Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tehran is willing to send its uranium abroad to be further enriched, as Western powers moved yesterday toward tougher sanctions against Tehran over its nuclear defiance.
Iran would have “no problem,” Ahmadinejad said in a television interview late on Tuesday, sending out it stocks of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to be further purified into reactor fuel.
DEADLINE
His statement came after the expiry on Jan. 31 of a deadline set by Tehran for world powers to respond to its counter proposal on a UN-brokered plan concerning Iran’s nuclear program.
“There is really no problem. Some made a fuss for nothing. There is no problem. We sign a contract. We give them [world powers] 3.5 percent [enriched uranium] and it will take four or five months for them to give us the 20 percent [enriched uranium],” he said in an interview broadcast live on state television.
Iran needs nuclear fuel to power its UN-monitored reactor in Tehran, but the West fears the program is masking efforts to produce atomic weapons — claims vehemently denied by the Islamic republic.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has proposed, in a bid to allay Western fears about Iran’s atomic ambitions, that Tehran ship out its LEU to Russia and France to be further purified into reactor fuel.
ABOUT-FACE
Iran, which agreed in principle to the offer during talks with world powers in Geneva in October, later appeared to reject the deal.
Ahmadinejad’s latest remarks reiterate his original support of the IAEA-brokered deal.
However his time-frame of four or five months for the process appears to fall short of the period of about a year experts say is needed for 3.5 percent LEU to be enriched to 20 percent.
THREATS
Over the past few months, he has also threatened to defy world powers and warned that Iran would press on with its own enrichment program if they continued threatening further sanctions.
Iranian Foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki said last week that “new ideas” were being discussed regarding the nuclear deal but did not elaborate.
Ahmadinejad, speaking casually in Tuesday’s interview, which mainly focused on Iran’s economic issues, did not say how much LEU Iran would be ready to ship out.
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
MORE RESPONSIBILITY: Draftees would be expected to fight alongside professional soldiers, likely requiring the transformation of some training brigades into combat units The armed forces are to start incorporating new conscripts into combined arms brigades this year to enhance combat readiness, the Executive Yuan’s latest policy report said. The new policy would affect Taiwanese men entering the military for their compulsory service, which was extended to one year under reforms by then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2022. The conscripts would be trained to operate machine guns, uncrewed aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided missile launchers and Stinger air defense systems, the report said, adding that the basic training would be lengthened to eight weeks. After basic training, conscripts would be sorted into infantry battalions that would take
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
RSS