Iraqi official: Biden affirms responsible pullout

January 14, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

BAGHDAD — Vice President-elect Joe Biden, above left, assured Iraq’s prime minister Tuesday that the incoming administration won’t withdraw U.S. troops in a way that threatens stability, an Iraqi spokesman said.

Biden later traveled to one of the major threats to that stability — the northern city of Kirkuk. He urged rival Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen to make concessions to resolve peacefully their competing claims to the oil-rich city.

U.S. officials issued no statement about Biden’s meeting with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which happened on the second and final day of his visit to Iraq.

Panel: Technology alone can’t protect kids online

NEW YORK — A task force charged with assessing technologies for protecting children from unwanted contact online has concluded that no single approach is foolproof and that parental oversight is vital.

The Harvard-led panel, in a report obtained by The Associated Press and scheduled for release today, dismissed prospects for age-verification technologies, the approach favored by many law-enforcement officials who had pushed for the creation of the task force.

The yearlong Internet Safety Technical Task Force also played down fears of Internet sexual predators who target children on social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. While citing other dangers such as online bullying, the panel said cases of predators typically involved youths well aware they were meeting an adult for sexual activities.

Sexually spread diseases on the rise, officials say

ATLANTA — Sexually spread diseases — for years on the decline — are on the rise, with reported chlamydia cases setting a record, government health officials said Tuesday.

The increase in chlamydia, a sometimes symptomless infection that can lead to infertility in women, is likely because of better screening, experts said. In 2007, there were 1.1 million cases, the most ever reported, said officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At least 15,000 women become infertile each year because of untreated chlamydia and gonorrhea infections, said Dr. John M. Douglas Jr., director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention.

Senator: Missing American is in secret Iranian prison

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A U.S. senator revealed Tuesday that he believes a former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran nearly two years ago is being held in a secret prison there.

Sen. Bill Nelson shed new light on the disappearance of Robert Levinson during a confirmation hearing for Hillary Rodham Clinton in Washington. Levinson, of Coral Springs, Fla., was last seen on Iran’s Kish island in March 2007 where he had gone to seek information for a client of his security firm.

Nelson, D-Fla., said the Iranian government has rebuffed numerous requests for information on Levinson’s whereabouts.

“The door has been closed at every turn,” Nelson said. “We think he is being held by the government of Iran in a secret prison.”

Russia insists it is blameless in oil crisis

MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin led European experts into the high-tech control room of Russia’s energy giant Gazprom on Tuesday to show that Moscow is blameless in a dispute with Ukraine that has slashed gas shipments to Europe.

But it wasn’t clear what the room’s banks of computers and schematic map of pipelines proved.

There were hopes early Tuesday that an agreement to bring in monitors would end the weeklong cutoff that has plunged parts of Europe into a new kind of cold war.

Instead, those hopes ran up against a chorus of fresh recriminations between Moscow and Kiev.

Associated Press