Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13

U.S. Diplomat: Israel is Right to be Concerned About Time Running Out on Nuclear Iran
May 27th, 2012
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

In an unusual briefing to reporters in Tel Aviv, Saturday, May 26, the unnamed US official, described as having intimate knowledge of the Baghdad talks, said: Israel’s concerns are justified and “we are doubtful it is possible to reach an agreement with Iran, but we must exhaust the diplomatic path because the alternative, whether a nuclear Iran or a regional war, is very serious.” DEBKAfile: This was a paraphrase of the contention by Israeli officials that an attack is preferable to a nuclear Iran. The official went on to say that the US would continue to pressure Iran with sanctions until it ceased enriching uranium.
These comments were the US answer to DEBKAfile's disclosures Friday, May 25, that President Obama had rejected Israel’s demands of Iran and, the next day, that Israeli leaders’ refused to meet the senior US delegate to the Baghdad talks, State’s Wendy Sherman.

The Al Houla Atrocity: the Outcome of Nuclear Diplomacy With Iran
May 27th, 2012
Daily Newsdebkafile
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

The wanton slaughter by Syrian forces of 92 confirmed victims, 32 of them children under ten, at the Homs village of Al-Houla Friday, May 25, was the most horrifying atrocity in the Middle East this week, but not the only one: In Sanaa, six days ago, al Qaeda’s suicide bombers, having penetrated Yemeni military ranks, detonated two tons of explosives at a parade rehearsal killing more than 100 soldiers and civilians and injuring 400.
Yet, according to the New York Times, after 15 months of bloodshed, President Barack Obama is working on the Yemenbi model for a plan to push Bashar Assad out of office, while “leaving remnants of his government in place. The Yemeni model replaced President Ali Abdullah in Sanaa with his vice president Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Whereas US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned Assad and his “cronies” for the al-Houla massacre, the “Yemen plan” would leave in place those very “cronies,” including Assad’s close relatives, who are responsible for massacres not only in al-Houla, but also in Homs, Hama, Idlib and Deraa, to name a few.
According to the NYT, when Obama tested the idea with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev at the Group-of-8 summit in Camp David last Saturday, May 19, the Russian prime minister raised the example of “Mubarak in a cage,” referring to Mubarak’s court appearance at his trial. Obama then “countered with Yemen, and the indication was, yes, this was something we could talk about.”
This scrap of dialogue lifted the veil from a key aspect of Obama’s broader Middle East program and the role he has assigned Moscow for carrying it through. This role was first revealed exclusively by DEBKA-Net-Weekly 542 of May 25 which reported that the US president is acting to bring the Russians into a partnership for securing deals on the Iranian nuclear program and the Syrian crisis.
So far, his venture has had two results:

1. The Iranian nuclear impasse and the outcome of the Syrian civil war have been more tightly integrated than ever before.
2. Any deal reached by the US, Russia and Iran on the two issues would have to entail a carving-up of Middle East influence among those three powers.
As for Israel’s role in the ongoing bargaining, we also disclosed in debkafile of May 19 that Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak had agreed to stand back for Barack Obama to put his interim deal with Iran to the test. Despite their reservations, they decided to go along with it after receiving assurances from the White House that Iranian violations would result in the immediate termination of negotiations and bring military action forward as the sole remaining option for stopping a nuclear Iran.

The US president promised to put his accord with Israel before the G-8 summit. And he did.
But for now there is no deal although Israel, in effect, gave Obama six months’ grace to explore his diplomatic initiative with Vladimir Putin and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei before turning back to the military option.
But as the days pass, major hurdles are piling up in the path of what some observers hail as Obama’s “Grand Bargain,” and others his “Grand Failure:” The Six-power talks with Iran have failed to persuade the ayatollahs to give up uranium enrichment up to weapons-grade; the world wants actions not words to halt the brutal massacres in Syria; rising bloodshed in Yemen continues to cripple the country. Obama’s hopes of a crisis-free six months for electioneering in peace look more and more like pipe-dreams.
The bargaining with Tehran is likely to stay stalled because Iran’s leaders take Obama’s deal with Israel as a six-month respite from a military threat. So why should they hurry in May or even June to reach a compromise with America on its demand to stop 20 percent uranium enrichment?
Bashar Assad and his army chiefs likewise feel US hands are tied by Obama's hopes of a breakthrough with Iran and they can safely carry on with their “unspeakable crimes” for the next six months under the Iranian-Russian umbrella. Words however strong will not discourage him from sending tanks to crush every last opponent and their children.

