Iran
Progress was made in Iran's dilution of its uranium. Reuters reported on October 20: Iran is taking further action to comply with an interim nuclear agreement with six world powers, a monthly U.N. atomic agency report showed, a finding the West may see as positive ahead of a November deadline for clinching a long-term deal. The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)...made clear that Iran is meeting its commitments under the temporary deal, as it and major powers seek to negotiate a final settlement of a decade-old nuclear dispute. It said Iran had diluted more than 4,100 kg of uranium enriched to a fissile concentration of up to 2 percent down to the level of natural uranium.
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| From BBC News website |
Gareth Porter, in an October 22 Truthout article, lays out the story of the deception behind the Western claim that Iran was "stonewalling" investigations into alleged past nuclear weapons research. The accusation...has been a familiar theme in mainstream media coverage of Iran's relations with the IAEA for years. What remains virtually unknown, however, is how a brazen deception by the George W. Bush administration and a key official within the IAEA created the false narrative of Iranian refusal to cooperate with the IAEA and was used to justify harsh international sanctions. Based on conversations with former IAEA officials, Wikileaks documents, and the public record, Porter describes the background. His article includes the smear campaign against the agency's director Mohamed ElBaredei - who had cleared Iran of six issues of concern in spite of the West's pressure -and the misleading report of meetings between the IAEA's Olli Heinonen and Iranian officials. In one of those meetings, Heinonen asked Iran's Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, whether various names of people, organizations and addresses found in the documents were correct. Soltanieh confirmed that the people, organizations and addresses did exist, but added, "So what?"....The language in the [IAEA May 2008 report from those meetings] was carefully chosen to mislead the reader without technically telling an outright lie. The report said Iran "did not dispute that some of the information contained in the documents was factually accurate, but said the events and activities concerned involved civil or conventional military applications." ...Iran, in a letter to the IAEA secretariat a few months later, denied that [they] had ever acknowledged the accuracy of anything in the intelligence documents except for those incidental details. The misleading report formed the basis of the allegations that continue to this day.
The window of opportunity that would bring the Iran "in from the cold" may be closing. The US Congressional elections are in a couple of weeks and pressure from the hardliners in the Israel lobby to keep Iran isolated will probably ratchet up. Netanyahu has already started the rumblings with his anti-Iran comments at the UN in September. Writing in The Guardian. Christopher de Ballaigue notes that Netanyahu's comments may reflect a fear that a rehabilitated Islamic Republic could dislodge Israel from western affections – a process already well advanced by the widespread killing of Palestinian civilians during the recent violence in Gaza. De Ballaigue stresses the importance of closing the nuclear deal - perhaps the best hope of restoring stability to the Middle East. A deal that offers Iran a nuclear power industry not exceeding its needs and ambitions, and the rest of the world reassurance through intrusive inspections, would do more than bring Iran in from the cold. It would inaugurate a new relationship between the Islamic Republic and the west that could keep together a region that is, in every other particular, coming apart. [The Guardian, October 2]
Climate Change
With an eye on the global climate conference in Paris in 2015, the EU agreed on goals for greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency and renewable energy. The Guardian reported on October 23: European leaders have struck a broad climate change pact obliging the EU as a whole to cut greenhouse gases by at least 40% by 2030. But key aspects of the deal that will form a bargaining position for global climate talks in Paris next year were left vague or voluntary, raising questions as to how the aims would be realised. As well as the greenhouse gas, two 27% targets were agreed – for renewable energy market share and increase in energy efficiency improvement. Informed Comment carried a post on solar energy good news stories. Morocco, India, Tanzania, and Mexico all have programs to increase the use of solar energy. Solar will likely be the world’s largest source of electricity by 2050, when some 26% of world energy will come from solar panels.
Related Link
Spotlight on Green News and Views [Daily Kos, Oct. 23]
Voter Suppression
With an eye on the global climate conference in Paris in 2015, the EU agreed on goals for greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency and renewable energy. The Guardian reported on October 23: European leaders have struck a broad climate change pact obliging the EU as a whole to cut greenhouse gases by at least 40% by 2030. But key aspects of the deal that will form a bargaining position for global climate talks in Paris next year were left vague or voluntary, raising questions as to how the aims would be realised. As well as the greenhouse gas, two 27% targets were agreed – for renewable energy market share and increase in energy efficiency improvement. Informed Comment carried a post on solar energy good news stories. Morocco, India, Tanzania, and Mexico all have programs to increase the use of solar energy. Solar will likely be the world’s largest source of electricity by 2050, when some 26% of world energy will come from solar panels.
