Susan Smallheer | Vernon, VT | February 9

The Rutland Herald - The Department of Health said late Monday there appears to be "a very large area" at the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor contaminated with radioactive tritium, and contamination levels continue to rise.

Because the area is so big, according to William Irwin, radiological health chief, there are many potential sources of radioactive water at this particularly high concentration of tritium.

Geeta Pandey | Delhi | February 9

BBC - India has deferred the commercial cultivation of what would have been its first genetically modified (GM) vegetable crop due to safety concerns.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said more studies were needed to ensure genetically modified aubergines were safe for consumers and the environment.

David Jolly | Paris | February 9

NYT - Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank president, is returning early from a conference in Australia to take part in a summit meeting of European leaders this week, amid speculation over possible action to ease the debt crisis several countries are facing.

The E.C.B. president often participates in such summit meetings, which bring together the leaders of the 27 E.U. member states and the head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso. But this one is being held at an especially difficult time for the 16-country euro currency.

Investors have grown wary of the feeble public finances of a number of European countries — particularly Greece, Spain, Portugal and, to a lesser extent, Italy — raising the fear in some minds that the entire currency system could come under attack.

Edward Wong | Beijing | February 9

NYT - The sentencing of an outspoken literary editor to five years in prison for subversion showed that the Chinese government will not relent in its ongoing crackdown against critics and dissidents, supporters of the editor said Tuesday.

The editor, Tan Zuoren, was sentenced Tuesday morning by a court in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, for criticizing the Chinese Communist Party by writing and protesting recently against the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when soldiers killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians.

But Mr. Tan’s supporters said he had another black mark against him — he was assembling an independent report on the thousands of children killed when schools collapsed across Sichuan and nearby provinces during a devastating earthquake in May 2008.

BBC: China quake activist sentenced on subversion charges

Martin Fackler | Tokyo | Feb 9

NYT - They were Tokyo’s worst-kept diplomatic secrets: clandestine cold war era agreements with Washington that obligated Japan to shoulder the costs of United States bases and allow nuclear-armed American ships to sail into Japanese ports.

For decades, Japanese leaders have gone to great lengths to deny the pacts’ existence, despite mounting proof to the contrary from the testimony of former diplomats and declassified documents in the United States. The most sensational instance came in 1972, when a reporter who unearthed evidence of one of the treaties was arrested on charges of obtaining state secrets, reportedly by means of an adulterous affair.

Now, the so-called secret treaties are causing problems again, this time in how Japan is handling its suddenly rocky relationship with the United States.

The new administration in Tokyo, whose election last summer ended a half-century of nearly unbroken control by the Liberal Democrats, wants to expose the treaties as a showcase of its determination to sweep aside the nation’s secretive, bureaucrat-dominated postwar order. Last fall, the foreign minister appointed a team of scholars to scour Japanese diplomatic archives for evidence of the treaties. Its findings are due this month.

The problem is that the inquiry is coming at a delicate moment in Japan’s ties with its longtime patron, the United States. The administrations of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama of Japan and President Obama are already divided over the relocation of an American air base in Okinawa. By exposing some of the less savory aspects of Japan’s military reliance on the United States, the investigation has drawn criticism, particularly from conservatives in both nations, as an effort by the left-leaning Hatoyama government to pull away from Washington.

Feb 9

BBC - Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc has said it will contest in court the conduct of the Ukrainian presidential election she appears to have narrowly lost.

Deputy leader Elena Shustik said the bloc would contest results at some polling stations and ask for a recount, Russia's Interfax news agency reports.

Another bloc official accused Viktor Yanukovych's party of "falsification", Reuters news agency says.

However, foreign monitors have praised the conduct of the election.

With more than 99% of votes counted after Sunday's poll, Mr Yanukovych was estimated to be ahead on some 48.83% of the vote, while Mrs Tymoshenko had around 45.59%.

Ms Shustik was quoted as saying that the bloc would "challenge the results at certain polling-stations and seek a recount".

The bloc had not yet decided, she added, whether it would pursue a third round of voting.

In Ukraine's parliament, bloc member Serhiy Sobolev told MPs: "Voting day displayed a cynical violation of Ukrainian law by the teams of Yanukovych, pressure on the electors and a broad arsenal of falsification by the Regions Party [of Viktor Yanukovych].