And Israel, seeing the US president lurching from one bargaining position to another to keep his initiative afloat, shifts uncertainly in and out of its unwritten commitment to withhold military action against Iran until November.

None of the parties involved in granting Obama his six-month grace period, whether Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei, Binyamin Netanyahu or Bashar Assad, can be sure that he will in fact be returned to the Whie House in November. And even if he is, how much will be left of his Grand Bargain.

Spent Fuel Rods Drive Growing Fear Over Plant in Japan
May 27th, 2012
Daily NewsNew York Times Online,
Categories: Today's Headlines;Warning

TOKYO — What passes for normal at the Fukushima Daiichi plant today would have caused shudders among even the most sanguine of experts before an earthquake and tsunami set off the world’s second most serious nuclear crisis after Chernobyl.

Fourteen months after the accident, a pool brimming with used fuel rods and filled with vast quantities of radioactive cesium still sits on the top floor of a heavily damaged reactor building, covered only with plastic.

The public’s fears about the pool have grown in recent months as some scientists have warned that it has the most potential for setting off a new catastrophe, now that the three nuclear reactors that suffered meltdowns are in a more stable state, and as frequent quakes continue to rattle the region.

The worries picked up new traction in recent days after the operator of the plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, said it had found a slight bulge in one of the walls of the reactor building, stoking fears over the building’s safety.

To try to quell such worries, the government sent the environment and nuclear minister to the plant on Saturday, where he climbed a makeshift staircase in protective garb to look at the structure supporting the pool, which he said appeared sound. The minister, Goshi Hosono, added that although the government accepted Tepco’s assurances that reinforcement work had shored up the building, it ordered the company to conduct further studies because of the bulge.

Some outside experts have also worked to allay fears, saying that the fuel in the pool is now so old that it cannot generate enough heat to start the kind of accident that would allow radioactive material to escape.

But many Japanese scoff at those assurances and point out that even if the building is strong enough, which they question, the jury-rigged cooling system for the pool has already malfunctioned several times, including a 24-hour failure in April. Had the outages continued, they would have left the rods at risk of dangerous overheating. Government critics are especially concerned, since Tepco has said the soonest it could begin emptying the pool is late 2013, dashing hopes for earlier action.

“The No. 4 reactor is visibly damaged and in a fragile state, down to the floor that holds the spent fuel pool,” said Hiroaki Koide, an assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute and one of the experts raising concerns. “Any radioactive release could be huge and go directly into the environment.”

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, expressed similar concerns during a trip to Japan last month.

The fears over the pool at Reactor No. 4 are helping to undermine assurances by Tepco and the Japanese government that the Fukushima plant has been stabilized, and are highlighting how complicated the cleanup of the site, expected to take decades, will be. The concerns are also raising questions about whether Japan’s all-out effort to convince its citizens that nuclear power is safe kept the authorities from exploring other — and some say safer — options for storing used fuel rods.

“It was taboo to raise questions about the spent fuel that was piling up,” said Hideo Kimura, who worked as a nuclear fuel engineer at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in the 1990s. “But it was clear that there was nowhere for the spent fuel to go.”

The worst-case situations for Reactor No. 4 would be for the pool to run dry if there is another problem with the cooling system and the rods catch fire, releasing enormous amounts of radioactive material, or for fission to restart if the metal panels that separate the rods are knocked over in a quake. That would be especially bad because the pool, unlike reactors, lacks containment vessels to hold in radioactive materials. (Even the roof that used to exist would be no match if the rods caught fire, for instance.)

Let the Headlines Speak
May 27th, 2012
Daily NewsFrom the Internet
Categories: Today's Headlines;Contemporary Issues

Clinton condemns Syria massacre: Assad's 'rule by murder' must end
The perpetrators of a massacre that left more than 92 dead – including 32 young children – in Houla, Syria “must be identified and held to account," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday. The United Nations said the victims died in what activists described as an artillery barrage by government forces in the worst violence since the start of a peace plan to slow the flow of blood in Syria's uprising.

