Iran’s Envoy to the IAEA Ali Ashgar Soltanieh said last week that a delegation of the UN nuclear watchdog would visit Iran on January 29-31 “to negotiate and discuss issues raised by the IAEA.”

The IAEA delegation is led by Herman Nackaerts who is in charge of the Iran nuclear file.

The visit comes amid heightened international tensions over the Iran nuclear program.

The EU voted on Monday to ban oil imports from Iran. The move came after the Islamic Republic announced earlier this month that it had launched a nuclear enrichment program at a well-protected underground facility near the holy Shia city of Qom.

The program envisages enriching uranium to the 20-percent level, which can easily be turned into fissile warhead material.

Western nations suspect Iran, which is already under numerous international sanctions, of pursuing a secret nuclear weapons program but Tehran insists it needs nuclear power solely for civilian purposes.

Iran has threatened to retaliate by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the main export route for supplies from the Middle East.

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The news came as an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team of experts began examining Japan’s safety checks on idled nuclear reactors.

Tokyo wants an international seal of approval for the energy-hungry country’s nuclear industry to bolster its faltering efforts at reassuring the public it is safe to resume atomic operations.

The vast majority of Japan’s 54 commercial nuclear reactors are offline because popular opposition is preventing their being restarted in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

The disaster, triggered by the March earthquake and tsunami, contaminated the environment and forced tens of thousands of residents around the Fukushima nuclear site, in northeast Japan, to evacuate their homes.

Many still do not know if or when they will be able to return.

Utility companies say Japan will experience severe power shortages if nuclear electricity production is not re-started.

“We are making contact with the International Atomic Energy Agency to see what’s possible after we received requests from Fukushima that it hoped IAEA will have a permanent presence in the area,” a Japanese diplomat told AFP, under the customary condition of anonymity.

Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba, whose parliamentary constituency is in Fukushima, told residents on Sunday that he was making the push after requests from local leaders.

“We are calling on IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano for the international agency’s constant presence,” he said in a speech, according to Jiji Press.

The announcement coincided with a visit by a 10-member team of experts, led by James Lyons, IAEA director of nuclear installation safety.

At the request of the Japanese government, Lyons’ team will review Japan’s “stress test” before Tokyo approves nuclear reactor re-starts.

The Vienna-based IAEA has offices around the world — including in Tokyo — but it does not normally have permanent bases to monitor commercial reactor sites.

The Tokyo government has struggled with public trust on the nuclear issue since the March disaster.

That drive appeared to have suffered a further setback on Monday when it was revealed the body set up to manage Japan’s unfolding atomic catastrophe at Fukushima kept no records of its meetings.

The government’s nuclear disaster task force, headed by then prime minister Naoto Kan and including all of his ministers, has no minutes of the meetings that approved the evacuation of people living near the exploding reactors.

The Cabinet Office, in charge of keeping all public records, said it has told the agency to study what it can do to create a written record of the decision-making processes.

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The authority, along with the national police administration (Rikspolisstyrelsen), the Swedish National Grid (Svenska Kraftnät) and the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap, MSB), authored the 139-page report, calling for among other things expanding the protection area around the plants and for permanent and armed security forces on-site.

“There is no reason why these security guards should not have the ability to protect themselves if they are exposed to violence. I don’t think this is very controversial,” Swedish Radiation Safety Authority inspector Stig Isaksson told AFP.

He stressed though that the most important step towards better security was ensuring better coordination between authorities and agencies so they could respond quicker if a threat emerged.

Isaksson said that Swedish security police were unaware of any “concrete threats” in recent years against the Scaninavian country’s three nuclear plants and 10 reactors, pointing out that environmental activists had prompted Sweden’s centre-right government to commission the report.

In June 2010, 50 Green peace activists entered the Forsmark nuclear power plant near Uppsala, north of Stockholm, to protest the reversal of a moratorium on nuclear power.

Twenty-nine of them were later fined for trespassing, with one found guilty of lesser arms law violation for possession of pepper spray.

Among the changes proposed in the report is to tighten laws against trespassing at nuclear facilities and beef up the penalty for doing so.

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The investigators said that they would stage an experiment where a model Phobos will be subjected to radiation similar to that from U.S. radars.

“The results of the experiment will allow us to prove or dismiss the possibility of the radars’ impact,” said Commission head Yury Koptev, the former head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin also said on Tuesday that the loss of the probe could have been caused by the U.S. radar’s activity.