"Consequently, the Tymoshenko bloc announces that we will defend in the courts our right, and the rights of our citizens, to honest and transparent elections."

Bill Tremblay | Trenton | Feb 9

Northumberland news - The military community is in shock following the arrest of 8 Wing Trenton Commander Colonel Russ Williams.

Col. Williams, 46, has been charged with the first-degree murders of Brighton resident Marie Comeau and Belleville resident Jessica Lloyd. He also faces two counts of forcible confinement, two counts of break and enter and two counts of sexual assault in connection with two home invasions in the Tweed area last September.

** 'In the company of the devil': Victim

Amal Jayasinghe | Colombo | Feb 9

AFP - Sri Lanka's former army chief and defeated presidential candidate Sarath Fonseka is to be court-martialled, officials said Tuesday, a day after he was hauled away from his office by armed troops.

Hours before his dramatic arrest, Fonseka told reporters that he was willing to face any international probe into alleged war crimes committed by Sri Lankan troops in last year's final stages of conflict with Tamil Tiger rebels.

Fonseka has been moved to an undisclosed military establishment ahead of disciplinary proceedings, a military official said.

"He will face a court martial even though he is not a serving officer," said the official, who declined to be named. "Military law applies up to six months from the date of retirement of any officer."

Fonseka, 59, the only four-star general in the army, quit in November after falling out with his commander-in-chief, President Mahinda Rajapakse.

In a brief statement posted on its website, the defence ministry said Fonseka would be charged with "certain fraudulent acts and other military offences".

Just prior to his arrest, Fonseka had said: "I am not prepared to protect anyone, if they have committed war crimes."

The government has resisted international calls for an investigation amid charges that a senior defence official ordered the killing of surrendering rebel leaders.

The United Nations says 7,000 civilians died during the final stages of fighting.

Mohammed A. Salih | Washington, DC | February 8

IPS - If there were any doubts about what exactly U.S. President Barack Obama meant when he warned Iran of "growing consequences" during his State of the Union address last month, they seem to be dispelled by recent statements from top administration officials, who are beating the sanctions drum loud and clear...

Talk of sanctions does not hurt in Washington and to a lesser degree in Western European capitals, where many are weary of what they see as Iran's mind games and perceived intransigence. In fact, as Mehrzad Boroujerdi, an Iran expert at New York's Syracuse University, says, it has become "a popular sport in Washington" to bash Iran...

In fact, many experts are deeply sceptical about the effectiveness of sanctions and consider them a failure in general. Although the U.S. and its allies have spoken of "smart sanctions" mostly aimed at Iran's military institutions, such as the Revolutionary Guards and its affiliate businesses, there is a lot of doubt as to whether a sanctions policy can bring an end to Iran's nuclear programme...

As a deal between Iran and the West appears far-fetched at this point, calls for regime change and use of force against Iran are on the rise. Richard Haas, head of the Council on Foreign Relations, in an article entitled "Enough is Enough" , called on Obama administration to work for regime change in Iran, a policy former President George W. Bush unsuccessfully pursued for years.

February 9

BBC - China has closed down what is believed to be the country's biggest training website for hackers, state media has reported. They say the site, Black Hawk Safety Net, gave lessons in hacking and sold downloads of malicious software.

The hacker training operation openly recruited thousands of members online and provided them with cyber attack lessons and Trojan software, the China Daily and the Wuhan Evening News said.

Black Hawk Safety Net recruited more than 12,000 paying subscribers and collected more than seven million yuan ($1m: £650,000) in membership fees, while another 170,000 people had signed up for free membership.
 

China Daily: 'Biggest hacker training site shut down'

Chad Pergram | Arlington, VA | February 8

FOXNews - Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. John Murtha, the first veteran of the Vietnam war and one of the most powerful lawmakers in Congress, died Wednesday morning at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, VA, after complications from gallbladder surgery. Murtha was 77.

A native of New Martinsville, W.Va., voters elected first elected Murtha to Congress in a 1974 special election that spelled impending doom for President Nixon and congressional Republicans. That fall, Democrats wrestled away 49 House seats from the GOP, reeling from the scourge of Watergate and a presidency in shambles.

Salynn Boyles | New York | February 7

WebMD - Study Shows Experimental Drug May Build New Bone by Decreasing Serotonin Levels in the Gut

The hormone serotonin may hold the key to new treatments for reversing osteoporosis-related bone loss, new research finds.

