Bush & Blair press conference

Following his recent visit to Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to Washington to report back to President Bush, and to speak at a press conference.

"Despite setbacks and missteps," said President Bush at the conference, "I strongly believe we did and are doing the right thing [in Iraq]." The general public in America and the U.K., however, would disagree with this, and the popularity of both Bush and Blair is at an all time low, primarily because of the debacle in Iraq.

Bush further stated that "the formation of a new government represents a new beginning for Iraq." Bringing democracy in the Middle East is the central idea of the Bush administration's foreign policy in that region. It was hoped that establishing 'freedom and democracy' in Iraq would bring about a domino effect in the rest of the Middle East.

But American-style democracy is very different from the true definition of the word. In American terms, a 'democracy' is a government that co-operates with the U.S. and opens up its financial markets to foreign (i.e. American) investment. Never mind if that government oppresses and tortures its citizens - it is democratic if it complies with the wishes of the U.S. If a government is unco-operative, the U.S. brands it 'undemocratic' and uses brute force to impose its will.

That the Bush administration does not seek true democracies in the Middle East was demonstrated recently, when the Islamist group Hamas was elected by the Palestinians. This election was democratic in the true sense of the word, but because the winners of that election are not favoured by the U.S., they have been shunned by the international community. In other words, democracy is good, as long as the democratic process brings into power a leader favourable to the U.S.

Chomsky in the Independent

Yesterday's Independent contained an extract from Chomsky's new book, Failed States.

New AIDS virus images may aid vaccine development

(Kenneth Roux, FSU)

Researchers at Florida State University have completed a two-year study to produce the most detailed images yet of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the infectious agent which causes AIDS.

Lead researcher Kenneth Roux and his colleauges used cryoelectron microscopy tomography to produce the above image, which shows an HIV particle magnified 43,000 times. The image reveals the surface architecture of the virus, elucidating the distribution of protein molecules on its surface (the grey spikes in the picture). These molecules interact with proteins on the surface of a cell during infection, when viruses enter host cells to reproduce.

The spike heads are responsible for binding of HIV to the surface of T-lymphocytes and macrophages, the immune system cells which the virus infects, while the spike stalks are responsible for fusion, during which the virus injects its genes into the host cell.

The FSU researchers were surprised to discover that the spike stalks have 'legs'. Previously it was thought that a stalk consisted of a tight bundle of three rods, but now it appears that the rods are instead arranged in a tripod-like structure.

"Until now, despite intensive study by many laboratories, the design details of the spikes and their distribution pattern on the surface of the virus membrane have been poorly understood, which has limited our understanding of how the virus infection actually occurs and frustrated efforts to create vaccines," says Roux.

The findings should provide valuable information for researchers trying to develop vaccines for AIDS, which has killed 25 million people, and infected 40 million more, worldwide.

U.S. Marines killed Iraqi civilians "in cold blood"

(Reuters)

(AP)

While the occasional deaths of British or American troops in Iraq always makes the headlines, the deaths of Iraqis, including innocent civilians, takes place on a daily basis and usually goes unreported and, therefore, unnoticed.

It now emerges that U.S. Marines murdered 23 innocent Iraqi civilians at Haditha, including a child aged 1, in revenge for the killing of one of their number in a roadside bombing. It also appears that after the massacre, which occured last November, the Marines involved tried to cover up the real events, claiming that the Iraqis were killed in a firefight following an ambush.

A United for Peace and Justice press release likens the event to the massacre of hundreds of civilians by U.S. troops in My Lai during the Vietnam War.

A recent headline in USA Today reads 'Nation's honor requires full inquiry into Haditha killings'. I would suggest that America's honour was lost long before its illegal invasion of Iraq.

New material could make objects invisible

Scientists at Duke University and the University of St. Andrews have developed a material that could make objects invisible. [Read more...]

New feature

I've added a new feature, which you've probably already noticed (if you're a regular visitor).

The news pictures slideshow above was created on Slide.com.

After activating the control by clicking on the slideshow, you can read the description of a photo by hovering your cursor over it, or access the original news story by double clicking on a photo.

