20120524 9am

9AM Intro

Good morning, it's 9 o'clock. I'm Bill September

9AM TAIWAN NEWS ....

Environmental groups are calling on the government to shut down the island's No. 2 nuclear power plant -- citing concerns over its safety. Protesters gathered outside the Legislature yesterday ... demanding the government to review the operations of the 30-year-old plant - which is located in Wan-li, New Taipei City. According to environmental groups ... a routine safety check in March found that one of 120 bolts that anchor the plant's No. 1 reactor to its concrete base had broken and six others cracked. Tai-Power recently applied to resume operations of the No. 1 reactor after replacing some parts and carrying out other safety checks. ----------- H-T-C launched its first fourth-generation smartphone in Taiwan yesterday --- with local wireless broadband operators predicting that the high-speed handheld device will expand the pool of 4-G subscribers. The model is also H-T-C's first smartphone to use the advanced in-cell touch screen -- which can be made thinner and lighter than the more traditional on-cell screens. According to H-T-C .. the compant expects to push Taiwan's wireless broadband market toward an era of higher speed with the launch of its EVO Design. It will go on sale islandewide next month. -------- A Gaoxiong City government official has been detained on suspicion of corruption. According to the city's District Prosecutors Office .... the official - who is charge of an Environmental Protection Bureau auto repair plant - instructed employees to sell scrap metal parts, tires and recycled engine oil to private operators. Prosecutors say the official then pocketed the profits.

iran

Talks between Iran and six world powers snagged yesterday over dueling proposals concerning Tehran's nuclear program, a tug-of-war that pits international concerns about the Islamic Republic's potential to build atomic weapons against enforcing crippling sanctions on its people. The daylong back-and-forth in Baghdad focused largely on whether the current enrichment level of Iran's uranium production is a red line the U.S. and other powers will not permit for fear it could become warhead-grade material.

doc

A doctor who helped the CIA hunt down Osama bin Laden was convicted yesterday of conspiring against the state and sentenced to 33 years in prison, adding new strains to an already deeply troubled relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan. U.S. officials had urged Pakistan to release the doctor, who ran a vaccination program for the CIA to collect DNA and verify the al-Qaida leader's presence at the compound in the town of Abbottabad where U.S. commandos killed him in May 2011 in a unilateral raid. The lengthy sentence will be taken as another sign of Pakistan's defiance of American wishes. It could give more fuel to critics in the United States that Pakistan _ which has yet to arrest anyone for helping shelter bin Laden _ should no longer be treated as an ally.

hacks

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says U.S. cyber experts hacked al-Qaida propaganda online in Yemen, changing ads that bragged about killing Americans into ads that showed the death toll of al-Qaida attacks against Yemenis. Clinton said the cyberattack was launched by State Department specialists who patrol the web and social media to counter al-Qaida's attempts to recruit new followers. Clinton said the effort is part of a multipronged attack on terrorism that goes beyond raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden to include diplomats working alongside special operations forces to shore up local governments and economies and train local forces. It was a rare public admission of the ongoing covert cyber war against extremists.

facebook

The US Congress wants to know more about Facebook's IPO. The APs Jerry Bodlander explains..

scandal

U.S. Senators investigating the Secret Service prostitution scandal said today that dozens of reported episodes of misconduct by agents point to a culture of carousing in the agency and urged Director Mark Sullivan to get past his insistence that the romp in Cartagena was a one-time mistake. The disconnect between the senators and Sullivan reappeared again and again throughout the two-hour hearing, even as the Secret Service chief for the first time apologized for the incident that tarnished the elite presidential protection force. By the end, Sullivan's job appeared secure even as new details emerged that left little doubt, senators said, that a pattern of sexual misbehavior had taken root in the agency.

WEATHER AM .....

partly cloudy skies and a high of 32 islandwide. Current Temperatures .... Taipei -- 27 Taichung -- 26 Gaoxiong -- 28

9AM Outro

That's the ICRT News at 9. I'm _____