Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that President Obama’s new nuclear strategy amounted to “atomic threats against Iranian people,” and Iranian state television reported Thursday that the military had begun a large exercise in the Persian Gulf, where the United States and Israel have both increased their presence in recent months.
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Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, addressed medical workers in Tehran on Wednesday.

The ayatollah’s statement on Wednesday referred to the section of Mr. Obama’s “Nuclear Posture Review” that guaranteed non-nuclear nations that they would never be threatened by a United States nuclear strike — as long as they are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as judged by the United States.

Speaking in Washington on Wednesday, Gary Samore, Mr. Obama’s top adviser on unconventional weapons, said the wording of the nuclear review was “deliberately crafted” to exclude Iran and North Korea from the security guarantee, creating an incentive for both countries to come into compliance with the treaty. (While North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests and is believed to have fuel for eight or more weapons, the United States has never acknowledged it as a nuclear-weapons state.)

Mr. Samore insisted that Mr. Obama’s decision did not amount to making a nuclear threat against Iran, which many Western countries believe is pursuing a weapon. The policy, Mr. Samore said, referred only to the use of nuclear weapons in the most extreme circumstances, which most experts believe means in retaliation for a strike against the United States or its allies.

Still, Ayatollah Khamenei’s statement struck at the heart of one of the criticisms of Mr. Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review: That it could give Iran a pretext to argue that it should develop nuclear weapons to defend itself. The ayatollah’s remarks suggested that the Iranian leadership regarded the administration policy as a new level of intimidation, or perhaps a justification for pursuing its nuclear program.

“How can the U.S. president make atomic threats against Iranian people?” Ayatollah Khamenei said in a speech to Iranian medical workers, the Fars news agency reported from Tehran. “This threat is a threat against humanity and international peace and no one in the world should dare to articulate such words.”

Ayatollah Khamenei said Wednesday that countries that had nuclear ability were themselves “brazenly lying” about their commitment to nonproliferation. He argued that nuclear-armed states sought to keep non-nuclear states from developing such weapons because they did not want competition. “We have repeatedly said that we do not intend to use weapons of mass destruction, but the Iranian people do not surrender to these threats and will force those who make such threats to come to their knees,” Ayatollah Khamenei said.

“We will not allow America to renew its hellish dominance over Iran,” he added.

To meet the United States’ demands, Iran would need to take several important steps, including halting uranium enrichment and allowing broad inspections of the country to ensure that Iran had no secret plants.

The Iranian military defined its military exercise as a three-day naval, ground and air-war game in the Persian Gulf, including the sensitive Strait of Hormuz, a narrow transit way through which a large amount of the world’s oil passes.

The deputy chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, Brig. Gen. Hussein Salami, said that the exercise, which is being called the Great Prophet 5, was aimed at showing “Iran’s strength and will against the threats of the enemies,” Fars reported. Iran regularly stages drills to show off its military power.

Iran has refused to suspend its nuclear program despite existing United Nations sanctions and calls by the United States for new, more stringent sanctions.

Iranian officials have floated in recent days the possibility of revisiting a deal to swap a portion of the country’s nuclear fuel. The Iranians had agreed in principle to a deal last year that would have allowed the fuel to be converted overseas and then returned in a form that would be difficult to convert for weapons use, but they later renounced the agreement.
While some officials have suggested recently that they might reconsider, they have recently insisted that all the fuel they gave up would have to be stored on Iranian soil. To the Obama administration, the main advantage of the original deal was that it would take the fuel out of Iranian hands for about a year, in the hopes of slowing their program.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Salehi, said Wednesday that Iran would be willing to discuss a deal on the sidelines of a Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review meeting in New York, which begins next month, the state-run Press TV reported

Nick Clegg at Trewirge Junior School during an election campaign visit to Redruth in Cornwall
Nick Clegg at Trewirge Junior School during an election campaign visit to Redruth in Cornwall Photo: PA

Should anyone be tempted to believe the debate-winning claim by the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, that his party stands for a "complete clean-up from top to toe of politics", they would be well advised to look at his party's campaigning tactics – and at Mr Clegg's own career in Europe before he entered Parliament in 2005.

But let us start with the Green candidate in last year's Norwich North by-election, Rupert Read, who would like to show you a Lib Dem leaflet.

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Headed "Residents shocked by Green Party candidate's terror views", it says: "Little is known about Rupert Read, but one thing is certain, local people have taken against his extreme views." Dr Read, said the flyer, believed that "Britain simply had the terrorist attacks on 7 July coming to us". One safely anonymous "local resident" was then quoted as saying: "What planet is he on?" Another, equally shy, "Norwich resident" opined: "I can't believe that anyone could think that."

The voters of Norwich would have been right not to believe it, since it was a wholesale distortion of something Dr Read had written, four years earlier, equating terrorism with acts such as the Iraq war, but very clearly condemning both and calling for an "ethic of non-violence", as practised by Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

"It had some quite unpleasant consequences for me," says Dr Read, a philosophy lecturer. "The whole Liberal Democrat campaign was sickening. I look now at Nick Clegg promising to clean up politics and I remember that he was specifically asked to criticise his party's tactics in Norwich, and he refused."

At the current and Euro elections, according to Dr Read, local Lib Dems have distributed leaflets printed in green, resembling Green Party literature, saying the Greens have no chance (actually, it is the main opposition party on the city council) and calling on their supporters to vote Lib Dem. In Tory areas, they have sent out leaflets printed in blue ink, saying the same about the Tories (who in fact hold the seat).

"People were telling me on the doorstep: 'I got your leaflet telling me to vote Lib Dem, so that's what I'm doing'," says Dr Read. "Anyone who's in politics knows that the Liberal Democrats are the dirtiest in their campaigning techniques, and I'm saying that as a former Lib Dem. It's one of the reasons I left."

In York, the Tory website was hacked into and redirected to the local Lib Dem one; in Cornwall, a Lib Dem candidate distributed flyers calling his opponent a "greasy-haired twat"; in Liverpool, a Lib Dem councillor was caught stuffing letterboxes with leaflets supposedly from a fringe party which smeared his Labour rival as a "lap-dancer".

Lest we think these merely local excesses, it may be worth quoting from an official Liberal Democrat election manual, Effective Opposition, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, published by the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors in 2002 and still in use, judging by the techniques seen around the country. On page 21, it instructs Lib Dems to "be wicked, act shamelessly, stir endlessly". Page 23 advises: "Don't be afraid to exaggerate. For example, responses to surveys and petitions are always 'massive'. If a council is doing something badly, public expressions are always of 'outrage'." Page 4 advises: "Positive campaigning will NOT be enough to win."

Of course, other politicians play dirty tricks too, though not as many. But the Lib Dems are promising a "new politics". The available evidence suggests that they behave much like the other parties, or perhaps even more cynically, when given the chance.

And what of Mr Clegg personally? Well, he has fiercely condemned the influence of lobbyists as part of the "old politics" and called for "reform on lobbying". But he has been distinctly coy about his own two past spells as a lobbyist, leaving them off his official biography on the Lib Dem website. Most interesting and recent is Mr Clegg's high-level stint, in the middle of his political career, with GPlus, the influential and controversial Brussels company.

Peter Guilford, GPlus's founder, explicitly pitches his firm as the place for organisations with "a real problem affecting their reputation". Its clients have included the Malaysian Palm Oil Council, whose plantations are accused of contributing to tropical deforestation (GPlus argued for a relaxation of EU regulations to allow more palm oil imports), and representatives of the Russian government, whose PR corner it fought during the recent war with Georgia.

This kind of thing is what led Corporate Europe Observatory, the EU transparency pressure group, to make GPlus the runner-up in its "Worst EU Lobbying" awards last year. "They are a very interesting company," says a spokesman for the pressure group. "We have lots of stories about them." Last year, too, GPlus was temporarily suspended from the European Commission's register of lobbyists for refusing to disclose its full client list.

GPlus often practises "revolving-door" recruitment, taking people straight out of the European institutions to lobby their former colleagues, a practice banned in America. One such recruit was Nick Clegg. Immediately after he left the European Parliament – he was a Lib Dem MEP from 1999 to 2004 – he became one of only five partners in GPlus. He did the job for just under a year, until elected to Westminster in May 2005, describing his work as giving businesses "intelligent professional help in engaging with the EU institutions".

In a press release, the lobbyist said Mr Clegg would "focus on developing GPlus's service to UK clients". Among GPlus's most important UK clients at the time was the Royal Bank of Scotland, then lobbying furiously to water down a string of EU directives regulating the financial services industry.

Among the key targets were the Investment Services Directive (ISD), which would have forced the big banks to be more transparent about their trades, and the Capital Requirements Directive (CRD), which would have made them hold more money to cover their risks.

Partly with the help of GPlus, RBS and its fellow banks succeeded in weakening the ISD. They also persuaded Britain's Financial Services Authority to implement the CRD in a "flexible" manner, arguing that otherwise it risked "crossing the line into internal management and governance". We know now that crossing the line into "internal management and governance" on the key issue of capital adequacy was very much needed. But it didn't happen, capital ran out, the crash followed – and RBS, now nationalised, became a byword for bad banking.

Two former GPlus staff have told The Daily Telegraph that Mr Clegg worked on the RBS account and an item in a trade journal at the time said he was "involved with" it. Mr Clegg, the former staffers said, did not lobby externally on RBS's behalf, but the future Lib Dem leader "would give comments on draft slides" and "participate in preparatory meetings if we were preparing a presentation. He would look over our pitches and give us his input. He was a regular presence in the office." Mr Guilford said that GPlus had "no record" of Mr Clegg working on the RBS account, but refused to deny that he did provide the kind of advice described.

