IRAN ENRICHING IN SECRET SITE

IMF chief: End of euro unlikely in 2012, but crisis will drag on 06.01.12 @ 17:26 By Valentina Pop

BRUSSELS - The euro will not vanish this year, but problems within the eurozone will slow down the global economy, with the International Monetary Fund set to lower its growth predictions in an upcoming report, its chief Christine Lagarde said Friday (6 January).Will 2012 be the end of the euro currency? My answer is I don't think so, she told reporters after meeting the South African finance minister.It's a young currency, it's a solid one as well. You have, within the zone, not in relation with the currency, serious pressures and issues concerning the sovereign debt, concerning the strength of the banking system, but the currency itself is not one that would vanish or disappear in 2012, she added.However, Lagarde appeared less convinced when asked about Greece potentially exiting the single currency.Will Greece quit the euro zone in 2012? The euro partners have affirmed, reaffirmed, and reaffirmed their determination. We can only support that.Greek officials this week warned of an uncontrolled default and being left out of the euro as they struggle to convince unions to cut labour costs - a key condition for the next tranche of bail-out money.

On Friday, the euro tumbled to record lows against the US dollar and Japanese yen, as it traded for $1.27, the lowest in 16 months and 98.21 yen, the lowest level in 11 years.Meanwhile, fears of a credit crunch in Europe are returning as banks parked a record €455 billion in the European Central Bank instead of lending to each other or to the real economy. The sum is almost equal to the cheap loans made available to EU banks by the very same ECB, precisely in order to avoid liquidity strains which would bring national economies to a halt.Fresh Eurostat data published that same day from November showed that eurozone unemployment remained at an all-time high of 10.3 percent for the second month running, with the highest rates once again registered in Spain (22.9%) and Greece (18.8%).Lagarde, who last month warned of another Great Depression looming due to the eurozone crisis, told her South African hosts to brace themselves for a 2012 that will not be a walk in the park and that they may suffer setbacks if the Europe crisis is not addressed successfully.

Cameron sees legal difficulties' in fighting new fiscal treaty 06.01.12 @ 22:01 By Valentina Pop

BRUSSELS - British PM David Cameron on Friday (6 January) vowed to do everything possible to prevent EU institutions from being used in a new fiscal treaty the UK has refused to join, but admitted there were legal difficulties in pursuing that path.The treaty negotiations resumed on Friday among 26 member states, with the UK participating as an observer. The text would allow the EU commission, acting on behalf of other signatories to the pact, to take deficit sinners to the European Court of Justice.Cameron, whose veto on EU treaty changes in December led to the creation of this new inter-governmental pact, told BBC 4 Radio on Friday that there are legal difficulties over blocking the 26 members from using the EU institutions.
Part of the problem is that the legal position is unclear. One of the strengths of there not being a treaty within the European Union is that the new thing, whatever it is, can't do things that are the property of the European Union.The British leader vowed to do everything possible to ensure that the single market and competitiveness were not discussed outside the full EU framework.We will be very clear that, when it comes to that, you cannot use the European institutions for those things because that would be wrong. You can't have a treaty outside the European Union that starts doing what should be done within the European Union, and that goes back to the issue of safeguards.Asked what he had achieved for the UK through his veto, Cameron said: What I stopped was that if you have a treaty within the framework of the European Union that didn't have safeguards on the single market and on financial services, Britain would have been in a worse position. I am not making some great claim to have achieved a safeguard, but what I did do was stop a treaty without safeguards.Cameron's stance was criticised domestically not only by the Labour opposition but also by his Liberal governing partner and vice-premier Nick Clegg, who warned against Britain being isolated in Europe after the veto.

