Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad criticized Russia on Sunday for supporting further UN Security Council sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, the ISNA news agency reported.
“If I was in the place of Russian officials, I would adopt a more careful stance,” the agency quoted him as saying after a Cabinet meeting.
The US last week succeeded in forging a compromise with the other four permanent members of the Security Council for a fourth round of sanctions against Iran for its defiance in refusing to halt uranium enrichment.
That process can be used to produce fuel for nuclear reactors, but in highly refined form, enriched uranium can be used to make an atomic weapon. Tehran denies charges by the big powers that it has a covert atomic arms program.
Washington said that both Russia and China had backed a tough draft UN sanctions resolution against Iran.
It came a day after Brazil and Turkey — non-permanent Security Council members — signed a deal in Tehran for it to ship much of its low enriched uranium abroad in exchange for fuel for a research reactor.
“We had expected that a friendly neighboring state would defend the Tehran Declaration,” Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying of Russia on Sunday.
The fourth round of sanctions would expand an existing arms embargo, measures against Iran’s banking sector and ban it from mining uranium and developing ballistic missiles overseas, according to a US official in New York.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday gave a cautious welcome to the Tehran accord.
“This is the politics of a diplomatic solution to the Iran problem,” he said.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
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Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of