Related Link
Spotlight on Green News and Views [Daily Kos, Oct. 23]
Voter Suppression
With Republicans on the verge of taking over the US Senate in November, every vote that might prevent that disaster is important. Here's some of the past week's news on the status of voter suppression in two "solid red" states in the midst of a demographic shift.
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| Poll tax sign- Mineola Texas, 1939 - Appeared in Mother Jones article |
Overturning a Federal trial court's earlier decision, the Supreme Court upheld without comment the Texas Voter ID Law, one of the worst in the nation. The majority decision was unsigned but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg along with Justices Kagan and Sotomayor authored a blistering dissent. Salon.com carried an Alternet article on Ginsburg's dissent. “Texas did not begin to demonstrate that the Bill’s discriminatory features were necessary to prevent fraud or to increase public confidence in the electoral process,” Ginsburg wrote in her dissent. The article summarizes the key points of Ginsburg's dissent, among them: hundreds of thousands of Texans will have a hard time getting the required ID and "On an extensive factual record developed in the course of a nine-day trial, the District Court found Senate Bill 14 [the voter ID law] irreconcilable with Section 2 of the [federal] Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it was enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose and would yield a prohibited discriminatory result.” The law could potentially disenfranchise 600,000 Texas voters. [Salon.com, Oct. 21] The law falls in line with Texas' long history of discriminatory voting practices. Mother Jones presents a look at that history, based on expert testimony by Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of history at Clemson University, and Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in an October 21 article. [Mother Jones, Oct. 21]
In Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State is delaying approval of tens of thousands of minority applications secured by by the New Georgia Project on the grounds that fraud was involved. There is little evidence of any such thing. Republican candidates are hyping voter fraud fears and the reason is fairly obvious. Republican concerns about large numbers of black voters turning out this year have already roiled politics in the Peachtree State. One GOP state lawmaker said he opposed opening a new early voting location because it was in a heavily minority area. Georgia, which has seen big demographic shifts over the last decade, has nearly 900,000 unregistered minority voters. Mitt Romney’s 2012 margin of victory over President Obama in the state was just 305,000 votes. Michelle Nunn, the Democratic candidate in the U.S. Senate race, is counting on a big minority turnout to propel her to an upset victory. [MSNBC, Oct. 21] NGP has introduced a lawsuit against 5 counties and has settled with one of them (De Kalb), The lawsuit is proceeding against the other 4 counties. Daily Kos reports: Earlier this month, NGP complained that the registrations in five counties—all of them surrounding large Democratic strongholds in Atlanta, Columbus and Savannah—had not processed some 40,000 of these registrations. Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp said the claim is wrong....Since most of those 40,000 people are likely to be Democrats, the consequences could have a major impact on the election, including the outcome in the tight open-seat Senate contest between Democrat Michelle Nunn and Republican David Perdue. Given the potential for disenfranchisement, the NGP, together with the NAACP, filed suit against Kemp and the county election boards. [Daily Kos, Oct. 24]
Related Links
The Palestinian Territory of the West Bank and Gaza has been under Israeli military occupation for more than 47 years. The Gaza Strip has been crippled by a land, sea, and air blockade for 7 years. This summer Gaza endured an Israeli assault that left the enclave devastated and more than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead. Even before the brutal Israeli siege, Gaza was deemed to become unlivable by 2020, and 80% of its people were receiving humanitarian aid of some type. The Palestinian Authority laid out its plans to achieve statehood in an address to the United Nations in September - going to the Security Council for a resolution to end the Israeli Occupation by a definitive date and, failing that (for example, because of a US veto), to join the International Criminal Court. Here are links to some stories relevant to Palestinian statehood and the Gaza War of 2014 that have developed since Abbas' speech at the UN.
October 3: Sweden announces its intention to recognise state of Palestine [Reuters, Oct. 3]
October 12: Donor conference co-hosted by Egypt and Norway raises 5.4 billion US dollars for rebuilding Gaza.[Al Jazeera, Oct. 12]
October 14: British parliament votes 274-12 in favor of recognizing Palestine [YNetNews, Oct. 14]
October 21: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced he was setting up an investigation into the attacks on United Nations facilities [Daily Mail, Oct. 21]
October 22: Democracy Now! interview with Noam Chomsky after his speech at the UN [Democracy Now!, Oct. 22]
October 23: Complicated mechanisms and restrictive measures risk prolonging the Gaza rebuilding effort [Al Jazeera, Oct. 23]
October 24: Irish upper house backs Palestinian state [Haaretz, Oct. 24]
October 24: Croatian Foreign Minister: "Croatia is likely to recognize Palestine as an independent state" [Daily Sabah, Oct. 24]