France's Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly called Cameron an obstinate kid for insisting on safeguards which ultimately would have benefited only bankers and traders, while Angela Merkel suggested the British leader was negotiating in bad faith. I really don't believe David Cameron was ever with us at the table,she said at the time.EU officials privately point to the equally intransigent Merkel's insistence on a full treaty change, which has become a political mantra in Germany, when much of the fiscal rules could have been dealt with through other legal ways, instead of creating this mess of a new treaty at 26-level but relying on EU institutions.
EUobserver understands that a legal u-turn by the council's own legal services also left Cameron in the cold, as his line of defence was based on an initial assessment that EU member states cannot use the community institutions outside the EU treaties.

As for the EU commission itself, it took a cautious line on Friday on the matter. The enforcement capacity of this international treaty is a matter that should be decided at the end of negotiations based on the provisions in the text, commission spokesman Olivier Bailly said during a press conference.German centre-right MEP Elmar Brok, who participated as an observer at the talks on Friday on the new legal text, told this website on the issue of involving the EU commission that nothing is decided until everything decided.But he was confident that in the end, the EU executive would get an even stronger role than the current wording which allows it to take countries to court on behalf of other signatories to the fiscal pact. It's still an ongoing process,he said after the meeting, as more follow-ups are being scheduled in the coming two weeks.As for Cameron's opposition to using EU institutions, Brok, a long-standing federalist said: He should go to the European Court of Justice then.

MUSLIM NATIONS

EZEKIEL 38:1-12
1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
2 Son of man, set thy face against Gog,(RULER) the land of Magog,(RUSSIA) the chief prince of Meshech(MOSCOW)and Tubal,(TOBOLSK) and prophesy against him,
3 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech(MOSCOW) and Tubal:
4 And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,(GOD FORCES THE RUSSIA-MUSLIMS TO MARCH) and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords:
5 Persia,(IRAN,IRAQ) Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:
6 Gomer,(GERMANY) and all his bands; the house of Togarmah (TURKEY)of the north quarters, and all his bands:(SUDAN,AFRICA) and many people with thee.
7 Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them.
8 After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains of Israel, which have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations, and they shall dwell safely all of them.
9 Thou shalt ascend and come like a storm, thou shalt be like a cloud to cover the land, thou, and all thy bands, and many people with thee.(RUSSIA-EGYPT AND MUSLIMS)
10 Thus saith the Lord GOD; It shall also come to pass, that at the same time shall things come into thy mind, and thou shalt think an evil thought:
11 And thou shalt say, I will go up to the land of unwalled villages; I will go to them that are at rest, that dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates,
12 To take a spoil, and to take a prey; to turn thine hand upon the desolate places that are now inhabited, and upon the people that are gathered out of the nations, which have gotten cattle and goods, that dwell in the midst of the land.

ISAIAH 17:1
1 The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.

PSALMS 83:3-7
3 They (ARABS,MUSLIMS) have taken crafty counsel against thy people,(ISRAEL) and consulted against thy hidden ones.
4 They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.
5 For they (MUSLIMS) have consulted together with one consent: they are confederate against thee:(TREATIES)
6 The tabernacles of Edom,(JORDAN) and the Ishmaelites;(ARABS) of Moab, PALESTINIANS,JORDAN) and the Hagarenes;(EGYPT)
7 Gebal,(HEZZBALLOH,LEBANON) and Ammon,(JORDAN) and Amalek;(SYRIA,ARABS,SINAI) the Philistines (PALESTINIANS) with the inhabitants of Tyre;(LEBANON)

DANIEL 11:40-43
40 And at the time of the end shall the king of the south( EGYPT) push at him:(EU DICTATOR IN ISRAEL) and the king of the north (RUSSIA AND MUSLIM HORDES OF EZEK 38+39) shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.
41 He shall enter also into the glorious land, and many countries shall be overthrown: but these shall escape out of his hand, even Edom, and Moab, and the chief of the children of Ammon.(JORDAN)
42 He shall stretch forth his hand also upon the countries: and the land of Egypt shall not escape.
43 But he shall have power over the treasures of gold and of silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and the Ethiopians shall be at his steps.

