Vienna Philharmonic says Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa has canceled his fall engagements with the renowned orchestra in October and November to recover from cancer

VIENNA The Vienna Philharmonic says Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa has canceled his fall engagements with the renowned orchestra in October and November to recover from cancer.Ozawa, an icon in the classical music world, announced in January that he has esophageal cancer and called off all his concerts between January and June to receive treatment.Philharmonic spokeswoman Yvonne Katzenberger said Friday that Ozawa is following his doctors’ recommendations regarding the fall engagements. She said the concerts in question – slated for Vienna, the Vatican, China and Japan – will take place with another conductor.

Philharmonic Chairman Clemens Hellsberg wished Ozawa well and says the orchestra respects and supports his decision.In Tokyo, the Kyodo news agency reported that Ozawa also has canceled an opera engagement in Japan in August. However, it said he will serve as conductor for the Saito Kinen Orchestra as planned for four days in early September.The Vienna Philharmonic says Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa has canceled his fall engagements with the renowned orchestra in October and November to recover from cancer.Ozawa, an icon in the classical music world, announced in January that he has esophageal cancer and called off all his concerts between January and June to receive treatment.

Philharmonic spokeswoman Yvonne Katzenberger said Friday that Ozawa is following his doctors’ recommendations regarding the fall engagements. She said the concerts in question – slated for Vienna, the Vatican, China and Japan – will take place with another conductor.Philharmonic Chairman Clemens Hellsberg wished Ozawa well and says the orchestra respects and supports his decision.

In Tokyo, the Kyodo news agency reported that Ozawa also has canceled an opera engagement in Japan in August. However, it said he will serve as conductor for the Saito Kinen Orchestra as planned for four days in early September.(AP)

OPEC price hawks like Iran and Venezuela are happy with present prices near $80 a barrel

VIENNA With U.S. demand for oil lackluster, even traditional OPEC price hawks like Iran and Venezuela are happy with present prices near $80 a barrel as they head into Tuesday’s meeting of the 12-nation organization.These two countries traditionally are the greatest advocates of tight OPEC supply. But ahead of their meeting there is informal unanimity among OPEC oil ministers that – with the world’s economic recovery feeble at best and crude prices at preferred levels – it’s best not to rock the boat.

That means the ministers will likely agree to maintain OPEC’s formal production target, now at 26 million barrels a day – a benchmark set over one year ago.OPEC has left its members’ production quotas unchanged since December 2008, when it announced the last of a series of cuts aimed at bringing their output down by 4.2 million barrels per day. The cuts helped engineer a rebound in crude prices, which had collapsed to the low $30s from a mid-2008 high of almost $150 per barrel.

Since the oil ministers last met three months ago, prices mostly have hovered between $70 and $80 a barrel – a range that most OPEC nations have factored into their national budgets this year. That has kept even hardliners Iran and Venezuela on board with other OPEC members.”OPEC should not take any decision to change production,” Iranian oil minister Masoud Mirkazemi told reporters in Tehran on Monday, echoing comments voiced by Rafael Ramirez, his Venezuean counterpart.Still, there will be behind-the-scenes pressure on some members to produce less by honoring their allotted targets.

At close to 27 million barrels a day, OPEC now is producing a daily 600,000 barrels above its official target – a result of cheating by individual nations on their quotas. While OPEC does not reveal which nations are overproducing, the Paris-based International Energy Agency put overall quota compliance within OPEC at only 58 percent in January.World oil demand is expected to rise this year due to surging economic activity in Asian countries, especially China. The IEA, which advises oil-consuming countries, predicts that the world’s appetite for crude will average 86.6 million barrels a day this year, or 1.6 million barrels a day more than 2009’s 86.5 million barrels.Still, oil markets remain concerned about shaky demand in the U.S. Crude consumption there and in other top industrialized nations is expected to contract in 2010 for the fifth consecutive year.(AP)

Christmas rock festival at BETHLEHEM

Christmas rock festival

BETHLEHEM, West Bank  O Come All Ye Faithful to Bethlehem’s first Christmas rock festival.A young musician who grew up near Jesus’ traditional birthplace feels the old-fashioned way of marking the holiday – hanging around Manger Square and listening to carols – is a little dull.So Emmanuel Fleckenstein has organized a three-day battle of the bands that he hopes will attract bigger crowds to Bethlehem. City elders, worried about putting off traditional pilgrims, are keeping the wailing electric guitars and pounding drums at a safe distance from the Church of the Nativity.

