UN report says Iran not answering questions about alleged nuclear weapons work
VIENNA (AP) - The U.N. nuclear agency said Friday that its attempts to probe allegations that Tehran worked on nuclear weapons were deadlocked - a finding that all but rules out hopes of full nuclear deal between six world powers and Iran by the Nov. 24 target date.
Iran agreed in February to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency, in what was seen as a test of Tehran’s professed new willingness to reduce tensions over its nuclear program.
Since then, the agency has sought information on alleged experiments with detonators that can be used to set off nuclear explosions; work on high-explosive charges used in nuclear blasts, and alleged studies on calculating nuclear explosive yields.
Iran denies wanting - or ever working on - nuclear arms. Since February, it has provided information only on the detonators, insisting that they were used for oil exploration or non-nuclear military purposes. The agency says interconnected information suggests that they were being tested for nuclear weapons use.
“Iran has not provided any explanations that enable the agency to clarify the outstanding practical measures,” said the confidential report from the IAEA obtained by The Associated Press.
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Obama authorizes 1,500 more troops to Iraq, including to Anbar; asks Congress for $5.6B
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama authorized a broad expansion on Friday of the U.S. military mission in Iraq that will boost the total number of American troops there to about 3,100 and spread advisory teams and trainers to the north and west where fighting with Islamic State militants has been fierce.
The president’s decision to escalate the U.S. effort in Iraq comes just three days after a bruising American election and amid persistent arguments that more U.S. troops are needed to bolster the struggling Iraqi forces. In particular, there have been calls to send troops to the western Anbar province, where extremists have been slaughtering men, women and children.
Obama authorized the Pentagon to send 1,500 troops to Iraq in addition to the 1,600 previously allowed. He also is asking Congress for more than $5 billion to fund the fight. Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said the military will set up several training sites across Iraq to instruct 12 Iraqi brigades, and also establish two operations centers where small advisory teams can work with Iraqi forces at the headquarters and brigade levels.
A senior military official said one of those centers will be in Anbar Province, and that it is likely that the bulk of the additional troops will be in Iraq by the end of the year. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly so spoke on condition of anonymity.
Kirby said the new changes were based on a request from the Iraqi officials, the assessment of military commanders on the progress that Iraq’s military has made in the fight and as part of a campaign plan “to defend key areas and go on the offensive against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” another name for IS.
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Solid US job gains in Oct. provide scant boost to wages, though raises may be getting closer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Healthy job growth in the United States has reached a level of consistency unseen in nearly two decades.
In the same week that voters signaled discontent with the U.S. economy, the government issued a report that showed employers have added at least 200,000 jobs for nine straight months - the longest such stretch since 1995.
Combine it with an unemployment rate that has slid to 5.8 percent - the lowest since 2008 - and the picture that emerged Friday was of a job market gaining increasing distance from the recession that officially ended nearly 5½ years ago.
The job gain for October was a solid 214,000, on top of a combined 31,000 more in August and September than the government had previously estimated.
The steady improvement contrasts with the struggles of economies overseas, a key reason the Federal Reserve is withdrawing its stimulus just as other central banks ramp up theirs. This week, for example, the European Central Bank opened the door wider for further help for a eurozone economy that may be on the brink of another recession.
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Dispute over immigration erupts during White House lunch designed to search for compromise
WASHINGTON (AP) - A White House lunch aiming for cooperation boiled into a fresh dispute with newly empowered Republicans over immigration reform Friday, with GOP leaders warning President Barack Obama to his face not to take unilateral action. The president stood unflinchingly by his plan to act.
Republicans attending the postelection lunch at Obama’s invitation said they asked him for more time to work on legislation, but the president said his patience was running out. He underscored his intent to act on his own by the end of the year if they don’t approve legislation to ease deportations before then and send it to him to sign.
The Republicans’ approach, three days after they resoundingly won control of the Senate in midterm elections, “seemed to fall on deaf ears,” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said in a telephone interview. “The president instead of being contrite or saying in effect to America, ’I hear you,’ as a result of the referendum on his policies that drove this last election, he seems unmoved and even defiant.”
“I don’t know why he would want to sabotage his last two years as president by doing something this provocative,” said Cornyn. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell earlier this week said the president’s stance was “like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”
Obama press secretary Josh Earnest said there was no reason that executive action on immigration should kill opportunities for the president and Republicans to find common ground.
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Jerusalem’s Muslims on edge over Israeli clampdown at contested shrine as clashes continue
JERUSALEM (AP) - Hundreds of Palestinians knelt on prayer carpets in a Jerusalem street Friday, faced by a cordon of Israeli riot police who blocked them from reaching Islam’s third- holiest shrine in the nearby Old City.
The worshippers eventually dispersed peacefully, but the scene highlighted the escalating tensions over the holy site - a walled, hilltop plateau known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount.
Israel argues that restricting access to the shrine, which has been common in recent weeks, is needed to clamp down on growing unrest in the contested city of 810,000 people. On Friday, Muslims under age 35 were denied entry, while restrictions were broader in preceding weeks.
Jerusalem’s Muslims, who make up about a third of the population, say the security clampdown only heightens fears that their traditional control of the holy site, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the gold-topped Dome of the Rock, is under threat from Jewish zealots.
