The United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Algeria may soon be getting nuclear reactors for the production of electricity if the plans of French supermajor Total and Italy's Eni are realized, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.[1]  --  "The strategy has its critics, not least those concerned at the spread of nuclear power in such a volatile region," wrote Carola Hoyos.  --  "However, oil industry sources said Total had the full support of the French government.  The oil company's new-found interest fits well with France's ambitions to advance its nuclear technology internationally." ...

"[A] number of independent observers, citing a barrage of advantages, believe a landslide for the Democratic candidate is a growing possibility," the Financial Times reported Wednesday.[1]  --  "Even those who believe the race will be as narrowly settled as the last two agree that the Republican party faces a probable meltdown in all the other elections that will be staged in November," Edward Luce said....

Tuesday saw the biggest drop in the price of oil since the beginning of "the first Gulf war" in January 1991, when the per-barrel price fell by more than $10, the Financial Times reported early Wednesday.[1]  --  On Tuesday, "NYMEX August West Texas Intermediate lost $5.34 to $136.04 a barrel, having shot to a record $145.85 on Friday," Robert Cookson said.  --  "Traders put the move down to suspicions that the dollar, in which oil is priced, had overcome its period of weakness, as well as a perceived easing of tensions in the Middle East," with reassuring comments coming from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he said.  --  In addition, "[m]arket concern over Hurricane Bertha receded, with computer models indicating it would steer clear of the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico."  --  Most other commodity prices also declined.  --  Bloomberg News took a different interpretive tack, attributing the decline above all to "signs that the global economy may slow."[2]  --  Mark Shenk quoted Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Winchester, Massachusetts, who said:  "All the bad economic news is making people take a second look at commodities.  Commodities were purchased as a hedge against inflation.  A global recession is looking more likely, and it's the greatest weapon in the fight against inflation."  --  Market Watch asked "Have commodities peaked?" and one expert said that "It's certainly possible."[3]  --  "But whether or not oil and other commodities are experiencing just another correction in a bull market, or a lasting reversal, remains an open question," said Mark Godt.  "Many market strategists simply point out that no market can keep rising to new records in a straight line." ...

Under a U.S.-Czech agreement signed Tuesday in the teeth of popular opposition to the plan, a "radar base" will be built in the former Soviet bloc country "as part of a planned extension of the U.S. missile defense shield to central Europe" that will, it is claimed, "defend it and its European allies against missile attacks from a foe such as Iran," the Financial Times of London reported.[1]  --  Jan Cienski said the agreement "points to intelligence suggesting Tehran could develop a long-range missile capable of striking its soil by 2015."  --  But U.S.-Polish talks about placing ten missile interceptors on Polish soil are "still in crisis following Warsaw’s rejection last week of the terms offered by Washington."  --  Last week "U.S. negotiators thought they had the outline of a deal that Rice could seal during a three-day trip to Eastern Europe," AP reported. [2] --  "Warsaw rebuffed that tentative deal Friday, in strong language that U.S. diplomats said came as a surprise."  --  But how the Czech agreement will get through parliament is a mystery, Anne Gearan wrote:  "The three-party governing coalition enjoys the support of only half of the 200 lawmakers in the Czech parliament's lower chamber, not enough to ratify any deal.  About two-thirds of Czechs say they oppose the missile defense deal, according to a number of polls."  --  Reuters quoted one of the "protesters in the Czech capital [who] unfurled a huge banner shaped like a bull's-eye" who said, "We believe that this could start another arms race."[3]  --  The Times of London observed that Tuesday's signing "seemed to bury" the idea advanced by U.S. President George W. Bush at the 2007 G8 meeting in German that the radar base for the missile defense shield could be based in Azerbaijan.[4]  --  COMMENT:  Although they mention opposition to the missile defense of shield, none of these articles explains the arguments on which that opposition is based.  --  These were brought out in March in a hearing of the House National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee that was described by Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel in a piece entitled "Missile Defense: Longest-Running Scam Exposed."[5]  --  (For the three hearings the subcommittee has held, see here.)  --  In his opening statement, Rep. John Tierney (D-MA 6th), the chair of the subcommittee, "pointed out that we have spent over $120 billion on missile defense in the past 25 years; that the annual budget is expected to double by 2013 to $19 billion; and that the current $10 billion per year is equal to one-third of the Homeland Security budget, roughly equal to the State Department budget, greater than the FEMA budget, 20 times greater than public diplomacy expenditures, and 30 times greater than Peace Corps."  --  Dr. Stephen Flynn, Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a retired Coast Guard Commander, testified "that the 'non-missile risk' — smuggling a weapon of mass destruction into the U.S. by ship, train, truck, or private jet — is 'far greater than the ballistic missile threat,'" yet "[t]he combined budgets for funding all the domestic and international port of entry interdiction efforts . . . is equal to roughly one-half of the annual budget for developing missile defense.  Nowhere in the U.S. government has there been or is there now an evaluation of whether that represents an appropriate balance."  --  Joseph Cirincione, author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, who worked the House Armed Services Committee and the National Security Subcommittee during the Cold War, said:  “I have known ballistic missile threats, I have researched ballistic missile threats.  Mr. Chairman, this is not a serious ballistic missile threat that we face today."  --  Cirincione called missile defense "the longest running scam in the history of the Department of Defense,” adding:  “This is an enormous waste of money, and if you leave this decision to the Joint Chiefs they won’t spend anything near what this Administration is requesting.”  --  A Raytheon executive told Defense News last week:  "Internationally, the market is very bright."[6]  --  Back in July 2001, Paul Loeb recalled in a Christian Science Monitor piece entitled "The Money Defense Shield" the moment when, after a talk, a Lockheed employee at the company's Missile & Space Division in Sunnyvale, CA, had the audacity to say:  "Let's get real.  We all know that if anyone ever attacks America, the bomb is going to be delivered by a suitcase, a car, a truck, or in a boat.  It's not going to come from a missile, because you can track where a missile comes from and retaliate.  We all know that we're lobbying for these programs because they make us money.  We don't care whether they'll ever work, or even be useful.  We care that the dollars come our way."[7] ...

