Tehran—President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on
Wednesday that some countries had offered to
provide Iran with uranium enriched to 20 percent
for use as nuclear reactor fuel, the official
IRNA news agency reported. Iran has always
insisted on its right to carry out its own
enrichment of uranium for a nuclear program
which it says is for purely peaceful purposes,
mainly to generate electricity. It rejects
Western suspicions its real intention is to
build an atomic bomb, which would require
uranium enriched to around 90 percent.
Kabul—The U.N.-backed watchdog overseeing a
fraud investigation in Afghanistan’s August 20
vote altered its ballot-counting rules
Wednesday, ditch-ing a plan criticized for
favoring President Hamid Karzai. The new recount
rules, which watchdog officials said were a
“clarification,” take into account the
possibility one candidate may have
disproportionately benefitted from fraud, a
finding that would be necessary in order for
Karzai to be forced to face a second round.
Burdipadu—More
than 300 people have died and millions have been
dis-placed in the states of Andhra Pradesh and
Karnataka after the worst floods in decades.
Authorities in Karnataka have warned against the
outbreak of water-borne dis-eases in camps for
flood victims. The rains came on the back of one
of the worst droughts in India.
Paris—A vaccine for run-of-the-mill flu also
provides some protection against swine flu,
especially the severest forms of the disease,
Mexican scientists report on Wednesday. The
authors stress, however, that their study is
limited in scale and that they see no evidence
for dropping programmes to vaccinate against the
pandemic H1N1 virus. Investigators led by Jose
Luis Valdespino-Gomez, an epidemiologist at the
national laboratory Birmex, compared 60 patients
who had fallen sick with swine flu with other
people, matched for age and background, who were
being treated for other diseases.
HOW to proceed in Afghanistan will be among the
most difficult and fateful deci-sions that
President Barack Obama ever makes. But he’s the
one who has to de-cide, not his generals. The
men with the stars on their shoulders - and I
say this with enormous respect for their
patriotism and service - need to shut up and
salute. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander
of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is
entitled to his opinion about the best way
forward.
