Honda expands airbag recall

Japanese carmaker Honda has said it is expanding a global recall of cars over concerns of faulty airbags that have been linked to at least one fatality and several injuries.

The recall by Japan's second largest carmaker comes as Honda rival Toyota battles to contain the fallout from a series of safety recalls affecting more than 8 million vehicles.

The latest expansion of Honda's airbag recall includes 378,000 cars in the US and 41,000 in Canada announced on Tuesday.

On Wednesday the company added another 17,000 cars in Japan, Australia and elsewhere in Asia, taking the number of affected cars to more than 430,000.

In a statement the carmaker said the potentially defective air bag inflators could rupture, "resulting in metal fragments passing through the airbag cushion material and possibly causing injury or fatality to vehicle occupants".

Fatality

The company said it had been alerted to 12 incidents involving the defect, including one fatality, but added that there had been no new reports since last year.

The expanded recall covers models made in 2001 and 2002 of the Honda Accord, Civic, TL, CR-V, Odyssey, Pilot and CL in North America and the Inspire, Saber and Lagreat models sold in Japan.

"We have concluded that we cannot be completely certain that the driver's airbag inflator in the vehicles being added to the recall at this time will perform as designed," Honda said.

The company has said it will replace the driver's side airbag inflator on the cars.

Honda's latest recall is the third the company has made over the airbag problem since it first went public on the matter in November 2008.

The company's announcement comes at a time of increased attention on vehicle recalls - particularly those affecting Japanese carmakers.

On Tuesday, Toyota said it would recall more than 440,000 of the 2010 model of its flagship Prius and other hybrid cars due to a braking glitch.

Greek civil servants go on strike

Thousands of Greek civil servants have marched through Athens as they went on a 24-hour strike in protest against the government's plans to freeze wages, gather more taxes and reform pensions.

The action on Wednesday left flights grounded and many schools and government offices closed, while public hospitals were expected to only take emergency cases.

Protests were said to be mostly peaceful apart from in one incident, where police fired tear gas at dozens of people who tried to break a cordon in the capital city.

The strike comes as the government moves to grapple with a debt crisis that has sent shock waves through the eurozone.

Greece is suffering from a budget deficit that is four times the European Union limit.

Runaway deficit

The socialist government has announced fresh measures to further cut the public salary bill and hike taxes, defying unions with plans to save the state $1.1bn this year.

"Today, the workers give their reply," protesters said over loudspeakers in the capital's central Syntagma Square, where hundreds of pensioners and striking workers began gathering on Wednesday for the demonstrations planned later in the morning.

"They had promised the rich would pay but instead they take the money from the poor," Ilias Iliopoulos, general secretary of the public sector umbrella union ADEDY, said.

"This is the policy we are fighting, not the effort to get out of the crisis."

Unions oppose plans to freeze public salaries, cut the salary supplements many Greeks get on top of their basic pay, and replace only one in five people leaving the civil service.

Al Jazeera's Barnaby Phillips, reporting from Athens, said there was a difference of opinion in Greece over who is responsible for the crisis.

"Many of the workers going on strike today will tell you that their salaries are very, very small, that they can't afford further cuts and that they are not the ones who got Greece into this mess.

"The government's analysis is different. It says that the public sector in Greece is bloated, inefficient ... that it is dragging this country down and drastic measures need to be taken."

Continental concerns

The European Commission has voiced concern that Greece's fiscal crisis could affect other parts of the 16-nation eurozone and EU leaders were due to discuss the issue during a summit in Brussels on Thursday.

European governments have agreed in principle to support Greece and are considering various options, including bilateral aid, a senior German coalition source said on Tuesday.

Phillips said that if the EU decided not to help Greece, the other option would be the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

"The IMF has helped other eastern European countries like Latvia and Hungary over the last year but it hasn't had to step into the eurozone itself," he said.

If it did, that would be a significant humiliation for Greece and for Europe."

A report in the Financial Times Deutschland on Wednesday suggested that Germany was preparing an aid plan for Greece.

The newspaper said Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German finance minister, was working on both a bilateral basis and at the European level on putting together a package to help Athens.

An unnamed government official quoted by the Financial Times said it was more self-interest than altruism that was driving Berlin.

"We are thinking about what we should do if the crisis spills from Greece into other euro countries," the official was quoted as saying.

"So it's more about finding firewalls, containing the problem, than principally about helping the Greeks."

Concerns over the Greek debt and other weak European economies made the euro reach an eight-month low against the US dollar last week.

It is believed that other eurozone nations may prefer to help Athens rather than have it go to IMF, which could further shatter confidence in the euro.

