Iran is making significant progress in expanding its nuclear program, including in opening up a potential second route to developing the bomb, a new UN atomic agency report showed on Wednesday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) latest quarterly update said Tehran had accelerated the installation of advanced uranium enrichment equipment at its central Natanz plant.
It also outlined further progress at a reactor under construction at Arak, also in central Iran, which Western countries fear could provide Iran with plutonium if the fuel is reprocessed.
The US Department of State said the report was an “unfortunate milestone” marking a decade of Iran expanding its nuclear activities “in blatant violation of its international obligations.”
A US congressional panel backed tougher sanctions against Iran.
Highly enriched uranium and plutonium can both be used in a nuclear weapon. North Korea used plutonium in two tests in 2006 and 2009, while uranium was used in the “Little Boy” atomic bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
The new IAEA report, seen by Agence France-Presse, said Iran has installed at Natanz almost 700 IR-2m centrifuges and/or empty centrifuge casings, compared with just 180 in February. However, none was operating.
Iran has said it intends to install about 3,000 of the new centrifuges at Natanz — where about 13,500 of the older models are in place — enabling it to speed up the enrichment of uranium.
The UN Security Council has passed numerous resolutions calling on Iran to suspend all enrichment and heavy water activities of the kind under development at Arak. It has imposed four rounds of sanctions.
Last year, additional unilateral US and EU sanctions targeting Iran’s oil exports and its financial system began to cause real problems for the Persian Gulf country’s economy.
Israel, the Middle East’s sole if undeclared nuclear-armed state, has refused to rule out military action against Iran, as has US President Barack Obama. Iran says that its atomic activities are peaceful.
Diplomatic efforts to resolve the impasse, most recently in six-power talks with Iran in Kazakhstan last month, have failed to make concrete progress.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
FAKE NEWS? ‘When the government demands the press become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment, something has gone very wrong,’ a civic group said The top US broadcast regulator on Saturday threatened media outlets over negative coverage of the Middle East war, after US President Donald Trump slammed critical headlines from the “Fake News Media.” The US president since his first term has derided mainstream media as “fake news” and has sued major outlets over what he sees as unfair coverage. Brendan Carr, head of the US Federal Communications Commission — which oversees the nation’s radio, television and Internet media — said broadcasters risked losing their licenses over news coverage. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will
RSS