Iran Nuclear Negotiator Calls for Talks

[cal04]

Iran's top nuclear negotiator Monday said Tehran was ``ready for any kind of negotiation to achieve our rights,'' renewing a call for further talks on the Islamic republic's atomic program. As officials from the five permanent U.N. Security Council members gathered in Paris to discuss strategy, Ali Larijani also called again for Iran's dispute with the international community to be returned to the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, headed by Mohamed ElBaradei.

``Let's allow Mr. ElBaradei to do his job based on the international conventions,'' Larijani told group of students in Tehran University, the official Iranian news agency reported. Diplomats representing the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, which hold Security Council vetoes, meet in Paris on Tuesday with Germany to discuss ElBaradei's report to the council that Iran was in violation of the council's demand that Tehran stop enriching uranium, a process that can produce fuel for a nuclear reactor or fissile material for a bomb.

The report opened the way for the council to take punitive measures against Iran, but immediate action was not seen as likely because Russia and China now are opposed to international sanctions against Tehran at this point. Iran contends it has a right to enrich uranium as long as it does not attempt to use it for nuclear weapons. Its opponents contend Iran ceded that right by conducting secret nuclear research and development.

Earlier Monday, government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham told reporters Tehran had earmarked $242.5 million for the completion of the Bushehr reactor in southwest Iran. Larijani said Bushehr would go on stream in 2007. Iran had expected the plant, which was built with Russian help, to be in operation by the end of this year.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5792856,00.html

[Robbien]

1. All that fighting in the Kurdish north may be tied to the US pressure

on Iran.

Iran thwarting off efforts to destabilizing actions from outside


Teheran, 1 May - In an effort to thwart off destabilizing activities of the US-led occupation forces against Iran, Iran continued today shelling Kurdish PKK bases in the areas around the villages of Laradu, Rushga and Qalaa Tuka, about 190 kilometers north of Sulaimaniyah. Iran claims these Kuridish PKK bases are being used as outposts from which agents provocateurs are infiltrating Iranian territory with the task of befriending the local Kurdish communities and engaging their help to identify possible targets for eventual selective US-led airstrikes.

Iranian security forces also cracked down on suspected collaborators in the Khuzestan province, where 25 people accused of involvement in a double bomb attack in January were arrested. On January 24 eight people had been killed and 46 wounded in two almoust contemporaneous bomb assaults in Ahwaz.

Iran holds the British occupation forces in southern Iraq responsible for infiltrating agents provocateurs into the Khuzestan province to destabilize the situation in its southwestern province, where Iran's Arab-speaking minority is concentrated.

http://www.arabmonitor.info/news/dettaglio.php?idnews=14040&lang=en

[Ghost Dog]

2. British remarkably quiet

recently, I see...