Dnb10252013 by World secrets

EDITOR ’ S VIEW

ince the 1979 Iranian revolution, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States have shared a common concern about Iran. But a recent thaw between Washington and Tehran has shaken that old alliance. In a meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised doubts about Iran’s intentions. Saudi Arabia expressed its qualms as well. Israel is worried about Iran-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia shares the nuclear worry, is locked in a proxy war with Iran in Syria, and is worried about Iranian meddling in the Shiitedominant region of the kingdom. The US agrees with those concerns, but it is intrigued by a possible new relationship with Iran. Under Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Iran has softened its anti-US rhetoric and promised to prove it is not developing nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Mr. Kerry is pushing for Syrian peace talks even though Saudi-backed factions say they will not participate. While it is too early to predict how these developments will play out, the reaction of US allies indicates they view the possibility of change in the US-Iran relationship quite seriously. John Yemma, editor@csmonitor.com

October 25, 2013

US phone-spying accusations pile up fresh allegations in europe feed a growing firestorm. By SARA MILLER LLANA

the European Union gathered Thursday for a two-day summit in Brussels that promises to PARIS – As the extent of US spying practices has be dominated by the National Security Agency emerged over the past six months, America’s scandal. While European politicians were dismayed longtime European allies have publicly protested – even as they expressed little surprise at the initial allegations of US surveillance of metadata, revealed by former NSA contractor behind the scenes. But the tone on the Continent has changed Edward Snowden, the mood has darkened considerably since it was alleged markedly this week. On that the US is directly spying Monday, a report in France’s This is today’s Monitor top on embassies and individuals Le Monde Monday alleged story. For more of today’s in Europe. that the US had accessed masstories, go to CSMonitor.com. President Obama spoke sive amounts of French telewith both Ms. Merkel and phone data. And Wednesday, the German government said it had informa- French President François Hollande after Le tion that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile Monde’s allegations. Subsequently, the White House said in a phone might have been bugged. Both countries summoned the United statement that the president assured the chanStates’ ambassadors to answer to the accusa- cellor that the US “is not monitoring and will tions, as anger mounted in a way that some say not monitor” her communications. But that could profoundly shift the allies’ relationships. has not tempered dismay from either Germany “Enough is enough,” is how one European or France.  To read the full article, click here official described the mood to the BBC, as STAFF WRITER

Spain’s recession officially ends But most spaniards may not feel improvement anytime soon. By ANDRÉS CALA CORRESPONDENT

MADRID – Spain’s recession is officially over.

But while that’s good news for Europe’s fifth biggest economy – and for the European Union as a whole – there’s still a long way to go before the majority of Spaniards feel the improvements. Spain’s central bank said Wednesday that the economy grew 0.1 percent in the third quarter – an insignificant but symbolically important indicator of the end of more than two years of grueling recession and an affirmation of Europe’s slow recovery. And Spain’s National Statistics Institute announced Thursday that unemployment dropped for a second straight quarter, to just under 26 percent. Exports have surged as a result of improved Spanish competitiveness, albeit primarily due to plummeting workers’ wages. Foreign investment is also rising, as stock markets once

again swell with money from abroad. It’s invariably the beginning of what most expect will be a very slow recovery and the result of successful policies that have reined in a government deficit, unsustainable borrowing costs, and decades of uncontrollable spending. “This is good news that will improve confidence in Europe as a whole,” says Josep Oliver, an applied economics professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. Still, the majority of Spaniards have little reason to cheer. Even as unemployment is dropping, it remains near record highs and salaries continue to fall. There is no end in sight to the austerity and painful adjustments that Spain has been prescribed to recover from its 7.5 percent economic contraction since 2008. Consensus forecasts estimate there are still two or three more years at least before any real recovery trickles down.  To read the full article, click here

