In Belated Inauguration, Ivory Coast’s President Urges Unity

Mr. Ouattara called for reconciliation and peace in a country that was once one of Africa’s richest but that has been devastated by years of unrest, political division and civil war.

“The time has arrived for Ivorians to come together,” Mr. Ouattara, a former economist and banker, said in a speech that did not deviate from his habitually austere manner. “Dear brothers and sisters, let’s celebrate peace. Like the great people we are, we are going to reunite. Yes, we are going to come together. Let us learn to live together again.”

The country is still reeling from a four-month armed standoff that killed as many as 3,000 people, according to officials and human rights groups, and that sent tens of thousands of refugees fleeing violence into neighboring lands. About 160,000 are still in exile in Liberia, according to the International Rescue Committee.

Sanctions imposed by the European Union, the United States and regional governments had crippled the economy as President Laurent Gbagbo, who decisively lost the presidential election in November, refused to give up office.

Life is slowly returning to a semblance of normalcy. Banks have reopened, the nation’s vital cocoa exports have resumed and civil servants have returned to their desks with two months’ back pay.

Mr. Ouattara must govern under the burden of multiple handicaps. The country is still split between his supporters and those of Mr. Gbagbo, who received 46 percent of the vote in the election; whole villages and cocoa farms in the west remain devastated; and Mr. Ouattara was installed largely by foreign forces.

Months of African diplomacy proved ineffectual in dislodging Mr. Gbagbo, and Mr. Ouattara’s fighters played a secondary role. Ultimately, it was the French missile attacks against Mr. Gbagbo’s heavy-weapons installations that led to his defeat.

France’s central role was recognized at the ceremony in Yamoussoukro when its president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the audience, was the first head of state to be saluted by Mr. Ouattara, and received sustained applause. Yet much of the population, especially Mr. Gbagbo’s supporters, resent the former colonial master and consider Mr. Ouattara as France’s man.

About 20 heads of state attended the ceremony, including African leaders who have clung to office for decades and are themselves beneficiaries of disputed or fraudulent elections. The event took place in Yamoussoukro, the native village of Ivory Coast’s founding president, Félix Houphou?t-Boigny, and its official capital, although Abidjan is the main commercial city and center of government.

Mr. Gbagbo remains under house arrest in the northern town of Korhogo, where he has been interrogated by Ouattara officials with a view to possible prosecution, and about 200 members of his government are also to be questioned, according to officials.

Mr. Gbagbo’s wife, Simone, a powerful influence in his government, has been interrogated in a separate location.

Mr. Ouattara has promised a South African-style “dialogue, truth and reconciliation” commission to look into the conflict, and he has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes committed “since Nov. 28,” the date of the election whose result Mr. Gbagbo refused to acknowledge.

Mr. Ouattara’s call for the investigation to include “all of Ivorian territory” reiterates his position that any atrocities committed by forces that eventually declared their loyalty to him, including a massacre in which hundreds died in Duékoué in the west, should also be punished. Nonetheless, according to Human Rights Watch, “the majority of abuses during the first three months were by forces under Gbagbo’s control” and “probably amounted to crimes against humanity.”

Indeed, the civilian population in Abidjan was repeatedly attacked, over the course of months, by uniformed men directly under Mr. Gbagbo’s control, in what appeared to be deliberate state policy. The killings of Gbagbo supporters that took place at the end of the conflict were carried out by ragtag forces that only belatedly swung to Mr. Ouattara.

Mr. Ouattara, a former prime minister and deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, faces the immense task of rebuilding a country damaged by civil war, 10 years of what is widely acknowledged as the corrupt leadership of Mr. Gbagbo and fierce ethnic divisions. The new government filed suit in Swiss courts this month against Mr. Gbagbo and his entourage to recover tens of millions of dollars in assets.

It was less than three weeks ago that the last pro-Gbagbo mercenaries were finally rooted out of Abidjan, fleeing across the lagoons to the west and killing dozens as they went. United Nations investigators later discovered a mass grave containing some 68 bodies in the neighborhood where the Gbagbo forces had been entrenched.