When investigators at Columbia University Medical Center treated mice and rats with an experimental drug that stopped the gut from synthesizing serotonin, they were able to reverse severe bone loss and essentially cure osteoporosis in the animals.

Jerusalem | February 8

AFP - Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon on Sunday denied apologising to a senior Saudi diplomat before a rare public handshake between officials of the two states.

Prince Turki al-Faisal had said he shook hands with Ayalon at a security conference in Munich, but only after the Israeli apologised for actions Turki objected to -- giving Turkey's ambassador a public dressing down.

However, Ayalon said it was not true he said sorry to Turki.

"Everyone who was present at the conference knows there was no apology from the deputy minister to the Saudi prince," said a statement from his office. more.

For background, see prior thread:
Turkey demands Israeli apology on eve of Barak visit

 

Update: Arab News:'Handshake not acquiescence to Israeli stance: Prince Turki'

Angus McDowell and Craig Whitlock | February 8

The Age - Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has called on her fellow Iranians to defy the security forces and take to the streets this week on the anniversary of the 1979 revolution. ''I believe people should take part in the demonstration,'' she said. ''They should ask for their rights, but they should do it peacefully. Obviously, the regime wants people to be violent because it gives them an excuse to crack down.''

Dr Ebadi, 62, a human rights lawyer who was awarded the peace prize in 2003, fled Iran during the turmoil after last June's disputed presidential election. She was speaking in London where she is living in exile. Dr Ebadi's family have remained in Tehran, and her husband and sister have been arrested and briefly jailed. ''I've never been contacted by the regime directly,'' she said. ''But they contacted my family and friends and said: 'Wherever she is, we can get rid of her.' ''I don't take the threat seriously. If people want to do something, they don't talk about it beforehand. Their main aim is to scare me off doing my work properly.''

The anniversary of the revolution is usually a triumphant affair for Iran's leaders, as thousands of loyalists are bussed in from across the nation to parade along the wide boulevards of Tehran. This year, however, the opposition Green Movement hopes to gatecrash the celebrations. Opposition leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi have called on their supporters to stage demonstrations in an effort to prove to the regime that it has lost popular support.

Washington DC | February 7

AFP - The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran is "real" for the United States but Al-Qaeda poses an even greater danger, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday.

"In terms of a country, obviously a nuclear-armed country like North Korea or Iran pose both a real or a potential threat," Clinton told CNN's "State of the Union", making it clear the Iranians don't yet possess an atomic weapon.

"But I think that most of us believe the greater threats are the trans-national non-state networks," she said, referring to Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Afghanistan, North Africa, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story | February 6

NYT - Billions of dollars were at stake when 21 executives of Goldman Sachs and the American International Group convened a conference call on Jan. 28, 2008, to try to resolve a rancorous dispute that had been escalating for months.

A.I.G. had long insured complex mortgage securities owned by Goldman and other firms against possible defaults. With the housing crisis deepening, A.I.G., once the world’s biggest insurer, had already paid Goldman $2 billion to cover losses the bank said it might suffer.A.I.G. executives wanted some of its money back, insisting that Goldman — like a homeowner overestimating the damages in a storm to get a bigger insurance payment — had inflated the potential losses. Goldman countered that it was owed even more, while also resisting consulting with third parties to help estimate a value for the securities.

After more than an hour of debate, the two sides on the call signed off with nothing settled.   more

Jawed Naqvi | New Delhi | February 7

DAWN -
Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, center, speaks to media in Kabul.—AP/File

NEW DELHI: India’s proposal for foreign secretary-level talks in New Delhi this month has been more or less accepted by Pakistan with the caveat that it should be a step towards a full engagement on important issues, including Kashmir and terrorism, diplomatic sources here said on Saturday.

“It would be like feeling the pulse, primarily,” a source close to Friday’s meeting between Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and Pakistan’s High Commissioner Shahid Malik said about the arriving meeting, adding that the venue was not an issue and only the timing was being tweaked, possibly for late February.

Indian reports say Ms Rao’s proposal to discuss “all outstanding issues affecting peace and security, including counter-terrorism” was made in a telephone call to her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir two weeks ago.

Even before the call Ms Rao had etched out India’s revised stance on the resumption of talks with Pakistan. In a TV interview in mid-January she stated that dialogue was “obviously the way forward for normalisation of relations and to resolve outstanding issues between the two countries”.