The slideshow requires Macromedia Flash Player.

Abbas gives Hamas an ultimatum

A militant from the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, an offshoot of Fatah (Mohammed Salem/Reuters).

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, has given Hamas an ultimatum. If the new government does not back a proposal to recognize Israel and renounce violence, Abbas will call a national referendum on the issue.

The proposal was drafted by Palestinian militants, from different factions, who are imprisoned by Israel.

Abbas's use of words echos the sentiments of the U.S. and Europe, who have repeatedly insisted that the new Islamist government must "recognize Israel and renounce violence".

I reiterate my earlier point that the onus should be on Israel to renounce state-sanctioned violence and recognize the Palestinians' right for self-determination and their own state.

While we are constantly reminded that Hamas seeks the destruction of Israel, we are never told that, since its creation, the Jewish state has sought to destroy the Palestinian people and erase the very memory of their existence from history.

Remember the catastrophe

(Image from Shaml, the Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Centre.)

May 15th (Monday of last week) marked the 58th Anniversary of al nakhba, or the catastrophe, when 750,000 Palestinians were displaced or expelled from their homes in historic Palestine, which became the state of Israel.

The events leading to the establishment of Israel are still fiercely disputed. The official Israeli version is that Palestinians abandoned or willingly gave up their land. Jewish Israeli schoolchildren were taught that Palestine was empty before the creation of modern Israel.

The so-called "revisionist historians," most notably Benny Morris, claim to debunk the official Israeli version of events but, in fact, deviate from it only slightly.

In reality, there was a major "purification"of Palestinian land by Jewish military and paramilitary forces in 1948, which amounted to partial ethnic cleansing. "'Disappearing' the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its existence," writes Israeli historian Tom Segev.

Today, the Zionist dream of a homogenous Jewish state cannot be realized with such a large (about 25%) Palestinian minority. This is Israel's demographic problem - the high Palestinian birthrate makes the possibility of an Arab majority in Israel very real. Outright extermination of the Palestinians is not an option, and, therefore, Israel has oppressed the Palestinians so brutally in the hope that they might leave their homes of their own accord.

Israel still denies the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. 50% of Palestinians in the occupied territories are refugees. Since its creation, Israel's policy towards the Palestinians has been to erase the very memory of their existence, in order to justify the wrongs committed against the Palestinians during Israel's painful birth.

The Israeli Supreme Court last week commemorated the nakhba by passing a law banning residents of the West Bank and Gaza who marry Israelis from obtaining Israeli citizenship, residency or entry permits.

Counting down to cancer

It comes as no surprise that genes involved in the circadian rhythm, or 'biological clock', are implicated in cancer.

Circadian rhythms (from the Latin circa, meaning 'around', and dies, meaning 'day') are roughly 24-hour physiological cycles which occur in most organisms, from plants and animals (including humans) to fungi and bacteria. These rhythms are important in determining behaviours such as sleeping and feeding.

The mammalian circadian rhythm is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the brain's hypothalamus. In humans, the cycle is known to have a duration of 25 hours. Under normal circumstances, however, the rhythm is synchronized with real time by information about the amount of light. But if you spent one month in a cave, without the external environmental cues needed by the brain to synchronize your bioclock with real time, your sleep/ wake patterns would follow a 25-hour cycle rather than a 24-hour one.

Researchers have now shown that Per1, an important genetic component of the circadian rhythm, is also invovled in cancer. There are reduced levels of the Per1 protein in tissue samples from cancer patients, and mutations in the Per1 gene interfere with cells' molecular defences against ionizing radiation, which can induce cancer by damaging DNA.

It is logical that genes involved in circadian rhythms should also be involved in cancer. Normally, cells divide a certain number of times and then die. In cancer, the internal clock found in cells ceases to function, so that they continue to grow and divide, forming tumours instead of dying.

New image through a gravity lens

(ESA/NASA/K Sharon/E Ofek/Tel Aviv U/Caltech)

This new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the kaleidoscopic effect of a cluster of galaxies.

Concentrations of matter, such as galaxies and dark matter, produce what cosmologists call gravitational lenses, which refract light rays emitted from objects behind them, leading to multiple images those objects.