EZEKIEL 39:1-8
1 Therefore, thou son of man, prophesy against Gog,(LEADER OF RUSSIA) and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech (MOSCOW) and Tubal: (TUBOLSK)
2 And I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north parts,(RUSSIA) and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel:
3 And I will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thy right hand.
4 Thou shalt fall upon the mountains of Israel, thou, and all thy bands,( ARABS) and the people that is with thee: I will give thee unto the ravenous birds of every sort, and to the beasts of the field to be devoured.
5 Thou shalt fall upon the open field: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD.
6 And I will send a fire on Magog,(NUCLEAR BOMB) and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD.
7 So will I make my holy name known in the midst of my people Israel; and I will not let them pollute my holy name any more: and the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, the Holy One in Israel.
8 Behold, it is come, and it is done, saith the Lord GOD; this is the day whereof I have spoken.

JOEL 2:3,20,30-31
3 A fire(NUCLEAR BOMB) devoureth before them;(RUSSIA-ARABS) and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
20 But I will remove far off from you the northern army,(RUSSIA,MUSLIMS) and will drive him into a land barren and desolate, with his face toward the east sea, and his hinder part toward the utmost sea, and his stink shall come up, and his ill savour shall come up, because he hath done great things.(SIBERIAN DESERT)
30 And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.(NUCLEAR BOMB)
31 The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD come.

Iran holds military exercise near Afghan border
ReutersReuters – Sat, Jan 7, 2012

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran launched a military maneuver near its border with Afghanistan on Saturday, the semi-official Fars news agency reported, days after naval exercises in the Gulf increased tensions with the West and pushed up oil prices.Mohammad Pakpour, commander of the Revolutionary Guards' ground forces, said the Martyrs of Unity exercises near Khvat, 60 km (40 miles) from Afghanistan, were aimed at boosting security along the Iranian borders, Fars reported.The Revolutionary Guards' naval forces' 10-day exercise in the Gulf that ended last Monday worsened relations with Washington days after U.S. President Barack Obama approved sanctions that aim to stop countries buying Iranian oil.Threats that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz, which leads out of the Gulf and provides the outlet for most oil from the Middle East, pushed up oil prices and Iran warned Washington not to send an aircraft carrier back into the Gulf.Forces with the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier strike group, the target of Tehran's threat, rescued 13 Iranian fishermen from Somali pirates days after passing through the Strait. [ID:nL6E8C6004]Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi played down the political significance of the rescue.On some occasions, Iran has helped and secured the released of many other countries' sailors that had been caught by pirates, he told state-run Press TV.This is a humanitarian gesture and it is not related to the countries' relations with each other.(Reporting By Mitra Amiri; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Report: Iran begins uranium enrichment at new site
Associated PressBy ALI AKBAR DAREINI | AP – JAN 8,12

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran has begun uranium enrichment at a new underground site well protected from possible airstrikes, a leading hardline newspaper reported Sunday in another show of defiance against Western pressure to rein in Tehran's nuclear program.Another newspaper quoted a senior commander of the powerful Revolutionary Guard force as saying Tehran's leadership has decided to order the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic oil route, if the country's petroleum exports are blocked. Revolutionary Guard ground forces also staged war games in eastern Iran in an apparent display of resolve against U.S. forces just over the border in Afghanistan.The supreme authorities ... have insisted that if enemies block the export of our oil, we won't allow a drop of oil to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. This is the strategy of the Islamic Republic in countering such threats, Revolutionary Guard deputy commander Ali Ashraf Nouri was quoted as saying by the Khorasan daily.Iranian politicians have issued similar threats in the past, but this is the strongest statement yet by a top commander in the security establishment.The latest statements are certain to fuel tensions with the U.S. and its allies, which are trying to turn up pressure on Iran with new sanctions to punish it over its disputed nuclear program. The West suspects Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons, but Iran denies this.