More

Gloria Galloway | Ottawa | Feb 3

Globe & Mail - The Conservative government will not ask for Omar Khadr to be repatriated from an American detention centre in Cuba despite a Supreme Court ruling that his rights have been violated, the Foreign Affairs Minister said Wednesday.

Un-freakin-believable

George Lekakis & Fleur Leyden | Sydney | February 6

News.com.au - The world's top central bankers began arriving in Australia yesterday as renewed fears about the strength of the global economic recovery gripped world share markets.

Representatives from 24 central banks and monetary authorities including the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank landed in Sydney to meet tomorrow at a secret location, the Herald Sun reports.

Joab Jackson | Yorktown Heights, NY | February 5

IDG News Service - Thanks to a change in recipe, IBM has created a graphene-based processor that can execute 100 billion cycles per second (100GHz), almost four times the speed of previous experimental graphene chips.

With this research, IBM has also shown that graphene-based transistors can be produced by the wafer, which could pave the way for commercial-scale production of graphene chips, said Yu–Ming Lin, the IBM researcher who led the work.

Julian Beltrame | Iqaluit, Nunavut | February 5

Toronto Star - The G7 ministers can only wish their meetings on the world’s economic mess go half as smoothly as their slide on the ice under tow by a pack of barking dogs.

A handful of ministers and central bankers, their red faces sticking out from coyote-fur lined parkas, were taken dog-sledding on frozen Frobisher Bay upon their arrival to Iqaluit Friday afternoon.

...I was very impressed with the cohesion of the dog pack. I wish we could train all our parliamentarians to be as cohesive as I saw among the dog pack today.”

Brett Michael Dykes | February 5

Yahoo! News - Sarah Palin's campaign against the derogatory usage of the word "retard" collided with her campaign to maintain her popularity with conservatives today, with confusing results.

A Palin spokeswoman seemed to back away from earlier criticism of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. Yesterday, when asked for comment on Limbaugh's use of the "r" word in a recent broadcast, Palin spokeswoman told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post, "Governor Palin believes crude and demeaning name - calling at the expense of others is disrespectful." Today, Stapleton claims the statement was meant generally and she was not specifically referring to Limbaugh. Still, she declined to say that Palin believes Limbaugh's statements were acceptable. Sargent reprinted the email he sent Stapleton in which he specifically asked about Limbaugh's statement.

John F. Burns & Alan Cowell | London | February 5

NYT - Ending months of dispute that threatened to bring down Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government, the prime ministers of Britain and Ireland on Friday hailed a breakthrough agreement to transfer the province’s police and justice system from Britain to local control on April 12.

Gathering at Hillsborough Castle near Belfast, Prime Ministers Gordon Brown of Britain and Brian Cowen of Ireland met with Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders after a late-night announcement that the main unionist party seeking continued ties to Britain had agreed to the handover — the most important and by far the most contentious of the issues still outstanding in the long-running and still fragile effort to bring peace to the six British-ruled counties of Northern Ireland.

Greg Quinn and Mark Drajem | February 5

Bloomberg - A yearlong dispute was settled between the U.S. and Canada over “Buy American” rules in the Obama administration’s stimulus package, the countries said.

The deal will allow use of Canadian products in many local U.S. projects funded by the stimulus program, the governments said in a joint statement. Canada agreed to sign up its provinces to the World Trade Organization’s government procurement agreement, which it had refused to do when the WTO was formed in 1995.

Buy American provisions approved in the $787 billion economic stimulus package a year ago mandated that all the steel and manufactured goods purchased with the funds be made in the U.S., or in countries with U.S. agreements on government procurement. Under the deal announced today, those Canadian-made goods would now qualify for purchase in stimulus projects. Products from other nations wouldn’t qualify.

Timothy R. Homan | Feb. 5yh

Bloomberg - The unemployment rate in the U.S. unexpectedly declined in January to 9.7 percent, the lowest level since August, while payrolls dropped as companies boosted worker hours and overtime instead of taking on new hires.

Employment fell by 20,000 last month, reflecting a plunge in construction jobs and a drop in state and local government hiring, figures from the Labor Department in Washington showed. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News forecast a gain. Manufacturing employment, factory hours and overtime increased.

...