Convicted in Iran of spying for Israel and sentenced to death, Ali Ashtari was interviewed on Iranian TV Monday, YNet reported Tuesday.[1]  --  Ali Ashtari described how he communicated with Mossad and how he used his position as computer salesman to but devices, said Dudi Cohen, who expressed surprise that Ashtari did not seem to have been tortured or abused:  "Throughout the interview Ashtari is calm and composed — though one might expect someone convicted of an offense as grievous as spying for Israel to undergo physical or psychological torture, and that some sign of this would be apparent in his demeanor."  --  The Washington Post said last week that the Ashtari case "was the country's first known conviction for espionage linked to Israel in almost a decade."[2]  --  A Jun. 29 AFP piece noted that Ashtari "still has time to appeal the verdict with a higher court," and quoted an unnamed Iranian intelligence official who said that "some of our research projects have failed because of the use of this equipment.  In some cases, failures are irreversible and big."[3]  --  The French version of the AFP article included these sentences, omitted from the English version posted on the web:  "In May 2007 the American TV network CBS referred to operations to sabotage Iran's nuclear program by Western intelligence agencies that arranged to furnish defective equipment to Iran.  The head of Iran's atomic program, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, said in January 2007 that electrical equipment imported from Turkey had been "trafficked" and had been the cause for the destruction of fifty uranium-enriching centrifuges in Natanz in 2006."  --  The Fars News Agency reported on Jun. 30 that Ashtari was arrested in 2007, 18 months ago, though his case was made public only on Saturday.[4]  --  The three Mossad agents — Jacques, Charles, and Tony — "apparently presented themselves as bankers who worked for the Fortis Bank (a Belgium bank ranked among Europe's top 20 financial institutions), and told him they were interested in exploring a business venture.  --  The three offered him an unofficial loan — 'which struck me as odd' — and proceeded to give him a laptop —'which could send and receive encrypted email' — as well as two DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) devices with a satellite hookup, 'to give to my Iranian clients.  I think those were wired.'  --  According to court records, Ashtari then said that the Mossad gave him $50,000 as a business loan, 'to buy merchandise to sell in Iran,' and paid for all of his travel expenses."  --  The FNA account is accompanied by photographs of the trial and of the some evidence used against Ashtari....

The "deadliest attack [in Kabul] since the 2001 fall of the Taliban" took 41 lives and wounded 150 on Monday when a "suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into the Indian embassy," AFP reported.[1]  --  A spokesman for the Taliban, which has been sponsoring a wave of suicide attacks, denied responsibility.  --  "Many of the dead were Afghans collecting Indian visas."  --  The blast occurred when the car rammed a vehicle carrying the Indian embassy's military attaché and a political counsellor as it was entering the embassy compound gates.  --  Two other Indian officials were killed, the New York Times reported.[2]  --  "There have been a number of attacks in Afghanistan in recent months notable for their increased sophistication and deadliness," Abdul Waheed Wafa and Alan Cowell noted.  --  The Indian embassy is located "in what is supposed to be one of the best-guarded neighborhoods of the city, protected by police roadblocks.  But the bomber managed to get through, and rammed a car laden with explosives into the embassy gates."  --  Time said the dead included "a brigadier general, R.D. Mehta, who had started his post just five months ago and a foreign service officer, V.V. Rao, whose two-year tour of duty in Kabul was about to end.  The bombing is likely to have regional ramifications," because "[m]any foreign policy hawks in India believe Pakistani intelligence operatives might be targeting India's interests."[3]  --  "The U.N. sent an e-mail to its staff advising them to stay off Kabul's roads because of reports that a second suicide car bomber was in the city," AP's Amir Shah reported.[4] ...

Emphasizing that his support for Barack Obama's candidacy is based on the hope that "[t]he force of [African-Americans' and young people's] rising expectations . . . could pressure a President Obama in a progressive direction and also energize a new wave of social movements," Tom Hayden wrote on Saturday that Barack Obama's pledge to end the Iraq war in 2009 "has been laced with loopholes all along, caveats that the mainstream media and his opponents [excepting Bill Richardson] have ignored or avoided until now."[1]  --  "The most shocking aspect of Samantha Powers' forced resignation earlier this year was not that she called Hillary Clinton a 'monster' off-camera, but that she flatly stated that Obama would review his whole position on Iraq once becoming president," Hayden wrote.  "Again, no one in the media or rival campaigns questioned whether this assertion by Powers was true.  Since Obama credited Powers with helping for months in writing his book, The Audacity of Hope, her comments on his inner thinking should have been pounced upon by the pundits."  --  "Obama's position, which always left a trail of unasked questions, now plants a seed of doubt, justifiably, among the peace bloc of American voters who harbor a legacy of betrayals beginning with Lyndon Johnson's 1964 pledge of 'no wider war' through Richard Nixon's 'secret plan for peace' to Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal and the deep complicity of Democrats in the evolution of the Iraq War.  --  It is difficult to understand Obama's motivation.  Perhaps it is his lifetime success at straddling positions and disarming potential opponents.  Perhaps it is a lawyer's training.  Perhaps being surrounded by national security advisers who oppose what they call 'precipitous withdrawal,' and pragmatic Democrats distinctly uncomfortable with their antiwar roots."  --  Hayden concluded:  "Grass-roots people power is the only force that can keep alive the astute sense of pragmatism that led Obama to criticize the coming war in 2002.  The stakes are higher now, and the enemies far more shrewd, wishing to rip asunder the Obama coalition.  The peace movement assumption should be that there is no one in Obama's inner circle of advisers to be counted on, no mainstream columnist to catch his eye with a persuasive column favoring withdrawal.  They never have.  Only the voice of the peace voters — and the countless activists who have volunteered on his behalf — can command his attention now." ...