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Eight states, including California and New York, pledged Thursday to work together to dramatically multiply the number of zero-emission cars on the nation’s roads by speeding the construction of charging stations and other infrastructure. The goal is to put 3.3 million battery-powered cars, plugin hybrids, and other cleanburning vehicles on the roads in those states by 2025. Maryland, Oregon, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Massachusetts are the other participants. Pirates kidnapped two Americans working on a commercial ship near the coast of Nigeria, US officials said Thursday. The Nigerian Navy ordered its forces to mount a rescue operation. The captain and an engineer were taken from an offshore supply vessel during an attack Wednesday in international waters off the Gulf of Guinea, said a US defense official. A Roma woman in Bulgaria has undergone DNA testing and faces preliminary charges of child selling as authorities investigate if she is the mother of a young girl found living with an unrelated couple in Greece, authorities said Thursday. Though the tests have yet to prove Sasha Ruseva is the biological mother of the girl known as Maria, the woman’s admission that she once left a baby behind in Greece opened her up to a formal investigation. The US violent crime rate went up 15 percent last year, and the property crime rate rose 12 percent, the government said Thursday, signs that the nation may be seeing the last of the substantial declines in crime of the past two decades. Russia on Thursday angrily dismissed espionage accusations against a Russian cultural exchange official in Washington, saying the US claims were unfounded. The FBI is looking into whether Yury Zaytsev, the head of a Russian governmentrun cultural exchange program, tried to recruit young Americans

Grilled: ‘Obamacare’ website team Testing was inadequate before the debut, contractors testify. By MARK TRUMBULL STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON – Contractors who helped to build the

troubled sign-up website for Obamacare said Thursday that an insufficient testing process contributed to an error-prone rollout. They put blame on the Obama administration – specifically the health agency that had the key role of “systems integrator” for the Healthcare.gov website – for the last-minute testing. The statements came in a hearing held by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, with Republicans and Democrats alike lamenting the site’s poor performance. At the same time, the contractors expressed optimism that the website could be made to work adequately without a wholesale software rewrite. “As painful as it sounds ... the system is working,” Cheryl Campbell of the firm CGI Federal said at the hearing. “People will be able to enroll at a faster pace,” she asserted, with time to enroll and have coverage start by Jan. 1, 2014, if they want. When asked if she could give a date when the site would be fixed, however, Ms. Campbell

did not give a direct estimate. “I cannot give you an exact date,” she testified, saying that doing so could “raise expectations.” The hearing marks the first time members of Congress have held a public inquiry into the technical problems that have dogged the rollout of health insurance “exchanges” under the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.” Although some states are managing their own exchanges for residents to shop for insurance, 36 states are relying on the HealthCare.gov website as their gateway. Four panelists from different companies generally refrained from overt criticism of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which took the lead role in creating the website. But when prompted in questioning, they said that “end-to-end” testing of the system began unusually late for such a large and complex project. Campbell and Andrew Slavitt of Optum/ QSSI said integrated testing was conducted in just the final couple of weeks before the website’s launch date of Oct. 1.  To read the full article, click here

Iran stops 20-percent enrichment halt of Near bomb-grade processing appears to signal progress. By MIKE ECKEL CORRESPONDENT

By most accounts, the negotiations in Geneva over Iran’s nuclear program are going well. Diplomats have been tight-lipped, but signals sent by Iran and by diplomats from the United States and other world powers indicate the sides are finding common ground in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran insists its program is for research and electricity generation, but the US and others, particularly Israel, are skeptical. For optimists, a claim Thursday that Iran has halted enrichment of uranium to the critical 20-percent threshold is a sign that 24 years of bluster between Tehran and Washington may be at an end. A halt to 20-percent enrichment is among the key concessions wanted by the West, and according to The Associated Press, Iran made that offer at last week’s talks with the P5+1

group (the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany). The most challenging part of uranium enrichment happens below the 20-percent threshold; once you get to 20 percent, it’s relatively easy to enrich up to bomb-grade levels. “I have never had such intense, detailed, straightforward, candid conversations with the Iranian delegation before,” said one US negotiator who gave reporters an off-the-record briefing last week. The loudest voice in the pessimists’ camp is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who wants to force the Iranians to give up their fissile material altogether. He insists Iran open up its underground, mountainside facilities and says the only reason for their location is to protect them from airstrikes, a point he reiterated in meetings with US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday.  To read the full article, click here