Mr Clegg worked in depth, staffers said, on another potentially controversial GPlus account, BG Group, formerly part of British Gas. The gas industry, under fire for its high prices, was resisting demands for an EU competition inquiry and BG Group was separately being investigated by the European Commission to see whether it was forcing prices too high. Another former employee said Mr Clegg had used his political connections to pitch for work from the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, but was rebuffed.

A Lib Dem spokesman said: "I don't know whether he gave internal advice. I suspect it's possible. Nick has never had a problem with lobbying companies representing their clients, so long as they do not use public officials."
In a speech last February after the banking meltdown, Charlie McCreevy, the EU commissioner then responsible for financial services, said: "I am convinced that over the years there has been too much regulatory capture [of Brussels] by the sell-side of the financial services market. Their lobbies have been strong and powerful. It was many of those same lobbyists who in the past managed to convince legislators to insert clauses and provisions that contributed so much to the lax standards and mass excesses that have created the systemic risks. The taxpayer is now forced to pick up the bill."

London, England (CNN) -- Flights across Europe are expected to return to "100 percent" on Thursday --seven days after ash from an Icelandic volcano forced the shutdown of airspace and stranded thousands of passengers around the world, the air traffic agency Eurocontrol said.

The mood among passengers was one of cautious optimism. After days of endless waiting, many reserved their celebrations for when they were airborne.

"I think when we land down in America, then we'll know we're there. But at the minute, we're a bit cautious," said Georgina Evett.

She was part of a group trying to fly from Manchester, England, to Florida for a world cheerleading championship this week.

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Manchester Airport was among many where flights are now taking off and landing.

The closure of so much European airspace for nearly a week left untold numbers of travelers stranded, and it's not clear how long it will take to get everyone home.

Many airlines added or rearranged flights to try to clear the backlog.

The crisis set off a surge of emergency requests from stranded Americans, prompting the U.S. State Department to scramble to arrange everything from housing to, in one case, dialysis treatment for an elderly patient in Frankfurt, Germany.

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At its peak, the crisis affected 1.2 million passengers a day and 29 percent of all global aviation, according to the International Air Transport Association.

It was the worst disruption of air traffic since the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001. Following those attacks, the United States closed its air space for three days, forcing Europe to postpone all transatlantic flights.

In addition to clearing a massive backlog of passengers and cargo, airlines now face financial headaches as well as logistical ones.

Budget carrier Ryanair indicated Wednesday it does not plan to pay compensation to passengers other than lost ticket costs.

The European Union's top official for transport had said Monday that airlines were responsible for taking care of them while they were stranded.

The International Air Transport Association estimated Wednesday that the Icelandic volcano crisis cost airlines more than $1.7 billion in lost revenue through Tuesday. Between Saturday and Monday, when disruptions were greatest, IATA said lost revenues reached $400 million each day.

The crisis began after the volcano beneath the Eyjafjallajokull glacier erupted Wednesday and sent a cloud of ash into the atmosphere. By the next day that cloud had reached Europe, where authorities quickly closed the airspace over safety fears.
Airspace was being closed based on theoretical models, not on facts. Test flights by our members showed that the models were wrong.
--Giovanni Bisignani, IATA
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Volcanic ash can shut down engines and electrical systems and damage a plane's windscreen.

By Tuesday, however, airlines had started to complain that the measures were too restrictive.

Ash levels in most parts of Europe, they said, were low enough to allow the safe operation of flights.

Scientists in Iceland said Wednesday the volcano has decreased its ash output by 80 percent compared to the first day of eruption, April 14.

Armann Hoskuldsson, a volcanologist at the University of Iceland, told a briefing that the volcano's output is now "insignificant," though it will continue to be active for a while.

That reduction in volcanic activity appeared to be the main reason that flights resumed operating in Europe on Wednesday, along with European countries relaxing their restrictions on flight, according to a spokeswoman for Eurocontrol, an intergovernmental body that manages European air travel.

In Britain, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) issued revised guidance on flying through volcano ash clouds, allowing airlines to conduct their own risk assessments and requiring them to report any ash damage to the authorities.

The 27 countries of the European Union also agreed with Eurocontrol to split the airspace into zones based on their ash content and to allow flights in the unaffected areas, said Spanish Minister of Public Works Jose Blanco.

"Airspace was being closed based on theoretical models, not on facts," said Giovanni Bisignani, director general and CEO of IATA. "Test flights by our members showed that the models were wrong."
He said the EU's decision to categorize airspace based on risk was a "step in the right direction," but Europe still needs uniform rules on air travel to avoid a repeat of the chaos of the past week.

NATS, the air traffic authority in Britain, said it is confident it had made the right decision in restricting flights.

"The primary concern for all the people involved -- the regulator, the government, and NATS -- has been to ensure flight safety," NATS Senior Manager Alex Bristol told CNN. "Until such time as we had evidence to give us different assurances, then the regulations which existed, and which we were using eight days ago ... then we had to restrict the airspace, and we did the right things."