Morning Brief, Wednesday, October 10

Europe

SERGEI ILNITSKY/AFP/Getty Images

Russian President Vladimir Putin says his country has no “objective data” that shows Iran is building a nuclear weapon, but French President Nicolas Sarkozy says “our positions have moved much closer” after Tuesday’s talks between the two leaders in Moscow.

Putin’s recent announcement that he will run for prime minister has boosted his party’s poll numbers.

Spanish authorities suspect the ETA of pulling off a car bomb attack in Bilbao. 

A shared distaste for immigrants is uniting Belgium’s factions.

Middle East

Turkey’s ruling AK Party vowed to seek parliamentary approval for cross-border raids on Kurdish militants.

Remember Egypt? The country is in the midst of “one of its largest crackdowns against public dissent in a decade,” according to the Christian Science Monitor.

Israel’s recent airstrike on a suspected Syrian nuclear facility has generated hot debate within the Bush administration, the New York Times reports.

People are returning to Nahr al-Bared, the refugee camp in northern Lebanon that was the scene of fierce fighting between government forces and al Qaeda-linked militants. 

Asia

China’s military has quietly promoted several top officers with Taiwan expertise.

A top U.S. Commerce Department official slammed China’s industrial policies as uncompetitive.

“Step aside,” U.S. First Lady Laura Bush tells Burma’s ruling junta, as if they would listen.

The South Korean port of Busan is looking to invest in North Korea.

Elsewhere

Economists say the U.S. housing slump will drive U.S. economic growth down to 2.4 percent in 2008, lower than previous consensus estimates. The IMF, meanwhile, estimates that global growth will slow to 4.8 percent and that U.S. growth will decline all the way to 1.9 percent.

U.S. officials are happy with a weak dollar, analysts say.

The Nobel Prize for chemistry goes to German scientist Gerhard Ertl for his work on surface chemistry.

Intrepid French NGO Doctors Without Borders is pulling out of Darfur because it’s too dangerous.

Today’s Agenda

• World Bank President Robert Zoellick outlines his agenda before the National Press Club.
• U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates heads to Britain and Russia.
• Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft blasts off from Kazakhstan and heads to the International Space Station. Malaysia’s first astronaut is aboard.
• Today is World Mental Health Day.
• The Frankfurt Book Fair kicks off in Germany.

Yesterday on Passport

• Analyst: U.S. would attack Iran in “maximum darkness”
• Georgia on the midnight train to being a banana republic
• A surge of facts about Burma