The United Nations has already sanctioned Iran for refusing to stop uranium enrichment — which can produce both nuclear fuel and fissile warhead material. Tehran says its nuclear program is only for energy and medical research, and refuses to halt uranium enrichment.Kayhan daily, which is close to Iran's ruling clerics, said Tehran has begun injecting uranium gas into sophisticated centrifuges at the Fordo facility near the holy city of Qom.Kayhan received reports yesterday that show Iran has begun uranium enrichment at the Fordo facility amid heightened foreign enemy threats, the paper said in a front-page report. Kayhan's manager is a representative of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final word on all important matters of state.Iran's nuclear chief, Fereidoun Abbasi, said late Saturday that his country will soon begin enrichment at Fordo. It was impossible to immediately reconcile the two reports.Iran has a major uranium enrichment facility in Natanz in central Iran, where nearly 8,000 centrifuges are operating. Tehran began enrichment at Natanz in April 2006.The Fordo centrifuges, however, are reportedly more efficient. And the site better shielded from aerial attack.Nouri said Iran's leadership has made a strategic decision to close the Strait of Hormuz, should the country's exports be blocked. One-sixth of the world's oil flows to market through the Strait of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

President Barack Obama approved new sanctions against Iran a week ago, targeting the central bank and its ability to sell petroleum abroad. The U.S. has delayed implementing the sanctions for at least six months, worried about sending the price of oil higher at a time when the global economy is already struggling. But the new sanctions nevertheless prompted a series of threats from Iranian officials about closing the Strait of Hormuz.The newspaper paraphrased Nouri as saying that a 10-day naval war game which ended Tuesday was preparation for such a closure. The Guard, which is Iran's most powerful military force and which has its own naval arm, has planned more sea maneuvers for February.The exalted leader (Khamenei) determined a new strategy for the armed forces, by which any threat from enemies will be responded to with threats, Nouri said.The U.S. and Israel have said that all options remain open, including military action, should Iran continue with its enrichment program.Tehran says it needs the program to produce fuel for future nuclear reactors and medical radioisotopes needed for cancer patients.The country has been enriching uranium to less than 5 percent for years, but it began to further enrich part of its uranium stockpile to nearly 20 percent as of February 2010, saying it needs the higher grade material to produce fuel for a Tehran reactor that makes medical radioisotopes needed for cancer patients. Weapons-grade uranium is usually about 90 percent enriched.

Iran says the higher enrichment activities — to nearly 20 percent — will be carried out at Fordo. These operations are of particular concern to the West because uranium at 20 percent enrichment can be converted into fissile material for a nuclear warhead much more quickly than that at 3.5 percent.Built next to a military complex, Fordo was long kept secret and was only acknowledged by Iran after it was identified by Western intelligence agencies in September 2009.Buried under 300 feet (90 meters) of rock, the facility is a hardened tunnel and is protected by air defense missile batteries and the Revolutionary Guard, Iran's most powerful military force. The site is located about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Qom, the religious nerve center of Iran's ruling system.The Fordo facility, like Natanz, has been designed and built underground. The enemy doesn't have the ability to damage it,the semiofficial Mehr news agency quoted nuclear chief Abbasi as saying Sunday.

How threat of loose Soviet nukes was avoided
Associated PressBy VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV | AP – JAN 8,12

MOSCOW (AP) — The doomsday scenario of Soviet nukes falling into the hands of rogue states or terrorists has, as far as is known, remained fiction, thanks to a massive U.S.-Russian effort to lock the weaponry up safely after the Soviet Union fell apart.
The vast nuclear arsenal, scattered among several newly independent nations, was secured because Russian military officers acted with professionalism and honesty, Moscow and Washington shared clear priorities, and the U.S. taxpayer coughed up billions of dollars, former top officials who dealt with the Soviet nuclear legacy say.Even so, as the world marks the 20th anniversary of the Soviet demise at the end of 1991, occasional doubts surface about whether the system was airtight. There's the Russian scientist who perhaps went to work for Iran's nuclear program, an old claim that portable nuclear devices went astray, the seizures of smuggled fissile material in the 1990s.But difficult though it is to prove a nuclear negative, U.S. and Russian officials insist in interviews with The Associated Press that the fears of the 1990s have not become a reality, even though the challenges of safeguarding Soviet nukes were daunting at the time.Twenty years on it's pretty hard to believe that not a single nuclear weapon has shown up loose,said Graham Allison, who played a key role in the effort as an assistant secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton and now heads Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

