WarSclerotic

The United States plans to impose personal sanctions on Syrian President Bashar Assad, sources close to the matter said on Wednesday, amid continued violent crackdowns on Syrian pro-democracy protests.

Assad had been partly rehabilitated in the West over the last three years but the United States and European Union condemned his use of force to quell unrest and warned they plan further steps after imposing sanctions on top Syrian officials.

	Syrian anti-regime protesters tearing down a poster of President Bashar al-Assad in Hama, north of Damascus, May 13, 2011.
	Photo by: AFP/YouTube

The Syrian leader told a delegation from the Damascus district of Midan that security forces had made mistakes handling the protests, Wednesday’s al Watan newspaper said.

One delegate said Assad told them 4,000 police would receive training “to prevent these excesses” being repeated, it said.

Human rights groups say Assad’s crackdown has killed at least 700 civilians. Authorities blame most of the violence on armed groups backed by Islamists and outside powers, saying they have also killed more than 120 soldiers and police.

Iran’s nuclear power plant in Bushehr has been put online, Iranian Foreign Minister said on Wednesday, adding that the plant would become fully operational within several weeks.

The plant’s operation was delayed by several months after last year Iranian officials estimated that the Stuxnet virus had hit Bushehr staff computers, adding, however, that the cyber attack did not affect major systems.

	A reactor at the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran on August 21, 2010.
	Photo by: AP

When Iran began loading fuel into Bushehr in August, officials said it would take two to three months for the plant to start producing electricity and that it would generate 1,000 megawatts, about 2.5 percent of the country’s power usage.

On Wednesday, however, the official Iranian news agency quoted the country’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi as saying that, as the Iranian regime “previously announced, Bushehr power plant has reached the criticality stage, [meaning] it has been successfully launched.”

The fission process, according to the country’s state-run Press TV, or criticality, allows the atoms to split by themselves in a chain reaction without interference from operators.

“This stage lasts for two months. We hope the plant will gain some 40 percent of its power within the next one to two months,” Salehi added.

He added that work has progressed at the site despite a two-month gap over a “technical glitch” in one of the pumps at the plant.

“We assure the [Iranian] nation that safety has the final say in Bushehr power plant,” Salehi pointed out.

Last week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov indicated that the Bushehr plant would be fully operational within weeks, telling the state-run news agency RIA that the plant was “a longstanding project and so I would refrain from naming concrete dates — but we are already on the threshold of the final launch of the reactor.”

The construction of the plant began in the 1970s by a German consortium, but was abandoned after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and has faced repeated delays since the mid-1990s, when Russia began work to complete it under a billion-dollar deal with Tehran.

The United States and other Western nations have urged Russia to abandon the project for years, fearing it would help Iran develop nuclear weapons. But an agreement obliging Tehran to repatriate spent nuclear fuel to Russia has eased those concerns.

Israel is establishing a national taskforce that will work to prevent cyber “terror attacks” by foreign countries on its strategic computer networks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Wednesday.

The national cybernetic taskforce was set up in order to protect Israel from possible harm to its defense systems and infrastructure networks.

	Benjamin Netanyahu attending the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Sunday, May 1, 2011.
	Photo by: AP

A special team of eight experts, headed by Maj. Gen. (res. ) Isaac Ben-Israel, submitted a line of recommendations for the establishment of the taskforce, which were adopted by Netanyahu.

“Israel is exposed to cyber attacks which can paralyze entire life systems on which the country runs,” Netanyahu warned. “Electricity, credit cards, water, transportation, traffic lights – every one of those is computerized and therefore susceptible to attack. There is an immediate need to form defenses in the face of such threats.”

“We are dealing with the security component,” the prime minister added. “I cannot go into detail about individual attacks, but not because there weren’t any. I promise that we will battle any future attacks – I have no doubt about it.”

The Prime Minister’s Office said Wednesday that the main responsibility of the taskforce will be to expand the state’s ability to defend vital infrastructure networks against cybernetic terrorist attacks perpetrated by foreign countries and terrorist elements.