Tehran accuses US of seizing pilgrim nuclear scientist
Iran accused the US yesterday of abducting and incarcerating a nuclear scientist who went missing while on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia.
The statements, from the Iranian Foreign Ministry, marked the first time that Tehran has admitted that the scientist, Shahram Amiri, was involved in the country’s nuclear programme. “Iran’s nuclear scientist, who had gone to Saudi Arabia, was handed over by Riyadh to Washington,” Ramin Mehmanparast, the ministry spokesman, said.
Mr Amiri, who, Iran said yesterday, worked for the civilian Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation, disappeared on pilgrimage to Mecca in June. The timing raised speculation that he could have helped to reveal to the West the existence of a clandestine uranium enrichment facility being built beneath a mountain near the holy city of Qom.Iran told the UN about the Fordow plant in September, days before Washington publicly revealed it. According to Western intelligence sources, this was because Tehran realised that its secrecy had been compromised. Some Arabic media reports at the time said that Mr Amiri had sought asylum.
In October, Iran lodged formal complaints with Washington and the United Nations alleging a Saudi and American role in his disappearance. Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian Foreign Minister, told a press conference in Tehran yesterday that the authorities now had evidence of that.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6949544.ece
Gangster Government
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Central bank chief forecasts a sluggish recovery
The economy is likely to expand moderately in 2010, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Monday, but his guardedly optimistic assessment for growth contained no hints that the central bank is looking to raise interest rates anytime soon.
"Economic forecasts are subject to great uncertainty, but my guess is that we will continue to see modest economic growth next year," Bernanke told the Economic Club of Washington in a speech. That growth, he said, would be "sufficient to bring down the unemployment rate, but at a slower pace than we would like."
But Bernanke also laid out the factors that could limit the recovery, suggesting that he still sees plenty of risk factors threatening the economy's performance. "The economy confronts some formidable headwinds that seem likely to keep the pace of expansion moderate," he told the group of Washington-area business leaders, ticking off tight credit conditions, the weak job market and Americans' reluctance to spend money when they fear for their job security.
He also showed little concern about inflation rearing its head, either now or in the future. Answering the question of whether Fed actions will lead to higher inflation, he said point blank: "The answer is no; the Federal Reserve is committed to keeping inflation low and will be able to do so." He added that "inflation could move lower from here."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/07/AR2009120703359.html
Obama Prepared to Circumvent Congress with Emissions Regulation
The Obama administration moved closer Monday to issuing regulations on greenhouse gases, a step that would enable it to limit emissions across the economy even if Congress does not pass climate legislation.
The move, which coincided with the first day of the international climate summit in Copenhagen, seemed timed to reassure delegates there that the United States is committed to reducing its emissions even if domestic legislation remains bogged down. But it provoked condemnation from key Republicans and from U.S. business groups, which vowed to tie up any regulations in litigation.
In Monday's much-anticipated announcement, the Environmental Protection Agency said that six gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, pose a danger to the environment and the health of Americans and that the agency would start drawing up regulations to reduce those emissions.
"These are reasonable, common-sense steps," EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said, adding that they would protect the environment "without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the better part of our economy." At the same time, however, EPA regulation is no one's preferred outcome -- not even the EPA's. Jackson said her agency and other administration officials would still prefer if Congress acted before they did.
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), a leading proponent of a Senate climate bill, issued a statement after the EPA's announcement saying, "The message to Congress is crystal clear: Get moving."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/07/AR2009120701645.html
A lonely voice against the Fed now leads a chorus
Ron Paul is used to going it alone. During 20 years in Washington, the libertarian Republican congressman from Texas has proposed doing away with personal income taxes, federal antitrust laws and the minimum wage. He's advocated pulling the United States out of the United Nations, NATO and the International Monetary Fund.
Those efforts have mostly been legislative non-starters. Many of his bills fail to attract a single co-sponsor.
But one of his perennial causes is headed to the House floor Wednesday with widespread support: to audit the Federal Reserve. That measure, which he first introduced in 1983, has the backing of more than 300 legislators and last month won bipartisan approval in the House Financial Services Committee.
The proposal would subject the Fed to unprecedented scrutiny by allowing the Government Accountability Office to audit all central bank operations, including its decisions on interest rates, lending to individual banks and transactions with foreign central banks. Fed officials and many private economists have argued strenuously against the measure, saying it would threaten economic stability by undermining the central bank's independence from political pressure.
"I'd like to know who they bail out and why," said Paul, who brought together a small cult following across the political spectrum in the last presidential election. "I'd like to know how much they pay for securities that they buy. Did they overpay? Why did Goldman Sachs come out well and Lehman Brothers go bankrupt?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/07/AR2009120703908.html
Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak!!
The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.
The document also sets unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.
The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as "the circle of commitment" – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.
The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol's principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.
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Copenhagen's Hidden Agenda: The Multibillion Trade in Carbon Derivatives
As I have previously shown, speculative derivatives (especially credit default swaps) are a primary cause of the economic crisis.
And I have pointed out that (1) the giant banks will make a killing on carbon trading, (2) while the leading scientist crusading against global warming says it won't work, and (3) there is a very high probability of massive fraud and insider trading in the carbon trading markets.
