The killing of terrorism suspects and insurgents by armed drones, controlled by pilots sitting in bases thousands of miles away in the western United States, has prompted criticism that the technology makes war too antiseptic. Questions also have been raised about the legality of drone strikes when employed in places such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, which are not at war with the United States. This debate will only intensify as technological advances enable what experts call lethal autonomy.
"If [the US] gives us uranium grade 20 percent, we would stop production. Those negotiations took place in Vienna. Apparently they know everything. I repeat: If you give us uranium grade 20 percent now, we will stop production."
This, in effect, is a return to Ahmadinejad's hopes for a deal in the autumn 2009 talks, where his effort to get an agreement was undermined by domestic opposition (as Weymouth astutely notes). Far from giving up the effort, this statement indicates he is determined to try once more.
President Ahmadinejad tells US NBC News that American hikers Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer to be freed in 48 hours
1250 GMT: Ahmadinejad, who is due to speak at the United Nations later this month, told The Washington Post that he was issuing a "unilateral pardon" of Fattal and Bauer, arrested in July 2009 while hiking on the Iran-Iraq border, as a "humanitarian gesture".
Masoud Shafiee, the lawyer for Bauer and Fattal, said bail for the two men had been set at $500,000 each.
Ahmadinejad had wanted to released Bauer and Fattal last September when a third American, Sarah Shourd, was freed, also on $500,000. However, the Iranian judiciary objected to the release of the two men, as well as Ahmadinejad's planned elaborate ceremony. In the end, Shourd was released with little fanfare.
Bauer and Fattal were sentenced this summer to eight years in prison. Shourd refused to return for the trial.
0950 GMT: It looks like President Ahmadinejad is using his interview with America's NBC News to make a high-profile political move in advance of his trip to the United Nations later this month.
NBC says it was told by Ahmadinejad that Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal, the US hikers detained in July 2009 and sentenced last month to eight years in prison on espionage charges will be freed in two days.
NBC posted the claim in a Twitter message. The interview will air later Tuesday on the Today show.
As the Obama administration steps up its support for regime change in Syria, the Arab Spring is moving into what could be its hottest phase. The puzzle is how to help the Syrian opposition gain power without foreign military intervention — and without triggering sectarian massacres inside the country.
For months, as protests mounted in Syria, President Obama waited to see if President Bashar al-Assad could deliver on his talk of reform. Last week, the administration all but gave up on him and switched gears — and began working actively for a transition to a democratic regime.
Attack on Intercontinental Hotel, Kabul, 28 JuneKabul, a place I once called home, has become a city of security barriers and fantasy palaces.
I can’t find my old house, my old street or the bakery where I used to watch the early-morning ritual of men slapping dough into hot ovens beneath the floor. They’ve all vanished behind a high-security superstructure of barricades and barbed wire, a foreign architecture of war. Elsewhere in the Afghan capital, a parallel construction boom is underway. The slapdash sprawl of nouveau riche development has sprouted modern apartment buildings, glass-plated shopping centers, wedding halls with fairy lights, and gaudy mansions with gold swan faucets and Greco-Roman balustrades, commissioned by wealthy men with many bodyguards and no taxable income.
Both of these facades are conspiring to cover up the past, paving over the rubble and the lessons of war, distancing ordinary people from the local elites and the bunkered foreigners alike. Most tragically, they are erasing the hope and the promise of change that burst forth in Afghanistan’s post-Taliban liberation nearly a decade ago.
Nader and SiminIn Iran, newspapers stay away from politically sensitive topics, more and more Web sites are being blocked and anti-government demonstrations have been declared illegal.
But the popular cinema is going strong, and in recent weeks, the screenings of two locally made films at theaters across the capital have become a popularity contest of sorts between supporters of the government and the grass-roots opposition movement.
A Town in the Nile DeltaOn his first political foray beyond cosmopolitan Cairo, Shady Ghazali Harb, a British-educated surgeon, hoped to find support for his effort to build a political party.
What he found instead, here [in Buzoor] in the Nile Delta, was uncertainty about the new crop of politicians emerging from Egypt’s revolution. Farmers who had gathered in a dirt yard to hear Harb speak stared blankly as the 32-year-old idealist in jeans, a purple dress shirt and Adidas sneakers spoke of his desire to set up shop “where people hang out.’’
“People don’t go to coffee shops here,” Karam el-Hadi Mohammed, 55, a merchant and farmer, told him. “They work hard and go to bed early.’’
In 2004, President George W. Bush unexpectedly lifted economic sanctions on Libya in return for its renunciation of nuclear weapons and terrorism. There was a burst of optimism among American oil executives eager to return to the Libyan oil fields they had been forced to abandon two decades earlier. Gaddafi, who had been sanctioned for Libya’s role in the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, also looked forward to U.S. help in reviving his flagging oil production.
Yet even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. He sought big bonus payments up front. Moreover, upset that he was not getting more U.S. government respect and recognition for his earlier concessions, he pressured the oil companies to influence U.S. policies.
A deadly blast during the inauguration of a major oil refinery by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad killed 2 and injured 20, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported Tuesday.
Authorities ruled out any form of sabotage and instead spoke of an industrial incident caused by a gas leak at the Abadan oil refinery, one of the largest and oldest industrial complexes in Iran.
According to Mehr, a ‘testing machine’ exploded almost directly after it was placed in the area where Ahmadinejad was preparing to give a speech.
Armed Men Trap Ambassadors in UAE Embassy, 22 May 2011As Yemen's President Saleh repeatedly backs away from a deal for transition of power and armed clashes escalate on the streets of the capital Sanaa and other cities, the US and the European Union seem to be spinning helplessly, entangled in their alliance with Saleh in the War on Terror.
Karen DeYoung reports for The Washington Post:
The Obama administration and its Arab and European allies are reassessing their military and economic support for Yemen in a desperate search for ways to force President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s resignation before civil war erupts.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 8:05
The killing of terrorism suspects and insurgents by armed drones, controlled by pilots sitting in bases thousands of miles away in the western United States, has prompted criticism that the technology makes war too antiseptic. Questions also have been raised about the legality of drone strikes when employed in places such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, which are not at war with the United States. This debate will only intensify as technological advances enable what experts call lethal autonomy.