The current Roscosmos head, Vladimir Popovkin previously said that that the inexplicable malfunction of the Russian spacecraft could have been caused by “interference from a foreign technical facility.”

“Experts do not dismiss the possibility that the probe could have accidentally come under the impact of emissions [from a U.S. radar stationed on the Marshall Islands], whose megawatt impulse triggered the malfunctioning of on-board electronics,” Russian business daily, Kommersant, said on Tuesday, citing an unnamed source in the country’s space industry as saying.

The source did not specify the type of radar, but said it was monitoring the trajectory of an asteroid at the time of the Phobos-Grunt launch.

It was more likely an accident rather than a determined act of sabotage, the source told the Kommersant.

The investigators are considering several causes of the failure, including a short circuit or “external impact.” They are expected to inform the Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin of the preliminary results of the investigation on January 20. The official results will be made public on January 26, Kommersant said.

Phobos-Grunt, launched on November 9, was designed to bring back rock and soil samples from the Martian moon Phobos. However, it got stuck in a so-called support orbit after its engines had failed to put it on course for the Red Planet, and fell back on Earth late on Sunday.

According to NASA, Russia has failed in all 17 of its attempts to study the Red Planet close-up since 1960. The most recent failure before November accident occurred in 1996, when Russia lost its Mars-96 orbiter during launch.

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Targeting anyone with an Apple ID, the bogus email, which claims to come from appleid@id.apple.com, informs recipients that their billing information records are out of date. “Failure to update your records will result in account termination,” it says.

Unlike so many scam emails, with their abysmal spelling and poor grammar, it’s clear that a bit more work has gone into this one.

As you’d expect, the email contains a genuine-looking link for readers to click on to enable them to confirm their billing information. According to Intego, clicking on the link takes you to an equally genuine-looking sign-in page requesting your Apple ID and password. Do that and you’ll come to another page asking you to update your profile, which includes a request for—you guessed it— your credit card information.

With so many people receiving Apple products like iPhones and iPads this Christmas, millions of newApple IDs will have been created since Christmas Day. Such new Apple customers are all potential targets for those operating the scam.

One way to check the authenticity of a link is to hover the cursor over it and see what address shows in the floating box that pops up. The genuine address (ie. the destination of the link) will show in the part immediately after ‘http://’. Alternatively, simply go directly to the website through another browser window and log-in from there to check that your account is in order.

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To help Japan’s biggest utility, known as Tepco, meet costs running into trillions of yen for compensation and cleanup, the government had already agreed in November to provide 890 billion yen through a bailout fund.

“We have reviewed the estimated sum of compensation after the committee addressing compensation disputes decided on additional measures to compensate victims who voluntarily evacuated,” Tepco said in a statement.

Tepco was told by an advisory panel in October it can expect to face bills for about 4.5 trillion yen in compensation in the first two years after the crisis, triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Earlier this month a separate panel on compensation guidelines said Tepco can expect bills for an additional 200 billion yen, media reported.

Trade minister Yukio Edano, who oversees energy policy, is likely to approve Tuesday’s request as early as January, a source close to the matter told Reuters.

The March disaster knocked out reactor cooling systems at the plant, 240 km (150 miles) northeast of Tokyo, triggering meltdowns and radiation leaks that forced some 80,000 people to leave their homes.

The strains of the crisis have put Tepco’s independence in doubt, and sources told Reuters this month the government may inject about $13 billion into it as early as next summer in a de facto nationalization.

The utility, also struggling with the cost of thermal fuel to make up for the loss of nuclear power, is seeking additional loans and plans to raise corporate electricity rates in April.

The crisis has prompted the government to review its energy policy and Edano is set to announce later on Tuesday an agenda for debating reform of electricity supply.

This is expected to include separation of power generation and transmission, which could help deregulate the power sector by allowing smaller players to enter, media reports said.

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Yonhap news agency and the Chosun Ilbo daily quoted an unidentified diplomatic source saying the Washington had also agreed to provide the North with up to 240,000 tonnes of food aid.

Pyongyang pledged “to implement initial measures of denuclearisation that include a suspension of its uranium enrichment programme,” Yonhap said.

The North apparently agreed to put stricter and clearer monitoring systems in place to ensure that the food aid reached those most in need, according to the source, Yonhap said.

The agreements came when Robert King, US special envoy for North Korean human rights, met with Ri Gun, head of North American affairs at North Korea’s foreign ministry, on Thursday and Friday in Beijing, the source said.

