Morning Brief, Monday, September 18

Iran

Forget Russia and China. The Security Council member the U.S. really needs to convince of the wisdom of sanctions against Iran? France. And Chirac isn’t buying it. He told French radio today that he’s behind a deal that would allow Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment during negotiations, not before, and that sanctions aren’t the way to go. 

Over the weekend, Ahmadinejad and Chavez got chummy in Caracas. 

Darfur

Demonstrations around the world over the weekend call for U.N. troops to be deployed to Darfur, while Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, in Cuba for the Non-Aligned Movement summit, says U.N. troops are out of the question. Craig Timberg reports on the worsening violence in Darfur. Bashir is in New York this week for the U.N. General Assembly.

Elsewhere

The U.S. military has detained an Iraqi AP photographer for the past five months, despite having never filed charges against him or held a hearing. 

FP spoke recently with Cyrus Nowrasteh, the Path to 9/11 screenwriter and producer, about the inaccuracies in his film’s portrayal of the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks. In the WSJ today, he goes after the “politically driven hysteria” surrounding the docudrama.

Four Canadian troops were killed this morning by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. Is it time to talk to the Taliban?

China announces it will increase its troop presence in Lebanon to 1,000. A Palestinian security chief is killed in Gaza. The German far right make gains in regional elections. A leak scandal threatens the Hungarian government. The Somali interim president survives a bomb attempt on his life. HIV hospital scandal in Kazakhstan. And a 2,000-year old army gets a new recruit.