But Russia and China the other two veto-holding members of the Security Council oppose such moves

But Russia and China, the other two veto-holding members of the Security Council, oppose such moves. The Western nations want to invoke Chapter 7 of the UN Charter that would allow economic sanctions or military action, if necessary, to force Iran to comply with the Security Council’s demand that it cease enrichment. Ahmadinejad told the official Islamic Republic News Agency that Washington and its allies “don’t give us anything and yet they want to impose sanctions on us.” He called the threat of sanctions “meaningless.” The United States is backing attempts by Britain and France to win Security Council approval for a UN resolution that would threaten possible further measures if Iran does not suspend uranium enrichment – a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors to generate electricity or material for atomic warheads. On Sunday, Ahmadinejad renewed Iran’s threat to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if the UN Security Council imposes sanctions over its nuclear program. The United States is leading Western efforts to have the UN Security Council censure Iran for refusing to cease enrichment of uranium.

It is the first time that an Iranian president has written to his US counterpart since 1979, when the two countries broke relations after Iranian militants stormed the US Embassy and held the occupants hostage for more than a year. Elham did not mention the nuclear dispute – the major issue on which Washington and Tehran are at loggerheads. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written to George W Bush proposing “new solutions” to their differences in the first letter from an Iranian leader to an American president in 27 years, government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said today. The letter was sent via the Swiss Embassy in Tehran which has a US interests section, Elham told a press conference.
In the letter, Ahmadinejad proposes “new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation of the world,” Elham said. he is the wrong person, at the wrong place, at the wrong time.”. All weekend, the White House floated the name of General Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency, as the successor to Porter Goss, who resigned unexpectedly on Friday.The Democrats were quick to say they would give General Hayden a good grilling during any confirmation hearings.Yesterday, however, the chorus of disapproval extended to the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, who told a television interviewer: “We should not have a military person leading a civilian agency at this time …

President Bush has come in for blistering criticism from Republican and Democratic intelligence experts over his apparent intention to name a seasoned Air Force general as the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The brewing battle is, in essence, a turf war between the US military, which already controls 80 per cent of the country’s intelligence resources, and the traditionally civilian leadership at the CIA, which feels the agency has been both over-politicised and deeply demoralised in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the intelligence farrago surrounding the Iraq war.
It now promises to turn into an intense political fight. Apple Computers wanted to claim ownership of the word “apple”, and McDonald’s has trademarked more than a hundred words and phrases such as “Have you had your break today?”.The privatisation of the English language has been under way for some time – the battle is merely moving to the sphere of symbols.. As the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday, smileys have since been incorporated into the car number plate tag of the state of Kentucky, and popped up on a commemorative postage stamp in a 1970s nostalgia series.A bit like smileys themselves, the trademarking of common words has become endemic. He earned just $45 for the commission, and not a penny since.It’s almost impossible to test the truth of these competing claims. By the time he thought to copyright his work, it had already been reproduced tens of millions of times and so had passed into the public domain.

Harvey Ball, a Massachusetts graphic artist, claimed a few years ago that he had come up with the smiley in 1963 as an upbeat symbol for disgruntled employees whose two insurance companies had merged. Mr Loufrani runs a one-man operation, while Wal-Mart is a multibillion-dollar giant that has transformed the landscape of middle America and now has its sights set on expanding overseas.Mr Loufrani claims he invented the smiley in the wake of the 1968 student riots in Paris in an attempt to put a positive spin on the tumultuous events shaking the Western world that year.He’s not the only one to make such a claim, however. They have been fighting about it ever since, culminating in what is expected to a final ruling from the US Patent and Trademark Office in the next few weeks.It’s a David-and-Goliath contest. When Mr Loufrani applied for the US trademark in 1997, he was opposed by Wal-Mart which had just begun using the symbol extensively. His London-based company, SmileyWorld, collects royalties from the propagation of the original smiley and its many offshoots (the Santa Claus smiley, the kissing smiley, and so on) from 80 countries around the world.America is not one of those countries.