In recent weeks, senior members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition have called for a greater Jewish presence and right to prayer on the mount, which is Judaism’s holiest site, stirring Muslim worries about encroachment. Under an arrangement in place since Israel’s capture of the Old City and its shrines in 1967, the sacred plateau is administered by Muslims reporting to Jordan, while Jews have a right to visit.
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With no new confirmed infections on US soil, Ebola slipping from America’s front pages
Ebola isn’t leading American newspapers and newscasts much these days. Dr. Albert Wu thinks that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
If he was cynical, says the professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, he would suggest that it’s because the elections are over, and politicians no longer are inflaming hysteria over Ebola for their own purposes. “But I’m not feeling that cynical today.”
Maybe it’s the lack of new Ebola cases in the U.S. Maybe Americans have been distracted by other stories, like the midterm elections. But Wu and others say there are signs that Americans have retreated from widespread panic and have reached a kind of equilibrium when it comes to the disease that is ravaging parts of West Africa.
“It may not be on the front page in news, but I think it’s actually in the fabric now of the United States,” says Bruce Johnson, president of SIM USA, the North Carolina-based Christian mission group that has been at the heart of the Ebola story since the outbreak started earlier this year.
When Johnson went to the doctor this week, among the questions he was asked was whether he had traveled internationally within the past 21 days - the incubation period for Ebola. Whether the disease is on page one or page three doesn’t matter, he says.
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Pilot who parachuted after SpaceShipTwo breakup is in small group of flyers lucky to survive
MOJAVE, Calif. (AP) - There were no ejection seats and no easy ways out of SpaceShipTwo if disaster struck.
As the doomed flight rocketed past the speed of sound some eight miles high and then shattered seconds later, the odds of survival were slim. Remarkably, as sections of the cockpit, fuselage, a wing and motor rained down over the Mojave Desert and pieces of the lightweight craft tiny enough to travel 35 miles were picked up by the winds, a single parachute was seen in the sky.
Pilot Peter Siebold was alive and drifting to safety.
“It’s no minor miracle that he did survive and survive in relatively good shape,” Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides said this week.
How Siebold, 43, survived the fall from extreme altitude a week ago while co-pilot Mike Alsbury, 39, died is not yet clear, but Siebold is not the first to live through such a harrowing ordeal.
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AP Exclusive: Saudi royal council recommends women over 30 be allowed to drive during day
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - The Saudi king’s advisory council has recommended that the government lift its ban on female drivers - but only for women over 30, who must be off the road by 8 p.m. and cannot wear makeup behind the wheel, a member of the council told The Associated Press Friday.
The Shura Council’s recommendations are not obligatory on the government. But simply making the recommendation was a startling shift after years of the kingdom staunchly rejecting any review of the ban.
There have been small but increasingly bold protests by women who took to their cars over the past year. The driving ban, which is unique in the world, is imposed because the kingdom’s ultraconservative Muslim clerics say “licentiousness” will spread if women drive.
The council member said the Shura Council made the recommendations in a secret, closed session held in the past month. The member spoke on condition of anonymity because the recommendations had not been made public.
Under the recommendations, only women over 30 would be allowed to drive and they would need permission from a male relative - usually a husband or father, but lacking those, a brother or son - to do so. They would be allowed to drive from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday through Wednesday and noon to 8 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, the weekend in the kingdom.
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Judge OKs Detroit’s plan to get out of bankruptcy, says this ’must never happen again’
DETROIT (AP) - A judge cleared Detroit to emerge from bankruptcy Friday, approving a hard-fought turnaround plan with a fervent plea to the people of this one-time industrial powerhouse to “move past your anger” and help fix the Motor City.
“What happened in Detroit must never happen again,” federal Judge Steven Rhodes said in bringing the case to a close a relatively speedy 16 months after Detroit - the cradle of the auto industry - became the biggest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy.
The plan calls for cutting retiree pensions by 4.5 percent, erasing $7 billion of debt and spending $1.7 billion to demolish thousands of blighted buildings, make the city safer and improve long-neglected basic services.
Rhodes praised decisions that settled the most contentious issues in the bankruptcy case, including a deal to prevent the sell-off of world-class art at the Detroit Institute of Arts and a consensus that prevented pension cuts from getting even worse for thousands of retirees. He said the pension deal “borders on the miraculous,” though he acknowledged the cuts could still cause severe misfortune for some.
Politicians and civic leaders, including Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, hailed Friday’s milestone as a fresh start for the city and the beginning of what could be a bright new era. It was Snyder who agreed with state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr to take the city into Chapter 9.
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’Obamacare’ heading back to Supreme Court: Case challenges the health law’s crucial subsidies
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear a new challenge to President Barack Obama’s health care law - a case that threatens subsidies that help millions of low- and middle-income people afford their health insurance premiums.
The justices said they will review a federal appeals court ruling that upheld IRS regulations that allow health-insurance tax credits under the Affordable Care Act for consumers in all 50 states. Opponents argue that most of the subsidies are illegal.
The long-running political and legal campaign to overturn or limit the 2010 health overhaul will be making its second appearance at the Supreme Court. The justices upheld the heart of the law in a 5-4 decision in 2012 in which Chief Justice John Roberts provided the decisive vote.
The case probably will be argued the first week in March, with a decision expected by late June.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest promised a vigorous defense before the high court.
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