Iran test fires nuclear missile capable of hitting Israel and parts of Europe

Iran has fired one of the longest-range missiles in its arsenal as part of testing it began ahead of a confrontation with foreign powers over a previously undisclosed secret nuclear facility later this week.

Earlier today the Revolutionary Guard is reported to have successfully launched the Shahab-3 missile, which is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and has a range of up to 1,200 miles – which would put Israel, most Arab states and parts of Europe, including much of Turkey, within its range.

Iranian television broadcast footage of the Shahab-3 being fired from desert terrain.

Iran’s war games began yesterday after the revelations about the enrichment plant, at a military base near the holy city of Qom. It dramatically upped the stakes for the meeting in Geneva on Thursday between Iranian representatives and those of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany.

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The US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany had demanded that Iran offer a “serious response” to questions about a military dimension to its nuclear programme, which Tehran insists is purely peaceful.

President Obama announced on Friday the discovery of a previously unknown uranium enrichment plant in a mountain, at a Revolutionary Guard base 20 miles from Qom.

The plant was declared to the UN nuclear watchdog only a week ago, after Tehran learnt of the foreign surveillance and decided to pre-empt its exposure with a cryptic note to the agency saying it was a “pilot plant”.

On Thursday Western officials will demand that Iran allow inspectors access to the site and the personnel who worked on it “within weeks”. American intelligence agencies estimate that the plant is designed to house 3,000 centrifuges, far too few to be used for energy production but enough to produce about one bomb’s worth of material a year. They will demand that Tehran submit to a much tougher inspections regime, a stiffer requirement than the present Security Council resolution insisting Iran halt uranium enrichment until questions about its programme are cleared up.

On Saturday Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, said that inspectors would be invited to visit the site but did not mention a date or indicate whether Iran would meet any of the other Western demands. He denounced Mr Obama’s release of the information at the opening of the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh as a “plot” meant to “unite the whole world against us”.

Iran’s military began test-firing short-range missiles yesterday in a show of strength demonstrating its preparedness to see off any military threat. That threat most likely comes from Israel, which has been restrained from carrying out strikes by Washington and remains impatient to do so.

Brigadier General Hossein Salami, air force commander of the Revolutionary Guards, said of the firings: “This exercise has a message of friendship for friendly countries. For greedy countries that seek to intimidate us, the message is that we are capable of a prompt and crushing response.”

For all the military showmanship, there were signs that Iran is feeling the pressure. President Ahmadinejad told reporters in New York that he was planning to start talks with a demand for highly enriched uranium “for medical, humanitarian purposes”. Diplomats saw that as a ploy to deflect attention away from the real issues and string out negotiations.

With Mr Obama’s tougher stance and Thursday’s deadline, the strategy of diplomatic engagement appears to be coming to an end. Hopes now lie in gathering Security Council backing for tough new sanctions on Iran. President Medvedev of Russia conceded that while he believed that sanctions were rarely productive, “in some cases, they are inevitable”. China has registered deep concern at the revelations.

Apple explains iPhone OS 3.1 Exchange changes

Phone 3G users hit a roadblock last week trying to login to Exchange 2007 servers after upgrading to iPhone OS 3.1.

(Credit: Apple)

Because the problems began with the latest update, it may seem reasonable to assume that the update is to blame, but it’s not. In fact, everything is working exactly how it’s supposed to be, according to Apple.

“iPhone OS 3.1 is working properly with Exchange Server 2007,” Apple representative Natalie Harrison told CNET News. “We added device encryption information to the data that can be managed by IT administrators using Exchange Server 2007. The policy of whether to support iPhone 3G, in addition to iPhone 3GS, which always has on-device encryption, on Exchange Server 2007 is set by the administrator and can be changed at any time.”

What this means is that iPhone OS 3.1 now properly identifies itself to Exchange 2007 as having hardware encryption, and that’s what is causing the problems for iPhone and iPhone 3G users.

iPhone OS 3.0 did not identify itself properly to Exchange 2007 on any iPhone. This means that if you had a 3G and Exchange 2007 was configured to require hardware encryption, you could still login, even though the device does not have hardware encryption.