In the above image, a massive cluster of galaxies, called SDSS J1004+4112, acts as a gravitational lens which produces five images of a quazar, and three of a galaxy, which lie 10 and 11 billion light years away, respectively. The galactic lense itself is 7 billion light years away.

This particular gravitational lense goes against mathematical theories which predict that lenses always produce odd numbers of images. Although only three images of the lensed galaxy are visible, Charles Keeton of Rutgers University believes that there is a fourth at the centre of the lens which is too faint to see.

The effects of gravitational lenses on light passing through them provides information about the distribution of matter in the lens. Keeton's belief that there is a faint fourth image of the galaxy suggests that the lens has an unusual configuration.

In telescope images, galaxies appear as smears, whereas quazars are visible as single points. Because their lensed appearance can be affected by small clumps of matter, "we can [in principle] probe structure in the mass distribution of the cluster all the way down to individual stars," says Keeton. The variations in brightness of quazars can also provide information about the configuration of a lens; the light rays producing each lensed image of the quazar travel different paths and, therefore, there will be differences in when, and for how long, each of the images brightens.

Carbon nanotubes: The hottest topic in physics

According to an index devised by a Ph.D. student at the Max Plank Institue for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, carbon nanotubes are the hottest research topic in physics, with more papers being cited more times than papers in any other field.

Carbon nanotubes are sheets of graphitic carbon wrapped to form cylinders which have extraordinary properties. Although very light, they are among the strongest fibres known, and conduct electricity and heat extremely well. Nanotubes therefore have the potential to be applied in a variety of fields, particularly electronics, optics and materials science.

Read about the applications of carbon nanotubes and other areas of nanotechnology in life sciences here.

The new Great Game

"Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia - to many these names breathe only a sense of utter remoteness or a memory of strange viccisitudes and of moribund romance. To me, I confess, they are the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world."

These words are just as applicable today as they were when written in 1898 by Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, the viceroy of India. He was referring to what became known as the "Great Game" - a race between the British and Russian empires to gain control of the heart of the Eurasian landmass and, therefore, access to the riches of India.

The U.S., Russia and China are today engaged in a new Great Game, but the prize this time is control of Central Asia's vast fossil fuel reserves. The U.S. is the world's largest energy consumer, accounting for 4% of the world's population but consuming one quarter of its energy. It has long recognized that it needs to diversify its energy sources, mainly because of its over-dependence on the politically unstable Middle Eastern petro-monarchies. The rising Chinese hegemon is hungry for energy to feed its unprecedented double-digit economic growth and its appetite for oil and gas can only increase, while Russia, being the largest regional power, would hope to control the energy reserves on its own doorstep.

Central Asia has the world's largest untapped energy reserves, and the largest remaining reserves outside of the Middle East. It has been estimated that the basin of the land-locked Caspian Sea has 170- 463 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, the largest single natural gas resource in the world. The U.S. Department of Energy gives a probability of 50% that the Caspian basin contains reserves of 243 billion barrels of oil, on a par with the 260 billion barrels of proven reserves claimed by the Arabian peninsula. The Kashagan oil field, off the Kasakh coast, was discovered in 2000 and is believed to be among the world's 5 largest oil fields. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan also have vast gas reserves but exports are limited by pipeline infrastructure.

(BBC)

Unsurprisingly, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney met Kasakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev earlier this month, with the aim of promoting a scheme to build a gas pipeline across the Caspian Sea towards Europe and, no doubt, of securing a contract for the oil industry services corporation Halliburton, of which he was once CEO.

"I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian," Cheney told an audience of oil industrialists in Washington D.C. in 1998. Securing the world's remaining energy reserves are the central concern of U.S. geopolitical strategy, and controlling access to Central Asian hydrocarbons is one of main factors influencing recent U.S. policy in the Middle East, the invasion in the late 1970s of Afghanistan by both Russia and the U.S., and the "war on terrorism".

Fluorescent green worms & small golden cages

These tiny worms, which have been genetically manipulated so that some of their nerve cells fluoresce, are being used to investigate how the human brain forms memories, and physicists have discovered "hollow golden cages" made of 16-18 gold atoms.

