Iran will harm US interests anywhere in the world if the US launches an attack on it, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said yesterday.
"The Americans should know that if they assault Iran their interests will be harmed anywhere in the world that is possible," he was quoted as saying by a state television announcer.
"The Iranian nation will respond to any blow with double the intensity," Khamenei added.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had vowed earlier in the day to resist any UN Security Council demands for a halt to the Islamic republic's nuclear program.
"We won't back down one iota on our lawful and inalienable rights," he was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA, just two days before a UN deadline to freeze uranium enrichment expires.
"If international institutions respect our legitimate rights, we will respect their decisions. However, we will not regard these decisions as valid if they are intended to deny us our rights," he was quoted as saying.
He also said the UN bodies should "fulfil their duty lawfully so that the Islamic republic will not need to reconsider its relations with them."
The council had given Iran until tomorrow to freeze enrichment work, which makes what can be fuel for civilian nuclear reactors but also material for a bomb, as a "confidence building" measure to allay fears the regime was seeking a nuclear arsenal.
Iran has rejected the UN demand, insisting it only wants to generate electricity and that fuel cycle work is a "legitimate right."
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, is to report to the council tomorrow on Iranian compliance. The report is expected to chastise Iran for a lack of cooperation with the UN watchdog.
The council could then move to make suspension of enrichment and full cooperation with the IAEA investigation of Iran's nuclear program legally binding -- opening the door to UN economic sanctions or even military action.
But according to Ahmadinejad, the dispute was merely serving as a "trial for international bodies to prove whether they are defending the rights of nations or whether they are acting as puppets in the hands of some bullying powers."
The Iranian atomic agency chief was set to hold last-ditch talks with the IAEA yesterday, diplomats said, although Iran doesn't appear to be offering any concessions.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS