center stage on Capitol Hill last week, but just outside of the limelight the debate raged over Yucca Mountain. The House and Senate held back-to-back committee hearings on nuclear energy issues, drawing more than a dozen witnesses and producing inches-thick stacks of expert testimony on the coming nuclear renaissance. With Yucca Mountain now nearly 20 years behind schedule, frustrations are mounting on Capitol Hill and in the nuclear industry to move forward with the proposed nuclear waste repository or find ways to store spent nuclear fuel at interim sites . The House committees made it clear they see little support for a vast network of interim sites nationwide, as proposed in the Senate with the backing of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. The debate is complicated by Bush's pursuit of waste recycling, a process halted in this country in the 1970s because of nuclear proliferation concerns, but now enjoying support . But Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico believes that recycling holds the key to the problem in part because the waste could be reused and made less toxic before it is buried in Yucca Mountain, expanding the repository's capacity. "Spent fuel rods aren't going to Yucca Mountain," Domenici said following a hearing of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittee. "Everybody knows that ." With just weeks left in the session, and competing bills making their way through Congress, observers are doubtful of a new nuclear-waste policy emerging this year. • • • All contents copyright 2005 Las Vegas SUN, Inc. ***************************************************************** 43 reviewjournal.com: EDITORIAL: Frank talk on Yucca Mountain Sep. 16, 2006 Quality plagued project just a PR ploy to advance the nuclear power industry On Tuesday, the new director of the Yucca Mountain Project told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that he's in charge of a troubled operation. Yucca Mountain suffers from "a quality problem in terms of the culture and people and how they view their responsibilities for quality," said Ward Sproat. "The organization has not developed in my opinion in a way that allows it today to be an appropriate and adequate licensee to advance and operate Yucca Mountain. ... It is time to get this program up to today's standards." Considering that the Department of Energy hopes to ask the NRC in a little less than two years for its license to run the nuclear waste repository -- located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas -- it's obvious Mr. Sproat has a tall order in front of him. Nevertheless, Mr. Sproat's candidness is certainly appreciated. As is the frank talk from nuclear industry chief Admiral Frank "Skip" Bowman. Just a day after Mr. Sproat's comments, Mr. Bowman -- president of the Nuclear Energy Institute -- told Congress that the multibillion-dollar Yucca Mountain Project is essentially just a giant public relations operation. "There's absolutely no technical reason, no reason for health and safety, to change what we are doing now" with nuclear waste -- which is stored on-site at commercial reactors -- Mr. Bowman said. "But there is a big reason that goes to the public perception of confidence in where we are going, whether we have a plan, and that is what we are hearing." So, to sum up the comments from Mr. Sproat and Mr. Bowman: We have a massive government project plagued by quality problems whose primary purpose is to spin the American public into accepting the need for more nuclear power plants. Tell us again why Nevadans aren't operating in the public interest when they agitate against Yucca Mountain? Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1997 - 2006 ***************************************************************** 44 Monroenews.com: DTE chief urges feds to take nuclear plant waste Informing Monroe County, Michigan, for more than 180 years By: story updated September 16. 2006 11:57PM DTE Energy's boss urged a Congressional subcommittee Wednesday to remove as soon as possible spent atomic fuel now piling up at the nation's 103 nuclear plants. "The industry's top priority is for the federal government to meet its statutory and contractual obligation to move used fuel away from operating and decommissioned reactor sites," said Anthony Earley Jr., DTE's chairman and chief executive officer. "Further delays in federal movement of used nuclear fuel and defense waste products will only add to utility damage claims." Mr. Earley testified before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality in his role as chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. He spoke in support of House Resolution 5360, a Bush administration proposal that would facilitate management of used nuclear fuel. The highly radioactive spent fuel is being stored at various nuclear facilities until the federal government creates a central long-term storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nev. Various utilities have sued the federal government for not meeting a contractual obligation in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to take custody of the nuclear fuel by 1998. Mr. Earley also suggested that one