Iran reiterated yesterday that any new sanctions against Tehran by world powers would not halt the Islamic republic’s nuclear program.
“Sanctions won’t have any impact on our activities,” said foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast at his weekly press conference when asked about the possibility of new sanctions on Tehran.
“We do not find them a deterrent. The more the sanctions, the more determined we will be to pursue our rights,” he said in Farsi, translated by the state-owned English language Press Television channel.
Iran has steadfastly maintained that it has the right to pursue nuclear technology as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Washington is ratcheting up pressure to impose new sanctions against Tehran for aggressively pursuing nuclear technology, which they suspect is aimed at making nuclear weapons.
Iran denies these allegations, saying its program is aimed at generating electricity.
In an interview with the New York Times, US President Barack Obama said he plans to place new restrictions on the use of atomic weapons as part of a major US nuclear policy overhaul but that he would make exceptions for “outliers like Iran and North Korea.”
“All countries, whether they’re nuclear weapons states, non-nuclear weapons states or aspiring nuclear weapons states, I think should be very clear about what our approach and our strategy is,” Obama said.
“And I do think that when you’re looking at outliers like Iran or North Korea, they should see that over the course of the last year and a half we have been executing a policy that will increasingly isolate them so long as they are operating outside of accepted international norms,” he said.
Obama was to unveil his new nuclear strategy yesterday, two days before signing a treaty with Russia to slash stockpiles of long-range nuclear warheads by a third, and less than a week before hosting world leaders at a key nuclear summit in Washington.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
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