U.S. military officers were present "at the crime scene, and took pictures and wrote reports," and "did not stop the executions" of at least "100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers" (probably many more) who were summarily executed, "usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks" in the summer of 1950 in South Korea, the Associated Press reported Sunday.[1]  --  But Frank Winslow, now 81 and living in Bellingham, WA, who was "a military adviser at Daejeon in those desperate days long ago," believes that Koreans, not Americans were responsible for the crimes:  "The Koreans were sovereign.  To me, there was never any question that the Koreans were in charge."  --  Sunday's article is a continuation of reporting begun in a May 18 piece by the same investigative journalists, Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang.  --  On Sunday, they reported for the first time in the U.S. on the existence of a 78-page "confidential narrative" written by Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, that has been declassified and that was "first uncovered by the newspaper Busan Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives."  --  According to the report, Lt. Col. Emmerich initially resisted a South Korean regimental commander's plan to "to execute some 3500 suspected peace time Communists, locked up in the local prison" in Busan (formerly Pusan), saying that "atrocities could not be condoned."  --  "But the American then indicated conditional acceptance of the plan," Hanley and Chang reported.  --  "'Colonel Kim promised not to execute the prisoners until the situation became more critical,' wrote Emmerich, who died in 1986.  'Colonel Kim was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the prisoners with machine guns.'  --  This passage, omitted from the published Army history, is the first documentation unearthed showing advance sanction by the U.S. military for such killings."  --  Later in July South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission "will resume excavating massacre sites, after having recovered remains of more than 400 people at four sites last year," Hanley and Chang said.  --  The record shows ineffectual expressions of concern and no action on the part of American higher-ups aware of the crimes.  --  "It was the British who took action, according to news reports at the time," Hanley and Chang said.  "On Dec. 7, in occupied North Korea, British officers saved 21 civilians lined up to be shot, by threatening to shoot the South Korean officer responsible.  Later that month, British troops seized 'Execution Hill,' outside Seoul, to block further mass killings there."  --  The record shows that Americans and South Koreans, for their part, engaged in cover-up, silence, and propaganda:  "To quiet the protests, the South Koreans barred journalists from execution sites and the State Department told diplomats to avoid commenting on atrocity reports.  Earlier, the U.S. Embassy in London had denounced as 'fabrication' Winnington's Daily Worker reporting on the Daejeon slaughter.  The Army eventually blamed all the thousands of Daejeon deaths on the North Koreans, who in fact had carried out executions of rightists there and elsewhere."  --  BACKGROUND:  --  In Hanley and Chang's earlier May 18 report, they said that the cold-blooded mass executions were "intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners" in the summer of 1950 "as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula."  --  The true number killed may be 200,000 that, an historian on the commission said.  --  "Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims' fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer," Hanley and Chang said.  --  The truth, often felt to be unspeakable, was suppressed so successfully that "[e]ven educated South Koreans remained ignorant of their country's past."  --  With the recent change of administration in South Korea, there is concern that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's work is in jeopardy, but "[t]he life of the commission — with a staff of 240 and annual budget of $19 million — is guaranteed by law until at least 2010, when it will issue a final, comprehensive report." ...

Prof. Darius Rejali of Reed College published a monumental book last year on the history of torture.   --  Its title: Torture and Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2007).  --  He was interviewed recently in Seattle by a local attorney, Robin Lindley.  --  "I think we forget that the founding truths of democracy are built on hard won insights into the way violence works," Rejali said, "and the deep understanding that the reason we obey laws that limit power is not that we worry about others, but that we worry about ourselves because no one can be trusted with absolute power over another person.  That’s the heart of early liberals, and they were right."  --  As for Torture and Democracy, he said its key insight about torture's connection to democracy, where it is not, in fact, rare, is that "wherever you have a high degree of public monitoring, the cleaner the torture will be with less to show the press, to show lawyers."  --  Rejali said his book is "remorseless toward everybody.  There’s not a single country or a single privileged group that doesn’t get its contribution to torture whether it’s Canada, which no one would think of having to do with torture, but I talk about its moments of torture.  Nobody is morally pure.  Once you think you’re morally pure, you forget your own history."  --  "In the 1910’s and 1920’s, when electricity was new, several [American] police forces used electric devices to get confessions from prisoners.  In Seattle from about 1922 to 1925 there was a cell in the downtown prison with an electrified mat. . . . Most forget that America is the place where electro-torture began — not Nazi Germany.  And it began for important reasons:  a socialist opposition, press who followed the police, church groups.  The police wanted to avoid bad publicity when they could, so they used these [devices].  It’s similar to the way stun guns and tasers are used today on populations that generally aren’t cared about in conditions that are hard to document."  --  "[N]one of these [techniques] work.  A large part of this is selling yourself as tough on security, and the perception that maybe you’re weak if you’re not torturing, which is a bad way to build credibility with other people, particularly with something that doesn’t really work.  But, as my father is fond of saying, 'God puts a limit on intelligence, but he puts no limit on stupidity.' . . . [T]he biggest problem with working on cruelty is you start disliking people.  Misanthropy is a real vice.  You wander asking, “How can people be so stupid?” . . . Anybody who puts cruelty and violence first in their lives starts disliking people.  Whether you’re in the police universe or the human rights universe, you think of people as petty, small, manipulative, and stupid." ...

