WORLD
November 9, 2011 | By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
Years of credible evidence indicates Iran may be secretly working to develop a nuclear weapon, the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency said Tuesday in a strongly worded report that renewed debate among Western powers over how to curb the Islamic Republic's nuclear ambitions. The report by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency cites a series of suspect activities that raises "serious concerns" about "possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear program. " Iran's leaders ordered a halt to an extensive nuclear program in 2003, the report says, but clandestine work on high-speed detonators and other weapons-related research "may still be ongoing.
WORLD
November 4, 2011 | By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times
Despite weeks of tough warnings, the Obama administration has backed away from its calls to impose new and potentially crippling economic sanctions against Iran in retaliation for an alleged plot to kill Saudi Arabia's ambassador on U.S. soil, according to diplomats and American officials. Though U.S. officials had declared that they would "hold Iran accountable" for a purported plot, they now have decided that a proposed move against Iran's central bank could disrupt international oil markets and further damage the reeling American and world economies.
ENTERTAINMENT
June 9, 2011 | By Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times
When tens of thousands of antigovernment protesters filled Cairo's Tahrir Square for 18 tense days and toppled Egypt's brutal dictator early this year, Mohamed ElBaradei visited the street revolutionaries exactly once — briefly — and never went back. Since then, ElBaradei has made repeated appearances on American TV talk shows to portray himself as the leader of Egypt's opposition movement and to argue that he now should become the country's first freely elected president. Revisionism is a recurrent theme in ElBaradei's memoir, "The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times.
WORLD
June 2, 2011 | By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times
Japan did not properly protect its nuclear plants against the threat of tsunami before the March 11 disaster that caused radiation to spew from the Fukushima Daiichi facility, concludes a preliminary report released Wednesday by international nuclear experts. "The tsunami hazard for several sites was underestimated," says a three-page summary released by a United Nations nuclear safety team investigating the aftermath of a magnitude 9 earthquake that triggered a nearly 50-foot-high wall of water, deluging the plant.
WORLD
March 21, 2011 | By Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times
The head of the U.N.'s atomic agency said Monday that the brewing crisis at Japan's reactors in the wake of the country's devastating earthquake and tsunami should lead officials around the world to reassess the international nuclear framework. "The agency's role in nuclear safety may need to be reexamined, along with the role of our safety standards," Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in a briefing to the agency's governing board. "It is already clear that arrangements for putting international nuclear experts in touch with each other quickly during a crisis need to be improved.
WORLD
March 14, 2011 | By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times
Japan's earthquake-stricken nuclear facilities are unlikely to suffer the kind of catastrophic accident that occurred in Chernobyl 25 years ago, the Japanese director-general of the U.N.'s nuclear agency said Monday. The design and structure of Japanese nuclear power plants are different from the Soviet-era facility where an April 26, 1986, explosion blew the roof off the northern Ukrainian complex's No. 4 reactor, unleashing a radiation cloud that swept across Europe and around the world.