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Abbas Urges Continuation of U.S. Aid Despite Agreement With Hamas

RAMALLAH, West Bank — President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority beseeched a group of visiting American Jews on Sunday to urge Congress not to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in aid as a result of his recent unity agreement with Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza.

“We need your help with Congress,” Mr. Abbas told the visitors from J Street, a group that calls itself pro-Israel and pro-peace. “I hear rumors that Hamas will be in the West Bank, or that it will share authority here. This will not happen. The new government will comply with my policies, and I am against terror and violence.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, said he would “bring back to Washington the message that this may be the last opportunity with a Palestinian leader willing to say yes to peace with Israel.” He said he would urge the White House to offer a plan to create a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines with agreed-upon land swaps and a request of Israel to pause West Bank settlement building for two to three months.

Those are the two conditions under which Mr. Abbas told the group that he would return to peace negotiations with Israel.

“This is our first choice, negotiations,” Mr. Abbas told the group at a lunch he hosted at his West Bank headquarters.

“If we were to start now in negotiations, we would not pay any attention to September,” he added, in reference to the Palestinians’ plan to ask the United Nations to recognize their state this year at its General Assembly meeting if no progress is made by then.

For its part, Israel says it has long advocated beginning talks right away without preconditions, and it contends that Mr. Abbas, with his demands for specific borders and halts on construction, is the one causing delays and lacking in seriousness.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is due to visit President Obama at the White House on May 20 and to address a joint session of Congress the following week. It is unclear if he will lay out a new proposal for how to restart talks, but moving peace negotiations forward will be the focus of the visit.

Ten days ago, Mr. Abbas’s Fatah party, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas made a surprise announcement that after four years of bitter division, they had agreed to establish a unity government of technocrats aimed at holding elections within a year and rebuilding Gaza. Mr. Abbas said that without national unity, a deal with Israel would produce little.

But because Hamas is labeled a terrorist group by the United States, some senators and representatives have expressed deep misgivings. On Friday, 27 senators sent Mr. Obama a letter urging him to halt aid to a unified Fatah-Hamas government unless all of its members renounce violence and recognize Israel. The administration has said it is waiting for more details before judging the new arrangement.

Mr. Abbas reiterated that the members of the new unity government would be affiliated with neither Fatah nor Hamas, that he would continue to set policy and that nothing in the West Bank would change regarding security and cooperation with Israel in the coming year leading up to the election. Israel has denounced the deal as bringing terrorists into the Palestinian government, and for that reason it has delayed handing over Palestinian tax receipts to the Palestinian Authority.

Mr. Abbas made clear that many details remained to be negotiated with Hamas. It also seems likely that he will face compromises. At the ceremony on Wednesday in Cairo, for example, Mr. Abbas originally insisted that the leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, neither sit on the podium nor make a speech. He won the argument over the seating, but Mr. Meshal was permitted a short talk.

Mr. Meshal said in an interview on Thursday that Hamas was committed to working with Fatah toward a Palestinian state within the 1967 lines and that together they would decide what kind of resistance to Israel was appropriate.

But he pointedly declined to say that such a state would mean the end of his movement’s dispute with Israel nor would he declare his opposition to the use of violence.

Asked if he thought nonviolent resistance was a useful approach for the Palestinians, he replied, “Unfortunately, nonviolence doesn’t work against the Israelis.”

 

Report Urges Storing Spent Nuclear Fuel, Not Reprocessing It

 

The challenge at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan involves not only damage to three reactors but also the loss of cooling water in at least one pool of spent radioactive fuel, which prompted some American experts to recommend an evacuation to a radius of 50 miles. And that pool was not loaded nearly as heavily as pools at similar reactors in the United States.

In a study to be released on Tuesday, engineers and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology therefore suggest that “the entire spent-fuel management system — on-site storage, consolidated long-term storage, geological disposal — is likely to be re-evaluated in a new light because of the Fukushima storage-pool experience.”

The accident in Japan has already generated calls for sending the fuel to factories where it would be mechanically chopped up and chemically dissolved to recover the plutonium that is made in routine reactor operations, as it frequently is in Europe and Japan. The plutonium could then be used as a substitute for uranium fuel at nuclear plants.

