NEWS,28.04.2012.

Dutch judge upholds foreigner pot ban

Long famous for "coffee shops" where joints and cappuccinos share the menu, the Netherlands' famed tolerance for drugs could be going up in smoke.A judge on Friday upheld a government plan to ban non-Dutch residents from buying marijuana by introducing a "weed pass" available only to residents.The new regulation reins in one of the country's most cherished symbols of tolerance - its laissez-faire attitude to soft drugs - and reflects the drift away from a long-held view of the Netherlands as a free-wheeling utopia.For many tourists visiting Amsterdam the image endures - and smoking a joint in a canal-side coffee shop ranks high on their to-do lists along with visiting cultural highlights like the Van Gogh Museum.The city's left-leaning Mayor Eberhard van der Laan is hoping to hammer out a compromise with the national government.Coffee shops also have not given up the fight. A week ago they mustered a few hundred patrons for a "smoke-in" in downtown Amsterdam to protest the new restrictions.A lawyer for owners, Maurice Veldman, said he would file an appeal against the ruling by a judge at The Hague District court, which clears the way for the weed pass to be introduced in southern provinces on May 1.The pass will roll out in the rest of the country - including Amsterdam - next year. It will turn coffee shops into private clubs with membership open only to Dutch residents and limited to 2 000 per shop.The most recent figures from the government's statistics bureau says the country has more than 650 coffee shops, 214 of them in Amsterdam. The number has been steadily declining as municipalities have imposed tougher regulations, such as shuttering ones close to schools.But the new membership rules are the most significant rollback in years to the traditional Dutch tolerance of marijuana use.The government argues that the move is justified as a way of cracking down on so-called "drug tourists", effectively couriers who drive over the border from neighboring Belgium and Germany to buy large amounts of marijuana and take it home to resell. They cause traffic and public order problems in towns along the Dutch border.Such issues do not exist in Amsterdam, where most tourists walk or ride bikes and buy pot purely for their own consumption.The weed pass "doesn't solve any problems we have here and it could create new problems", said city spokesperson Tahira Limon.It is not just hardcore potheads taking a toke in the city. Limon said four to five million tourists visit Amsterdam each year and around 23% say they visit a coffee shop during their stay.Amsterdam argues that the reasons coffee shops were first tolerated decades ago are still relevant today - they are well-regulated havens where people can buy soft drugs without coming into contact with dealers of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine.Coffee shops also are banned from serving alcohol and from selling drugs to people under 18.The government in The Hague said on Friday there would be no exceptions to the new rules."Amsterdam will also have to enforce this policy," said Job van de Sande, a spokespersonfor the ministry of security and justice.The conservative Dutch government introduced the new measures saying it wants to return the shops back to what they were originally intended to be: small local stores selling to local people.However the Dutch government collapsed this week and new elections are scheduled for September. It is unclear whether the new administration will keep the new measures in place.Coffee shop lawyer Veldman called Friday's court ruling a political judgment."The judge completely fails to answer the principal question: Can you discriminate against foreigners when there is no public order issue at stake?" he asked.Coffee shop owners in the southern city of Maastricht have said they plan to disregard the new measures, forcing the government to prosecute one of them in a test case.

Syria accuses UN chief of encouraging militants

 

 A Syrian government newspaper says UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon is encouraging militant attacks by focusing his criticism on the government.Saturday's editorial in the state-run Tishrin daily comes a day after Ban said Syrian President Bashar Assad's continued crackdown on protests has reached an "intolerable stage".Tishrin says Ban has avoided talks about rebel violence in favour of "outrageous" attacks on the Syrian government.The Syrian capital was hit by four explosions on Friday that left at least 11 people dead and dozens wounded.Assad's government blamed the blasts on "terrorists", the term the government uses to describe opposition forces that it says are carrying out a foreign conspiracy.

Israelis being fooled on Iran: ex-security chief

Israel's former security chief Yuval Diskin on Saturday accused top ministers of misleading the public about the chances any pre-emptive military action against Iran's nuclear facilities succeeding.Diskin singled out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak for criticism over their increasingly bellicose comments in the standoff with Iran over its nuclear programme."My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us in an event on the scale of war with Iran or a regional war," Diskin said in comments carried by army radio and the Haaretz newspaper."I don't believe in either the prime minister or the defence minister. I don't believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings," he said."Believe me, I have observed them from up close ... They are not people who I, on a personal level, trust to lead Israel to an event on that scale and carry it off. These are not people who I would want to have holding the wheel in such an event."They are misleading the public on the Iran issue. They tell the public that if Israel acts, Iran won't have a nuclear bomb. This is misleading. Actually, many experts say that an Israeli attack would accelerate the Iranian nuclear race."Diskin, who stepped down as head of Israel's Shin Bet domestic security service last year after six years in the post, was addressing a public meeting in Kfar Saba in the Tel Aviv suburbs.In March, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan also spoke out publicly against a military option on Iran. He told US network CBS an Israeli attack would have "devastating" consequences for Israel and would, in any case, be unlikely to put an end to the Iranian nuclear programme.On relations between Israeli Jews and other groups, Diskin said: "Over the past 10-15 years, Israel has become more and more racist. All of the studies point to this. This is racism toward Arabs and toward foreigners, and we are also becoming a more belligerent society."Diskin also said he believed another political assassination, like that of then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a Jewish extremist, could occur in the future."Today there are extremist Jews, not just in the territories but also inside the Green Line - dozens of them - who, in a situation in which settlements are evacuated, would be willing to take up arms against their Jewish brothers," he said.