Writing for the Financial Times late Sunday on the eve of the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Andrew Ward judged the Bush presidency all but over.  --  "With just four months until the election and six months until he leaves office, Mr. Bush’s time and political capital are almost spent.  For a while last year it looked possible that he would launch air strikes against Iran in a final spasm of military action.  But that option now appears dead, with speculation shifting to whether Israel might take matters into its own hands."  --  "Mr. Bush will bid farewell to the G8 on a more harmonious note than would have been thought possible five years ago," Ward wrote.  --  "He has friendly or cordial relations with all the group’s leaders — in contrast to the tensions with Jacques Chirac of France and Gerhard Schroeder of Germany after the invasion of Iraq.  --  There are even signs that the reputation of the U.S. around the world is rebounding.  --  Sentiment towards the U.S. improved in 10 of 21 countries surveyed for the annual Pew Global Attitudes Project this year.  But researchers cautioned that the improvement could be explained by anticipation of Mr. Bush leaving office." ...

Philip Bobbitt was profiled this weekend in France in an article by Marc Weitzmann, a writer associated with the journal Le Meilleur des Mondes.  --  The article is translated below from Le Monde 2, the weekend supplement to the Paris newspaper Le Monde.  --  Weitzmann presented Bobbitt on the verge of his 60th birthday (he was born on July 22, 1948) as "unquestionably one of the thinkers who has with the greatest perspicacity tried to reflect on the contemporary world and to make it understood" and one who will in 2009 almost certainly "be called to Washington to play a role in the areas he knows so well: national security, terrorism."[1]  --  He visited Bobbitt in his penthouse apartment on Park Avenue and offered a rare glimpse into the private world of a somewhat reclusive scholar whose new book is being read carefully by presidential candidates and their advisers.  --  The Parisian journalist offered in 2,000 words a brief exegesis of Bobbitt's ideas, but by beginning with a quotation from The Great Gatsby and ending with a question — "Is this science fiction, paranoia, or the new face of the Western democracies?"  — Weitzmann indicated a desire to reserve judgment on Bobbitt's conclusions, which he called "ambiguous."  --  But "[e]ven if you don't share his convictions, it's hard to deny the rigor of his approach, which is both modest and ambitious."  --  NOTE:  At 7:00 p.m. on Mon., Jul. 7, at Tacoma's Mandolin Café, UFPPC's Monday evening book discussion group, Digging Deeper, will conclude a two-week examination of Bobbitt's new book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (Knopf, 2008)....