The reports could not be independently confirmed.

Suspending the uranium enrichment programme — first disclosed by the North one year ago — is a key demand of Washington’s before six-party negotiations can resume.

The North quit the six-party forum — which also includes China, Russia, Japan and South Korea — in April 2009, one month before its second nuclear test.

Pyongyang has long said it wanted the six-nation talks to re-start, but without preconditions.

But the United States says the North must first show “seriousness of purpose” by shutting down the enrichment programme.

According to both Yonhap and Chosun Ilbo, the two countries were likely to hold a third round of talks this coming week in Beijing to discuss resuming the six-party talks.

Glyn Davies, the US special representative on North Korea, will likely meet with North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-Gwan in Beijing around Thursday, the source said.

North Korea was promised 500,000 tonnes of food aid from the United States when it dismantled part of its nuclear facilities in Yongbyon in 2008.

It had received 170,000 tonnes by the time the aid was suspended in 2009 as tensions worsened over the North’s nuclear programmes.

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During the trip, the mayor of Beijing announced he will visit the Dutch capital this week. The exact dates and programme have not yet been disclosed.

Huawei, a large Chine telecom and IT firm, has announced plans to expand its Amsterdam office with some 100 staff this year. It currently employs 300 people in Amsterdam.

In all, there are nearly 300 Chinese companies in the Netherlands. Around a third are located in and around Amsterdam.

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“Last night at 11:29 pm (1859 GMT), the Bushehr power plant was connected with 60 megawatts to the national grid,” the organisation’s spokesman Hamid Khadem Qaemi, told Al-Alam television.

The connection of the Russian-built plant in southern Iran to the national grid was originally scheduled for the end of 2010.

The Bushehr plant was started up in November 2010 but repeated technical problems delayed its operations, leading to the removal of its fuel rods last March.

“The capacity will gradually increase and it (is going through its) testing phase and on Shahrviar 21 (September 12) in a ceremony the power plant will reach its 40-percent capacity,” Khadem Qaemi said.

The deputy atomic chief in charge of power plants, Mohammad Ahmadian, told state television the plant was expected to reach full capacity at “around the end of Aban or beginning of Azar (November).”

“But it is very important for us to take these final steps with utmost safety concerns in mind. We want to have guaranteed functional operation,” Ahmadian added.

In mid-August, Iran’s atomic organisation chief Fereydoon Abbasi Davani said the plant was expected to reach “full capacity of 1,000 megawatts” in late November or early December.

Russia, which built the plant, has pinned the delays on Iran, saying its engineers have been forced to work with outdated parts. The latest delay in March was blamed on wear and tear at the plant.

Construction started in the 1970s with the help of German company Siemens, which quit the project after the 1979 Islamic revolution over concerns about nuclear proliferation.

In 1994, Russia agreed to complete the plant and provide fuel for it, with the supply deal committing Iran to returning the spent fuel to allay Western concerns over its nuclear ambitions.

Western governments suspect Iran is seeking an atomic weapons capability under the guise of its civilian space and nuclear programmes, a charge Iran vehemently denies.

Iran on Friday welcomed as a “step forward” an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on its nuclear activities, saying it highlighted positive steps taken by Tehran towards “cooperation and transparency.”

But the UN atomic watchdog said in a confidential report, a copy of which was obtained by AFP on Friday, that it was “increasingly concerned about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed nuclear related activities involving military related organisations.”

These included “activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile”, according to the report, which is due to be discussed by the IAEA’s 35-member board of governors at a September 12-16 meeting.

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“The deployment of this [missile defense] element in Turkey will constitute our contribution to the defense system being developed within the new NATO [defense] strategy and will strengthen the defense potential of NATO as well as our national defense system,” Unal said.

Talks on the radar deployment are in their final stage, he added.

Local media reported that the radar is planned to be installed in the country’s southeast.

Russia and NATO agreed at a Russia-NATO summit in Lisbon in November 2010 to work together on the missile shield but NATO wants it to be based on two independent systems that exchange information, while Russia favors a joint system with full-scale interoperability.

In June, Russia’s envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin said the United States was already deploying its missile defense system in Europe without waiting for an agreement with Russia.

Russia has retained staunch opposition to the planned deployment of U.S. missile defense systems near its borders, claiming they would be a security threat. The United States insists that the shield would defend NATO members against missiles from North Korea and Iran, but Moscow demands legally binding guarantees that the NATO missile defense systems will not be directed against it.

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