India, South Africa could complicate US agenda in UN Security Council - Christian Science Monitor

Washington

The rise of the world’s middle powers was on display at the United Nations Tuesday as India, South Africa, and Germany were all elected to join the big guns on the United Nations Security Council for two years, starting in January.

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The arrival of the South Asian and African regional powers as two of the five new nonpermanent members elected to the Security Council Tuesday could bring new clout to the council – in developing nations, in particular.

But adding India and South Africa to a council where Brazil already holds one of the 10 total nonpermanent seats could also pose new challenges to the council’s old guard, including the United States. Iran, for example, could find a new base of support in the troika of developing powers, all of which have resisted mounting US-led pressures on Iran over its nuclear program.

Brazil voted against the latest round of UN sanctions against Iran in June, and India indicated at the time that it did not favor the resolution and considered sanctions “counterproductive.”

Brazil, India, and South Africa "want to be among the big players, they want to be the ones who get permanent seats [on the Security Council] eventually," says Steve Groves, an expert in international institutions at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

The UN General Assembly elected five new nonpermanent members to join the five nonpermanent members that still have a year on their revolving terms. Together the 10 will join the council’s five permanent and veto-wielding members: The US, China, Russia, France, and Great Britain.

India, South Africa, and Colombia ran unopposed for the two-year terms reserved for their regions, while Germany and Portugal were elected to two seats reserved for the “Western” regional group.

Portugal won over Canada in what in the end was the election’s only hotly contested race.

With the addition of India, the Security Council will include all of the world’s major emerging powers known as the BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
At the same time, the newly configured council will also include five of the six countries that are pressing for a permanent seat on a proposed expanded Security Council.

The gathering of so many powerful developing countries on the council at once has some diplomatic experts predicting trouble for the US agenda, be it Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Burma (Myanmar). But Heritage's Mr. Groves says the US should take this "rather unprecedented opportunity" to test the kind of world powers these countries want to be.

"I would hope the US would take this as an opportunity to say, 'OK, Brazil, India, and South Africa, you are among the rising powers of the world and want to play a bigger role, let's see how responsible you are now,' " he says, "When the question is Iran or North Korea, will they act with international security in mind or follow the same regional and parochial interests? Let's see if they really want the responsibility."

The confluence of potential permanent members onto the council – Germany, India, South Africa, Brazil and Nigeria (like Brazil an existing nonpermanent member) – is likely to boost pressure for a reform of the council, which has operated under the same five post-World-War-II powers since the UN’s founding in 1945. Japan, which is also a likely candidate for an expanded council, finishes up its current nonpermanent term in December.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday that Germany would “want to use this seat to increase our influence on the reform of the UN.”

Germany already is a member of the group of nations – the council’s five permanent members plus Germany, or the so-called “P5 + 1” – that are attempting to address the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomatic means.

The Iran issue remains unresolved, with Tehran continuing to pursue a nuclear program that it says is peaceful but which world powers suspect is aimed at delivering a nuclear weapon. With Iran moving forward just as the Security Council balance appears to be shifting away from favoring additional punitive action, some diplomatic experts suggest the Iran portfolio could eventually be taken up outside the council by an ad-hoc “collation of the willing.”

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Israeli Freeze Terms Rejected by Palestinians; Talks in Limbo - BusinessWeek

October 11, 2010, 7:01 PM EDT By Calev Ben-David

Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set terms for the renewal of a West Bank settlement freeze that were swiftly rejected by the Palestinians, leaving the status of U.S.-brokered peace talks in limbo.

Netanyahu told parliament yesterday he was ready to convene his Cabinet and ask for an extension of a freeze on settlement building if “the Palestinian leadership tells its people in an unequivocal manner that it recognizes Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

Mohammad Shtayyeh, a member of the Palestinian Authority negotiating team, said Netanyahu’s demand was “unacceptable.”

The comments come as the U.S. is trying to keep peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians alive after Israel’s 10-month freeze on construction in the West Bank expired on Sept. 26. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has said he will only return to talks if Israel reimposes the construction moratorium.

“There is no way that the Palestinian Authority is going to make this declaration,” said Jonathan Spyer, a political scientist at Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, near Tel Aviv. “The government of Israel is trying to educate the U.S. administration on why there is no basis for a productive peace process at this point.”

The Palestinians reject Israel’s demand that they recognize it as the state of the Jewish people on the grounds it undermines the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Israel says recognition of it as a Jewish state is necessary to ensure the Palestinians don’t make additional claims once a peace treaty has been signed.

‘Work Constructively’

“The parties must work constructively to create conditions for the negotiations to continue,” U.S. State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said in an e-mail. “Both sides need to take steps if we are going to move forward.”

The Arab League last week backed the Palestinian Authority’s position not to resume direct peace talks until Israel renews the freeze, and gave U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration more time to revive the peace effort.

Israel had signaled last week that a compromise may be in the works. “The U.S. has come back to Israel with a number of suggestions, incentives if you would, that enable the government to maybe pass a limited extension of two or three months,” Ambassador Michael Oren told the Washington Post.

Shtayyeh said Netanyahu was “adding additional complications” to the renewal of talks. “We hope that the international community will bring Israel into the talks without any conditionality,” he said.

West Bank

About 500,000 Jews have moved to the West Bank and east Jerusalem since Israel captured the territory in 1967.

The United Nations says that settlements are illegal, and the International Committee of the Red Cross says they breach the Fourth Geneva Convention governing actions on occupied territory. Obama has said the settlements aren’t legitimate.

Israel says the settlements don’t fall under the convention because the territory wasn’t recognized as belonging to anyone before the 1967 war, in which Israel prevailed, and therefore isn’t occupied.

Netanyahu, who spoke at the opening of the winter parliamentary session, told lawmakers that security arrangements for Israel were vital in ensuring that “the peace was maintained.” He said they would also safeguard the country “in the regrettable but possible event that the peace was violated.”

Israel and the Palestinians agreed last month to try and reach an agreement on the framework for a comprehensive peace accord within a year. All the issues at the core of the conflict would be on the table, including the borders of a future Palestinian state, security arrangements for Israel, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and the status of Jerusalem.

Spyer said he expected more bargaining in the month before the Arab League meets again to discuss the peace process. “There will be a series of proposals and counterproposals,” he said.

--With assistance from Alisa Odenheimer in Jerusalem. Editors: Peter Hirschberg, Louis Meixler.

To contact the reporter on this story: Calev Ben-David in Jerusalem at cbendavid@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg in Jerusalem at

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Could we ever learn to love driverless cars? - BBC News

12 October 2010 Last updated at 06:36 ET By Jon Kelly BBC News Magazine David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider: the future of motoring? Google's engineers have tested a self-driving car. But could motorists ever really let go of the wheel?

No more pile-ups, no more road rage, no more exasperated cursing as you stall at the lights.

Reading the paper during the morning commute, enjoying the scenery rather than staring at the tarmac, cutting your transport costs down to a fraction.

The promises of automatic, driver-less cars like those currently being tested by Google in California are many and varied.

Environmentalists say they could slash carbon emissions. Safety campaigners hope the removal of human error could reduce the number of road casualties which, in the UK alone, numbered 2,222 deaths and 24,690 serious injuries in 2009.

But, like a sticky clutch, the nagging doubts persist.

Could a planet with 350 million Top Gear viewers ever willingly surrender the joy of pushing down on the accelerator, the thrill of the open road? Will we ever have enough faith in technology to step inside 2,500kg of motor vehicle with no-one at the controls?

It's not as though the idea is especially novel. The notion of a "smart", driver-free motor vehicle has long persisted in science fiction, most memorably - at least, among aficionados of kitsch 1980s tea-time television - in the form of KITT, David Hasselhoff's sentient car in the series Knight Rider.

And real-life scientists, too, have been intrigued by the idea for many years.

As far back as 1977, engineers at the Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering laboratory in Japan produced a self-driving car which reached speeds of 20mph (32km/h).

In the following decade, a robotic Mercedes-Benz tipped the speedometer at more than 60mph (97km/h) on traffic-free streets. By 1994, scientists had developed a vehicle that was able to negotiate its way through three lanes of Paris traffic.

The Darpa Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the US defence department, pits driverless cars against each other over courses nearly 100km (60 miles) long. And driverless taxi pods are already transporting passengers around London's Heathrow airport.

Most recently, Google's cars have negotiated 140,000 miles (225,260km) - including navigating San Francisco's streets and crossing the Golden Gate Bridge - using radar sensors, roof-mounted video cameras and a laser range finder which lets it "see" other vehicles, according to the company.

This long lineage prompts the question: why aren't we, already, abandoning our cars and hailing self-driving taxis to take us to work? Surely it would be cheaper, more fuel-efficient, and leave us less vulnerable to dangerous drivers.

Undoubtedly, many technical issues still need to be ironed out. If a desktop computer bluescreens the crash is metaphorical. If the complex network of computers required to navigate a car through a typical urban commute fail, it's all too real.

Dr John Baruch, of the University of Bradford's school of computing, informatics and media, believes the automotive industry has deliberately refrained from investing in such technology.

He notes that air passengers are more than happy to fly in craft steered by auto-pilot, and is confident that all it would take to transform our way of getting around would be a dedicated team of engineers and a few million pounds of investment.

But this, Dr Baruch believes, would bring its own set of negatives - undermining the very concept of private car ownership and drastically reducing the number of vehicles on the road. He envisages robotic taxis summoned on demand replacing cars sitting idle in driveways for most of the day.

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Any system would have to be 150% reliable before anyone would put their faith in it”

End Quote Quentin Willson Motoring journalist As a result, he suspects the major car manufacturers have dragged their wheels when it comes to development.

"They're against it because it would make cars into white goods," he says. "They couldn't sell you the experience of driving - but it would cut costs, we wouldn't need so many cars on the road, and there would be fewer accidents.

"I don't believe people would miss driving to their offices. I'd rather read or get on with some work than sit in a traffic jam staring at someone's exhaust pipe."

All the same, many remain sceptical. The motoring journalist Quentin Willson believes the idea is a potentially valid one that deserves research and investment. But he says we will have to go a long way before we put our such a level of trust on a daily basis in robot drivers.

"The pleasure of driving is already being eroded in this country, anyway," he concedes. "But I suspect that any system would have to be 150% reliable before anyone would put their faith in it.

"The human brain can react quickly to the blizzard of information we're confronted with on the roads. By contrast, we know what sat nav is like - it takes you on all sorts of circuitous routes.

"It's a terribly laudable idea but I don't think it's going to work."

Only time will tell whether this utopia will come to pass - and, indeed, whether motorists will be prepared to surrender the pleasures and frustrations of life behind the wheel.

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