Unlike much of the U.S. press, which for the most part is unmitigatedly hostile to Iran and sympathetic to a military strike on its nuclear program, the Financial Times of London is doing all it can to dissuade Western power élites from the madness of an attack by Israel or the U.S.  --  This is clear from three pieces posted late Sunday that will appear in the paper's Monday print edition.  --  In the first, a hopeful article on diplomatic progress reported that although "senior Western diplomats said Tehran’s answer was confusing," the E.U.'s foreign policy chief will meet with Iran's top security negotiator in week of July 14-18.[1]  --  Although "a letter from foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki was negative in tone and contained no indication that Iran would suspend uranium enrichment as the West demands," a phone conversation on Friday Javier Solana and Saeed Jalili was "positive" and "left open the possibility that the Iranians might soon enter into talks over their uranium enrichment program," James Blitz and Najmeh Bozorgmehr said.  --  The Financial Times said the confusing response probably indicated that "the Iranians are holding an internal debate over what line to take."  --  In the second piece, an editorial, the Financial Times warned that an attack on Iran could "drag the U.S. into a regional war and polarize the region for decades" and said that "[s]uch an attack must not happen."[2]  --  Citing "indications that the Iranian regime is thinking harder about the international offer," the British daily expressed the hope that "the debate is won by those who want to start some serious talking."  --  Finally, the Financial Times also published a more urgent anti-Iran war piece by Anatol Lieven, arguing that Britain has "a categorical duty" to stop the insanity of an attack on Iran:  "The British government can stop this nonsense.  All that it needs to do is make clear to the U.S. administration, initially in private but in public if necessary, that the consequence of an attack would be complete British military withdrawal, not only from Iraq but from Afghanistan as well."[3]  --  "[T]his is not a step that, as a friend of Afghanistan, I would ever advocate," said Lieven, a professor at King’s College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., "were it not for one blindingly obvious fact:  that a U.S.-backed Israeli attack on Iran will in any case doom our enterprise in Afghanistan to irretrievable failure.  From the moment that Israeli munitions fall on Iran, all hope of stabilizing Afghanistan on Western terms will be lost.  From then on, every British soldier who dies in Afghanistan will die for nothing."  --  "At present, according to informed Western sources, Iran’s strategy towards the Taliban has been to open lines of communication but provide only symbolic amounts of aid," Lieven wrote.  After all, so hostile were relations between Taliban Afghanistan and Iran that the countries almost went to war in 1998, and Iran supported the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban after 9/11.  Today, however, Iran has positioned itself so as to increase its help to the Taliban greatly if it is attacked by Israel and the U.S." ...

Reporting on the trip last weekend to Israel by the U.S.'s top military official, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the London Telegraph reported late Saturday that there is a lack of confidence in the adequacy of Israeli intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.[1]  --  "These intelligence gaps lay behind Admiral Mullen's decision to speak out on Wednesday against military action, saying it would be 'extremely stressful' to 'open a third front' in the war on terror," Tim Shipman said.  --  But "[t]hose familiar with the Israeli-American military talks believe that Israel is still determined to act before Iran has enough highly enriched uranium to build a bomb, and before Tehran has acquired the Russian SA-20 air defense system to protect its nuclear facilities," according to Shipman....

Still referred to as CERN, for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), as it was called when it was founded in 1952, this famous scientific laboratory's official name is now Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research).  --  CERN is where W and Z bosons were discovered, and, it is hoped, where the Higgs boson, widely presumed to exist but never observed, will be found in the not-so-distant future; it is also the place where the World Wide Web began as a project initiated by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1989.  --  CERN was profiled in Saturday's Financial Times of London.[1]  --  Its most important machine — known as "the Machine" — is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, which "20 European member states agreed in 1994 to build . . . after the U.S. government cancelled an even more powerful atom-smasher, the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, $2bn into construction, because its costs were running far ahead of budget," Clive Cookson recalled.  --  Thanks to the cancellation of the Super Collider, the LHC is "a de facto global instrument."  --  "CERN was founded close to Geneva because the city symbolized internationalism and political neutrality.  The footprint of the lab was originally entirely within Switzerland but today several of its buildings are in France and the collider's ring crosses the Swiss-French border six times.  In keeping with the relaxed atmosphere, I never encountered any passport control or security checks when I drove across the frontier on the public road."  --  The U.S. government has contributed some $530m to building it.  --  "Many components for the accelerator and detectors were made in the U.S., and almost 1,000 of the 9,000 scientists expected to use the LHC will be American," Cookson noted.  --  But the LHC's director is a Welshman named Lyn Evans, who has spent his entire professional life at CERN.  --  In a coda to Cookson's article, Edwin Heathcote called the Large Hadron Collider "perhaps the most complex, most technologically advanced, and most philosophically challenging thing ever to be constructed."  --  But humanity hardly knows how the building it housing it should look.  Heathcote observed:  "As post-Einstein physics pulls away from our broader culture, introducing ideas of supersymmetry, strings, and multiple extra dimensions, we, as a culture, have become resigned to our incomprehension.  --  The medieval master masons were at the forefront of engineering expertise.  Sir Christopher Wren built London's St. Paul's while actively involved in mathematics, optics, and science; Sir Robert Hooke built London's Monument as a scientific observatory.  Now we have entirely lost our faith in architecture's ability to express anything about our culture, particularly about our science." ...

