Iran acknowledged that traces of weapons-grade uranium were found at one of its nuclear facilities but denied enriching the material. Iran's foreign minister said his country was prepared to allow unfettered nuclear inspections.
Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Monday his country has "nothing to hide" from inspectors. But he said before Iran signs a protocol allowing the more severe inspections, it wants assurances that that move will end the conflict over its nuclear program.
"We want to make sure that additional protocol is going to solve the problems and it is going to be enough," Kharrazi told reporters at the UN.
The UN International Atomic Energy Agency has demanded that Iran agree by Oct. 31 to allow unfettered inspections and stop all uranium enrichment. The US, Europe and Russia have hiked up pressure on Tehran to meet the deadline.
The IAEA is sending a team to Iran for key negotiations Thursday. Then -- the agency hopes -- a new round of inspections will begin Friday.
Iran insists it will not stop uranium enrichment and that it has a right to a peaceful nuclear program, as allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT. As a signatory, Iran is prohibited from developing nuclear weapons.
"We have always stressed that we don't have any program to produce a nuclear weapons and all our activities are legal in the framework of our commitment to the NPT and our rights based on NPT and under the safeguard of IAEA," Kharrazi said.
"Everyone talks about signing additional protocol, and in principle, we don't have any problem to have more severe inspections because we don't have anything to hide," he said.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, who met with Kharrazi on Monday, said the Iranians hope their efforts to clear up the nuclear issue will be reciprocated.
"The Iranians showed flexibility. They hope -- as he [Kharrazi] mentioned to us -- that they will be met with flexibility from the other side," Maher told reporters.
In Tehran, Iran's representative to the IAEA acknowledged that traces of enriched uranium were found at the Kalay-e Electric Co., just west of Tehran. Diplomats said last week that IAEA inspectors had uncovered the traces at the site -- the second such find following the discovery of traces earlier this year at a plant in Natanz.
But Ali Akbar Salehi, speaking on Tehran television, ruled out that the enriched uranium found at either site was produced in Iran. Tehran maintains that traces of the new enriched material were imported on equipment purchased from abroad.
"It needs a lot of centrifuges to work for a long time to enrich uranium," he told the TV station. "The IAEA and we know that there has been no such level of activity in Iran."
The United States, however, has pointed the discoveries as evidence that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons.
IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said the agency had no comment on the Iranian acknowledgment of the find at Kalay-e.
Christopher Paine, a nonproliferation expert at the Washington-based National Resources Defense Council, said Iran's argument was "plausible." But Thomas Cochran, with the same think tank, said it was unlikely that Iran would not have checked any used equipment for traces of contamination.
A diplomat familiar with the Iran nuclear issue, speaking in Vienna on condition of anonymity, said there was no way of telling from the samples available to the IAEA whether the Iranian explanation for the two discoveries was true.
The European Union on Monday called on Iran to "immediately comply" with the IAEA's demand for unfettered inspections and to sign the additional protocol to the NPT "without delay as a first and essential step to restore international trust."
"The Iranian nuclear program remains a matter of grave concern for the EU," the 15-member union's foreign ministers said in a statement after a gathering in Brussels.
Iran repeated its stance Monday that it would not back off a nuclear program it insists is purely for energy production.
"We don't accept any restrictions on the peaceful use of nuclear energy," government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh told reported on Monday. "Peaceful use of nuclear energy is the right of the Iranian nation and we won't compromise on this."
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the