UN Security Council member Turkey insisted yesterday that diplomacy is the best way to resolve Iran’s nuclear crisis and offered to help break a deadlock over an atomic fuel deal for Tehran.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, on a visit to Tehran, reiterated that Ankara, which has resisted a US push for a fourth round of sanctions against Iran, favored negotiations to resolve the impasse.
World powers led by the US believe Iran’s nuclear program is masking a drive for atomic weapons. Tehran says the program is solely aimed at generating electricity to fuel its growing economy.
“The solution for Iran’s nuclear program is through negotiations and diplomatic process,” Davutoglu said at a media conference in Tehran in remarks translated through an interpreter.
Turkey, one of the 15 UN Security Council members and a regional ally of Iran, “is ready to act as an intermediary in the issue of uranium exchange as a third country and hopes to have a fruitful role in this,” Davutoglu said. “We will continue to try our best to see what we can do for this nuclear fuel swap.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who jointly addressed the press conference with Davutoglu, said Iran has been regularly consulting Turkey over its nuclear program, but did not explicitly react to Ankara’s latest offer.
“Turkey will do its part if Iranians deem fit,” Davutoglu said in response.
Western powers are particularly infuriated with Iran because it defiantly began work on high-grade uranium enrichment after a deadlock over a UN-drafted deal to supply Tehran with the material intended to power a research reactor.
The deal from last October envisaged Iran sending its low-enriched uranium to Russia and France for conversion into high-grade 20 percent enriched uranium, to be returned later to Tehran as fuel for the medical research reactor.
However, the deal stalled when Iran insisted that the exchange of the two materials happen simultaneously inside the country, a condition rejected by world powers.
Mottaki at the weekend said Tehran planned to talk to all the 15 members of the UN Security Council, including Washington, over the proposed fuel swap.
On Monday he went further and said he believed a deal was still possible.
“If the other side has serious political will for the fuel exchange formula, this can be a multi-lateral trust building opportunity, especially for the Islamic republic to trust the other side,” he said.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS