The street protests in Iran will be not be televised–how passé. Instead, they are being tweeted.
The microblog service Twitter has become a critical way to get out information about the tumult in Iran’s capital, Tehran, where people have poured into the street to protest the disputed results of last Friday’s presidential election. And the whole world is watching. The U.S. State Department has confirmed that over the weekend officials reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service [Time].
The vast majority of Twitter messages support the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, and argue that he was the true winner of the presidential election. Twitter users are posting messages, known as tweets, with the term #IranElection, which allows users to search for all tweets on the subject. On Monday evening, Twitter was registering about 30 new posts a minute with that tag. One read, “We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Moussavi’s message. One Person = One Broadcaster. #IranElection” [The New York Times]. Since then, the Iranian government has restricted the movements of foreign journalists and has cracked down on blogs and Web sites within the country, but the flow of information on Twitter has only increased.
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Israeli researchers say they’ve developed a way to modify nuclear fuel so that it can be used only in power plants, and can’t be recycled later to build nuclear weapons. Lead researcher Yigal Ronen says the work could help “de-claw” some countries if nuclear fuel producers – the US, Russia, Germany, France and Japan – agree to put the denaturing additive they have proven effective into all plutonium [Jerusalem Post].
Israeli scientists suggest in their study that the element americium be added to the fuel at a level of 0.1 percent [Israel National News]. According to their research, the addition would neutralize the fissile plutonium produced by nuclear reactors, making that “denatured” plutonium unusable in a weapon. The research will be published in the journal Science and Global Security next month.
Ronen explains that when a country purchases a nuclear reactor from one of the five nuclear fuel producers, the sale includes nuclear fuel for the reactor. “Thus, if the five agree to insert the additive into fuel for countries now developing nuclear power – such as Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Qatar, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – they will have to use it for peaceful purposes rather than warfare” [The Register], says Ronen. However, the researchers say that countries with more advanced nuclear programs, like Iran, have other ways to produce weapons-grade fuel.
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Iran says it has successfully launched a domestically built satellite into orbit using a rocket that was also made in Iran, marking the country’s entry into the league of spacefaring nations on the 30th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranian state television showed footage of a rocket blasting off from a launchpad and lighting up the night sky as it streaked into space…. “Dear Iranian nation, your children have placed the first indigenous satellite into orbit,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a televised message [Reuters].
The announcement may prompt new concerns from the United States and Europe, as experts say that the rocket Iran used to blast its satellite into space could also be used to launch a ballistic missile. But the rocket launch was viewed in a different light by the Iranian government, which sees the accomplishment as an important milestone along the road to reclaiming Persia’s ancient claim to major power status, which it feels the jealous west is trying to deny it [The Guardian]. On Wednesday, senior diplomats from six nations will meet in Frankfurt to discuss Iran’s nuclear fuel enrichment program, which many fear could lead Iran to developing nuclear weapons.
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On Sunday, the Iranian state television network showed impressive footage of a slender white rocket blasting off from a launch pad, leaving behind billows of smoke. Iranian officials say that the rocket, named Safir, or “ambassador,” successfully reached orbit, demonstrating the technological known-how to send up satellites. The rocket released equipment that beamed flight data back to ground control, said Reza Taghipoor, the head of Iran’s Space Agency, in a live television interview [AP].
Yet shortly after Iranian officials boasted of their fledgling space program, unnamed sources from the U.S. Defense Department began disputing those claims of a successful launch. “The Iranians did not successfully launch the rocket,” a senior U.S. defense official told CNN Monday. The two-stage rocket could have been capable of launching a satellite into space, but the U.S. intelligence assessment shows that the second stage “was erratic and out of control,” said the official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the intelligence. The rocket “did not perform as designed,” the official said [CNN].
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