Panetta: US sends forces to Jordan

BRUSSELS (AP) — The United States has sent military troops to the Jordan-Syria border to bolster that country's military capabilities in the event that violence escalates along its border with Syria, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday.

Speaking at a NATO conference of defense ministers in Brussels, Panetta said the U.S. has been working with Jordan to monitor chemical and biological weapons sites in Syria and also to help Jordan deal with refugees pouring over the border from Syria. The troops are also building a headquarters for themselves.

But the revelation of U.S. military personnel so close to the 19-month-old Syrian conflict suggests an escalation in the U.S. military involvement in the conflict, even as Washington pushes back on any suggestion of a direct intervention in Syria.

It also follows several days of shelling between Turkey and Syria, an indication that the civil war could spill across Syria's borders and become a regional conflict.

"We have a group of our forces there working to help build a headquarters there and to insure that we make the relationship between the United States and Jordan a strong one so that we can deal with all the possible consequences of what's happening in Syria," Panetta said.

The development comes with the U.S. presidential election less than a month away, and at a time when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, has been criticizing President Barack Obama's foreign policy, accusing the administration of embracing too passive a stance in the convulsive Mideast region.

The defense secretary and other administration officials have expressed concern about Syrian President Bashar Assad's arsenal of chemical weapons. Panetta said last week that the United States believes that while the weapons are still secure, intelligence suggests the regime might have moved the weapons to protect them. The Obama administration has said that Assad's use of chemical weapons would be a "red line" that would change the U.S. policy of providing only non-lethal aid to the rebels seeking to topple him.

Pentagon press secretary George Little, traveling with Panetta, said the U.S. and Jordan agreed that "increased cooperation and more detailed planning are necessary in order to respond to the severe consequences of the Assad regime's brutality."

He said the U.S. has provided medical kits, water tanks, and other forms of humanitarian aid to help Jordanians assist Syrian refugees fleeing into their country.

Little said the military personnel were there to help Jordan with the flood of Syrian refugees over its borders and the security of Syria's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

"As we've said before, we have been planning for various contingencies, both unilaterally and with our regional partners," Little said in a written statement. "There are various scenarios in which the Assad regime's reprehensible actions could affect our partners in the region. For this reason and many others, we are always working on our contingency planning, for which we consult with our friends."

A U.S. defense official in Washington said the forces are made up of 100 military planners and other personnel who stayed on in Jordan after attending an annual exercise in May, and several dozen more have flown in since, operating from a joint U.S.-Jordanian military center north of Amman that Americans have used for years.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the mission on the record.

In Jordan, the biggest problem for now seems to be the strain put on the country's meager resources by the estimated 200,000 Syrian refugees who have flooded across the border — the largest fleeing to any country.

Several dozen refugees in Jordan rioted in their desert border camp of Zaatari early this month, destroying tents and medicine and leaving scores of refugee families out in the night cold.

Jordanian men also are moving the other way across the border — joining what intelligence officials have estimated to be around 2,000 foreigners fighting alongside Syrian rebels trying to topple Assad. A Jordanian border guard was wounded after armed men — believed trying to go fight — exchanged gunfire at the northern frontier.

Turkey has reinforced its border with artillery guns and deployed more fighter jets to an air base close to the border region after an errant Syrian mortar shell killed five people in a Turkish border town last week and Turkey retaliated with artillery strikes.

Turkey's military chief Gen. Necdet Ozel vowed Wednesday to respond with more force to any further shelling from Syria, keeping up the pressure on its southern neighbor a day after NATO said it stood ready to defend Turkey.

Iran's spy agency finds voice in cyberspace

Associated Press/Vahid Salemi - Iranian photojournalist Maryam Rahmanian checks the newly launched website of Iran's Intelligence Ministry, in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2012. A glimpse into the shadow world of Iran's main spy agency is now a click away. In an unexpected display of outreach, the Intelligence Ministry now hosts a website with addresses of provincial offices, appeals for tips and anti-American essays that mock rising obesity rates, large prison populations and school shootings. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A glimpse into the shadow world of Iran's main spy agency is now a click away.

In an unexpected display of outreach, the Intelligence Ministry now hosts a website with addresses of provincial offices, appeals for tips and anti-American essays that mock rising obesity rates, large prison populations and school shootings.