“We prefer that in Manger Square, we have the traditional music, the traditional choirs, the traditional Christmas carols,” said Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh.The festival’s nine foreign and four local acts are mostly performing on an outdoor stage at Bethlehem University. Here, said Fleckenstein, guitar player for the Austrian pop rock band Cardiac Move, “we can get as loud as we want.”

On Christmas Eve, though, Fleckenstein’s four-man band gets to play in the prime venue, Manger Square, and, in a nod to the occasion, will end its 45-minute set with a rendition of “Silent Night.”

The festival, modest in scale, is a sign of Bethlehem’s gradual revival as a tourist attraction, after gloomy years when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict all but shut down the city.In 2009, some 2 million tourists visited the Palestinian territories, or four times the 2007 figure, and 80 percent came to Bethlehem, said the Palestinian tourism minister, Khuloud Deibes. More Bethlehem hotels are being built, increasing the number of rooms from 2,000 to 3,000 by next year, she said.

The tourism boomlet is part of efforts by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to spur economic growth in the West Bank and restore a sense of normality, even as efforts to restart peace talks remain deadlocked.

In marketing Bethlehem, city officials seek to assure potential visitors that they are safe while not glossing over the hardships of life under Israeli military rule.

Bethlehem, a town of 32,000 just south of Jerusalem, is ringed on three sides by Israel’s West Bank separation barrier, portrayed by Israel as a shield against suicide bombers and by Palestinians as a land grab.Israel has eased some movement restrictions in the West Bank and pledged to facilitate the influx of pilgrims to Bethlehem, but the towering barrier continues to disrupt the lives of many in the holy city.

“We suffer from this wall of separation … but the tourists, they are safe, they are welcome every minute and every day in this city,” said Batarseh, who recently visited Indonesia and Bethlehem’s sister city, Joplin, Missouri, to drum up business.

Some 15,000 visitors are expected on Christmas Eve, about the same as last year, said Tony Morcos, a city official. Regardless of the turnout, many souvenir shops and local artisans now sell many of their wares through the Internet, rather than to pilgrims.

However, the global economic crisis put a damper on the demand for olive wood nativity scenes and Christmas ornaments, said Amani Juha of the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, which helps market Bethlehem’s specialties through a network of churches in the United States.

Fleckenstein, the fledgling music impresario, said it’s time for new ideas.

The son of a Palestinian mother and German father, he grew up in Beit Jalla, near Bethlehem. He said he had the inspiration for the rock festival after last year’s family visit to Manger Square.

Traditionally, choirs sing Christmas carols in the square, as pilgrims wait for the Midnight Mass to begin in the nearby Church of the Nativity, built over the grotto where tradition says Jesus was born.

“It was really sad here, there was not much to do,” Fleckenstein said of last year’s festivities.

With the help of several Roman Catholic Church officials in Vienna, where he now lives, he brought the bands together. His high school friend from Bethlehem, Elias Halabi, persuaded local officials to go along.

The pair booked 13 groups and performers, including a Palestinian hip hop band, a dance troupe, a guitar-playing priest from the U.S. and a garage band from Germany.

On Monday evening, Fleckenstein’s group – in addition to him a drummer, vocalist and bass guitar player – rehearsed on the stage set up in the outdoor basketball court of Bethlehem University.

On Tuesday evening, the first day of performances, turnout was relatively light, with only about 300 people showing up. But the small crowd was enthusiastic.

“It’s the first time that I hear rock music in Bethlehem,” said Fida Ghareeb, 28, a project coordinator at the university. “It’s live, it’s Christmas and we should enjoy this time of the year.”