or two central interim storage sites be created near the Yucca Mountain facility and that the capacity of the Yucca Mountain facility be increased from its planned 70,000 metric ton limit. "To realize fully the benefits that nuclear power offers, the country must resolve outstanding issues related to the ultimate disposal of used nuclear fuel," Mr. Earley told legislators. "A viable used fuel management strategy is necessary to retain long-term public confidence in operating existing nuclear power plants and in building new nuclear power plants to meet our nation's growing electricity needs, and to fuel our economic growth." DTE is studying the possibility of building a new nuclear plant at the site of its 1,130-megawatt Fermi nuclear plant near Newport. Other utility companies around the nation also are pondering new nuclear plant construction, but continued doubts about waste disposal could sidetrack those plans, he suggested. Mr. Earley told the subcommittee that other legislation proposing that fuel now stored in water-filled spent-fuel pools at nuclear plants be moved immediately to storage in casks at each site wasn't a good idea and could cost the industry and its customers $800 million over five years. Some utilities already have opted for cask storage because their fuel pools have reached capacity. At the Fermi plant, 746 tons of spent fuel have accumulated in the plant's fuel pool. But the utility is studying the option of cask storage when the pool reaches capacity, which could be in 2010. September 17, 2006 [ /] ***************************************************************** 45 Independent: US giant Fluor makes last-ditch bid for £5bn clean-up contract By Tim Webb Published: 17 September 2006 Fluor, the US engineering giant, has mounted a last-ditch action to persuade the Government to allow it to buy the clean-up company British Nuclear Group (BNG). Fluor executives are arguing that their acquisition of the state-owned firm, which runs the Sellafield site, would be the best way to safeguard the jobs of its 12,000-strong UK workforce. They also promise to maintain BNG as a British entity. UK-based executives from Fluor met officials from the Department of Trade and Industry last week to press their case. The company has also been seeking a meeting with Geoffrey Norris, No 10's senior policy adviser. The Government rejected Fluor's £400m bid for BNG earlier this month because it wants to hold an open sale process. This decision is due to be formally approved at the end of the month. But privately, Fluor knows its chances of bringing about a government U-turn on the sale are slim. The sale of BNG has been bogged down by disagreements between its parent company, BNFL, and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which owns the Sellafield site in Cumbria. Last month, BNFL and the NDA resolved to break up BNG rather than sell it in its entirety, which had been the original plan. Fluor went ahead with its own takeover bid for the company anyway. BNG holds the current contracts to operate and decommission the Sellafield site and the Magnox reactor sites, dotted around the country. Whoever buys BNG will be in prime position to win the new five-year Sellafield contract, worth £5bn. This contract, being prepared by the NDA, will carry an option to be extended by a further five years; this is worth another estimated £5bn. The Amicus union is also angry about how the sale of BNG has been handled and the uncertainty this has caused staff. © 2006 Independent News and Media Limited ***************************************************************** 46 Salt Lake Tribune: Keillor: Coffee, tea or TATP Article Last Updated: 09/16/2006 11:49:11 AM MDT Garrison Keillor Syndicated columnist And now you can't bring your cup of coffee on board the airplane. It's the latest new rule laid down by the nation's security wizards. Everyone knows it's ridiculous - the notion that you can toss together a few liquids and make an explosive is a fiction from late-night movies. You might as well prohibit bald men on the grounds that the evil Lex Luthor was bald and so was Blofeld, the head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. But we ditch our venti latte in the trash barrel (goodbye, four bucks) and board the flight, and there we read in the paper that aggressive CIA questioning of an al-Qaida bigwig, stripping him, turning the air conditioner to 40 degrees, blasting him with Red Hot Chili Peppers music, broke him so he ratted on Jose Padilla, a terrorist who set out to make a dirty bomb and who believed that by swinging a bucket of uranium in a circle over his head he could separate plutonium. It's like a cartoon. The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring loaded firearms aboard: guys in orange vests sitting in exit rows with deer rifles on their laps, ladies with Mr. Colt in their purses, kids with peashooters. Somebody wake up the NRA. Does the Second Amendment say ''The right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed except on commercial airliners''? Where is the right wing when you really need them? This way, if some guy in a burnoose sets up a chemistry lab in row 24 and mixes hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone in a big beaker that is packed in 15 pounds of dry ice to keep it cool, and cooks up some triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the passengers will be able, in the several hours it will take him to make the deadly explosive, to bring him under control, assuming the fumes haven't knocked Ahmed out. And they could nab the mastermind, too, the monocled guy in first class petting the white cat. It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Admiral Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland. It's an alien term, like Fatherland or Deutschland or Tomorrowland. Irving Berlin didn't write ''God Bless Our Homeland.'' You never heard John Wayne say, ''Men, we're going over that hill and we're going to kick those krauts out of there. And we're going to raise the flag of the homeland.'' ''Homeland'' was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: ''Zie homeland - ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!'' Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old U.S.A. But they couldn't call it the Department of National Security because there was one of those already, so they created this new Achtung bureau to make us take off our shoes and put the toothpaste in the checked luggage and dump the coffee. The jihadists we're afraid of are, so far as we know, young Muslim men from the Middle East, not old grandmas named Evelyn and Gladys married to soybean farmers, and not even old white guys like me, but nonetheless they pat us down for plastic explosives under our Sansabelts and have us raise our stockinged feet to be wanded for possible toe bombs. It's all to make us feel we're in a movie and it will have a happy ending. God forbid, somebody shows up at an airport somewhere in the world with an explosive tucked up in his lower colon. The Achtung people will come up with some new security procedures that will effectively kill airline travel, and then this enormous bureaucracy can turn its attention to the nation's highways. Pull over at the checkpoint, get out of the car, open the trunk, take off your shoes, put your hands on the top of the car, turn your head to the right, and cough. They can search each laptop for possible terrorist-type writing and confiscate cell phones, white powder, shoelaces, car keys, pencils, anything sharp or cylindrical or made of glass, and interrogate people randomly, putting them naked into cold rooms with ugly music played at top volume. It's all fine with me. I'm a liberal and we love ridiculous government programs that intrude on personal freedom. But where are the conservatives who used to object to this sort of thing? --- Garrison Keillor's ''A Prairie Home Companion'' can be heard Saturdays on public radio stations across the country. © Copyright 2006, The Salt Lake Tribune. ***************************************************************** 47 Boston Globe: Mistakes, costs stall nuclear waste project near Columbia River Cleanup price tag could near $100b at weapons plant By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times | September 16, 2006 RICHLAND, Wash. -- On a desert plateau 7 miles from the Columbia River, a massive federal project to clean up a Cold War-era nuclear weapons plant is deeply troubled. The effort to avoid an environmental calamity here, at the most polluted site in North America, is a priority of the Energy Department but has foundered because of engineering mistakes and runaway costs. Fifty-three million gallons of radioactive sludge, most of it the texture of ketchup, is stored in scores of underground tanks, some of which have leaked for years. The Energy Department and contractor Bechtel Corp. are trying to build a sophisticated waste treatment complex -- a small-scale industrial city -- that would transform the sludge into radioactive glass. After spending $4 billion since 1989 and getting rid of three previous contractors, the program has yet to transform a gallon of sludge. ``We have had some world-class technical issues," acknowledged John Eschenberg, the federal manager for construction. ``I have made mistakes. Bechtel has made mistakes. If I could relive the last three years, there are things I would do differently." The project is a long-distance race to empty the leaky tanks and secure the radioactive waste before it becomes a greater menace to the Columbia River. The job is likely to take decades, and the price tag could approach $100 billion. In January, the Energy Department stopped construction on the two most important parts of the project after it realized it had miscalculated the earthquake risks at the sprawling federal facility, known as the Hanford Site. In recent weeks, it put off any resumption of construction until after October 2007. At best, the plant would be finished in 2019. What remains uncertain is whether the plant's remarkably complex technology will work as planned. Shortly after construction was halted, a team of specialists delivered a sobering report that warned of a large number of other potential technical issues that could undermine the plant's operation. In addition, a long list of major safety problems has been discovered -- though these problems are