There's no mission statement on the site, but it appears part of stepped-up attempts by Iran's leadership to promote national unity and project its authority amid Western sanctions and international isolation. After protests in Tehran last week over Iran's slumping currency, the nationally broadcast Friday prayers tapped heavily into the theme of shared sacrifice in times of trouble. And on Wednesday, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described the sanctions as a "war against a nation."

The new website also fits into Iran's narrative of fighting a "soft war" in cyberspace against Western cultural and political influences. For more than a year, Iran's leaders have touted plans for a "clean" Internet that could presumably try to block Western content, but Web experts have raised questions about its technical feasibility.

"The ministry is going online to make its presence known to the Iranian public, especially the young who use the Internet," said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born political analyst based in Israel. "This is basically a show of force."

What the new Farsi-language site, www.vaja.ir, lacks in innovation (mostly a simple list of stories and links), it makes up for in pure anti-American bluntness.

Click on "America from a Different Perspective." The list of shame includes the huge U.S. prison population, rising obesity, school shooting statistics, why supporters of euthanasia seek to "kill grandparents" and how giant chain stores such as Walmart are smothering small businesses.

Another essay claims the chief goal of U.S. economic sanctions is not to force concessions over Tehran's nuclear program, but to incite civil unrest. It specifically cites U.S. diplomat Jillian Burns, who set up Washington's first Iranian monitoring office in Dubai in 2006 and is currently the consul in Herat in western Afghanistan, where Iran has strong cultural and economic ties. There was no immediate comment from the State Department.

Tehran-based political commentator Hamid Reza Shokouhi sees the website — the web name is the Farsi acronym for the Intelligence Ministry — as part of a new image-building campaign by Iran's ruling system in the Internet era, which has left authorities in a constant struggle to block opposition sites and Western influences.

"Economic and military threats against Iran have increased. Under such circumstances, it is necessary to reduce the gap between the people and the ruling system," said Shokouhi. "The website is a move in this direction. This is a big deal."

It's far from the first time that Iran's leadership has planted its flag in cyberspace.

Websites have operated for years for Khamenei and others including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — in Farsi, English and Arabic. More than a dozen state-run and semiofficial news services also flood the Web around the clock.

"The leadership, particularly within the hardline elements of the Intelligence Ministry, has an obsession with the notion that Washington is coordinating a soft revolution to unseat the Islamic Republic," said Suzanne Maloney, an Iranian affairs expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Part of Iran's counterstrategy appears to be a kind of information overload in response to U.S. initiatives, such as the State Department's launch last year of a "virtual embassy" in English and Farsi that seeks to reach out to ordinary Iranians. The site was quickly blocked by Iranian authorities, but firewall bypasses such as proxy servers are widely used by Iran's young and tech-skilled population.

"There is probably an element of mimicry here as well," said Maloney. "The Iranians enjoy turning the table on Washington and imitating American tactics."

Last week, a U.S. broadcast oversight board accused Iran of jamming regional radio and television programming that includes the Persian services for the Voice of America and the BBC. And on Monday — two days after the website was launched — Iran's Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi claimed that Iran's secret services have the upper hand in the Web war with the West.

"The intelligence apparatus confronts enemy measures in the cyber front," the official IRNA news agency quoted Moslehi as saying.

The intelligence minister was at the center of one of Iran's most public political feuds. Khamenei last year demanded Moslehi keep the post despite objections from Ahmadinejad, who was so angered that he boycotted government meetings for more than a week. In response, the ruling clerics arrested dozens of Ahmadinejad's allies and left him politically weakened entering his final year in office.

A journalist at Tehran's moderate Shargh newspaper, Soroush Farhadian, interprets the new website as an effort by intelligence agency to gain its own voice.

"One of the objectives is to demonstrate its independent position rather than speaking through the semiofficial news agencies," he said.

There is also a potential for touches of candor amid the high-voltage propaganda. One article appears to buck the official line that sanctions on Iran's oil exports are meaningless. It notes Iran has "paid heavy costs" in its showdown with the West.

"On the one hand, Iran has faced problems with a cut in its main source of revenue. On the other hand, the West has taken all measures to force Iran to give up its nuclear program," the post said. "Despite all the costs suffered by the West to stop Iran's nuclear program, the Islamic Republic has continued its path and the West has failed."

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Political objections derail European defense deal

LONDON (AP) — A deal to create a European defense and aerospace giant to rival Boeing Co. collapsed Wednesday when BAE Systems and EADS NV called off merger talks in the face of government objections.

