Shorter Question Everything

Palestine
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will accept the recommendation of independent election experts on Thursday to postpone the vote he had scheduled for January, senior officials said. The Central Election Commission said it had advised Abbas to put off the election since the rival Hamas Islamist group ruling some 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had warned it would not allow them to vote. “We met today and we decided to tell the president, who called these elections, that we cannot have elections at the time he scheduled them,” said commission head Hanna Naser.

Afghanistan
The U.S. envoy in Afghanistan, a former Army general who once commanded troops in the country, has objected strongly to emerging plans to send tens of thousands of additional forces to the country, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry resigned his Army commission to take the job as U.S. ambassador in Kabul earlier this year, and his is an influential voice among those advising President Barack Obama on Afghanistan. Eikenberry sent multiple classified cables to Washington over the past week that question the wisdom of adding forces when the Afghan political situation is unstable and uncertain, said an official familiar with the cables. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations and the classified documents.

*[D]oesn’t it seem odd to hear hawks say that health reform is fiscally irresponsible, while in the next breath they cheer a larger deployment of troops in Afghanistan?

Koreas
North Korea on Thursday accused South Korea’s military of staging a naval clash this week to raise tensions on the peninsula, and said it would pay dearly for the provocation.

Russia
President Dmitry Medvedev called on Russia on Thursday to refocus its economy away from Soviet-era energy and heavy industry towards information technology, telecommunications and space.

Colombia and Venezuela
Colombia has reported Venezuela to the United Nations Security Council for what it describes as the country’s “war threats” against the Andean nation. Caracas and Bogota have stepped up their rhetoric against each other following the latter’s move to sign a defense accord with the US that would give Washington access to military bases in Colombia. Colombia’s UN ambassador, Claudia Blum, submitted a “diplomatic note regarding the threats by Venezuela of use of force against Colombia,” the foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday, according to AFP.

Karadzic
Legal advisors to Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic have gone on strike over unpaid fees; as Karadzic insists on representing himself at the Tribunal. Court papers filed by Karadzic on Wednesday claim his legal team is owed some 70,000 euros (100,000 dollars) in unpaid bills. While 64-year-old Karadzic insists on representing himself at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), the genocide and war crimes suspect has eight legal advisors helping him to prepare his defense.

Swine Flu
*Swine flu has sickened about 22 million Americans since April and killed nearly 4,000, including 540 children, say startling federal estimates released Thursday.

*Canada’s top medical official defended the national H1N1 vaccination campaign on Thursday, and said the costs of doing nothing would be far higher than the money spent immunizing millions of people. The Globe and Mail newspaper, citing medical data from various levels of government, said Canada has so far spent $1.5 billion on the campaign — more than twice as much as officials initially estimated. But Dr. David Butler-Jones, Canada’s chief public health officer, said millions of people could become sick and thousands die if there was no vaccination program. So far around 20 percent of Canada’s 34 million population have been immunized, and there is no sign the virus has peaked, he said.

Canada
So many young Canadians want to become trigger pullers in Afghanistan that the army is not accepting any new infantry recruits at the moment, according to the army’s top general. “I am 1,600 infantrymen over my establishment,” Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie said Thursday, adding that the high numbers of recruits who want to “serve at the tip of the spear . . . completely refuted” any notion that there were problems getting people to serve in a wartime army.

Russia and US
Ongoing arms cuts talks between Russia and the U.S. have seen differences on inspection and verification procedures, the chief of the General Staff said on Thursday. Moscow and Washington are negotiating a replacement for the current Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), the basis for Russian-U.S. strategic nuclear disarmament, which expires on December 5. The current round of talks near Geneva began on Monday. “There are a number of problems pertaining to inspections, verification, and reporting figures,” Army Gen. Nikolai Makarov said. Makarov also said Washington was seeking to keep a point from the original treaty on the U.S. monitoring of Russia’s mobile ground-based missiles. He said monitoring had been provided by a U.S. team based in the Russian city of Votkinsk, home to a missile manufacturing plant. “We do not have such missions in the United States, so it is quite natural that this [Votkinsk] mission will be removed, and it will leave its post on December 5,” he said. “We want the treaty to ensure both the security of the Russian Federation and of the United States on equal levels.”

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