Iran making new model centrifuges named IR3 and IR4

new model centrifuges

TEHRAN, Iran’s nuclear chief said Friday the country has started making more efficient centrifuge models that it plans to put in use by early 2011 – a statement that underscores Tehran’s defiance and adds to international concerns over its nuclear ambitions.The official, Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, said Iranian scientists are still testing the more advanced models before they will become operational at the country’s enrichment facilities.Tehran has been saying since April that it is building more advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium with higher efficiency and precision, but Salehi’s remarks were the first indication of a timeline when the new models could become operational.

The new centrifuge models will be able to enrich uranium much faster than the old ones – which would add to growing concerns in the West because they would allow Tehran to accelerate the pace of its program. That would mean Iran could amass more material in a shorter space of time that could be turned into the fissile core of missiles, should Tehran choose to do so.

Iran’s uranium enrichment is a major concern to the international community, worried that the program masks efforts to make a nuclear weapon. Tehran insists its enrichment work is peaceful and only meant to generate electricity, not make an atomic bomb.

Iran has threatened to expand its enrichment program tenfold, even while rejecting a plan brokered by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to supply fuel for Iran’s research reactor if Tehran exports most of its enriched stockpile. The U.N. plan would leave Iran – at least temporarily – without enough uranium to produce a bomb.

Centrifuges are machines used to enrich uranium – a technology that can produce fuel for power plants or materials for a nuclear weapon. Uranium enriched to low level is used to produce fuel but further enrichment makes it suitable for use in building nuclear arms.

“We are currently producing new generation of centrifuges named IR3 and IR4,” Salehi told the semiofficial Fars news agency. “We hope to use them by early 2011 after resolving problems and defects.”He did not elaborate on the technical details or the difference between various centrifuge types.However, Salehi added: “We are not in a rush to enter the industrial-scale production stage.”

The new centrifuges would likely replace the decades-old P-1 centrifuges, once acquired on the black market and in use at Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, central Iran.

Iran has said the new centrifuges would also be installed at Iran’s recently revealed secret uranium enrichment facility. The plant is still under construction at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom.

Salehi said that more than 6,000 centrifuges are currently enriching uranium – 2,000 more than the figure mentioned in a November report by the U.N. watchdog, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.

The IAEA has reported that it is watching Iran’s efforts to improve its centrifuges.Iran says it will install more than 50,000 centrifuges at Natanz, but currently they have installed fewer than 9,000, so there could easily be room for more advanced models in the future, a Vienna nuclear expert said. The expert spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Iranian officials have claimed that most parts for the new centrifuges are made domestically and others have been imported – a sign that Iran was able to get around U.N. sanctions imposed on the country for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment.Iran’s defiance has not wavered amid recent signals of possible more U.N. sanctions over its enrichment. Salehi said Friday such new sanctions won’t stop Iran from developing its nuclear program.

“We don’t welcome new (U.N. Security Council) resolutions,” he told ISNA, another semiofficial news agency. “But resolutions won’t stop us in any field, including the nuclear.”

the IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei criticized Iran for hiding its efforts to build a uranium

The members of the UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, is expected to vote Friday on a draft condemning Iran’s nuclear activities, while the Western countries suspect the country is developing nuclear weapons.The diplomats from the United States, England, France, Germany, Russia and China proposed that the draft UN resolution demanding that Iran halt uranium processing building where previously secret and asks Iran confirm that Iran has no other hidden nuclear activities.The IAEA board of commissioners consisting of 35 countries, which met in Vienna on Thursday, is expected to continue to debate and vote on the draft last Friday. If agreed, the draft will be the first act of the IAEA on Iran since 2006.Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, warned on Thursday that Iran would not cooperate with the IAEA if the resolution is approved.In a meeting Thursday, the IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei criticized Iran for hiding its efforts to build a uranium processing near the city of Qom to early September. ElBaradei also said his investigation of allegations that Iran has tried to make nuclear weapons had reached a dead end street, because Tehran does not want to cooperate.