Now, Bloomberg notes that the carbon trading scheme will be centered around derivatives:
The banks are preparing to do with carbon what they’ve done before: design and market derivatives contracts that will help client companies hedge their price risk over the long term. They’re also ready to sell carbon-related financial products to outside investors.
[Blythe] Masters says banks must be allowed to lead the way if a mandatory carbon-trading system is going to help save the planet at the lowest possible cost. And derivatives related to carbon must be part of the mix, she says. Derivatives are securities whose value is derived from the value of an underlying commodity -- in this case, CO2 and other greenhouse gases...
Who is Blythe Masters?
She is the JP Morgan employee who invented credit default swaps, and is now heading JPM's carbon trading efforts.
Four Ways to Fix Afghanistan Without Guns
When Clare Lockhart arrived in Kabul in January 2002, she was an optimistic twenty-eight-year-old veteran of the United Nations and the World Bank who had just played a major role in drafting the agreement that formed Afghanistan's first post-Taliban government. Then, as an advisor to the Afghan government, including finance minister Ashraf Ghani, she spent the next several years designing and implementing Afghanistan's National Development Framework, which established everything from a national police force to a nationwide cell-phone industry to a monetary system. Lockhart's guiding philosophy was that foreign governments needed to provide cash but then get out of the way, leaving most of the actual reconstruction work to Afghanis. When it came time to introduce a single Afghan currency, for instance, Lockhart advocated successfully for recruiting the country's preexisting "hawala" network — black-market currency traders — to facilitate the changeover, rather than importing an army of foreign bureaucrats.
But three years after she arrived, Lockhart's initial optimism eroded into deep frustration as she became convinced that an often counterproductive foreign-aid complex and an increasingly corrupt Afghan government were going to undo much of the good she'd accomplished. In 2005 she moved back to the West, where she cofounded with Ghani the Institute for State Effectiveness, a nonprofit that works directly with the leadership teams of teetering nations like Kosovo, Nepal, and Somalia to enact the institution-building framework Lockhart developed and tested during her time in Afghanistan.
Now, with President Obama weighing the best way forward in Afghanistan, Lockhart has been called back into service. This summer, she was asked by military officials to help reevaluate U. S. policy, and she continues to advise high-level members of the government and military, such as General David Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2009/clare-lockhart-1209#ixzz0Z0zQlmOM
The climate-change travesty
WASHINGTON POST
With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth's last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate-change meeting. Its organizers had hoped that it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone's choices.
China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate-change theater, promises only to reduce its "carbon intensity" -- carbon emissions per unit of production. So China's emissions will rise.
Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.
Disclosure of e-mails and documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Britain -- a collaborator with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- reveals some scientists' willingness to suppress or massage data and rig the peer-review process and the publication of scholarly work. The CRU materials also reveal paranoia on the part of scientists who believe that in trying to engineer "consensus" and alarm about warming, they are a brave and embattled minority.
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Barack Obama’s deadline to bring troops home from Afghanistan starts to slip
President Obama’s July 2011 date to begin pulling troops out of Afghanistan appeared to be slipping yesterday after senior US officials conceded that the deadline was not to be set in stone and that American and Nato forces will remain there for at least five more years.
The comments by Robert Gates, Mr Obama’s Defence Secretary, and Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, followed criticism last week by Bob Ainsworth in an interview with The Times that setting a date to start withdrawing forces was unwise.
The British Defence Secretary told The Times: “You can’t put a time on it. You’ve got to look at conditions.” In an interview in the US yesterday, Mr Gates said that the July 2011 date was not arbitrary.
Mr Gates added: “The pace of ... bringing them home will depend on the circumstances on the ground. Those judgments will be made by our commanders in the field.”
Mrs Clinton said: “We’re not talking about an exit strategy or a drop-dead deadline. What we’re talking about is an assessment that ... we can begin a transition, a transition to hand off responsibility to the Afghan forces.”
Mr Obama, when he announced last week a date to begin bringing US forces home within 18 months of his surge of 30,000 additional troops, also said that withdrawal would be conditional on how things looked on the ground.
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Copenhagen prepares steel cages for troublemakers!
NY TIMES
COPENHAGEN — At an abandoned beer warehouse in this city’s Valby district, law enforcement officials have constructed an elaborate holding facility with three dozen steel cages to accommodate more than 350 potential troublemakers during a United Nations climate conference that gets under way here on Monday.
Critics call the holding pens — and a variety of other security preparations made as thousands of government officials, heads of state, environmental groups and assorted anarchists descend on the Danish capital — over the top. The police say the reactions of the critics are overheated, if predictable.
“This is surely the biggest police action we have ever had in Danish history,” said Per Larsen, the chief coordinating officer for the Copenhagen police force. “But I think the complaints are the kind we are very used to hearing in this country.”
Officials have made it clear that they aim to keep the peace during the 12-day conference, organized under United Nations auspices. From new laws rushed through Parliament allowing stiffer fines and extended detentions for those deemed unruly to public displays of newly acquired antiriot and emergency equipment, leaders here say they are preparing for the worst while hoping for the best. Meanwhile, a variety of protest and advocacy groups — some with obscure political lineage — have signaled in online postings and other public statements that they will not be cooperating.
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