The content of Iran's response to a P5+1 negotiating offer was still unknown late Saturday, but Iran indicated "that it has no plans to meet a key Western demand that it stop enriching uranium," the Associated Press reported.[1]  --  None of the recipients would speak on the record about the substance of Iran's response.  --  Meanwhile, "Iranian state media reported Friday that EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, have agreed to hold the latest in a series of talks in the second half of July," but one European official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AP that "no firm decision will be made by Solana to meet with Jalili until the contents of the Iranian response had been evaluated," Ali Akbar Dareini said.  --  IRNA, Iran's official news agency, reported Saturday that "delivered to the Foreign Office by Iranian Ambassador to London Rasoul Movahedian on Friday evening.  --  It came after the response was also delivered to the office of European Union Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana in Brussels.  It was also understood that copies were being sent to the capitals of all the respective countries."[2]  --  The New York Times, citing unnamed "officials involved in the diplomacy," reported late Saturday on the content of the response, saying that "Iran’s response failed to address the crucial issue of its uranium enrichment activities."[3]  --  Elaine Sciolino reported that Iran's response consisted of "a letter by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki," which said "that Iran would be willing to open comprehensive negotiations with the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and the six world powers that proposed the incentives. The letter did not specifically address the proposals they presented last month."  --  The New York Times led its story with the sentence "Iran’s nuclear policy has not changed, an Iranian government spokesman said Saturday in Tehran, confirming that Iran would not comply with Security Council resolutions requiring it to stop enriching uranium," and quoted snippets of Mottaki's letter suggesting Iranian intransigence.  --  "The Iranian response was filled with criticism of the way the six world powers — the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China — have conducted the diplomacy," Sciolino said.  "'The time for negotiating from the condescending position of inequality has come to an end,' the response said, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules."  --  However, Sciolino said that a "senior European official involved in the negotiations said Saturday that Mr. Solana would meet with Saeed Jalaili [sic], Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, in the second half of July," Sciolino said, confirming IRNA's statement Friday.  --  Reuters agreed, citing an E.U. spokesperson who said that "in principle, the position is to respond favorably" to the idea of a meeting.[4]  --  Reuters said Mottaki's letter was four pages long.  --  In an intriguing blog entry on the Los Angeles Times web site, Ramin Mostaghim and Borzou Daragahi reported that "Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, took a trip from Tehran today to the holy city of Qom" to meet behind closed doors with "three key Iranian clerics": Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi, Ayatollah Lotfullah Safi Golpayegani, and Ayatollah Jaffar Sobhani.[5]  --  "Iranian politicians often seek political and religious cover before making bold moves, in case something backfires," Mostaghim and Daragahi said; they speculated inconclusively about the reason for the meetings, which were reported by the "usually rather reliable Persian-language news website Tabnak, but other sources also confirmed the information." ...

"[T]he definitive official explanation of what happened to Tower Seven is finally about to be published in America," BBC News said on Fri., Jul. 4.[1]  --  After a two-year investigation, "[t]he National Institute of Standards and Technology, based near Washington, D.C., is expected to conclude in its long-awaited report this month that ordinary fires caused the building to collapse," Mike Rudin reported.  --  "Other skyscrapers haven't fully collapsed before because of fire," Rudin noted.  "But NIST argues that what happened on 9/11 was unique."  --  BBC also posted a video of WT7 collapsing.  --  The video is also posted here, along with a notice that "The Conspiracy Files: 9/11 — The Third Tower" will be broadcast on BBC Two on Sun., Jul. 6, 2008....

On Jul. 4, Iran sent a written response to the P5+1 negotiating proposal made on Jun. 14 by Javier Solana, the E.U.'s foreign policy chief.  --  Its contents are still unknown, but hopes were raised "that Tehran would give enough ground to allow formal negotiations to begin," the Financial Times reported Saturday.[1]  --  The hopes translated immediately into a fall in the price of oil, AP reported.[2] ...