The companies said they had "decided to terminate their discussions" over the proposed $45 billion tie-up because of conflicting interests between the British, French and German governments.

"It has become clear that the interests of the parties' government stakeholders cannot be adequately reconciled with each other or with the objectives that BAE Systems and EADS established for the merger," the companies said in a statement.

The proposed merger between Britain's BAE and Franco-German EADS, the parent of Airbus, would have created a company with a market value just shy of Boeing's.

But from the start, investors were skeptical about the deal because of the political disagreements. All three governments had to approve the deal for it to go ahead.

"It's not up to me to regret or rejoice," French President Francois Hollande said. "The French state as shareholder made known a certain number of arguments, of conditions. Our German friends had a certain number of criteria that were important to them. The British did the same. And the companies came to their conclusion."

The companies confirmed the end of their discussions just hours before a deadline on whether to go ahead with the merger, ask for more time or call it off.

The chief executives of both companies had emphasized that the merger was sought not out of necessity, but in the hope of leapfrogging Boeing to the number one spot.

A number of concerns were instantly raised, including the scale and location of any job cuts. Questions were also raised about what the deal would do to the delicate balance thatGermany and France have achieved in EADS after years of bickering.

German officials never appeared keen on the deal, preferring EADS to stay the way it was.

The British government was wary about what the prospective deal would do to BAE's big business dealings with the U.S., as well as the scale of the involvement of other governments in the combined entity's affairs. If the new entity was perceived as state-owned, it could affect its ability to vie for contracts in the U.S. and Asia.

BAE's biggest shareholder, Invesco Perpetual, which owns more than 13 percent of the group, also relayed its concerns that the merger could threaten BAE's U.S. defense contracts. BAE is a central lynchpin of the commercial relationship between the U.S. and the U.K.

In the end, these objections proved too difficult to solve, derailing a deal that would have created a company with annual sales of around €70 billion ($90 billion) and a combined global workforce in excess of 220,000.

"That government disagreements killed this deal carries a lesson for consolidation of the European defence market as a whole," said Guy Anderson, a defense industry analyst at IHS Jane's. "Meshing the interests of investors and governments and bringing together state-owned, privately-owned and quasi-state owned corporations together will prove to be a Herculean task."

France is the only government that owns a direct stake in either of the two companies, but Germany has long held sway in EADS via shares held by automaker Daimler and private and public banks. Berlin was arguing for a slice of its own in the new company in order to maintain that historic role.

The deal also didn't sit well with French conglomerate Lagardere, which owns a 7.5 percent stake in EADS. Lagardere's CEO, who is also chairman of EADS itself, said this month that the merger did not create value.

Tom Enders, the chief executive of EADS, and his counterpart at BAE, Ian King, both expressed disappointment at the outcome.

"It is, of course, a pity we didn't succeed but I'm glad we tried," said Enders.

Analysts believe that the collapse of the merger would leave BAE more vulnerable in the face of major cuts in U.S. and U.K. defense spending. That's not the case for EADS, which is expected to continue to have a good revenue stream from its commercial aircraft businesses.

BAE will have to "evolve its business model to be effective in a different climate in the future, that's a challenge for the management team going forward," British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond admitted.

EADS shares rose on the news the merger was off, closing 5.3 percent higher in Paris. BAE shares ended 1.4 percent lower in London.

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Rising Sea Levels Mean Evacuation of Island States in a Decade

Some Pacific island nations including Tuvalu and the Arctic’s Kivalina could have to evacuate their populations in the next ten years due to rising sea levels. It’s as clear a sign as any of the existence of climate change and its irreversible impact.

As Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told the Guardian at the SXSW Eco conference in Austin, Texas, the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting at a much faster rate than predicted. The major ice sheets in Greenland and the Arctic are “critical from the standpoint of sea level rise.” Once these start melting, sea level begins to rise at a faster rate, a reminder of how what happens in one part of the world plays out elsewhere.

Many of the Pacific Islands are only 4.6 meters above sea level at their highest point, so even a small rise in ocean temperatures could causes flooding, erosion and the loss of fresh water supplies.

There’s no question that the sea ice in the arctic is lessening. Three weeks ago, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado reported that the sea ice had shrunk 18 percent more than the previous record in 2007, to a record low of 3.41 square kilometers.

