LONDON (Reuters) – Two German airports halted flights on Wednesday as ash from an Icelandic volcano drifted across northern Europe, with parts of Scandinavia also facing a risk of disruption.

The Grimsvotn volcano forced the cancellation of some 500 European flights on Tuesday, with Scotland especially hard hit.

Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based agency responsible for some of the world’s busiest air corridors, said the ash cloud may affect parts of Denmark, southern Norway and southwest Sweden on Wednesday.

In northern Germany, Hamburg and Bremen airports canceled takeoffs and landings, and German authorities said Berlin terminals could also face closure from 1000 GMT.

“Currently there is no forecast when the restriction will be lifted,” Hamburg airport said on its website. German airline Lufthansa advised passengers that tickets for canceled flights within Germany could be exchanged for rail vouchers.

The ash has caused far fewer problems than last year, when more than 10 million people were hit by a six-day European airspace shutdown after another Icelandic volcano erupted. Airlines put their revenue loss then at $1.7 billion.

But the latest episode has exposed disarray among the people who decide on aviation safety as they try to apply new rules to avoid another mass shutdown. Budget airline Ryanair was again vocal in its criticism on Tuesday, and airline association IATA said more coordination was needed.

LONDON (Reuters) – Ash from an Icelandic volcano forced the cancellation of dozens of flights to and from Scotland Tuesday but Ireland’s Ryanair said it would protest against “unnecessary” restrictions.

Worries about the effect of the ash cloud pushed forward U.S. President Barack Obama’s planned departure from Ireland and he arrived Monday night in Britain to begin a state visit.

Last year, ash from another Icelandic volcano caused 100,000 flights to be canceled, stranding 10 million passengers and costing the industry an estimated $1.7 billion in lost revenue.

Iceland’s President Olafur Grimsson told CNN the latest eruption was on a “monumental” scale but would not wreak the same havoc on aviation.

“In terms of Europe, this is not going to be anywhere like what happened last year. It’s a different eruption and I think Europe is also better prepared to deal with it,” he said.

But airline shares fell between 3 to 5 percent Monday as investors worried about the costs of canceled flights.

Norway’s airport operator said the ash cloud would cause some flight restrictions on its west coast Tuesday and Denmark said a small area of its airspace would be closed.

