President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has sought to justify his confidence the United States will not attack Iran, saying the proof comes from his mathematical skills as an engineer and faith in God, the press reported on Monday.

Ahmadinejad told academics in a speech that elements inside Iran were pressing for compromise in the nuclear standoff with the West over fears the United States could launch a military strike.

“In some discussions I told them ‘I am an engineer and I am examining the issue. They do not dare wage war against us and I base this on a double proof’,” he said in the speech on Sunday, reported by the reformist Etemad Melli and Kargozaran newspapers.

“I tell them: ‘I am an engineer and I am a master in calculation and tabulation.

“I draw up tables. For hours, I write out different hypotheses. …

North Korea has agreed to make a full declaration of all its nuclear programmes and to disable them by the end of the year, the chief United States negotiator said on Sunday.

“One thing that we agreed on is that the DPRK (North Korea) will provide a full declaration of all of their nuclear programs and will disable their nuclear programs by the end of this year, 2007,” Christopher Hill told journalists after two days of talks in Geneva.

North Korea has already shut down a key nuclear reactor at Yongbyon under an agreement reached on February 13.

Under the deal, North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear programme in return for aid and security and diplomatic guarantees, notably normalising ties with the United States. 
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hWEBb-G-HH_GcxMMmxdVS0m5J-xA

Zur Erinnerung:

Unser zweites Ziel ist es, Regime, die den Terrorismus …

The Israeli economy is ablaze. The very hotels, malls, restaurants, theaters, travel agencies, car dealerships and construction sites that earlier this decade stood eerily empty while terror raged in the streets are now brimming with customers, turnovers and profits.

Data released last week by the Central Bureau of Statistics indicates that GDP soared 6.6 percent during the first half of the year; since 2002, unemployment has dropped from 10.9% to 7.5%; household spending on durable goods skyrocketed 36%; inflation stood at 1.1%; interest rates sank below the US Federal Reserve’s level; and the shekel’s dollar value swelled 20% this decade.

There is an economic miracle lurking behind Tel Aviv’s increasingly Manhattanesque skyline, one that has turned the Promised Land into the Land of Milk and Money and the Jewish state into the developed world’s fastest-growing economy. How could all this happen a mere five years after …

In contrast to President Bush’s dark comparison between Iraq and the bloody aftermath of the Vietnam War last month, there is another, comforting version of the Vietnam analogy that’s gained currency among policy makers and pundits. It goes something like this:

After that last helicopter took off from the U.S. embassy in Saigon 32 years ago, the nasty strategic consequences then predicted did not in fact materialize. The “dominoes” did not fall, the Russians and Chinese did not take over, and America remained No. 1 in Southeast Asia and in the world.

But alas, cut-and-run from Iraq will not have the same serendipitous aftermath, because Iraq is not at all like Vietnam.

Unlike Iraq, Vietnam was a peripheral arena of the Cold War. Strategic resources like oil were not at stake, and neither were bases (OK, Moscow obtained access to Da Nang and Cam …

Europe as we know it is slowly going out of business. Since French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed constitution of the European Union, we’ve heard countless theories as to why: the unreality of trying to forge 25 E.U. countries into a United States of Europe; fear of ceding excessive power to Brussels, the E.U. capital; and an irrational backlash against globalization. Whatever their truth, these theories miss a larger reality: Unless Europe reverses two trends—low birthrates and meager economic growth—it faces a bleak future of rising domestic discontent and falling global power. Actually, that future has already arrived.

Ever since 1498, after Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened trade to the Far East, Europe has shaped global history, for good and ill. It settled North and South America, invented modern science, led the Industrial Revolution, oversaw the slave trade, created …

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday proposed the idea of basing a nation’s carbon emissions allowance on population size. German commentators on Friday say it’s another step on the path towards isolating the USA.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,503176,00.html

Parties to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol wound up troubled talks here Friday with broad pledges, but no specific commitments, to deepen cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming.

In a final document issued after hours of wrangling, they ditched a proposed text whereby industrialized countries would consider cutting their emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020 compared to their 1990 levels, diplomats said.

The goal had been spelt out in a draft statement backed by countries of the European Union but opposed by other delegations, notably Canada, Japan, Switzerland, New Zealand and Russia, they said.

The figures had been spelt out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the world’s top climate-change experts—as an option for policymakers seeking to keep global warming to less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels.

Instead, the Vienna paper said Kyoto parties …

http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=IA38307