Vienna

Climate negotiators from more than 150 nations assembled in Vienna on Monday with calls for a global deal beyond 2012 to replace the United Nations’s Kyoto Protocol and include outsiders such as the United States and China. ”Climate change is already a harsh reality, a massive obstacle to development,” Austrian Environment Minister Josef Proell said.

Iran has slowed the installation of centrifuge machines that enrich uranium for its controversial nuclear programme, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Monday. Western powers have condemned Tehran’s expansion of enrichment work in defiance of United Nations demands.

North Korea has agreed to wide-ranging United Nations measures to verify a shutdown of its atom-bomb programme, nuclear inspectors said on Tuesday, but doubts arose about when disarmament would begin. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, said he would recommend its governing board ratify a new inspector mission.

South Africa proposed a compromise on Friday to prevent a global meeting on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty from collapsing over Iranian objections to the agenda, and Tehran said it would consider the idea.The proposal resembled a gesture by Japan made earlier in the day but was dismissed by Iran as not good enough.

With the precision of a surgeon, Andreas Rupp carefully wraps sensor strips around a 21-tonne bell in Vienna’s famous St Stephen’s Cathedral. Europe’s second-largest bell, nicknamed ”Pummerin”, is one of several famous bells across the continent being checked to determine their life spans, and unlock the secret of the optimum chime.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was suffering a crisis of confidence as member states met to debate how to prevent the pact from falling apart. The NPT binds members without nuclear bombs not to acquire them via diversions of peaceful nuclear energy know-how.

Iran vowed on Wednesday to press on with its nuclear-fuel programme, ignoring a United Nations deadline to freeze uranium enrichment or face broader sanctions, but offered to guarantee it would not try to develop atomic weapons. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remained defiant as a 60-day grace period Iran had been given was expiring.

Most Western and developing nations in the United Nations nuclear watchdog tentatively agreed on Wednesday to shelve Iran’s request for aid to a nuclear project over fears it could yield bomb-grade plutonium, diplomats said. But the deal left open the possibility of revisiting Iran’s case later.