Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written to US President George W. Bush proposing "new solutions" to their differences in the first letter from an Iranian leader to a US president in 27 years, government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said yesterday.
The letter was sent via the Swiss Embassy in Tehran which has a US interests section, Elham told a press conference.
In the letter, Ahmadinejad proposes "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation of the world," Elham said.
Elham did not mention the nuclear dispute -- the major issue on which Washington and Tehran are at loggerheads. The US is leading Western efforts to have the UN Security Council censure Iran for refusing to cease enrichment of uranium.
It is the first time that an Iranian president has written to his US counterpart since 1979, when the two countries broke relations after Iranian militants stormed the US embassy and held the occupants hostage for more than a year.
On Sunday, Ahmadinejad renewed Iran's threat to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) if the UN Security Council imposes sanctions over its nuclear program.
Ahmadinejad told the official Islamic Republic News Agency that Washington and its allies "don't give us anything and yet they want to impose sanctions on us." He called the threat of sanctions "meaningless."
The US is backing attempts by Britain and France to win Security Council approval for a UN resolution that would threaten possible further measures if Iran does not suspend uranium enrichment -- a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors to generate electricity or material for atomic warheads.
The Western nations want to invoke Chapter 7 of the UN Charter that would allow economic sanctions or military action, if necessary, to force Iran to comply with the Security Council's demand that it cease enrichment.
But Russia and China, the other two veto-holding members of the Security Council, oppose such moves.
Meanwhile, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, in Turkey as part of Iranian efforts to try to rally support among the country's neighbors, said yesterday Iran would like to see a peaceful solution to growing tensions with the US over its nuclear program.
"We wish the issue of the nuclear program to be solved through peaceful means," Larijani told reporters upon his arrival in Ankara.
Larijani said that Iran regarded the "NPT as a good agreement. We have no intention to leave it."
But he added that "if we're threatened ... then we would decide accordingly."
Larijani's visit comes a few days after he met with the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, where he sought to ease regional fears about Iran's nuclear intentions.
Larijani is scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and Yigit Alpogan, head of the National Security Council.
And in New York, the foreign ministers of six major powers were to meet yesterday in a bid to map out a common strategy to force Iran to halt sensitive nuclear fuel work that could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will host her counterparts from Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia as well as EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana at a working dinner that will focus on Tehran.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver