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/begin my translation Something’s Wrong with Kim Jong-il... in Power Struggle or Detained? [Newsis[ Quoting a reliable source in S. Korea, Jiji Press of Japan reported on Jan. 26 that there is an intelligence that something may be wrong with Kim Jong-il recently. In its dispatch from Seoul, it reported that Kim Jong-il is not in Pyongyang, and intense power struggle could be going on between factions inside his inner circle. Intelligence outfits of U.S. and S. Korea are now trying to verify this now, according to the report. The source suggests the possibility that something might have happened to...

A remarkable thing happened at the United Nations yesterday. We, the United States, told the world “no”. The messenger was Robert Joseph, the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Speaking before the dozens of nations that have gathered for the review conference on Small Arms and Light Weapons, Joseph told the world in no uncertain terms where the United States stood. “The U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of our citizens to keep and bear arms, and there will be no infringement of those rights,” he proclaimed to the dignitaries and functionaries. “The United States will not agree...

* Bush calls for promoting use of nuclear power both at home and abroad WASHINGTON: The United States is seeking to build an international coalition of nuclear powers to provide safe fuel and stop sensitive technology reaching rogue states, officials said. Robert Joseph, under secretary of state for arms control and international security, said the programme aims to “prevent future Iran” - a reference to the increasingly tense standoff over suspicions that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons. The United States wants to stop “countries which seek to acquire sensitive technology associated with enrichment and reprocessing with real purposes...

<p>A key Iraqi scientist recently told the CIA that high-strength aluminum tubes bought by Baghdad weren't meant for nuclear bomb production, as President Bush suggested in his State of the Union address, two experts on Iraq's nuclear program say.</p> <p>Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, who headed a uranium-enrichment unit vital to Iraq's pre-1991 bomb plans, "also said that since '91 they hadn't resurrected a nuclear weapon program," according to ex-Iraq inspector David Albright, an American physicist who acted as go-between for Obeidi to talk to U.S. authorities a few weeks ago.</p>

Wed September 10, 2003 02:16 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top CIA expert on weapons of mass destruction, who became embroiled in controversy over whether the White House stretched evidence about Iraq's programs, said he planned to leave the agency in October. Alan Foley, who heads the Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center, told colleagues in a note dated Aug. 29 that he had been "thinking about life after the agency for some time" and decided to leave after 26 years to enter the private sector. He alluded to this summer's finger-pointing between the Central Intelligence Agency and...

For the highly disciplined George W. Bush team, loyalty to the president — and that he exhibits towards his subordinates — has been more than a priority; to outsiders, it has often seemed an obsession. It came as a shock, then, to many Bush-watchers when the administration made the mistake of trying to appease critics of its war with Saddam Hussein by calling the inclusion of a reference to British intelligence findings in the 2003 State of the Union address a "mistake." The predictable result was to precipitate a hardy perennial of Washington politics: the circular firing squad. First, the...