GOP contenders spar over Pakistan, foreign aid at debate: What We're Reading Now
Nov 14, 2011

IRAN
Obama vows new bid to thwart Iran nuclear effort
AP - November 13, 2011
President Barack Obama says sanctions on Iran are having "enormous bite," but he still wants to work with Russia and China to find more ways of putting pressure on Tehran to halt its nuclear program.

Politics stokes fears over Iran nuclear plans
Roula Khalaf, Financial Times - November 14, 2011
In January this year, Hillary Clinton sounded an unusually relaxed note about Iran’s nuclear programme. “The sanctions are working,” the US secretary of state declared, adding that the US authorities’ best estimate was that the programme had been “slowed down”.

Behind Iran's Nuclear Quest: An Ancient Civilization's Pride and Insecurity
Karl Vick, Time (Blog)- November 13, 2011
Every nation has its pride, but the feeling runs especially deep in Iran. There, the sense of nationhood extends back 2,500 years, to the time of Darius and Xerxes and other names that Americans might possibly have heard of somewhere — maybe in the action movie 300 — but which anchor modern Iranians to a stream of history that predates every Abrahamic religion, including Islam, and carries real implications for the nuclear issue. For outsiders, it makes the issue a lot tougher.

McManus: Facing a nuclear Iran
Doyle MacManus, LA Times (Op-Ed) - November 13, 2011
Republicans are critical of Obama's approach, but their own policies aren't that different.

What gives: Japan lobbying for more nuclear weapons?
Nov 25, 2009

The former government in Japan, ousted from power in recent elections, was playing a curious double game.

It professed support for nuclear disarmament while lobbying for keeping these weapons.

Read the article below:

Japan lobbied for robust nuclear umbrella before power shift

TOKYO, Nov. 23 KYODO News - By Masakatsu Ota

    Before the shift in political power in Japan in September, the Japanese government aggressively lobbied a U.S. congressional nuclear taskforce to maintain the credibility of the U.S. ''nuclear umbrella'' as a deterrence against possible attacks from China, North Korea and other nations, according to sources familiar with the matter Monday.

    The lobbying by the only country to have suffered atomic bombings for robust nuclear deterrence capabilities came just before U.S. President Barack Obama pledged that his country would pursue the ''peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.''