With iPhone OS 3.1, all iPhones identify themselves properly to the server, essentially fixing a glitch in the previous operating system. However, now iPhone and iPhone 3G users that upgraded to iPhone OS 3.1 cannot login to Exchange 2007 servers that require hardware encryption.

If you use the new iPhone 3GS, you won’t notice any change. Apple’s newest phone is equipped with hardware encryption, so it will meet the requirements of the Exchange server when identifying itself.

If you already upgraded to iPhone OS 3.1 on an iPhone or iPhone 3G and connect to an Exchange 2007 server, you can ask that the IT admin turn off the hardware encryption requirement for those devices.

Company IT administrators who require hardware encryption to access Exchange 2007 will need to decide whether they want older iPhones to access their servers. If so, they will need to configure Exchange to not require encryption from the iPhone and iPhone 3G.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine in challenge to Google

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is emerging as a challenger to the dominance of Google after capturing a near-11 per cent share of the market in little more than three months.

The latest statistics from Nielsen, the research firm, show that Bing, which went live in June, is now the fastest-growing internet search engine in the United States. Its market share leapt to 10.7 per cent in August, from 9 per cent in July — a rise of more than 22 per cent.

While Google retains a huge lead, with 65 per cent in Nielsen’s survey, its share increased by only 2.6 per cent in the same period.

Bing is billed by Microsoft as a “decision engine”, helping users to make practical choices with their online searches. Executives claimed that people’s search habits had evolved as the web has become more sophisticated and Google’s list of “ten blue links” were out of date.

Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, said that another update to the service was due in the autumn. He told The Times that Microsoft was examining ways to make Bing more relevant for its markets in Europe and more responsive to users, rather than trying to make them conform to the design of the engine. “We don’t think that the ten blue links is always the right model,” Mr Weitz said.

Microsoft, he added, was investigating how to tailor Bing for different national audiences. For example, British users of search engines tended to look for news more than other users.

This week Bing unveiled another twist, with a feature that allows users to search using image galleries instead of text links. Visual search will concentrate initially on travel, health, leisure and shopping.

Microsoft is aiming to add features that are not yet generally available on Google. “All the companies are really investing heavily in innovation,” Mr Weitz said.

Forrester, the research company, estimates that, in the US alone, the search and associated advertising market will grow by 15 per cent a year to more than $30 billion (£18 billion) in 2014.

The UK search market is worth up to $2 billion and, at 90 per cent, Google has an even stronger grip on this market. Microsoft has a share of about 6 per cent of online searches in Britain, although the figure was above 10 per cent briefly after the launch of Bing. Microsoft acknowledges that the slide in its share shows that its innovations must overcome consumer inertia.

Next year Bing is likely to receive another boost under a search technology deal between Microsoft and Yahoo!. In late July, the companies signed a ten-year deal under which searches on Yahoo!’s websites will be generated by Bing. Microsoft will license Yahoo!’s search technology, allowing the software giant to integrate certain aspects of it into Bing. AdCenter, Microsoft’s advertising search product, will replace Yahoo!’s equivalent service.

The Yahoo! search engine has about 16 per cent market share in the US, according to Nielsen.

American antitrust regulators have requested more documents as they look into the arrangement, but the companies are confident that the deal will go through as planned early next year. European antitrust regulators are also talking to them.

While Google and other engines also provide image searches, Microsoft’s service breaks new ground by offering a more “graphical way to search and discover information”.

Microsoft, in a blog post, said that its own research had found that consumers could process results with images 20 per cent faster than with text-only results. The feature, still in testing mode, will offer galleries in nearly 50 categories from consumer products to travel destinations to films to music. A search for “digital cameras”, for example, returns a gallery of thumbnail pictures of cameras that can then be filtered by manufacturer or by price, displaying a new set of images.

At the launch of the visual search feature at the TechCrunch50 start-ups conference in San Francisco, Ron Conway, the veteran investor who has backed Google and PayPal, the internet payments service, in the past, said: “Competition breeds innovation and this nice little battle between Google and Microsoft is having a huge benefit to consumers.”

Google is also rolling out new search features. At the same TechCrunch50 conference, it stepped up its efforts to woo newspaper and magazine publishers with a search service that displays results in the style of a “virtual magazine”. Its Fast Flip software will feature content f

The new iPod Nano: More features, same size

It’s a triumph of engineering and design that has managed to pack new features — video camera, FM radio, microphone, speaker, dorky pedometer — into an elegant device that’s a pleasure to use.

The latest iPod Nano’s new features are quality instruments that perform quite nicely, especially considering that the player is not much bigger than a couple sticks of gum, side by side. (Monica M. Davey / European Pressphoto Agency / September 9, 2009)

A.Q. Khan still poses proliferation risk, US warns

WASHINGTON: The United States warned Tuesday that reputed Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who has regained freedom of movement in Pakistan, still risks spreading his nuclear weapons know-how.

It stopped short of criticizing its ally in the war on terror but recalled that Washington has long raised with Islamabad its fears about Khan, who five years ago admitted leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

‘Our concerns over the potential for… proliferation activities by Mr. Khan are well known to the Pakistani government. We believe that he remains a proliferation risk,’ State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

A State Department official told AFP earlier on condition of anonymity that Khan represented a ‘serious’ risk.

‘We’re following this closely,’ Kelly added when asked about the development at the daily news briefing.

In February, a Pakistani court declared Khan a free man, five years after the reputed father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb was effectively put under house arrest for operating a clandestine proliferation network.

Last Friday, the 72-year-old Khan complained to a high court that his movements were still being restricted by the government’s security arrangements on his behalf.

The court ordered the government to respond to Khan’s claim on September 4.

Local media quoted Khan as saying the restrictions had been withdrawn ahead of Friday’s hearing.

Khan told AFP the reports were correct but added he could not elaborate because the court had barred him from giving interviews to foreign media.

David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and nuclear specialist, told AFP that ‘it is a mistake’ to remove restrictions on a man who cannot be ‘trusted.’He said there is a risk that Khan, who retracted his 2004 confession, will now be able to offer nuclear know-how to scientists from Iran, North Korea and any other rogue countries feared to be pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), said Khan may now not just be motivated by money, but also a ‘bitterness’ with the West over his house arrest.

Last year, Albright wrote on the ISIS website that there were strong suspicions Khan could have sold Iran and North Korea blueprints for an advanced nuclear warhead.

He said the United States and the UN atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), must be allowed to question Khan to learn if he had sold such plans to Pyongyang or Tehran.

But he told AFP Tuesday that the United States never used its leverage to arrange for such questioning amid fears it would provoke a ‘backlash’ in Pakistan, a key US ally.

American lawmakers in March introduced legislation aimed at cutting off military aid to Pakistan unless US officials could question Khan.

Albright said the US government should now push for Khan to be extradited to European countries or the United States for prosecution over possible violation of proliferation laws.

A second State Department official told reporters later Tuesday on the condition of anonymity that he expected US concerns to be raised again with the authorities in Islamabad, but could not confirm they had been.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had expressed concerns when Islamabad High Court eased restrictions on Khan in February. — AFP

NKorea fires two short-range missiles

Updated at: 0633 PST,  Saturday, July 04, 2009
SEOUL: North Korea on Saturday test-fired two more short-range missiles following similar launches earlier this week, according to South Korean military sources quoted the defence ministry said.

“North Korea test-fired two missiles this morning,” a spokesman for the defence ministry told media.

He said the missiles were launched from a base near the eastern port of Wonsan into the East Sea (Sea of Japan). According to local news agency, one of the missiles was a SCUD with a range of 500 kilometres (312 miles).