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Obama sends letters to Arab leaders urging confidence building measures toward Israel
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Press Release)--Following is the Middle East excerpt from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibb's press briefing on Monday:
Q Thank you, Robert. The President is sending Secretary Gates and George Mitchell to the Middle East. Can you confirm that he also wrote letters to a series of heads of state in the Arab countries, to push them for confidence-building measures towards Israel?
MR. GIBBS: Well, we have -- I think the President mentioned -- alluded to some of this in the speech that he made in Cairo. The President has called on all sides to take steps to create a climate for the resumption and the conclusion of negotiations towards a two-state solution. So I don't think this is anything extraordinary.
Q But he did send those letters to --
MR. GIBBS: The President has sent some letters, yes.
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Q Could you tell us what does the President hope to achieve by having four U.S. officials in the Middle East at the same time, including Secretary Gates?
MR. GIBBS: Well, right, we have Senator Mitchell, our envoy to the Middle East. We have General Jones, and we have Secretary Gates. Obviously, each of them has -- General Jones is representing an interagency group. Obviously, Secretary Gates is meeting with defense counterparts in Israel. And Senator Mitchell is meeting with a number of people, including, I believe, Prime Minister Netanyahu, in order to continue our push to see progress on aspects of long-term Middle East peace.
Q Could you confirm that --
MR. GIBBS: I don't know who the fourth one is. Say again?
Q Dennis Ross is --
MR. GIBBS: Dennis Ross?
Q Is on the way, as well, to --
MR. GIBBS: That I don't know the answer to. Is he? Oh, Dennis is with General Jones, yes.
U.S. Defense Secretary
Robert Gates visits Israel and Jordan
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Press Release)--Following are two Pentagon videos on U.S Defense Secretary Robert Gates' visit to the Middle East:
Clinton: No Administration
conflict on Israel-Iran
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Press Release)--Following are Middle East excerpts from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's appearance on Sunday on "Meet the Press" moderated by David Gregory:
QUESTION: Let me turn to another hotspot, and that is Iran. A big headline this week again with your words: “Clinton’s ‘Defense Umbrella’ Stirs Tensions.” The headline goes on: “Suggests U.S. Will Have to Protect Allies from Nuclear-Armed Iran.” You were in Bangkok on Wednesday, and this is what you said that got this started:
“We want Iran to calculate what I think is a fair assessment that if the United States extends a defense umbrella over the region, if we do even more to support the military capacity of those in the Gulf, it’s unlikely that Iran will be any stronger or safer, because they won’t be able to intimidate and dominate, as they apparently believe they can once they have a nuclear weapon.”
Did you mean to suggest that the U.S. is considering a nuclear umbrella that would say to nations in the Arab world that an attack on you, just like NATO or Japan, is an attack on the United States, and the United States would retaliate?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I think it’s clear that we’re trying to affect the internal calculus of the Iranian regime. The Iranian Government, which is facing its own challenges of legitimacy from its people, has to know that its pursuit of nuclear weapons, something that our country along with our allies stand strongly against – we believe as a matter of policy it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons, the G-8 came out with a very strong statement to that effect coming from Italy – so we are united in our continuing commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
What we want to do is to send a message to whoever is making these decisions that if you’re pursuing nuclear weapons for the purpose of intimidating, of projecting your power, we’re not going to let that happen. First, we’re going to do everything we can to prevent you from ever getting a nuclear weapon, but your pursuit is futile because we will never let Iran – nuclear-armed, not nuclear-armed – it is something that we view with great concern, and that’s why we’re doing everything we can to prevent that from ever happening.
QUESTION: All right, but let’s be specific. Are you talking about a nuclear umbrella?
SECRETARY CLINTON: We are not talking in specifics, David, because that would come later, if at all. My view is you hope for the best, you plan for the worst. Our hope is – that’s why we’re engaged in the President’s policy of engagement toward Iran – is that Iran will understand why it is in their interest to go along with the consensus of the international community, which very clearly says you have rights and responsibilities; you have a right to pursue the peaceful use of
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civil nuclear power, you do not have a right to obtain a nuclear weapon, you do not have the right to have the full enrichment and reprocessing cycle under your control. But there’s a lot that we can do with Iran if Iran accepts what is the international consensus.
QUESTION: One of the big challenges here is preventing Israel from acting first: If they feel there’s an existential threat, would they strike out at Iran to take out a nuclear program? And there’s been various positions taken within the Administration about that. Vice President Biden just a couple of weeks ago said this on ABC:
“We cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination, if they make a determination, that they are existentially threatened and their survival is threatened by another country.”
In the meantime, Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said:
“Well, I have been for some time concerned that any strike on Iran by Israel, I worry about it being very destabilizing, not just in and of itself, but the unintended consequences of a strike like that.”
