Israel out of nuclear closet: power station in sight?

It’s not just Abu Dhabi looking to build a nuclear power plant for generating electricity. According to the business newspaper Globes, Israel is considering building a nuclear power plant of its own in the Negev desert region.

Instead of looking to cleaner energy sources, the Israel Electric Company (IEC) says it is mulling the idea of building a nuclear fuel power station as an option instead of a coal fueled one.

According to IEC’s deputy CEO and VP of production and transport, Moshe Bachar, the transition to environmentally friendly energy sources was essential, and that higher electricity rates were inevitable.

“The era of cheap electricity is over,” he said. More >>>

World's glaciers continue to melt at historic rates

Latest figures show the world's glaciers are continuing to melt so fast that many will disappear by the middle of this century.

[Above: An aerial view of the Siachen glacier]

Glaciers across the globe are continuing to melt so fast that many will disappear by the middle of this century, the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) said today.

The announcement of the latest annual results from monitoring in nine mountain ranges on four continents comes as doubts have been cast on how much climate scientists have exaggerated the problem of glacier melt, which is seen as a leading indicator of how much the planet is heating up.

Last week the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) apologised for "a paragraph" in its four-volume 2007 report which warned there was a "very high" risk that the Himalayan glaciers, on which at least half a billion of the world's poorest people depend for water, would disappear by 2035.

However the director of the WGMS, Professor Wilfried Haeberli, said the latest global results indicated most glaciers were continuing to melt at historically high rates. More >>>

Attack of the Drones

I’ve been waiting for some media outlet to run a story on a seemingly ignored policy shift concerning the Predator Drone attacks in Pakistan by the CIA.
I’m still waiting. So, rather than continue to wait, I decided to put this out there.

We all heard about the CIA deaths in Afghanistan on December 30, 2009, along with the Xe (Blackwater) contractors, after a Jordanian double-agent blew himself up inside a gym at a US installation — because security measures weren’t followed. But what I found most interesting about this story was the comments immediately after the attack. This was widely reported at the time. According to CNN International:

“An American intelligence official vowed Thursday (December 31, 2009) that the United States would avenge a suspected terrorist attack on a U.S. base in Afghanistan that resulted in the deaths of seven CIA officers.”

So, REVENGE is now the purpose of launching Predator Drone strikes in Pakistan? Is that supposed to be the motive of our intelligence agencies in fighting counter-terrorism? More >>>

Insight with Dr. Rifat Hussain

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Nuclear power plans in Africa, Middle East

Dec 29 (Reuters) - Many countries in Africa and the Middle East have said they want to develop civilian nuclear programmes to meet rising power demand.

Nuclear is seen by many as a long-term solution to high fuel costs and an effective way to cut carbon emissions from the electricity generation sector.
A fall in fossil fuel prices since summer 2008 has made nuclear power less attractive than it was when oil CLc1 was above $147 a barrel in July 2008. South Africa is the only country in the region with an operational nuclear power plant.
Below are the nuclear aspirations of countries across Africa and the Middle East. More >>>

Pakistan Presses U.S. for Nuclear Cooperation

Friday, Jan. 22, 2010 - Pakistan yesterday pressed the United States for bilateral civilian nuclear trade arrangements and recognition as a legitimate nuclear-weapon state, the Daily Times of Pakistan reported

Pakistani Defense Minister Ahmad Mukhtar voiced the demands during a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates that addressed the necessity of developing a long-term cooperative relationship between the two states. The officials discussed Pakistan's geopolitical, financial and security circumstances, and Mukhtar emphasized his country's actions to combat domestic militants. More >>>

JANUARY 14, 2010 - On December 14, The Times announced that it had obtained documents about Iran’s nuclear programme that revealed “a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator.

This is the component of a nuclear weapon that triggers the explosion”. (Leading article, ‘Explosive Deceit; The exposure of Iran's programme to test an essential component of a nuclear weapon confirms a pattern of duplicity by a bellicose regime,’ The Times, December 14, 2009)

The Times had no doubts about the authenticity or significance of the document:

“The discovery is an indictment both of Iran's duplicity and of the West's complacency... regardless of divisions within the regime, Iran has sought a nuclear capability. Its efforts have been accelerated in the past decade. The prospect of an Iranian bomb is alarming.” (Ibid) Read More >>>

New Revelations Tear Holes in Nuclear Trigger Story

WASHINGTON - January 5, 2010- New revelations about two documents leaked to The Times of London to show that Iran is working on a "nuclear trigger" mechanism have further undermined the credibility of the document the newspaper had presented as evidence of a continuing Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

A columnist for the Times has acknowledged that the two-page Persian language document published by The Times last month was not a photocopy of the original document but an expurgated and retyped version of the original.

A translation of a second Persian language document also published by The Times, moreover, contradicts the claim by The Times that it shows the "nuclear trigger" document was written within an organisation run by an Iranian military scientist.
Former Central Intelligence Agency official Philip Giraldi has said U.S. intelligence judges the "nuclear trigger" document to be a forgery, as IPS reported last week. The IPS story also pointed out that the document lacked both security markings and identification of either the issuing organisation or the recipient.
The new revelations point to additional reasons why intelligence analysts would have been suspicious of the "nuclear trigger" document.
On Dec. 14, The Times published what it explicitly represented as a photocopy of a complete Persian language document showing Iranian plans for testing a neutron initiator, a triggering device for a nuclear weapon, along with an English language translation. More >>>

US intelligence chief criticises spy failings in Afghanistan

Maj Gen Michael Flynn says newspaper articles about key areas in Afghanistan can be more useful than their own information.

US army intelligence chiefs in Afghanistan find foreign newspaper articles about the country more useful than the information collected by their own soldiers in the field, a highly critical report by the top US intelligence officer said yesterday.
According to Maj Gen Michael Flynn and two other intelligence advisers, the huge intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan is "only marginally relevant" to Nato's overall war plan because nearly all of its effort is spent finding Taliban fighters to kill rather than trying to understand the needs and grievances of ordinary Afghan civilians. Their support is now seen by military chiefs as key to beating the insurgency.
Bogged down producing detailed flow diagrams of rebel cells, intelligence officers are consequently "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of co-operation among villagers", the report says. More >>>