But in the M.I.T. report, experts argue that there is no reason to find a substitute for uranium because the existing global supply is plentiful. In fact, there is enough uranium available to fuel 10 times as many reactors as exist today, even if each of the new ones ran for 100 years, the study says.

Rather than processing the fuel to retrieve plutonium, the report suggests, the fuel should be “managed” so that the option of doing so is preserved — perhaps by storing the fuel in above-ground silos for a century. It recommends moving it to a centralized repository, starting with fuel from nuclear reactors that have been retired and torn down.

A summary of the report released last fall also made that point, but the conclusion is likely to gain far more attention in coming months as federal regulators and Congress awaken to the potential for an accident involving spent fuel.

Congress chose Yucca Mountain, a site in the Nevada desert, as the top candidate for a nuclear waste burial site in 1987, but President Obama shut down an Energy Department program to develop the repository and appointed a commission to study alternatives, including reprocessing. The panel is expected to issue a preliminary report this spring.

Also standing in the way of Yucca is the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, who has effectively blocked money for the program.

The M.I.T. study also raises the idea of storing more waste in small steel and concrete silos, known as dry casks, in a central area with low population density. All the spent fuel produced so far would fill an area under 300 acres, experts say.

Another alternative for nuclear waste disposal is to build a new class of reactors powerful enough to break up the elements that are hardest to dispose of: materials that are created in reactors and remain significantly radioactive for tens of thousands of years. But that would require development of new technologies at a substantial cost and, like reprocessing, would carry a risk of releasing radioactive contaminants from fuel that is now mostly packaged in compact and airtight forms.

The new reactors and conventional reprocessing would each create a waste stream for which a repository would be needed anyway, the scientists add. The executive director of the M.I.T. study, Charles W. Forsberg, said the Fukushima accident would therefore “place more emphasis on getting a geological repository program up and running.”

All the same, engineers involved in the Yucca Mountain project say that even if Congress could be persuaded to authorize money for a permanent repository, it would be a few years before the government could decide whether the site was suitable and many more years before it could absorb a major fraction of the waste now sitting at reactor sites.

 

Pope's Easter Message Urges Peace in Africa, Middle East

 Sabina Castelfranco | Rome ?April 24, 2011

Pope Benedict XVI delivers his blessing during the 'Urbi et Orbi' (Latin for to the City and to the World) message from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican, April 24, 2011

Tens of thousands of worshippers attended Easter Mass in Saint Peter’s Square Sunday. In his message to the world, Pope Benedict prayed for victims of conflicts in Ivory Coast and other African countries and called for an end to the fighting in Libya.

Easter Sunday brings to an end a very busy Holy Week for the 84-year-old Pope Benedict. Worshippers of all ages and nationalities attended Easter mass Sunday.? For those in the square it is a very special time.

"To be here at Easter time is renewal, it’s refreshing and its looking ahead no matter what is happening in the world," says this worshipper. "It’s very, very crowded but what I think is really, really neat about it is there are people from all over the world. I like it because it is kind of an international conglomeration of people coming together."

At the end of the mass, the pope delivered his papal address to the city of Rome and to the world, known as the "Urbi et Orbi,"? from the central balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

The pope asked for help for those fleeing conflict and for refugees from various African countries, particularly Libya and Ivory Coast, who have been forced to leave their homes. The pope urged people of good will to open their hearts to welcome them.

The pope also turned his thoughts to Japan and other countries that in recent months have been tested by natural disasters, which have sown pain and anguish.

Pope Benedict then gave his Easter greetings and blessings to the faithful around the world in more that 60 different languages.?

Obama urges cuts and taxing rich

 13 April 2011 Last updated at 17:57 ET Mr Obama said: "We do not have to sacrifice the America we believe in"

President Barack Obama has called for raised taxes on the rich as well as cuts in government spending in what he termed a balanced approach to cutting the huge US budget deficit.

In a speech in Washington DC he outlined a package of tax increases and spending cuts aimed at reducing the deficit by $4tn (￡2.45tn) by 2023.