LONDON, March 9 (Reuters) – The United Nations Ethics Committee has upheld complaints by a former employee of the U.N. Development Programme who said he suffered retaliation from the UNDP for alleging that its Somalia programme was corrupt. The man, Ismail Ahmed, was transferred to another office without proper visa support, and the UNDP Somalia office later told a potential employer not to hire him because of his "silly non-proven accusations", Ethics Committee Chairman Robert Benson found in a report seen by Reuters. A new UN Security Council report says that as much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted to a network of corrupt contractors, radical Islamist militants and local UN staff members, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. The report outlines such serious problems that it recommends Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Programme’s operations in Somalia, the paper said, noting diplomats had shown it the as yet unpublished document. Ahmed has identified one of the main authors of the retaliation as Eric Overvest, a Dutch national who is now in charge of the UNDP office in earthquake-stricken Haiti. Ahmed’s case has been supported by the U.S.-based Government Accountability Project (GAP), a non-profit organisation which backs whistleblowers in exposing corruption. "A retaliator in Dr. Ahmed’s case was promoted and transferred to Haiti, where he was the Country Director for UNDP at the time of the devastating earthquake there," GAP said in a statement issued to Reuters. "The move is a cause for concern as the ability of UNDP to monitor the disbursement of aid in Haiti has been severely compromised by the chaotic aftermath of the disaster." UNDP spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that following the Ethics Committee ruling, "the matter of individual accountability" for the retaliation against Ahmed had been referred to the UNDP’s Office of Audit and Investigations. "As that aspect is currently pending, UNDP is not in a position to comment further," he said. He described Overvest as talented, dedicated and skilled in dealing with countries in crisis. "We are extremely pleased with his critical work in Haiti, where he has been UNDP’s Country Director since 2009. Our investigation found no involvement on his part in any of the alleged corrupt activities," Dujarric said. Overvest did not respond to emailed questions from Reuters on Tuesday. Dujarric said he would not be available for comment. "SILLY ACCUSATIONS" Ahmed says it was Overvest, then a deputy country director in the UNDP Somalia programme, who flew to Dubai in November 2007 and told the Somali Money Transmitters Association not to take him on as a consultant. The U.N. Ethics Committee chairman’s report did not mention Overvest by name, but upheld Ahmed’s complaint of damage to his professional reputation. "It is therefore concluded that the UNDP Somalia Country Office as a retaliatory act communicated quite openly in relation to the consultancy contract that ‘UNDP cannot accept Ahmed, who is making all these silly non-proven accusations, to work on a project UNDP was funding’," it said. Ahmed, a British national, worked for the UNDP from 2005-7 on a programme to prevent Somalia’s money transfer system from being abused for money laundering and terrorist finance. The Ethics Committee report upheld three of his complaints of retaliation but rejected four others, including allegations relating to the withholding of payments and non-renewal of his contract. Ahmed was awarded undisclosed compensation last month. In his whistleblowing dossiers, first reported in May 2008 by Reuters, he alleged the existence of fraudulent payments and bogus contracts in the UNDP Somalia programme and said it had supported a company with suspected links to Islamist militants. The company, Dalsan, collapsed in May 2006 and depositors lost more than $30 million, a blow to the Somali economy which depends heavily on remittances from nationals living abroad. The country faces an Islamist insurgency and has become a haven for pirates who extort huge ransoms by hijacking ships. UNDP spokesman Dujarric said the agency had given "due consideration" to the corruption allegations and engaged an independent international forensic company to investigate them. "The results of the investigation were that no corruption had occurred," Dujarric said, declining to name the investigating company or release the report. Ahmed described the finding as "incredible", adding: "The fact they have refused to share any information clearly shows they have something to hide."GAP International Program Officer Shelley Walden said it was unclear how widely or narrowly the UNDP was defining corruption. "To a certain extent, this is a semantic trick bag as, strictly speaking, no U.N. agency finds that corruption has occurred. U.N. investigators are not agents of law enforcement … Legally, UNDP neither clears nor arraigns anyone," she said. GAP urged the UNDP to make its report public. "In the absence of the investigative report, GAP cannot determine if there was a good faith effort to investigate Mr. Ahmed’s disclosures," Walden told Reuters. "Indeed, a failure to disclose it suggests that UNDP is trying to hide something or inappropriately protect a malefactor." The Security Council report suggests the food distribution system in Somalia needs completely rebuilding to break a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors, the New York Times said. The report also says regional Somali authorities are collaborating with pirates, and Somali government ministers have auctioned off diplomatic visas for trips to Europe to the highest bidders, possibly including pirates and insurgents. (Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations; editing by Tim Pearce)

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – NATO should develop closer ties with China, India, Pakistan and Russia and become the forum for consultation on global security, the alliance’s head said on Sunday, but a senior Russian politician reacted with skepticism.

The four countries all had interests in stability in Afghanistan and could do more to help develop and assist the country, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.

“What would be the harm if countries such as China, India, Pakistan and others were to develop closer ties with NATO? I think, in fact, there would only be a benefit, in terms of trust, confidence and cooperation,” he said.

NATO should become the global forum with other nations on a host of security issues extending from terrorism, cyber attacks, nuclear proliferation, piracy, climate change and competition for natural resources as well as Afghanistan, he said.

“NATO can be the place where views, concerns and best practices on security are shared by NATO’s global partners. And where … we might work out how to tackle global challenges together,” he told a conference in Munich ahead of discussion of a new NATO Strategic Concept due to be approved in November.

Rasmussen said NATO was already working with Pakistan, and other countries stood to gain from a stable Afghanistan. “India has a stake in Afghan stability. China too. And both could help further develop and rebuild Afghanistan. The same goes for Russia,” he said.