fixable, construction managers say. They include the potential for explosive hydrogen gas to build up inside the plant's pipes; concerns that the steel frame had inadequate fireproofing; and the discovery of faulty welds in tanks designed to hold dangerous waste. Energy Department officials disclosed in May that the plant would probably cost $11.6 billion to build, double the estimate of only three years ago. An independent cost estimate due in coming weeks from the Army Corps of Engineers is expected to exceed $13 billion. Bechtel says it underestimated how much US expertise in nuclear engineering has atrophied. Academic specialists agree that the United States has lost much of its nuclear know-how. The history of problems at Hanford raises questions about how effectively the radioactive waste dumps left over from the Cold War can be cleaned up -- even with the best technology and with almost unlimited federal spending. Rough estimates for building and operating the plant -- then decommissioning the facility when the job is done -- range from more than $50 billion to $100 billion.[ /] © Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company. ***************************************************************** 48 [NYTr] Maguire: A Visit with Mordechai Vanunu Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 16:56:21 -0500 (CDT) X-Sender-Host-Name: chumbly.math.missouri.edu X-Spam-Class: HAM-VERY Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit Counterpunch - Sep 16, 2006 http://www.counterpunch.org/maguire09162006.html Next Year in Jerusalem A Visit with Mordechai Vanunu By MAIREAD CORRIGAN MAGUIRE On 7 September 2006, upon hearing of her unanimous appointment as the next Israeli Supreme Court President, Justice Dorit Beinisch said she would preserve "the Supreme Court's culture of values." She went on to say, "As for the talk of eroding public confidence in the court system, everyone from all walks of life comes to Court to ask for its help." She said the Supreme Court had no political agenda and protected basic values. I found these interesting comments from Justice Beinisch, who just the day before sat in the Israeli Court (together with Justices Chesine and Brunis) hearing the third appeal of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistleblower, against his restrictions. In l986, Mordechai Vanunu, acting out of conscience, revealed to the world that Israel had a nuclear weapons program. Sentenced to 18 years in prison, the first 12 years in solitary confinement in a tiny cell, and eventually was released in April 2004, having completed the entire 18 years. Upon his release, the Israeli Government imposed draconian restrictions on his freedom. He is forbidden to speak to foreigners or foreign press or to leave Israel. Each year for the past two years, on the 2lst of April, these restrictions have been renewed and Vanunu remains a virtual prisoner, living within a couple of square miles of East Jerusalem and under constant security surveillance everywhere he goes. On this, my fourth visit to support Mordechai Vanunu (whom I have nominated many times for the Nobel Peace Prize), I attended the Israeli Supreme Court hearings on Vanunu's restrictions on 6 September 2006. Vanunu's defense lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, argued that in all the interviews Mordechai gave to the international media since his release in April 2004, there were no new secrets revealed and nothing he said was endangering the security of the State. He said that the Supreme Court stated in its judgment last year, that "the no breaches of restrictions together with the 'passing of time' factor are the base in deciding the continuing or ending of the restrictions." Now after two-and-a-half years and in light of the fact that Mordechai did not breach the restrictions for eight months, Feldman argued, the Court should consider the ending of the restrictions. Mr. Feldman said that the ban on Mordechai to leave the country is a serious breach of his fundamental constitutional human rights. The attorney for the State came to the Court with four or five men, secret expert witnesses from the Secret Services and from the secret Israeli Nuclear Committee, to give the three judges a testimony behind closed doors, without Mordechai and his lawyers present, as they have done in the previous discussions in the Supreme Court. Their aim would be to convince the Court that Vanunu still has more information to reveal and he is a serious danger to the security of the State. Justice Beinisch, said that there is no need to hear these secret testimonies as their position was well accepted by the previous bench of the Court, and "it is accepted on this bench too." The attorney for the State disputed Feldman's statements, arguing that "Vanunu is still a danger to the State security; he has more unpublished information and he wanted to make it public." He also said that it is not true that Vanunu did not breach the restrictions in the past eight months and that he has material on that, but he wants it to be heard in closed doors. Mr. Feldman said only if the State has a proper order should it make it closed doors evidence. In the end, the Court asked