Kivalina, Alaska (uscgpress/flickr)

Mann (who was one of the members of an IPCC team on climate change that won a Nobel Prize in 2007) and other scientists had previously predicted that sea levels would rise to dangerous levels for residents of islands such as Tuvalu, but they had not thought this would happen so soon. Mann emphasized the huge dilemma for the islands’ residents, who stand to lose “thousands of years of culture” and will have to leave their homes, their world, behind before too long as a direct result of “dangerous anthropogenic interference.”

Overall, Mann states that we need to acknowledge that greenhouse gas emissions are already affecting us in dramatic ways. The unprecedented drought and wildfires of last summer are other indicators that what some thought were theoretical effects of climate change have become realities. Says Mann,

The climate models tell us that what today are record breaking levels of heat will become a typical summer in a matter of 20-30 years if we carry on with business as usual. Not only will this become the new normal but we will have to change the scale because we will see heat and drought far worse than anything we have seen before.

Mann is aware of how dire his predictions sound and has indeed come under heavy criticism from climate deniers for making such. But as he tells the Guardian, scientists have tended to be “conservative in their forecasts out of fear that they will be attacked for overstating evidence.” Climate deniers have used “tactics” that seek “not only to intimidate scientists already in the public arena, but also to warn off others from taking part in the public discourse.”

Tuvalu (mrlins/flickr)

On a more positive note, Mann describes himself as “optimistic” that public attitudes about climate change are shifting. He even suggests that we are “close to a potential tipping point in public consciousness” due, for worse or for better, to people experiencing what climate change means, the searing heat of summers like the last one.

Indeed, I often recall a conversation with a student who has declared himself a staunch supporter of fighting against global warming. This student was not, by his own admitting, an environmentalist activist or drawn to green causes. He had spent a happy semester studying in a Scandinavian country where he’d found reindeer meat for sale at the grocery store. Returning to New Jersey, he was appalled at how cold the winter wasn’t and so many people (not me) shrugged off the warmer temperatures.

Islands are being lost, soon there will no sea ice in the arctic in the summer. Welcome to a warm new world of our own making.

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Read more: arctic, climate change, climate denier, drought, extreme weather, global warming, greenland, sea ice, Tuvalu

Top photo: leighblackall/flickr

Russia says no to US-funded disarmament effort

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia said Wednesday it had no intention to automatically extend a 20-year old deal with the United States helping secure the nation's nuclear stockpiles, a move that comes amid a growing isolationist streak in Kremlin policy.

Under the 1992 program initiated by Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, the U.S. has provided billions of dollars in equipment and know-how to help Russia and its ex-Soviet neighbors deal with Soviet nuclear legacy.

The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program provided reinforced rail cars to carry nuclear warheads, high-tech security systems for storage sites and helped pay for the dismantling of mothballed nuclear submarines and other weapons. It played a major role in preventing thedeadly weapons from falling into the wrong hands while the Russian government was facing a severe money crunch amid an economic meltdown and political turmoil that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that it wouldn't accept a U.S. offer to extend the deal that expires in 2013 without a major overhaul.

"American partners know that their proposal doesn't correspond to our ideas about what forms and what foundation we need to develop further cooperation," it said in a statement. "For that, we need, in particular, a different and more modern legal framework."

While the ministry wouldn't elaborate further on the motives behind Moscow's decision, or spell out its demands, representatives of Russia's top military brass have long complained that the Nunn-Lugar program gives the U.S. too much access and information about the nation's military technologies and weapons sites.

Lugar said in a statement that during his trip to Russia in August, Russian officials told him that they would like to make changes in the original agreement instead of simply extending it. "At no time did officials indicate that, at this stage of negotiation, they were intent on ending it, only amending it," he said.

He added that Russia's space agency officials also welcomed prospects for future work during his visit to a facility dismantling mothballed missiles.

Moscow's move follows its decision last month to end the U.S. Agency for International Development's two decades of work in Russia. Moscow explained that decision by saying that the agency was using its money to influence elections — a claim the U.S. denied.

President Vladimir Putin, who was re-elected to a third term in March despite massive demonstrations in Moscow against his rule, has permeated his campaign with anti-American rhetoric, accusing Washington of fomenting protest.

Following Putin's inauguration in May, the Kremlin-controlled parliament quickly rubber-stamped a series of repressive laws that sharply hiked fines for taking part in unauthorized protests, recriminalized slander and required non-government organizations that receive foreign funding to register as foreign agents. Yet another bill under discussion expands the definition of treason to include handing over information to international organizations.