I.A.E.A. Director General to Visit Tehran

[alp227]

Source: NYT

The United Nations nuclear monitoring agency said on Friday that its leader would travel to Iran on Sunday for a meeting with the country’s top nuclear negotiator. The unexpected development signaled that both sides had stepped up both the urgency of resolving their dispute and the seniority of the officials doing the negotiating.

The nuclear monitor, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been locked in a protracted dispute with Iran over access to an Iranian military base where the agency’s nuclear inspectors suspect that experiments on nuclear weapons triggers have been performed. Iran has rejected the agency’s repeated requests for unrestricted access to the site, called Parchin.

The access issue has broader implications for Iran’s negotiations with six major powers — the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany — over its entire uranium enrichment program, which are scheduled to take place next Wednesday in Baghdad. The six nations have urged Iran to allow the nuclear inspectors access to Parchin as a sign that it is sincere in promising that Iranian nuclear activities are for peaceful ends.

I.A.E.A. officials and their Iranian counterparts have been negotiating at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna, where talks were set to resume on Monday. But the announcement by the agency on Friday changed the venue to Tehran, and said that the director general, Yukiya Amano, would lead the delegation.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/world/middleeast/iaea-director-general-to-visit-tehran.html

[grahampuba]

1. Lunch?

Why, thats a strange place to grab lunch on their way to Japan to deal with a looming and imminent threat to thousands if not millions of people.