Nobel winner: Stop Iran catastrophe

Shirin Ebadi, Iran's Nobel peace laureate, has said her country faces a catastrophe that could undermine security in the whole region if government repression of the people is not stopped.

"A recurrence of the recent months' events, the continuation of the repressive policies and the killing of defenceless people could bring about a catastrophe that may undermine peace and security in Iran, if not in the entire region," Ebadi said in an open letter to the United Nations on Wednesday.

The office of Navi Pillay, the high commissioner for human rights, confirmed she had received the letter, which comes as the 47-member council prepares to hold a three-hour review of Iran's human rights policies on February 15.

Saying the patience and tolerance of Iranians was not limitless, Ebadi urged action to persuade the government to change course, calling on the council to appoint a special investigator for Iran who could help end mounting repression.

The letter comes on the eve of the 31st anniversary of Iran's Islamic revolution.

Opposition activists have called for anti-government protests on Thursday but the authorities have pledged to crack down hard if they take place.

Earlier the government announced the arrest of several people it said were preparing to disrupt official rallies.

Widespread unrest erupted in the wake of the disputed presidential vote in June last year, amid allegations that the election, resulting in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad winning a second term, was rigged.

US imposes new sanctions on Iran

The US government has imposed fresh sanctions on Iran as Tehran informed nuclear inspectors that it would begin higher-grade uranium enrichment "within a few days".

The US treasury department said on Wednesday that it was freezing the assets in US jurisdictions of Rostam Qasemi, a Revolutionary Guard general, and four subsidiaries of a previously penalised construction company that he runs.

The sanctions expand existing US penalties against elements of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which Western intelligence officials believe is spearheading Iran's nuclear programme.

Qasemi commands the Guard Corps' Khatam al-­Anbiya Construction Headquarters, which the US treasury has described as its engineering arm, involved in the construction of streets, tunnels, waterworks, agricultural projects and pipelines.

Its profits "are available to support the full range of the IRGC's illicit activities, including WMD proliferation and support for terrorism", the department said.

Khatam al-­Anbiya was first hit with US sanctions by the administration of George Bush, the former president, in 2007.

'Dangerous activities'

Wednesday's penalties apply to Qasemi and Khatam al-Anbiya subsidiaries, the Fater Engineering Institute, the Imensazen Consultant Engineers Institute, the Makin Institute and the Rahab Institute.

Stuart Levey, the US treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said: "Today's action exposing Khatam al-Anbiya subsidiaries will help firms worldwide avoid business that ultimately benefits the IRGC and its dangerous activities."

The announcement comes as Washington tries to rally international support against Tehran's nuclear programme, seeking fresh sanctionsby the UN Security Council, which has already hit Iran with three sets of sanctions.

Speaking at a White House press briefing on Tuesday, Barack Obama, the US president, said the international community was pursuing "a significant regime of sanctions" against what Washington called Iran's intransigence.

Obama's comments came after Tehran said on Tuesday that it had begun the process of enriching uranium at higher levels, fuelling fears that the process could eventually be used to produce nuclear weapons.

It had been reported in Iranian state media that the process of refining uranium to 20 per cent purity had begun earlier in the week, but Tehran told nuclear inspectors on Wednesday that it had only been making preparations for the higher enrichment.

"We were told that it was expected the facility would begin to produce up to 20 per cent [uranium] within a few days," an internal memo by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said.

'Modest' enrichment

The IAEA memo indicated that, for now at least, the Iranian operation was modest in scale.

The memo from Yukiya Amano, the IAEA chief, said Iran had recalibrated 164 centrifuges, out of its 8,000 enrichment machines, for higher-scale enrichment at its Natanz plant.

He said Iran notified the IAEA of the plan on Monday and the IAEA quickly asked Iran not to launch it before inspectors could adjust their monitoring procedures, as well as get clarification on the expected duration of the new programme and technical details.

"On Wednesday, when agency inspectors arrived at the pilot plant, they were informed that Iran had begun to feed the low-enriched uranium into one cascade the previous evening for [test] purposes," the memo said.

A cascade is 164 centrifuges hooked up in series that spin and respin uranium gas to the required enrichment level.

The document, relying on onsite reports from IAEA inspectors, also cited Iranian experts at the enrichment site at Natanz as saying that only about 10kg of low enriched uranium out of 1.8 tonnes, had been fed into the cascade for further enrichment.

A nuclear bomb requires uranium of about 90 per cent purity, but nuclear experts say getting to 20 per cent is a big step because low-level enrichment is the most time-consuming and difficult stage of the process.