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the University of Washington, and McGill University warned eighteen months ago that "the Arctic ice cap could disappear in a few decades," but they are now wondering whether their prediction was "too conservative," the Sunday Times of London reported on Jun. 29, 2008.[1]  --  Last summer, the summer ice cap was reduced to "just 1.6m square miles, 43% less than in 1979 when accurate satellite observations began," down from the 2.7m square miles that have been the summer norm since observations began.  --  Though some see potential benefits from the melting, Professor Mark Serreze of the University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center is pessimistic:  "“It is a great irony that the melting of the ice cap could give us access to yet more fossil fuels that will accelerate climate change even further.  I suspect the only thing that is going to stop humanity wrecking the planet is when we get hit by some serious ecological disasters, and by then it may well be too late.” ...

The London Independent reported Saturday that in the event of an attack on Iran by Israel or the U.S., Iraqi leaders say that "Iraq will be plunged into a new war. . . . Iranian retaliation would take place in Iraq, said Dr. Mahmoud Othman, the influential Iraqi MP."[1]  --  "An embarrassing aspect of the American pin-prick war against Iran is that many of its instruments were previously on the payroll of Saddam Hussein," veteran Mideast journalist Patrick Cockburn observed, citing the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) and dissidents from Arab districts in southern Iran around Ahwaz.  --  "Though the MEK is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups, the Pentagon and other U.S. institutions have been periodically friendly to it. The U.S. task force charged by Mr. Bush with destabilizing the Iranian government is likely to co-operate with it."  --  In an Op-Ed piece published Saturday in Beirut's Daily Star, Rami Khouri observed that "One of the frightening lessons one learns from spending time in Washington is that most of the men and women who make, or influence, American policy in the Middle East actually have little or no first-hand experience of the region.  They know very little about its people or its political trends at the grassroots level, as the Iraq experience reconfirms so painfully.  --  American policy-making throughout the Middle East remains defined largely by three principal forces:  pro-Israeli interests and lobbies in the United States that pander almost totally to Israeli government positions; an almost genetic, if understandable, need to respond to the 9/11 terror attack against the U.S. by politically and militarily striking against Middle Eastern targets; and a growing determination to confront and contain Iran and its assorted Sunni and Shiite Arab allies."[2]  --  Khouri argued that "the single most important strategic development in the Middle East" today is "a new spirit of populist defiance, resistance, and self-assertion" that has led "[l]arge numbers of Arabs, Iranians, and Turks — hundreds of millions of people — [to] shed their legacy of passive acquiescence in their own suffering, weakness, marginalization, and victimization."  --  "Washington policymakers and think-tank zealots who prefer to ignore these realities, and instead act mainly on the basis of pro-Israeli inclinations or arm-twisting, are free to do so, of course," Khouri concluded.  --  "The cost, however, becomes more obvious for those who wish to see the real world as it is:  a place characterized by massive, region-wide militancy and defiance, anchored squarely in resistance to American-Israeli aggression." ...

The release of "CSNY: Déjà Vu," a documentary film on a 2006 road trip of "the folk-rock super-group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young," was the occasion for an interview with Neil Young in Friday's Financial Times of London.[1]  --  The film is due in U.S. theaters on July 25, Billboard said ten days ago.[2]  --  In an interview with Young, Wes Orshoski said the film shows "friction, portraying fans who saluted the group's efforts and those who felt betrayed by them."  --  Young also reveals that he is presently consumed by a technical project to eliminate roadside refueling:  "That's the goal of the project. . . . We can't do this anymore.  I mean, we have wars being fought all the time.  It's an endless damn war over energy.  You take away oil, and what do you have to fight about?  People are so addicted and reliant on it.  We think we have to have it to maintain our lifestyle.  Are we that stupid? . . . So this is the problem with oil.  How do we deal with it, how do we get rid of it?  How do we eliminate the tentacles of power that come in and touch us at every gas station, where we make our contact with our biggest enemy? . . . We're close to having a solution, or getting close to a solution.  We're moving in the right direction.  This is the age of innovation.  There's no way that we're not going to figure out a much better way of doing it."  --  Young ends the long interview by rejecting the notion of American decline:  "I think potentially we're going to lead the world through innovation.  We're going to solve the problem of consumption that we created.  That's what the whole thing is about.  That's the goal.  Not everybody knows it.  But that's what's happening, in the back rooms, in the labs and the garages, in the physics clubs, and the science labs around the country and around the world.  That's the real thing.  That's what's really happening.  All this other shit is just window dressing."[3] ...