US President George W. Bush's chief negotiator with North Korea told a Senate panel on Tuesday that it was "quite possible" that the country had turned all 8,000 of its spent nuclear fuel rods into plutonium to fuel nuclear weapons.
The assessment by US Assistant Secretary of State for Asia James Kelly, the who just returned from an inclusive set of negotiations with the North Koreans in Beijing, left open the possibility that while the Bush administration has been conducting painstakingly slow negotiations with Pyongyang, the government there has made good on its threats to produce several new atomic bombs. But after the testimony, Kelly said that formal intelligence assessments of North Korea's arsenal had not changed, and "the operative phrase I used is `we don't know for sure.'"
Until Tuesday, the administration's public position has been that it believes North Korea, at worst, has turned only a portion of the spent fuel rods into nuclear fuel. The rods were under international inspection until New Year's Day 2003, when the North Korean government ordered the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspectors to leave the country. After that, the rods were moved from storage at Yongbyon, the country's main nuclear complex.
Ever since, US intelligence agencies have been wrestling with the question of how many rods have been reprocessed and how quickly North Korea's nuclear arsenal has grown. The country is believed to have produced one or two weapons in the early 1990s, during the administration of Bush's father. If it has now produced five or six more, as some intelligence officials estimate, that could create a far more difficult disarmament challenge: The North could hide several, and perhaps sell one or two, as it has periodically threatened to do.
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
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