Yukiya Amano, a disarmament negotiator, faces immediate tests from a defiant Iran and provocative North Korea as he takes over the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) yesterday from Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei.
Amano, 62, handled nuclear proliferation issues for Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for three decades. He joined the IAEA’s 35-member board of governors in September 2005 and was elected the agency’s director general in July.
Amano assumes his post two days after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Cabinet ordered Iran’s nuclear agency to begin building 10 uranium enrichment sites within two months, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported. Iran says the fuel is for civilian use while the US claims it is for weapons development.
“Iran seems to be saying its last ‘goodbye’ to ElBaradei and saying ‘hello’ to Amano,” said Takehiko Yamamoto, a professor of international relations at Waseda University in Tokyo. “There’s a tough road ahead of Amano, with his first and major task being to beef up the agency’s inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites and shoot down the country’s ambitious nuclear armament plans.”
The IRNA report came a day after the UN agency censured Iran for concealing the existence of an enrichment plant built into the side of a mountain. The IAEA board demanded that Iran suspend construction of the almost-completed Fordo plant.
Iran already faces three sets of UN Security Council resolutions over its nuclear program. ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said on Friday that the agency had reached a “dead end” in its six-year investigation into whether Iran is concealing a nuclear weapons program.
Amano resigned from the Japanese Foreign Ministry on Nov. 13, said a ministry official who declined to be named. His appointment comes as the IAEA tries to balance the growing demand for nuclear reactors against the spread of weapons technologies through the network of Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan. The former head of Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programs was placed under house arrest in 2004 after confessing to running a network that sold machinery for making bomb-grade uranium to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
IAEA inspectors were kicked out of North Korea on April 16, a month before that nation tested a nuclear device. The Security Council in June imposed more sanctions, including restricting financial transactions.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
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