NEWS,07.03.2012.

Iran will allow UN inspectors into complex

IRAN will grant UN inspectors access to a military complex where the UN nuclear agency suspects secret atomic work has been carried out, the semi-official ISNA news agency reports. Tehran had previously banned UN inspectors from visiting the Parchin installation, southeast of Tehran, but a statement by Iran's permanent envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency today said the visit would now be allowed in a gesture of goodwill. However, it would require an agreement between the two sides on guidelines for the inspection, ISNA reported. Inspecting Parchin was a key request made by senior IAEA teams that visited Tehran in January and February. Iran rebuffed those demands at the time, as well as attempts by the nuclear agency's team to question Iranian officials and secure other information linked to the allegations of secret weapons work. The latest development comes a day after IAEA chief, Yukiya Amano, expressed growing concern that there was new activity at Parchin. Amano did not specify whether he believed the activity was linked to suspected new weapons experiments or attempts to clean up previous alleged work. The Parchin complex has been often mentioned in the West as a suspected base for secret nuclear experiments - a claim Iran consistently denies. IAEA inspectors visited the site in 2005, but only one of four areas on the grounds and reported no unusual activities. Last year, IAEA's report said there were indications Tehran has conducted high-explosives testing to set off a nuclear charge at Parchin. Iran denied the atomic activity and insisted that any decision to open the site rests with the armed forces since it was a military, not nuclear, facility.Speaking yesterday in Vienna, Austria, Amano said the suspicions of "activities ... ongoing at the Parchin site" in Iran means "going there sooner is better than later" for IAEA inspectors seeking to probe suspicions that Iran has been - or is - working secretly to develop nuclear arms."We have our credible information that indicates that Iran engaged in activities relevant to the development of nuclear explosive devices," Amano said outside of a 35-nation IAEA board meeting in Vienna, describing his sources as "old information and new information”. Iran denies any intention of possessing nuclear weapons and says all of its atomic activities are peaceful, but the IAEA says it has intelligence-based suspicions that may not be the case based on thousands of pages of documentation.” Given that Parchin is a military site, access to this facility is a time-consuming process and it can't be visited repeatedly," ISNA quoted the Iranian statement as saying. It added that following repeated IAEA demands, "permission will be granted for access once more”. The statement added that Tehran and IAEA need to agree on "modalities" before the visit can take place. There was no immediate comment at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna on Tehran's decision. It comes as fears are growing that Israel's air force may soon strike Iran in an attempt to destroy its nuclear facilities. President Barack Obama met with Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington yesterday and told the Israeli prime minister that the United States "will always have Israel's back," but that diplomacy is the best way to resolve the crisis over potential Iranian nuclear weapons.

NEWS,05.03.2012.

Obama increase pressure to Iran

President Barack Obama says he doesn't want war but insists he would attack Iran if that was the only option left to stop that nation from getting a nuclear weapon."Loose talk of war" only plays into Iran's hands, Obama said Sunday. On Monday, he will try to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to slow quickening pressure among many in his hawkish government to attack Iran's disputed nuclear development sites. Obama is trying to avert an Israeli strike that could come this spring, and which the United States sees as dangerously premature. The president is expected to tell Netanyahu in private at the White House that although the U.S. is committed to Israel's security it does not want to be dragged into another war. Obama is unlikely to spell out U.S. "red lines" that would trigger a military response, despite Israeli pressure to do so.U.S. officials believe that while Tehran can build a nuclear weapon, it has not yet decided to do so. They want to give sanctions time to pressure Iran to give up any military nuclear ambitions. Israel says the threat is too great to wait and many officials there are advocating a pre-emptive strike.Obama did not directly call on Israel to stand down, and made a point of saying Israel should always have the right to defend itself as it sees fit.That was the part of Obama's speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that Netanyahu said he liked best. Speaking to reporters in Canada ahead of his arrival in the U.S., Netanyahu made no reference to the sanctions and diplomacy Obama emphasized Obama is unlikely to persuade Netanyahu that economic sanctions and diplomacy are enough to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and he is unlikely to win any new concessions from Netanyahu on peace talks, the issue that drew bad blood between the two men in previous meetings and led the Israeli leader to publicly scold Obama last year. Netanyahu has not publicly backed a military strike, but his government spurned arguments from top U.S. national security leaders that a pre-emptive attack would fail."Now is not the time for bluster," Obama said. "Now is the time to let our increased pressure sink in." Obama framed military force as a last resort, not the next option at a time when sanctions are squeezing Iran. He said just the talk of war has driven up the price of oil to the benefit of Iran. Although Israel says it hasn't decided whether to strike, it has signalled readiness to do so within the next several months. The top U.S. military officer recently called a unilateral strike "imprudent," a mild catchall for the chain-reaction of oil price hikes, Iranian retaliation, terror strikes and a possible wider Mideast war that U.S. official’s fear could flow from an Israeli strike. Israel says a nuclear-armed Iran would be a threat to its existence. It cites Iranian leaders' repeated calls for Israel's destruction, support for anti-Israel militant groups and its arsenal of ballistic missiles that are already capable of striking Israel. Israel also fears a nuclear Iran would touch off an atomic weapons race in a region hostile to Israel's existence.Addressing the powerful pro-Israel lobby, Obama delivered messages to multiple political audiences: Israel, Iran, Jewish voters, a restless Congress, a wary international community and three Republican presidential contenders who will speak to the same group Tuesday. At the core was his bullish assertion that the United States will never settle for containing a nuclear-armed Iran or fail to defend Israel.