RUSSIAN SCEPTCISM

ANKARA/MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – The United States and Germany said on Saturday they saw no sign Tehran would make concessions on its nuclear programme, despite upbeat comments from Iran’s foreign minister over prospects for a deal.

Iran’s Manouchehr Mottaki said he had “a very good meeting” with the head of the U.N. nuclear agency on a plan to swap Iran’s low-enriched uranium for higher-grade nuclear fuel to be used in a Tehran reactor producing medical isotopes.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiya Amano said he wanted dialogue with Iran to speed up.

“Dialogue is continuing, this should be accelerated. That’s the point,” he told reporters on the sidelines of an annual security conference in Munich. He added that during the meeting Mottaki had made no new proposal on the swap plan.

An accord on exchanging fuel could mark a major breakthrough in the long-running dispute over Iran’s nuclear programme, which the West fears could be used to produce an atomic bomb.

But U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Iran had failed to address Western concerns and suggested it was time for more sanctions on the Islamic Republic, which denies its nuclear programme has a military goal.

“I don’t have the sense that we’re close to an agreement,” Gates told reporters in Ankara where he met Turkish leaders.

MUNICH (Reuters) – Iran sees good prospects for clinching a deal with world powers on exchanging some of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) for higher-grade fuel it can use in a reactor producing medical isotopes, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Friday.

Such a deal could represent a major breakthrough in the long-running dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, but it was not clear whether Iran’s conditions would be acceptable to the United States and others.

“I personally believe we have created conducive ground for such an exchange in the not very distant future,” Mottaki told the annual Munich Security Conference.

But he said it should be up to Tehran to set the amounts to be exchanged, based on its needs.

The uranium swap deal was first discussed last year between Iran and six world powers, which saw it as a way to ensure Tehran did not further enrich its uranium to a level that would be potentially usable in a nuclear bomb.

But Tehran, which denies any bomb-making intentions, had failed to respond positively to the proposal from the group — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — until this week.

Mottaki said he would discuss the exchange on Saturday with the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, on the fringes of the Munich conference.

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – Afghanistan will not pay bribes to persuade Taliban footsoldiers to stop fighting, but will help them to reintegrate into Afghan society and find jobs, Foreign Minister Zalmay Rasul said on Friday.

In an interview with Reuters, Rasul also rejected the suggestion that Taliban fighters might accept money under the scheme, which Western donors agreed to fund at a conference in London last week, and then simply resume their insurgency.

“We are not going to bribe them to stop fighting. If they come on board, drop their guns, reintegrate their village, they need to live. They need to have a life to feed their family,” Rasul said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

“So we need to provide them the kind of social help — for example land, agriculture, whatever they need — so they can start to learn and have a proper life. The issue is not to pay them money or bribe them.”

Rasul said the Taliban insurgents fighting the Afghan government and NATO forces were not a homogeneous group.

There were footsoldiers with no ideological motivation or links to groups like al Qaeda, and “those people can be brought on board,” he said.

“But there are elements within the Taliban — Pakistani Taliban and some Afghan Taliban — that have closer links with al Qaeda, and those people cannot be integrated or reconciled, so we need to fight them.”

LONDON (Reuters) – The United States will more than double its security assistance for Yemen and Britain will host an international meeting this month to seek ways of preventing the poorest Arab state from becoming an al Qaeda stronghold.

The moves highlighted mounting Western concern over Yemen after a failed Christmas Day attempt to bomb a U.S. airliner by a Nigerian man who said he had received training and equipment in the country that borders Saudi Arabia.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen branch of Osama bin Laden’s network, has claimed responsibility for the attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear as his flight from Amsterdam approached Detroit.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Friday that Yemen presented a regional and global threat as an incubator and potential safe haven for terrorism.

Brown’s office said he would host a high-level meeting in London on January 28 to discuss countering radicalization in Yemen. The talks will be held in parallel with an international conference on Afghanistan the same day.

“The international community must not deny Yemen the support it needs to tackle extremism,” Brown said in a statement.

The increase in U.S. backing for Yemen was announced in Baghdad by General David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command.