Morning Brief, Monday, October 16, 2006

North Korea The Security Council's sanctions resolution is looking increasingly like a Rorschach test: everyone sees what they want to. For Australia, Japan, and the United States the resolution had teeth. Russia and China aren't so sure. The United States makes clear that just coming back to the table won't end the sanctions. For its ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

North Korea

North Korea

The Security Council's sanctions resolution is looking increasingly like a Rorschach test: everyone sees what they want to. For Australia, Japan, and the United States the resolution had teeth. Russia and China aren't so sure.

The United States makes clear that just coming back to the table won't end the sanctions. For its part, the EU sees a "good precedent" for Iran. 

The UN's food program asks the world to remember the regime's real victims. 

Some Japanese want to at least talk about acquiring nukes themselves. “We need to find a way to prevent Japan from coming under attack,” says an LDP rep.

The incoming UN Secretary-General sounds off on the crisis. 

Is China building a fence along the NK border?

Iraq

Saddam Hussein talks smack from the clink. Iraq's liberation, he says, is at hand.

Those who can are fleeing the rising violence. The UN is trying to measure the flow:

Our staff [are] seeing about 2,000 people a day coming across, so it's more than 40,000 people a month just into Syria.

Iran

The EU pulls the plug on negotiations with Iran: it's back to the Security Council we go. But the door to talks isn't "double-locked" EU officials stress. More metaphors as events warrant… 

Ahmadinejad is none too pleased with the slapdown of North Korea.

Some Western countries have turned the UN Security Council into a weapon to impose their hegemony and issue resolutions against countries that oppose them.

Elsewhere

The Pope is heading to Turkey as part of his "regret but no apologies" tour.

Scandal engulfs the Israeli president. 

China now applies for more patents than Germany.

A bloody attack in Sri Lanka nails the coffin of a ceasefire.  

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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