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as intelligence assets, a US intelligence official told The Associated Press. Voting on its first big bill since the end of a 16-day partial government shutdown, House Republicans and Democrats acted in near unison, voting 417 to 3 to pass an $8.2 billion bill that sketches out plans for dams, harbors, river navigation, and other water projects for the coming decade. North Korea plans to allow six detained South Koreans to return home, officials in Seoul said Thursday, an unusual move that accompanied Pyongyang’s separate approval of a visit by South Korean lawmakers to a recently restarted factory park both Koreas run in the North. President Obama called on Congress Thursday to finish finish work on an immigration overhaul by the end of the year, a lofty goal that will be difficult to meet given the staunch opposition of many House Republicans. The Senate passed sweeping legislation this summer that would provide an eventual path to citizenship for some 11 million immigrants living here illegally, but the measure has languished in the GOP-led House. Compiled from wire service reports “THE OBJECT OF THE MONITOR IS TO INJURE NO MAN, BUT TO BLESS ALL MANKIND.”

– Mary Baker Eddy

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EDITORIAL / THE MONITOR’S VIEW

Germany calls Europe to attention If a big question mark were hanging over for more handouts from Europe-wide instituthe global economy, it is over Europe. The tions. The bill could be as high as $69 billion. “People doubt that we have learned all the Continent’s emergence from a three-year recession is still very much in doubt. On lessons from the last banking crisis,” says Thursday, the European Union’s leaders met in German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. The Germans are not being stingy. They Brussels to try and lift those doubts, especially know that each of the 18 eurozone countries about Europe’s troubled banks. The biggest concern is whether nations with must learn from experience and make internal reforms that will stick and prethe worst bank woes, such as Italy, Ireland, and Spain, have National self-discipline, vent another crisis. Many loans will need to be restructured or learned enough lessons from not more German the 2009 financial crisis. bailouts, will help cement closed out. The 28-member EU, whose Germany does not think so. the EU’s economic future. unity has frayed, needs the It prefers that each country, not smaller group in the eurozone German taxpayers, be the primary backstop for what it calls Pleitebanken, to succeed. The EU must be in sync on its or busted banks. These are banks saddled with financial health to hold the union together. loans that, in hindsight, should not have been That is not easy when half of its 19 million given out in the first place, whether in housing unemployed people have been without a job for more than a year and Germany and France or in ill-conceived start-up companies. Starting next month, the EU plans a “stress appear to be drifting apart on EU reforms. Letting each eurozone nation solve its banktest” of 130 banks to reveal the extent of bad loans that will probably not ever be repaid ing mess will help ensure that lessons sink in, (“nonperforming”). When the test results are drive momentum toward more reforms, and known for this “asset-quality review,” Germany develop national self-discipline in finances.  To read the full editorial, click here does not want national leaders to come looking

A CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

When you need a father

ith the passing of my husband, my children and I have endeavored to fill the void. He was an amazing man: a father, musician, professor, and diplomat – a large presence in all our lives that suddenly seems to have gone missing. My older son, an officer in the US Marine Corps and a leader and veteran of war zones, told me recently that he felt fatherless. As a lifelong Christian Scientist, my first response to my son was one centered in prayer. “You are never without your Father,” I assured him. No matter where we go or how difficult our situation might be, our FatherMother, God, is there, and we can open our hearts to that divine parenting presence. I reminded him that in his recent deployment in Afghanistan he was witness to God’s presence as he and his men trained Afghan policemen without harm to themselves or their colleagues. And I thought about the gift my son brought home to his father, a US

flag that had flown over the Marine base in Afghanistan. Dear to me was the accompanying certificate from the Marines, on which was written a statement from Mary Baker Eddy (a quotation from “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” which my son had chosen): “As a drop of water is one with the ocean, a ray of light one with the sun, even so God and man, Father and son, are one in being” (p. 361). We all yearn for that tender care and reassurance that come from perhaps a human parent at first, and that broaden and encircle us in the embrace of God’s love. God is an infinite, unchanging, true parent to whom we can always turn, and who is always there for us, whether we are in a war zone or going through our daily routines. We are never fatherless or motherless when we see ourselves in this true light as a child of God.

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– Sharon Carper  To read the full perspective, click here T H E C H R I ST I A N SC I E N C E M ONITOR