the State to obtain the certificate for secrecy and make a new date to continue the hearing of the appeal. One thing was clear from both the State Attorney and from the Judge's statements in the Court, that with or without Vanunu breaching the restrictions, eight months or a year's time (since the previous decision of the Court) is not enough time to end restrictions. The President of the Court said that "the Court in its decision left the term 'time' undefined" and asked the State what is their position to how much longer the restrictions could continue, but there was no clear answer from the State Prosecutor as to how long was long enough! As I sat in the Israeli Court, I was surprised at one of the comments by President Beinisch to the effect that two years of restrictions do not seem too long! I thought to myself that it is, two-and-a-half years of restrictions, plus 18 years in prison (12 in solitary) and every day that goes by now, Mordechai Vanunu is a virtual prisoner, whose life is constantly in danger, being re-punished again and again (itself an action forbidden by law). How long is it going to be before it is finally long enough? Vanunu has no secrets; Israel and the world know it. His situation is now worse than a prison term, when at least he could look forward to getting out at a given time. Now he knows the Israeli government, directed by the Security Services of Israel, can keep him in Israel forever if they like, and no one outside Israeli, or inside, apart from the Israeli Supreme Court, if they really are a Court of Justice, can do anything about it! Vanunu has gone (yet again, as this is the third appeal!) to the Israeli Court to ask for its help, and the question is: Will they help give him justice NOW, and if not now, WHEN? Or must he live out the rest of his life incarcerated within Israel, a victim of secret court hearings, and security bureaucrats, and a victim of an allegedly democratic country with a sham justice system, offering no hope to Vanunu or any of its citizens who come looking for justice from their Courts of Justice. Both inside Israel and in the international community, many people wait and watch to see if President Beinisch and her two Justice colleagues will have the courage to uphold international law and basic common decency and justice and restore Mordechai Vanunu's right to his basic freedom of speech and movement. The result of this appeal will indeed give us an indication of the future strength of Israeli justice for those who go to ask for its help. We wait in hope that we may yet see JUSTICE IN JERUSALEM. [Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, is Hon. President of Peace People, Northern Ireland.] * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================ ***************************************************************** 49 Reuters: Germany proposes shared uranium enrichment facilities Sunday September 17, 11:07 PM BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany has proposed the creation of shared, U.N.-monitored uranium enrichment facilities as an alternative to individual countries acquiring their own enrichment technology, which could be misused for bomb-making. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the Handelsblatt newspaper that such facilities could be supervised by the United Nation's nuclear monitoring organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Countries such as Iran could then source fuel rods to be used in nuclear power stations from a shared enrichment facility located outside their borders and operated under strict monitoring by the U.N.'s non-proliferation watchdog. "A third-party state could make an exterritorial area available for an enrichment facility -- that would have a similar status to the U.N. in New York," Steinmeier was quoted as saying in comments from an interview released ahead of publication on Monday. "The facility could be financed by states, who would in return have the right to take delivery of atomic fuel." IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei had been informed of the suggestions this weekend, the newspaper said, adding that the legal framework already existed for the IAEA to create such "extraterritorial" facilities. Steinmeier's backing for such facilities comes on the eve of the atomic agency's 50th General Conference in Vienna. Many other countries were considering the use of nuclear energy and contemplating whether to build their own enrichment plants in order to fuel power generation, he said. "In order to prevent similar developments as in Iran in other developing countries and to reinforce the non-proliferation treaty then a multilateralisation of the means of circulating nuclear fuel is required," he said. There had to be international delivery guarantees for nuclear fuel, he said, in order to limit the need for individual countries to have their own means of production. Iran denies western accusations that its nuclear programme is a cover for acquiring nuclear weapons, saying it aims only to produce electricity. It says it has a sovereign right to run its own nuclear programme, including uranium enrichment. Germany, which has played a leading role in calling for a diplomatic solution to the Iran crisis, will take on the presidency of the European Union in the first half of 2007 and also of the Group of Eight nations. Steinmeier stressed that diplomacy was the only channel to solve the dispute over Iran's nuclear programme and that the chances of success were best before proceeds got underway against Tehran at the Security Council. Asked if there was a deadline before which the Security Council would take action, Steinmeier that there was not but the situation would not "drag on for weeks if Iran does not move." Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** 50 Sunday Herald: Rally against nuclear bomb replacement - By James Hamilton Anti-Trident campaigners, taking part in an awareness-raising peace trek, rallied in Glasgow yesterday and called on the government to bin the bomb. The Long Walk for Peace began on Thursday with anti-nuclear protesters setting off from the Faslane naval base on the Clyde. The group, including church and union leaders, is walking 85 miles to the Scottish parliament, where ministers will be asked to oppose any plans to replace the UKs Trident missiles. Activists reached Glasgow on Friday evening and held a rally involving several hundred people in the citys George Square yesterday. Speakers at the gathering included anti-war campaigner Rose Gentle, whose soldier son Gordon was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Scottish Socialist Party leader Colin Fox and SNP deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon. She called for the nuclear deterrent to be scrapped, saying there was no rational argument for spending taxpayers money on new nuclear weapons. She said: Nuclear weapons are a scar on Scotland and a threat to world peace. We should be ashamed to have them sited on our shores. Yet Scotlands First Minister has repeatedly failed to say whether he backs the replacement of the Trident nuclear missile system. Money devoted to Trident would be better spent on changing Scotland for good, she argued. At First Ministers Questions on Thursday, Jack McConnell said he had told MSPs earlier this year that the question of Trident replacement required serious debate and not a knee-jerk reaction from the Nationalists. l Powerplay: page 38 17 September 2006 © newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved ***************************************************************** 51 SF New Mexican: LANL faces possible fine of nearly $800,000 By DEBORAH BAKER | Associated Press September 16, 2006 Environment Department aims to punish lab for failing to report contamination The state Environment Department proposes to fine Los Alamos National Laboratory nearly $800,000 for failing to report chromium contamination in a groundwater monitoring well in 2004 and 2005. According to the department, the lab ignored requirements that such contamination be reported promptly. The state agency Friday issued a notice of violation to the lab proposing a penalty of $795,620 and offered to enter into settlement discussions. New Mexicos groundwater is the source of drinking water for the vast majority of our citizens and the amount of this penalty reflects this importance, Environment Secretary Ron Curry said in a statement. Settlement talks, which could result in a lower-than-proposed fine, would include a discussion of cleanup, said Marissa Stone, a department spokeswoman. The well, in Mortandad Canyon, monitors the aquifer that residents of Los Alamos and White Rock rely on for drinking water, the department said. Drinking water supplies for communities are regularly scrutinized, and didnt show chromium levels above state standards. LANL spokesman Jeff Berger said the lab began last year to improve its communications with, and responsiveness to, the Environment Department. The labs new management team, Los Alamos National Security, includes the University of California the previous operator and Bechtel Corp., BWX Technologies Inc. and Washington Group International. We take very, very seriously our obligation to inform the department and ... the public about environmental issues and how were addressing them, Berger said. He said the lab is trying to determine the extent of chromium contamination and within a month should have in place a so-called sentry well that would alert officials whether the chromium plume was approaching the water supply. Its the second alleged violation by LANL of an environmental cleanup consent order that took effect in March 2005, the department said. The agency on July 12 contended the lab and the U.S. Department of Energy had disposed of potentially hazardous waste at the municipal landfill in Los Alamos in November 2005 and recommended a penalty of nearly $89,000. That case is still in negotiations, Stone said. Fridays notice of violation stemmed from four groundwater samples taken from the Mortandad Canyon well in January 2004 and in May, September and November 2005. They detected toxic hexavalent chromium which is known to cause cancer and liver and kidney damage at four times the drinking water standard and eight times the state groundwater quality standard, according to the department. LANL didnt report the findings until late 