The Iran nuclear dossier topped early talks yesterday on the penultimate day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw adding his voice to a renewed Western diplomatic tack.
Other Davos topics were the global spread of bird flu and what former US president Bill Clinton had come to tell the annual gathering of business and political leaders.
Straw struck a conciliatory tone over Iran's nuclear program, stressing that talks had to produce a bargain that allowed Tehran to maintain its national dignity.
Straw said the West, which fears Tehran could be trying to develop nuclear arms, wanted diplomacy "to secure a bargain [that] does not involve humiliation of either side" and allowed Iran to "preserve a sense of national dignity."
"We have to have a bargain which enables both sides to come out of it with their head held high and not low," he said.
"It's hard going. It's hard to think of another government which is harder to negotiate with," he said, but "it's the only way through."
The US and EU want the Iran dossier referred to the council via its nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency, which is due to meet on Thursday to discuss the matter.
In Davos, Straw said Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani would also meet tomorrow with British and other officials to discuss the issue.
At another Davos seminar, meanwhile, health and pharmaceutical leaders discussed the bird flu virus, which has killed at least 83 people since late 2003 and is spreading around the world.
David Nabarro, the UN's senior coordinator for avian and human influenza, told the audience: "it is only as governments have started to do simulations that countries are realizing they are nowhere near prepared for the kind of damage this does."
Anthony Fauci of the US National Institute of Health noted that viruses change constantly and said: "It would be unconscionable if the world did not prepare" for worst case scenarios.
Clinton was to address the forum later yesterday.
Meanwhile, the most popular workshop at the forum was not on world trade, energy fears or the power of the Chinese market -- it was on sex and relationships.
So popular was the seminar by New York-based sex therapist Dagmar O'Connor that it was the only one of the 240-odd debates and public sessions that was repeated this year.
"I was amazed how open people were and how willing they were to talk about their relationships," O'Connor said. "What I see in the professional world is that people are so busy they don't have time for sex."
She said questions at her first session, an intimate gathering of some 50 people, two thirds of them women, ranged from the menopause to homosexuality, genital lubrication, sex abuse, children and keeping a relationship alive.
Her advice to couples is hardly rocket science, she admitted -- spend more time together, "get the babysitter in, hang out." She also suggests people spend 90 minutes three times a week touching each other.
"I would love to come back next year," O'Connor said.
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