A quick U.S.-sponsored deal had Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan handing all their nukes over to Russia, and American cash helped safeguard the weapons at a time when the new governments couldn't even afford to pay military wages on time. Additional U.S. incentives offered jobs to disgruntled nuclear scientists from the former Soviet Union, many of whom were courted by nations like Iran.There have been gnawing fears that a few Soviet nukes still might have gone missing, but experts with inside knowledge say that if it were true the world would already know.If somebody or a terrorist group got hold of a nuclear weapon, they would probably use it as quickly as possible,said Steven Pifer, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, held other senior State Department posts and is now director of the Brookings Institution's Arms Control Initiative. So the fact that you haven't seen a nuclear detonation ... reflects the fact that the nuclear weapons have been maintained in a secure way.That was no mean achievement given the enormous proliferation risks posed by the Soviet breakup.The economic meltdown of the early 1990s forced many officers of the once-proud Soviet Army to moonlight as security guards or even cab drivers. And with the wars and ethnic clashes triggered by the Soviet collapse came strong incentives to steal weapons for the black market.The immediate task for the Russian military was to quickly remove thousands of battlefield weapons such as nuclear artillery shells and land mines from other Soviet nations. These relatively compact arms posed the biggest proliferation risk and often were stored close to areas of conflict.The military officers who did the job were the unknown heroes, said Alexander Golts, a Russian independent analyst. It's hard to imagine what might have happened if the tactical nuclear weapons had remained on the territories of the states involved in military conflicts.

The next goal, strongly backed by Washington, was to remove strategic nuclear weapons from Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. The first two agreed quickly, but Ukraine, which had inherited enough of the Soviet arsenal to be the world's third largest nuclear power, balked at the plan, setting the stage for years of diplomatic battles.A war for custody of nukes? All this was quite terrifying,said Allison.
Pifer said that some Ukrainian officials longed to keep them, but around 1992 concluded their country had neither the money nor the expertise to remain a nuclear power.Also, the world's worst nuclear disaster had happened in 1986 at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, and public opinion wasn't keen on keeping nukes.Still, Ukraine bargained for years for compensation in tough talks that sometimes made even seasoned diplomats lose their temper.There was a lot of pressure, they threatened us with all kinds of economic sanctions, they wanted to get this issue over with fast, Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine's then president, told the AP.Ukraine insisted the U.S. provide hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for safeguarding and dismantling the arsenal. From Russia it demanded nuclear fuel as compensation for the highly enriched uranium in the warheads. And it wanted security guarantees from all the nuclear powers.We didn't want to get naked for free,Kravchuk said.Tensions over which country military officers in Ukraine should swear allegiance to — Russia or Ukraine — also stoked tensions. In February, 1992 an entire squadron of combat jets flew from Ukraine to Russia after their pilots refused to take the oath.Ukraine eventually got the money and security guarantees it was seeking, but the Russians had other obstacles to overcome. For instance, the economy was so bad that the military struggled to pay wages on time, and top brass were reduced to struggling to give the strategic nuclear forces personnel better rations, said Maj.-Gen. (Ret.) Vladimir Dvorkin, a nuclear weapons expert in the Russian Defense Ministry in the early 1990s.Control over the security of nuclear weapons never slackened, Dvorkin said. People realized their responsibility because they were fully aware of the dangers.Nuclear arsenals surrendered by former Soviet republics had to be safely transported long distances to centralized storage sites and secured. Dismantling missiles, bombers and submarines as required by the 1991 START treaty with the U.S. also required huge funds.Russia badly needed assistance, Dvorkin said, and the U.S. responded quickly with the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program initiated by Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, which provided billions of dollars in equipment and know-how to help Russia and its neighbors deal with the Soviet nuclear legacy.It seems to me that Nunn-Lugar was one of the smartest uses of defense dollars we ever made,Pifer said.