Iran not ready for visit to suspect nuclear site
The U.N. nuclear watchdog has not yet given good enough reasons to visit an Iranian site where it suspects there may have been experiments for developing nuclear weapons, Iranian media said.

Egypt election: Hamdin Sabbahi seeks recount
The candidate who is said to have come third - missing out on a run-off - in Egypt's historic election has demanded a recount, citing many "violations". Hamdin Sabbahi, from the leftist al-Karamah party, said conscripts had voted illegally. Mr Sabbahi missed out on the second round by 700,000 votes, according to unofficial results from state media.

House to Examine Plan for United Nations to Regulate the Internet
May 27th, 2012
Daily NewsThe House
Categories: Today's Headlines;World Government

House lawmakers will consider an international proposal next week to give the United Nations more control over the Internet.

The proposal is backed by China, Russia, Brazil, India and other UN members, and would give the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) more control over the governance of the Internet.

It’s an unpopular idea with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress, and officials with the Obama administration have also criticized it.

“We're quite concerned,” Larry Strickling, the head of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said in an interview with The Hill earlier this year.

He said the measure would expose the Internet to “top-down regulation where it's really the governments that are at the table, but the rest of the stakeholders aren't.”

At a hearing earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also criticized the proposal. He said China and Russia are "not exactly bastions of Internet freedom."

"Any place that bans certain terms from search should not be a leader in international Internet regulatory frameworks," he said, adding that he will keep a close eye on the process.

Yet the proposal could come up for a vote at a UN conference in Dubai in December.

Faith Leaders Vow to Fight Threats to Religious Liberties in Public Sphere
May 27th, 2012
Daily NewsFox News - Lauren Green
Categories: Today's Headlines;Warning

Leaders from a variety of faith backgrounds, politicians and educators met Thursday in Washington, D.C., for the National Religious Freedom Conference: Rising Threats to Religious Freedom, an event that organizers say is part of a battle against the trampling of religious liberties in the public sphere.

"This debate is not just about contraceptives, but about coercion. It's not about Catholics it's about conscience," Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention said during one of the panel discussions. He went on to say, "it's about principle, not pelvic politics."

Former Utah Gov. Michael Levitt, also a former Health and Human Services secretary, said of the conference, "This is the uniting of the faith community to declare that we're going to fight back to defend religious freedom."

The conference outlined three major threats to religious freedom: The first is the government mandate that religious institutions, such as hospitals and universities, act contrary to their conscience by offering birth control coverage to their employees. The second is what religious leaders say is a threat to the autonomy of religious organizations to choose their own leaders.

The third issue, a key one, is religious principles in in everyday life, like pharmacists who object for moral reasons to carrying what believers equate to abortion-causing drugs or religious student groups being marginalized on school campuses. One example of the latter is the fight at Vanderbilt University over its non-discrimination policy, requiring student religious groups be open to anyone, even those who don't hold to their beliefs.

Conference participants see a prejudice that affects all religions.

"We need to find a way to bridge not only the faith divide but also the political divide to try to find a way where everybody can enjoy religious liberty," Nathan Diament, director of public policy for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, said. "It doesn't have to be a zero sum game. Some people's rights do not have to come at the expense of other peoples rights. We can find a way to make it a win-win situation for everybody."

The conference comes in the wake of a federal lawsuit filed by more than 40 Catholic institutions over the health care law that mandates the church offer institutional employees contraceptive coverage and other benefits that go against Catholic teaching. Churches already are exempt from the mandate.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan said the church is pushing forward, looking at all options.

"We are not going to give up dialogue with them. Who knows, maybe the lawsuits will make some progress, but so far we haven't seen any mitigation. Mitigation that the administration offered us back in February didn't help us much, because we are self-insured and it didn't touch those straight-jacketing exemptions."

As a way of moving forward, the conference announced plans to create religious freedom caucuses in every state, an effort designed to bridge the gap between politics and religion.