BBC report.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has labelled the US an "atomic criminal" at a conference on nuclear disarmament in Tehran.

He also said that the use of nuclear weapons was prohibited by religion.

BBC report.

Mohammad Khatami was expected to attend a nuclear disarmament conference in Japan, but his aides say he was banned from travelling.

Organisers of the meeting in Hiroshima have confirmed that he cancelled his appearance at the last minute.

Times report.

According to one report the Pentagon is moving hundreds of bunker-buster bombs to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The latest version of the weapon, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, is said to weigh 15 tonnes and be capable of burrowing through 200ft of reinforced concrete before exploding.

[...]

It was unclear yesterday who was behind the leak of the Gates memo but the vehemence of the White House response suggests that senior Pentagon figures may be responsible. A similar pattern shadowed Mr Obama's decision to deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan last year.

Independent article.

It is one of the few genuine issues of life and death during this general election campaign. It will not dictate how much any British school improves, how many police appear on the streets of a city, or how quickly patients are allowed to leave hospitals around the country. But it will, literally, decide the fate of thousands of British service personnel and, ultimately, how many of them live and die.

Yet nobody wants to talk about Afghanistan.

Times report.

Israel has delivered a secret warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad that it will respond to missile attacks from Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese-based Islamist group, by launching immediate retaliation against Syria itself.

In a message, sent earlier this month, Israel made it clear that it now regards Hezbollah as a division of the Syrian army and that reprisals against Syria will be fast and devastating.

Reuters report.

The nation's top military officer said on Sunday that military options existed to try to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon but that diplomatic efforts were the best way forward now.

"We in the Pentagon, we plan for contingencies all the time and certainly there are options which exist" for dealing with the Iran nuclear threat militarily, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a forum at Columbia University in New York.

New York Times report.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran's steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama's national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.

Laura Rozen on Politico.

The White House is confirming that President Barack Obama received a letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month.

"Yes, President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to the President in March," National Security Council spokesman Michael Hammer told POLITICO Saturday. "We are not going to get into details on the content of the correspondence at this time."

AFP report.

A son of influential Iranian cleric and ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani faces arrest on return from abroad, Tehran's prosecutor said in a newspaper report on Saturday.

BBC report.

As pressure grows on Iran over its nuclear programme, there is evidence that behind the scenes, the United States has stepped up its push to isolate Tehran economically.

[...]

William Burns, US Under-Secretary of State, told a Congressional committee: "What we've been doing is to try to use every lever that we already have at our disposal to encourage foreign companies, foreign entities to cut their ties with the Iranian economy."

"The squeeze is on," said Kate Dorian, Dubai bureau chief for the energy analysts Platts. "Very few people are willing to deal with Iran directly."

Robert Fisk in the Independent.

A clue to the seriousness with which everyone now takes the possibility of war is contained in a remark made by an anonymous US spokesman who warned that the transfer of Scud missiles to Hizbollah would represent a "serious risk" to Lebanon. Not to Israel, mark you -- but to Lebanon. There is no doubt that this is an allusion to frequent threats from the Israelis themselves that in another war with Hizbollah, the Lebanese government would be held responsible and as a result Lebanon's infrastructure would be destroyed.

Bloomberg report.

Germany might consider exiting Europe's current monetary union to create a smaller bloc as the Greek crisis threatens to turn the euro area into a region of "fiscal profligacy," Morgan Stanley said.

Telegraph report.

The former CIA chief, Porter Goss, approved a 2005 decision to destroy 92 tapes showing US agents waterboarding two terrorism suspects, according to newly released internal emails.

[...]

"These documents provide further evidence that senior CIA officials were willing to risk being prosecuted for obstruction of justice in order to avoid being prosecuted for torture," said Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the ACLU. "If the Department of Justice fails to hold these officials accountable, they will have succeeded in their cover-up."

Guardian report.

Pakistan's government is to pursue a renewed criminal investigation into the murder of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto after a devastating UN report blamed the previous military-led government of Pervez Musharraf for wilfully failing to provide her with adequate security.

The report of a UN inquiry commission, released late yesterday, said that the possible role of the military and its intelligence apparatus in her assassination needed to be investigated. It said that Pakistan's spy agencies had obstructed the investigation, "severely hampering" the search for the truth.

Guardian leading article. The article referred to is here.

Two analysts at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) have argued that the international community should accept Iran's current counter-offer, which is to have the fuel swap (low-enriched uranium for fuel elements) but keep it on Iranian soil. Ivanka Barzashka and Ivan Oelrich say that in haggling over details we are losing sight of the goal, which would be to make it more difficult, not easier, for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

[...]

We are back to a familiar game of diplomatic brinkmanship, but one cannot help thinking that if sanity were to break out it would be in a form not too far away from the FAS's version. The gaps are bridgeable. There is, unfortunately, much that could happen in the Middle East to derail that outcome.

Washington Post report.

The three-member U.N. panel said her death could have been prevented if the government under then-President Pervez Musharraf, the Punjab province government, and the Rawalpindi District Police had taken adequate measures "to respond to the extraordinary, fresh and urgent security risks that they knew she faced."

It also found that the investigation into her death was severely hampered by intelligence agencies and other government officials, "which impeded an unfettered search for the truth."