Iran Is Ready for Nuclear Deal, Leader Says
Ahmadinejad Revives Plan, but U.S. Says He Hasn’t Made Official Approach; Opposition Leader Lashes Out at Regime

By JAY SOLOMON
FEBRUARY 2, 2010

WASHINGTON—Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his government would accept a nuclear fuel-swap agreement overseen by the United Nations, a deal the Obama administration has viewed as central to limiting Tehran’s ability to develop atomic weapons.

The Iranian leader’s announcement on state television Tuesday, however, was immediately greeted with skepticism by Western diplomats, who have watched Tehran flip-flop on the fuel-swap issue since it was proposed in October.

Senior U.S. officials said Mr. Ahmadinejad hadn’t conveyed an agreement to the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“The deal is still on the table,” said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. “We don’t exactly know what Ahmadinejad said, but if he’s prepared to say yes, that’s good news. He should contact the IAEA.”

Many U.S. and European diplomats said Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments appeared designed to upend an accelerating international campaign to sanction Iran for its nuclear work. In recent days, the Obama administration has begun circulating to allied countries the names of Iranian entities—including its central bank and businesses controlled by its elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—that Washington wants sanctioned under a new U.N. Security Council resolution, say officials who have seen the list.

“Iran has continued to try and divide the international community on sanctions,” said a European diplomat working on Iran. “I don’t see why this overture would be any different.”

The Obama administration said it wouldn’t renegotiate the terms of the deal…

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Leaked climate change emails scientist ‘hid’ data flaws
Exclusive: Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures

Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk
Monday 1 February 2010 21.00 GMT

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-­Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”.

The revelations on the inadequacies of the 1990 paper do not undermine the case that humans are causing climate change, and other studies have produced similar findings. But they do call into question the probity of some climate change science.

The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN’s embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.

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Six more weeks of winter, Phil says
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Don’t put those cold weather clothes in storage just yet.

Punxsutawney Phil, the internationally known weather prognosticating groundhog, saw his shadow this morning and predicted six more weeks of winter.

Thousands gathered on Gobbler’s Knob in Jefferson County to await the groundhog’s annual prediction. The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club said Phil has seen his shadow 98 times since 1887, hasn’t seen it 15 times, and there are no records for nine years.

Officially, the vernal equinox occurs at 1:32 p.m. March 20, marking the arrival of spring in the northern hemisphere — six weeks, four days from today.

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