He attacked Republican plans he said would harm the poor and elderly.

Republicans have said any increase in taxes is a "non-starter".

"We have to live within our means, reduce our deficit, and get back on a path that will allow us to pay down our debt," Mr Obama said in a speech at George Washington University.

"And we have to do it in a way that protects the recovery, and protects the investments we need to grow, create jobs, and win the future."

The ballooning US deficit is set to be a top issue in the 2012 election campaign, and in recent weeks, Republicans have laid out their own plan to cut it, based on big reductions in healthcare and social programmes for the poor and elderly and in education spending.

Continue reading the main story

Their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America”

End Quote President Barack Obama The deficit is forecast to reach $1.5 trillion (￡921bn) this year and both Democrats and Republicans have said cutting it is a priority.

Mr Obama on Wednesday unveiled his own proposal - in a speech in which he used the word "vision" more than a dozen times.

The remarks came after Republicans had accused him of failing to exercise leadership, and many US political analysts said the Republican opposition had seized the political momentum.

Republicans on Wednesday attacked Mr Obama's speech as mere campaign rhetoric, noting he recently launched his re-election bid. Primarily, they firmly rejected his proposal to raise additional tax revenue from the wealthy.

"At a time when millions of our countrymen remain unemployed, the president again proposes tax increases on job creators," said Jeb Hensarling of Texas, a member of the party's House leadership team, calling Mr Obama's speech "class warfare".

Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House budget committee, said: "Exploiting people's emotions of fear, envy and anxiety is not hope, it's not change, it's partisanship. We don't need partisanship. We don't need demagoguery. We need solutions."

Led by Mr Ryan, Republicans have offered their own proposal that would go further than Mr Obama's, slashing $6.2 trillion from government spending over the next decade, in large part through cuts to government programmes that serve the elderly and the poor.

Continue reading the main story Andrew North BBC News, Washington

President Obama answered calls to tackle the US budget deficit by going on the attack. He ripped into Republican plans to rein in spending on social programmes, saying it would lead to "a fundamentally different America".

His plan is more balanced, he claimed, but will still match deficit reductions the Republicans are promising - except over 12 years rather than their 10.

Mr Obama was short on details on how he'll achieve this, except to rule out extending Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy and other loopholes they enjoy. The Republicans have already said no to that.

Simply by making this speech President Obama has given ground. The budget plan he announced just two months ago proposed much smaller deficit cuts.

Sorting out the US government's disastrous finances is becoming the defining issue ahead of the 2012 presidential elections. It's just that no one can agree how to do it.

The proposal would also drastically reduce taxes for wealthy Americans, a move conservatives say would boost economic growth.

The House is due to vote on Mr Ryan's proposal on Friday.

In his speech, the president repeatedly drew a contrast with the Republicans' proposal, insisting that spending cuts should not harm the US social safety net, such as the social security retirement system and healthcare programmes for the poor and elderly.

In particular, he singled out the Republicans' proposal to cut taxes for the wealthy while making elderly Americans pay more for their healthcare, as analysts say the Republican plan would work out.

"This is not a vision of the America I know," he said.

"They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that's paid for by asking 33 seniors to each pay $6,000 more in health costs? That's not right, and it's not going to happen as long as I'm president.

"The fact is, their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.

"There's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires."

Bruising battle ahead

Buoyed by the fiscally conservative Tea Party movement, Republicans have won a series of policy victories, including forcing $38.5bn in government spending cuts for the remainder of the current fiscal year.

On Wednesday, Mr Obama also sought to brush back liberals in his own party who warn cutting spending now would hinder the nascent economic recovery.

"Doing nothing on the deficit is just not an option," he said. "Our debt has grown so large that we could do real damage to the economy if we don't begin a process now to get our fiscal house in order."

US political observers expect the fight over the government budget for the fiscal year beginning 1 October to be bruising, as Republicans and Democrats push their competing visions.

Last week, the US government came within an hour of shutting down as Republican and Democratic leaders battled to reach an agreement on a budget for the next six months.

The deal reached just before midnight on Friday cut $38.5bn in government spending to 30 September.