Under the program, the U.S. provided reinforced rail cars to carry nuclear warheads, high-tech security systems for storage sites and dismantling mothballed nuclear subs.
The program provided colossal support,Dvorkin said.Building on their cooperation in securing the Soviet nuclear arsenals, Moscow and Washington moved later to reduce the number of nuclear weapons held by both sides, most recently with the New START deal signed by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev that took effect last year.But while Dvorkin says the military in Russia and other ex-Soviet nations kept tight control over atomic weapons, numerous civilian agencies were far less diligent in keeping track of nuclear materials at their disposal. Fissile materials at nuclear power plants were controlled by one agency, and research reactors were in the hands of another one,he said.Oversight at civilian structures was less stringent than in the military, creating conditions for a steady string of thefts of radioactive materials in the early 1990s, which were later seized by police in Germany and other European nations.There were such cases, but they didn't entail catastrophic consequences, Dvorkin said, noting that the amounts of uranium and plutonium seized in Germany and elsewhere were extremely small, each measuring just a few grams.Another major worry for the West was that scientists with nuclear know-how would be hired by unfriendly forces.The U.S. responded quickly by setting up research centers that distributed grants to scientists so that they can do civilian research and do it in Russia and avoid the temptations perhaps to go to countries such as North Korea and Iran,Pifer said.Thousands of scientists participated in this project in Russia and Ukraine, so we know of thousands of people who stayed behind,he said.Whether we got everybody, I don't know.Iran was working actively to attract scientists from Russia and other ex-Soviet lands, and the International Atomic Energy Agency in a report released in November said a foreign expert helped Iran on some of its alleged weapons-related experiments by working on ways to set off a nuclear blast through a sophisticated multipoint explosives trigger. Diplomats identified him as former Soviet scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko, who worked in Iran for several years.Despite the assurances from Russian and U.S. officials that no Soviet nukes got lost in the chaos of the post-Soviet years, allegations occasionally surfaced that some of the weapons went missing.

Gen. Alexander Lebed, who headed Russia's Security Council for several months in 1996, made the most stunning of such claims in 1997, saying the military lost track of dozens of suitcase-sized portable nuclear devices. Lebed issued several contradictory statements about the number missing, and Russian officials rejected his claim.Dvorkin said Lebed, who died in a helicopter crash in 2002, didn't know what he was talking about.I personally know people who were counting the weapons at centralized depots, and they have confirmed that nothing was stolen,he said.They did the check after Lebed's statements and made sure that everything was in place.Maria Danilova in Kiev, Ukraine contributed to this report.(This version CORRECTS to Brookings Institution, not Institute in paragraph 8.)

Iran Guard says will close strait if oil blocked
AP – JAN 8,12

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — An Iranian newspaper quotes a senior commander in Iran's Revolutionary Guard as saying that Tehran's leadership has decided to order the closure of the strategic Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf if the country's oil exports are blocked.Khorasan daily reported Sunday that Ali Ashraf Nouri says the strategic decision has been made by Iran's top authorities.Iranian politicians have made the threat in the past, but this is the strongest statement yet that a closure of the strait is official policy.The U.S. has recently enacted new sanctions targeting Iran's central bank and its ability to sell petroleum abroad over Tehran's nuclear program. Washington says Tehran is trying to develop weapons, while Iran denies the charges.

US will respond if Iran blocks Strait: Panetta
AFPAFP – JAN 8,12

The United States will respond if Iran tries to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Gulf, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Sunday, saying such a move would cross a red line.We made very clear that the United States will not tolerate the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz,Panetta told CBS television. That's another red line for us and that we will respond to them.Panetta was seconded by General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said Iran has the means to close the waterway, through which 20 percent of the world's oil passes.But we would take action and reopen the Straits, the general said on the same show, Face the Nation.Their comments follow Iranian threats to close the strait if the European Union goes through with an embargo on Iranian oil, the latest step to pressure Tehran to give up a nuclear program that the West suspects is aimed at gaining atomic weapons.

