Morning brief, April 7

Fasten your seatbelts. The Telegraph is reporting: “United Nations officials investigating Iran’s nuclear programme say they have found convincing evidence that the Iranians are working on a secret uranium enrichment project that has not been officially declared.”

Iraq

Car bomb near Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, which is holy to Shiites. Another one followed at a Shiite mosque in Baghdad. Looks like Jafari isn’t backing down from wanting to be prime minister.   

The NYT says Bush faced “tough questions” in a defend-the-war townhall meeting in Charlotte, but all it reports is a get-it-out-of-my-system scolding from a MoveOn.org member. The transcript seems to show a Q&A session that wasn’t particularly tough.

There’s no gasoline available in Kirkuk, which sits atop huge oil reserves. And if you don’t care, well, you better: “The petroleum industry in northern Iraq is in such dire straits that almost nothing is sold overseas.”

In the LAT, Rosa Brooks interprets Washington’s nudging of government formation in Iraq as blaming the Iraqis. She thinks “hectoring remarks by Rice and Straw have just made a bad situation worse.”

Returning injured troops get a Texas-sized welcome in Galveston yesterday. The strange funeral-marring Kansans protested outside Walter Reed with signs like “God Blew Up the Troops.”

Elsewhere 

Hamas is broke, under pressure, and now without EU funding for a while.

I realize that it’s hard to click on article with “vital task” and “IMF” in the title, so I read  today’s David Ignatius column for you. The point: America is buying products from the rest of the world (huge trade deficit) in exchange for IOUs (Asia has huge surpluses).  At some point the rest of the world will stop taking our cheap paper. The imbalance could lead to a world economic meltdown. The IMF could/should broker and manage a gradual adjustment process.

The capture of Charles Taylor has had a positive impact on Monrovia.

In the Guardian, Simon Tisdall says Europe is tired and confused: 

The EU’s post-referendum “period of reflection” has become a longueur of indefinite duration. And diplomats say these enervating events, contributing to plunging public confidence, have only encouraged a new Europe-wide phenomenon – enlargement fatigue.

ElBaradei talks to Al Ahram about all things nuclear. De Villepin ignores calls to resign.