Where do you fall on the spectrum of Administration views about the impact of a strike by Israel?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, let me say that I personally don’t see the contradiction here. The Vice President was stating a fact: Israel is a sovereign nation; any sovereign nation facing what it considers to be an existential threat, as successive Israeli governments have characterized the possibility of Iran having a nuclear weapon would mean to them, is not going to listen to other nations, I mean, if they believe that they are acting in the furtherance of their survival.
However, as Admiral Mullen said, we continue to believe that very intensive diplomacy, bringing the international community together, making clear to the Iranians what the costs of their pursuit of nuclear weapons might be, is the preferable route.
So clearly, we have a long, durable relationship with Israel. We believe strongly that Israel’s security must be protected. But we also believe that pursuing this path with Iran that we’re on right now, that frankly we’re bringing more and more people to see it our way – I thought the G-8 statement was quite remarkable in that sense – is the better approach for us to take. So we will continue to work with all of our allies, and most particularly Israel, to determine the best way forward to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state.
QUESTION: Defense Secretary Gates is on his way to Israel this week. Is the message to the Israelis: you’ve got to hang tight here?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, also General Jones will be there. We have a full panoply of a lot of our national security team that will be meeting with comparable Israeli officials. And our message is as it has been: The United States stands with you, the United States believes that Israel has a right to security. We believe, however, that this approach we’re taking holds out the promise of realizing our common objective. And we want to brief the Israelis, we want to listen to the Israelis, and we want to enlist the support of all of our allies and friends in moving forward on this policy.
QUESTION: Is Iran an illegitimate regime?
SECRETARY CLINTON: That’s really for the people of Iran to decide. I have been moved by the – just the cries for freedom and a clear appeal to the Iranian Government that this really significant country with a people that go back millennia, that has such a great culture and history, deserves better than what they’re getting.
QUESTION: But if the United States decides to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program, as has been the stated policy of the willingness to engage, are you not betraying this democratic movement trying to overthrow that regime?
SECRETARY CLINTON: I don’t think so, David, because you can go back in history, and not very long back, where we have negotiated with many governments who we did not believe represented the will of their people. Look at all the negotiations that went on with the Soviet Union. Look at the breakthrough and subsequent negotiations with communist China. That’s what you do in diplomacy. You don’t get to choose the people. That’s up to the internal dynamics within a society.
But clearly, we would hope better for the Iranian people. We would hope that there is more openness, that peaceful demonstrations are respected, that press freedom is respected. Yet we also know that whoever is in charge in Iran is going to be making decisions that will affect the security of the region and the world.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Press elease) The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts present hip-hop artists from Argentina, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, the Philippines, and Vietnam in a free performance on the Millennium Stage, Tuesday, July 28 at 6:00 PM. As participants in ECA’s Cultural Visitors Program with the Kennedy Center, these artists are concluding a cultural exchange program that included visits to New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.
The Cultural Visitors Program provides opportunities for young performing artists from diverse and traditionally underrepresented communities to participate in professional development training in the United States. The goal of this program is to energize the work of emerging international artists in their own countries by providing them with instructive and informative experiences in their discipline, exposing them to the creation and performance of world-class art, and giving them opportunities to develop relationships with U.S. arts professionals. These programs also provide exposure to American society, culture and values.
Secretary of State Clinton has identified cultural exchange programs as one of the “smart power” elements that are integral to the State Department’s public diplomacy mission to increase mutual understanding between Americans and people of other nations.
Schumer: Flash trading on stock market gives preferential treatment
WASHINGTON, DC (Press Release)—U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer (Democrat, New York) announced Monday that he has urged the head of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to ban the practice of so-called “flash trading” that gives advance knowledge of stock orders to certain traders. Schumer added that if the SEC fails to act, he would consider introducing legislation to ban the practice.
“This kind of unfair access seriously compromises the integrity of our markets and creates a two-tiered system where a privileged group of insiders receives preferential treatment, depriving others of a fair price for their transactions. If allowed to continue, these practices will undermine the confidence of ordinary investors, and drive them away from our capital markets,” Schumer wrote in a letter Friday to SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro.
Schumer’s concerns regard special programs offered by exchanges such as NASDAQ and BATS, as well as an electronic trading platform called DirectEdge. Each of these marketplaces currently allow sophisticated high-frequency traders to gain access to trading information before it is sent out widely to other traders. For a fee, the exchange will “flash” information about buy and sell orders for just a few fractions of a second before the information is made publicly available. These traders, using super-fast computers, can then act on that early information to trade ahead of the pending orders. The practice can influence the pricing of stocks, experts say.
“Flash trading” is a type of high-frequency trading, a technique that has gained attention recently for contributing to the spike in trading volume and, according to critics, increased volatility on U.S. exchanges. According to one industry estimate, high frequency trading accounted for $21 billion in profits in 2008.
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