Israel razes four Palestinian homes near Jericho
AFPAFP – Thu, Jan 5, 2012

Israeli troops on Thursday demolished four villas near the ancient city of Jericho, which Israel said endangered a nearby archaeological site, sources on both sides said.An AFP correspondent at the scene said the villas, which are located in Ad-Duyuk at-Tahta northwest of the town, were owned by Palestinians living in Jerusalem and Ramallah.Locals at the scene said the villas had been demolished because they were built without a permit.A spokesman for COGAT, a unit within the Israeli defence ministry which administers the occupied West Bank, said the homes were built without permission and were endangering a nearby archaeological site.They are in the area of the Hasmonean palace and were built illegally, without a permit, COGAT spokesman Guy Inbar told AFP, referring to a site on a hill on Jericho's western edge which overlooks the town.He said the owners had been repeatedly warned about the demolition in orders dating back as far as 2008.Israel demolished another four houses in the same area in mid-November, saying they risked threatening the nearby archaeological site.Last month, a coalition of international rights groups and aid organisations said Israel's demolition of homes in the West Bank and east Jerusalem had displaced more than 1,000 people in 2011, twice that of the previous year and the highest number since 2005.

Israel vows treat hackers like other terrorists'
AFPAFP – Sat, Jan 7, 2012

Israel said on Saturday that it will respond to cyber-attacks in the same way it responds to violent terrorist acts, by striking back with force against hackers who threaten the Jewish state.The message from Deputy Foreign Minister Dany Ayalon came after a self-defined Saudi hacker from a cabal known as group-xp published details of more than 6,000 Israeli credit cards online.It is necessary to send a message to everyone who attacks or tries to attack Israel, including in cyberspace, Ayalon said in quotes published widely in Israeli media.Hackers stand warned, he said, that they are putting themselves in danger and that they will not benefit from any immunity against reprisal actions from Israel.Cyber-attacks amount to terrorism that must be treated as such. In cyberspace, we have active capacities and we can hit those who try to hit us.Ayalon also applauded the United States for declaring that all attacks in their cyberspace will be considered as a declaration of war and they will react as if it had been a missile attack.On Thursday, the Saudi hacker, who goes by the name OxOmar, said he had posted the details of 11,000 Israeli credit cards online, but Israel's three major credit card companies said only 6,050 cards were affected.

Earlier in the week, 0xOmar posted a message on an Israeli sports website saying group-xp, which he described as the greatest Saudi Arabian hacker team,had posted details of 400,000 Israeli cards online.After examining the details, Israel's major credit card companies said only 14,000 valid cards had been exposed.Israeli news website Ynet reported that an Israeli computer expert claimed to have uncovered the true identity of 0xOmar -- a 19-year-old Mexican waiter called Omar Habib.

The Canadian Press - ONLINE EDITION
HMCS Charlottetown departs for Mediterranean counter-terrorism mission
By: The Canadian Press Posted: 01/8/2012 9:15 AM

HALIFAX - Hundreds of loved ones gathered on the deck of HMCS Charlottetown this morning to bid farewell to sailors bound for the Mediterranean Sea.About 250 sailors left the Halifax Harbour to embark upon an six-month counter-terrorism mission.The Charlottetown is part of NATO’s Operation Active Endeavour and will be tracking, boarding and reporting on ships believed to be involved in terrorism.That is the anti-terrorism operation launched in October 2001 in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.Cmdr. Wade Carter says he doesn't anticipate a significant amount of risk during the mission, but the crew is also trained to react to a crisis if necessary.
He says the ship will not be stationed in any one area of the Mediterranean, but rather patrol throughout the sea.