No War with Iran: Petition Over 2100 people have signed the Just Foreign Policy/Peace Action petition against war with Iran through the Just Foreign Policy website. (Peace Action has collected 15,000 signatures.) Please sign and circulate if you have not done so: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/involved/iranpetition.html
No War with Iran: T-shirts The perfect gift: for a nice-looking "No Iran War" t-shirt, please visit our friends at the "Mossadegh Project": http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/
Just Foreign Policy News daily podcast: Take a summary of today's foreign news with you. http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/podcasts/podcast_howto.html
Summary: U.S./Top News The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday to condemn North Korea and impose stiff sanctions on it in response to its nuclear test. North Korea's ambassador rejected the council's demand to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
Air samples from North Korea confirm that a nuclear explosion was carried out a week ago, US intelligence officials say.
President Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the U.S. is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to history-of-civilization stakes now, writes Tom Raum for the Associated Press.
Questions over the effectiveness of the Security Council's sanctions on North Korea grew Sunday, as both South Korea and China, the North's two most important trading partners, indicated that business and economic relations would be largely unaffected, the New York Times reported.
The Bush administration has made headway in cutting off North Korea and Iran from the international financial system, the New York Times reports. As a result of the American campaign, some foreign banks are cutting ties with North Korea and Iran. Some say the moves against Iran could damage US economic interests if Iran switched to currencies other than the dollar for its large oil trades. [Many Americans, like workers in export industries, would actually benefit from a lower dollar -JFP.]
Representative John Murtha, writing in the Washington Post, confesses to being a "Defeatocrat," if that means taking a good hard look at the administration's Iraq policy and determining that it's a failure. It's time that the White House and the GOP start working with Democrats to come up with a reasonable timetable for withdrawal, he says.
Iran The US Sunday used new U.N. sanctions against North Korea to warn Iran, AP reports. Western powers have agreed to start working on U.N. sanctions against Iran next week, but have yet to bridge differences on how harsh the penalties should be. Iran called threats of sanctions ''psychological warfare'' and said it would not be intimidated.
Iraq A video posted on the internet in the name of one of Iraq's largest insurgent groups called for the creation of a separate Sunni Islamic state in the country. This may indicate a shift in strategy for parts of the Sunni Arab insurgency. The video claimed for the new state areas of Iraq, such as Kirkuk, sure to be the scene of bloody contest if there is a partition.
Reconstruction funds are drying up and US builders are pulling out of Iraq, leaving completed projects and unfulfilled plans in the hands of an Iraqi government unprepared to manage them, AP reports. Many Iraqi government ministries aren't able yet to pick up where the Americans leave off, the reconstruction chief at the U.S. Embassy said.
British army internet forums were full of praise for the army chief's comments that British troops should leave Iraq soon, the London Sunday Times reports.
Iraq's democracy is being challenged by calls for the formation of a hardline "government of national salvation", the London Sunday Times reports. The proposal, being widely discussed in political and intelligence circles in Baghdad, is to replace the government with a regime capable of imposing order and confronting the sectarian militias.
Thousands of Iraqis are fleeing the country every day, in what the UN's refugee agency describes as a steady, silent exodus, BBC reports. UNHCR also says the number of internally displaced is growing, with some 365,000 Iraqis uprooted this year.
Israel The governments of Israel and the US, in close cooperation with Europe, are engaged in a experiment in order to see if is it possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it, writes Israeli journalist Uri Avnery. The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs are the million and a quarter Palestinians living there.
China A senior State Department official said today that China had begun inspecting trucks crossing its border with North Korea. AP reported that Chinese customs inspectors examined cargo trucks bound for the North more closely today than they did last week.
Ecuador A banana magnate and a young economist close to Venezuela will face each other in a presidential election runoff on Nov. 26 after neither obtained enough votes to win in a first round Sunday, writes Juan Forero for the Washington Post. Rafael Correa, the economist, promises to overturn Ecuador's old economic order and calls for a constitutional assembly. Correa, who obtained his PhD in Economics from the University of Illinois, is influenced by Keynesian thought, which sees a central role for government in managing the economy, and by contemporary economists such as the American Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, who argues that unchecked globalization harms poor countries, Forero reports.
Venezuela Venezuela gained votes but still lagged behind Guatemala on Monday in the fourth round of secret balloting for an open Latin American seat in the U.N. Security Council for the years 2007-2008, Reuters reports.
Contents: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/newsroom/blog/
-------- Robert Naiman Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org
Just Foreign Policy is a membership organization devoted to reforming U.S. foreign policy so that it reflects the values and interests of the majority of Americans.