2005, although the March 2005 order required notice in writing within 15 days, the department said. ©2006, Santa Fe New Mexican, all rights reserved. Opinions ***************************************************************** 52 KnoxNews: Practice helps emergency responders get terror-ready Teams from six states gather to test skills in simulated radiological incidents By FRANK MUNGER, munger@knews.com September 15, 2006 CLINTON - Perfect isn't possible when dealing with nuclear terror. But practice surely helps. Emergency responders from six states gathered here this week to prepare for the worst, and Thursday they tested their skills in a series of simulated radiological incidents. The field exercise at the National Guard Armory was dubbed "Atomic Junction." "One of the best things you can do is stay really calm," said Maj. David Smith, commander of the Tennessee National Guard's 45th Civil Support Team, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Smith was watching teams traverse a field with hand-held Geiger counters to evaluate the extent of contamination from a radiological dispersal device - a so-called dirty bomb. Low-level sources of cesium-137 were distributed in the field to allow the team to track down the radioactivity. In a real-life event, it's critical that responders gather accurate information about the problem and react appropriately to minimize the health problems and avoid public panic, Smith said. "Communication is power," he said. At other locations near the armory, teams were helping decontaminate victims exposed to radioactive materials and responding to an accident in which a vehicle releases its radioactive cargo. Steve Johnson of the U.S. Department of Energy's Radiological Assistance Program said the exercise is important because it fosters cooperation among response teams from state, federal and local agencies - military and civilian - and familiarizes participants with equipment that would be used in a nuclear emergency. The exercise was co-sponsored by DOE, the Tennessee National Guard and the state of Tennessee. Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329. © 2006 - Knoxville News Sentinel ***************************************************************** 53 Hanford News: Hanford vit plant hits work milestone This story was published Friday, September 15th, 2006 By Annette Cary, Herald staff writer Bechtel National has reached a construction milestone on the $12.2 billion vitrification plant at Hanford, finishing the pouring of the last foundation for the plant's main buildings. The most recent work was completing the final 155-cubic yard concrete placement for the Analytical Laboratory's steel-laced foundation. Foundation work had already been completed on the other buildings that will handle radioactive waste at the Waste Treatment Plant - the High Level Waste Facility, the Low Activity Waste Facility and the Pretreatment Facility. The Analytical Laboratory is the smallest of those buildings, but still has a footprint the size of a football field and will stand four stories high. Construction crews placed nearly 13,000 cubic yards of concrete, enough to fill 1,300 concrete trucks, for the five-foot thick foundation and its underground infrastructure. The laboratory will collect nearly 10,000 waste samples each year it operates to come up with the correct "recipe" for each batch of glass made. The vitrification plant is being built to turn much of 53 million gallons of radioactive waste into a stable glass form for disposal. The waste, now held in underground tanks, is left from the past production of plutonium at the Hanford nuclear reservation for the nation's nuclear weapons program. Once the best glass recipe for each batch is identified, glass formers and the waste will be fed into the High Level Waste and Low Activity Waste facilities to produce glass expected to isolate the waste from the environment for thousands of years. "We began work on the laboratory nearly two years ago and have made good progress," Bill Elkins, project director for Bechtel National, said in a statement. "We anticipate erecting structural steel later this fall." Engineering, procurement and construction on the Analytical Laboratory is 29 percent complete, according to the Department of Energy. Work is 57 percent complete at the Low Activity Waste Facility, 37 percent complete at the High Level Waste Facility and 36 percent complete at the Pretreatment Facility. Construction work is on hold on the Pretreatment and High Level Waste Facility while some issues are resolved. Those include completing a new earthquake study for the plant site and resolving some other technical issues. Design work continues, however, and construction is planned to resume in about a year. Besides working on construction of the Analytical Laboratory, Bechtel National also is continuing construction on the Low Activity Waste Facility and dozens of support buildings and underground infrastructure. © 2006 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. ***************************************************************** NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: *****************************************************************