Iran gives warning on sanctions threat
A defiant Iran, calling the Republican defeat in the U.S. elections a “landmark victory for the Iranian nation,” warned Friday it would reassess its cooperation with international atomic regulators if the United Nations moves forward with comprehensive sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program.
The caution came from Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, as he concluded a day of meetings in Moscow aimed at winning Russia’s support for weakening or postponing the sanctions, which European and U.S. negotiators hope to bring to the U.N. Security Council as early as the end of the month.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran’s enemies could not do “a damn thing” to divert Iran’s nuclear program, one of many indications that Iran might already be prepared to endure an initial round of sanctions if its current round of diplomacy fails.
“By God’s grace, our powerful nation will continue its path, and the enemy cannot do a damn thing on the nuclear issue,” the president said, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.
Nairobi, Kenya
Climate talks slow, groups complain
Environmentalists complained Friday that negotiators for industrial nations are moving too slowly at a U.N. conference to set controls on global-warming gases after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
A leader of the talks said, however, that slow might be better if eventually the United States signs on to mandatory emissions reductions.
Tuesday’s Democratic election victory in the United States heartened those looking for a change in U.S. attitudes.
“The new Congress will challenge the Bush administration’s global warming policy on several fronts,” an unofficial conference newsletter told the 5,000 participants at the two-week session, which ends next Friday.
London
Britain tracking multiple plots
British authorities are tracking almost 30 terrorist plots involving 1,600 people, the country’s domestic spy chief said in remarks released Friday, warning that young British Muslims are at risk of being radicalized by extremists.
It was the first public estimate of the threat by the head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who said her agency and police are monitoring 200 cells actively engaged in plotting or aiding attacks in Britain and abroad.
More than a year after the suicide attacks on London’s transit system, Manningham-Buller predicted the fight against terrorism would last a generation.
“It is a sustained campaign, not a series of isolated incidents,” she said in a speech to a small audience of academics.
Manningham-Buller said MI5 had foiled five major plots since the July 2005 transit bomb attacks in London, which killed 52 commuters and the four suicide bombers.