Violence in Stone Age Britain

A survey of 350 skulls from Neolithic (4,000- 3,200 BC) sites in southern Britain reveals that approximately 5% had healed depressed fractures while 2% had unhealed injuries. Statistically, this means that there was a probability of 1 in 14 that a New Stone Age Briton would incur a head injury.

Most of the skulls examined had injuries on the left side, consistent with attacks by right-handed people brandishing blunt objects. There is, however, evidence that some of the skulls were damaged by stone axes and that ears were occassionally cut off.

Protests to free Egyptian bloggers

Sandmonkey has pictures of a demonstration in Washington D.C., whose participants are protesting against the release of Alaa Abdel Fatah.

Alaa is the most prominent of Egypt's approximately 800 bloggers, and was one of several dozen arrested by the Egyptian government for supporting an independent Egyptian judiciary.

Sandmonkey notes that:

"Currently there are about 48 of them detained, 6 of them are bloggers, and 3 of them are women. The best known is Alaa, which makes him the posterboy of this campaign - but getting them out is equally as important. Egypt has fewer than 830 bloggers all in all, 60 of whom are political and less than 30 are politically active. Now 6 of those are in jail - 20% of all politically active Egyptian bloggers - and amongst them one of Egypt's most highly profiled one."

He's also noticed that there have in the past few days been frequent visits to his blog from the IP addresses of Egyptian government and security service officials.

(Banner from The Beirut Spring Blog.)

The Man of War's weaponry

Portugese Man of War

New research by a team at the University of Heidelberg shows that prey coming into contact with the tentacles of a jellyfish are stung within one-millionth of a second, making the jellyfish sting one of nature's fastest mechanisms; and a three-year study by marine biologists at the Sea Mammal Research Unit of St. Andrews University has found that dolphins call each other by 'name'.

The Census of Marine Zooplankton

Images obtained by the Census of Marine Zooplankton project. View the entire high-resolution gallery, and a movie clip.

New Scientist reports that:

"The latest research cruise in the ongoing Census of Marine Zooplankton project pulled weird and wonderful looking organisms up from as deep as 5000 metres...By collecting a comprehensive sample of zooplankton and sequencing all the species' genomes, scientists are creating a database of unique genetic "barcodes" that allows microscopic ocean life to be identified much more quickly."

The Sultan's Elephant in London

The Sultan's time-travelling elephant is in London until tomorrow.

Israel's undeclared nuclear program

Zoom in

The U.S. National Security Archive has just released 30 recently declassified documents which show that President Nixon was provided with evidence of Israel's nuclear program soon after he came into office in 1969.

Using the documents, Avner Cohen of the University of Maryland's Center for International and Security Studies and William Burr of the National Security Archive describe the debate that took place within the Nixon administration about whether or not Israel should be allowed to continue its nuclear program.

Their article, entitled Israel Crosses the Threshold, is published in the May/June issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It shows that the Nixon administration considered confronting Israel about its nuclear program, but decided instead that U.S.-Israeli relations would be based on a "don't ask, don't tell" policy; that, as long as Israel signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the U.S. "could live" with an undeclared and secret Israeli nuclear program, despite U.S. knowledge that Israel was fully capable of developing nuclear weapons; and that, despite Israel's assurance that it was not developing nuclear weapons, it had been doing so since 1958 at the Dimona facility, which was built expressly for that purpose, and which was kept hidden from U.S. officials who went to Israel on fact-finding missions.

The brain & the dread of pain

The dread associated with the anticipation of a painful event, such as a visit to the dentist, activates regions of the brain involved in processing pain stimuli. [Read more...]

"The BNP is on its way"

The far-right British National Party (BNP) made big gains in yesterday's local elections, nearly doubling its number of councillors when it won 11 seats in Barking and Dagenham, 3 in Epping Forest and 3 in New Sandwell.

Although there were predictions that the BNP would capitalize on dissatisfaction with the Labour Party, the party's gains are far greater than was expected, prompting Russell Green, the party's councillor for New Sandwell to declare that "the BNP is on its way."

The BNP's election campaign was primarily based on aggressive Islamophobia. They are neo-Nazi thugs masquerading as politicians.

BNP leader Nick Griffin denies that his party is racist. Griffin discusses the election gains of his party in this video clip; he also has his own blog (chairmanscolumn.blogspot.com), which I refuse to link to.

Britain's chemistry crisis

A report published yesterday by the Select Committee on Science and Technology says it is "disappointing" that the University of Sussex has proposed to close its highly-rated Chemistry department.

The university has decided that "retaining a chemistry department in its present form for the long-term would cost an extra £750k, with no guarantee of long-term success in recruitment or research activity," and academics at Sussex say that there is no guarantee that the department will keep its 5-star rating for research quality.

According to the report, the government has not given enough "powers or political support" to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The HEFCE is responsible for distributing £6.3 billion from the Department for Education and Skills to British universities, but does not have "the teeth, the tools, nor the will" to carry out its role effectively.

Applications for undergraduate chemistry courses at Sussex actually increased by 40% compared to last year, although there has been an overall 7% decrease in the number of chemistry graduates in the U.K.

"The key problem," says Professor Guy Orpen, head of chemistry at Bristol University, "is that the costs of operating a chemistry department are high and not reflected in the price that HEFCE pays a university to educate chemistry students."

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) says that the chemistry department at Sussex is "thriving." Dr. Richard Pike, chief executive of the RSC, criticized the decision to close the department, and called for the government to change its recent policy of cutting funding to all but the country's top chemistry departments.

The report recognizes that "the problems faced by Sussex in relation to chemistry provision are by no means unique to that institution...[and that] the situation at Sussex is...symptomatic of a wider problem"; the announcement by Sussex University follows last year's closure of chemistry departments at King's College, Queen Mary, Swansea and the University of London.

Physics departments are in a similar situation - dozens up and down the country have been closed down in recent years, and graduates in the subject are being attracted to high-paying jobs in the City rather than pursuing research careers, leading to a shortage of school teachers specializing in the subject.

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are of "critical strategic importance"; a steady flow of graduates in the subjects is seen as crucial to the U.K.'s economy and its standing as one of the world's leaders in research.

Embryos imaged in 3D

Researchers from Texas and Utah have combined CT scanning and computing to produce detailed three-dimensional images of mouse embryos. [Read more...]

Israel's new government

The government of incoming Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is to be sworn in today, and Olmert will put his programme to the new parliament. The programme contains plans to redraw Israel's borders, and Olmert has told the Knesset that the future borders would look very different from those of today.

Olmert plans to pull some of the Jewish settlers from isolated West Bank settlements. The new borders will, however, contain the largest West Bank settlements and will annex yet more Palestinian territory.

An amended route of Israel's 'security barrier', approved by the government on 30th April, penetrates deeply into Palestinian territory. In some places, the barrier is 22km further into Palestinian territory than the Green Line. (The Green Line is the informal border established in 1949 - the border was drawn on a map with a green pencil. Since the occupation of Palestinian territories during the 6 Day War in 1967, Israel has been in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for the "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict".)

Zoom in

According to Olmert's plans, Ma'ale Adumim, the largest illegal Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, will be expanded westwards. This will link it with Jerusalem, which is 9km away, and encircle Arab East Jerusalem in the process. Once the barrier is complete, Ma'ale Adumim will be enclosed by it, thus cutting off East Jerusalem from neighbouring Palestinian areas and leaving the northern and southern West Bank connected by narrow strips of land under Israeli control. This will leave the occupied Palestinian territories divided into three isolated areas, constituting 50-60% of the West Bank as it stands now. This remaining territory will effectively be bisected by the expanded Ma'ale Adumim settlement.

"Negotiations with the Palestinian Authority is [sic] the desired basis to lead us to a peace agreement,"says Olmert, "but a Palestinian government led by a terror organisation will not be partner for negotiations."

If negotiating with the PA was really the "desired basis" to a peace agreement, surely Olmert's government would at least try to negotiate with Hamas. In reality, Israel has never sought negotiations with the Palestinians, regardless of who the Palestinian leader is, as this would inevitably involve some compromise on the part of Israel.

It is not surprising that Olmert will not negotiate Israel's future borders with the Palestinians, for his plans leave no room for a satisfactory Palestinian state.

Species on the verge of extinction

The black-tailed godwit, Limosa limosa

Only about 600 pallid squills, Scilla morrisii, remain

Hippopotamus amphibius

Gazella dama

The Mallorcan midwife frog, Alytes muletensis

The World Conservation Union (IUCN) has released its 2006 Red List of Threatened Species. The number of known threatened species is now 16,119, a small increase on the 15,589 species named in the last Red List, which was published in November 2004.

Nevertheless, according to ICUN director general Achim Steiner, "the 2006 Red List shows a clear trend; biodiversity loss is increasing, not slowing down. [This will have] far-reaching implications...for the productivity and resilience of ecosystems and the lives and livelihoods of billions of people who depend on them."

The number of species categorized as threatened comprise more than one third of the 40,177 assessed by the IUCN, which is recognized as being highly authoritative on the status of Earth's flaura and fauna. Species threatened with extinction include one in three amphibians, one in four mammals and coniferous trees and one in eight birds. Polar bears, gazelles and the hippopotamus are among the familiar species added to the 2006 Red List.

99% of the species on the 2006 Red List are threatened because of human activities such as over-exploitation of resources and pollution.

BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

According to the Report of the Independent Panel for BBC Governors on Impartiality of BBC Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the Beeb occasionally fails to give a "full and fair account" of the situation in the Middle East, although, in general, the reporting of the conflict is very good:

"What the BBC does now is good for the most part - some of it very good...but it could and should do better to meet the gold standard which it sets itself in its best programmes. Apart from individual lapses, sometimes of tone, language or attitude, there was little to suggest systematic or deliberate bias. On the contrary, there was evidence, in the programming and in other ways, of a commitment to be fair, accurate and impartial."

However, researchers at Glasgow University's Mass Media Unit view BBC coverage of the conflict differently. A study of BBC and ITV coverage of the Middle East carried out in 2004 "suggests that television news...confuses viewers." The study, published in the book Bad News From Israel, continues:

"Israelis are quoted and speak in interviews over twice as much as Palestinians and there are major differences in the language used to describe the two sides. This operates in favours of the Israelis and influences how viewers understand the conflict. Because there was not account of historical events...there was a tendency for viewers to see the problems as 'starting' with Palestinian action...[whereas] Israeli actions tended to be explained and contextualised - they were often shown as merely 'responding' to what had been done to them by Palestinians...[There is] a strong emphasis on Israeli casualties...[and] a tendency to present Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as vulnerable communities, rather than as having a role in imposing the occupation."

So much for the conclusion by the independent panel that the BBC's coverage is "impartial." BBC reporting is generally considered to be the best journalism in the world. Another way of saying that is that the BBC provides the best misinformation in the world.

ElBaradei reports on Iran

IAEA Board of Governors, Vienna, Austria.

Mohammed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), presented his report on the Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, to the UN Security Council last Friday.

The report states that Iran has refused to halt enriching uranium but cautiously notes that the IAEA was unable to confirm whether or not Iran's nuclear program is as advanced as some claim it to be.

The Bush administration is now pressuring the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution, under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, declaring that Iran is a threat to "international peace and security".

"We have a lot of diplomatic arrows in our quiver at the Security Council and also like-minded states that would be able and willing to look at additional measures if the Security Council does not move quickly enough," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice told CBS News on Sunday.

The U.S. will continue to exaggerate the threat posed by Iran to convince such "like-minded states" that Iran poses a great threat and that urgent action is needed. Indeed, Rice is due to meet foreign ministers of Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany on May 9th, in a last-ditch effort to persuade veto-wielding Russia and China that economic sanctions should be imposed upon Iran.

"There are a variety of things that could be undertaken within or without the Security Council,” said John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the UN. In other words, the U.S. will act unilaterally if diplomacy at the UN fails. The situation is reminiscent of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq three years ago.