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/ 4 February 2008
Iran on Monday fired a rocket into space to mark the opening of its first space centre, triggering swift condemnation from the United States amid continued tensions over the Iranian nuclear drive. The space centre, located in the remote desert of western Iran, will be used to launch Iran’s first home-produced satellite in May or June this year, officials said.
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/ 15 January 2008
Nahid Keshavarz says two weeks in an Iranian jail didn’t deter her from helping try to collect one million signatures for a petition urging more women’s rights and, if anything, prison showed the cause was worth fighting for. Keshavarz is one of dozens of women who campaigners say have been detained since 2006 when the drive was launched. Most were released within a few days or weeks.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards accused the United States of fabricating footage claiming to show Iranian speedboats harassing US warships in the Strait of Hormuz, state television reported. ”The footage released by the US Navy are file pictures and the audio has been fabricated,” a source in the naval section of the Revolutionary Guards was quoted as saying.
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/ 24 December 2007
Iran will soon announce an international tender for building 19 nuclear power plants, a week after Russia said it had begun fuel deliveries to the Islamic state’s first such facility. Kazem Jalali, a spokesperson for Parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, said each power plant would have a capacity of 1 000 megawatts.
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/ 17 December 2007
Iran will not halt uranium enrichment even with delivery of fuel from Russia for its first nuclear power plant, a senior Iranian official said on Monday, adding he could not yet confirm Iran had received the fuel. The Russian state agency building the station said in a statement on Monday it had delivered the first fuel shipment for the Bushehr plant.
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/ 13 December 2007
A car to be made by Iran, Malaysia and Turkey will be launched in 2011, the head of the Middle East’s biggest carmaker, Iran Khodro, said on Wednesday. Proton chief executive, Syed Zainal Abidin Syed Mohamed Tahir, said in November the countries would develop the car with Islamic features such as a compass to determine the direction of Mecca.
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/ 8 December 2007
There are few obvious parallels between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the religiously devout Iranian President, and Jim Morrison, the famously hedonistic lead singer of The Doors. But now the fact that the pair are to share a cinematic bond in the form of biopics directed by Oliver Stone is generating stern disapproval in Tehran.
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/ 6 December 2007
Iran has hanged a man convicted of raping three boys when he was 13 despite retractions from his accusers and an order for a judicial review of his case. Makwan Mouloudzadeh (20) was put to death on Wednesday in a prison in the western province of Kermanshah.
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/ 5 December 2007
A jubilant Iranian leadership called on Tuesday for plans for new United Nations sanctions against the country to be dropped in the face of the United States report confirming it had abandoned its nuclear weapons programme. The report has forced America’s European allies to re-evaluate policy towards Iran on Tuesday.
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/ 1 December 2007
Iran was not to blame for the disappointment expressed by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana after key talks in London on the nuclear crisis failed, chief negotiator Saeed Jalili said on Saturday. Solana said on Friday he was ”disappointed” after the last-ditch talks in London failed to produce a breakthrough.
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/ 20 November 2007
A 5,1-magnitude earthquake jolted Iran’s oil-rich south-west on Tuesday and caused minor damage to buildings, the official Irna news agency said. The quake occurred at 5.20am GMT near the town of Ghaleh-tal in an eastern part of Khuzestan province. About 20 children were hurt as they tried to run out of a school building.
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/ 12 November 2007
The United States could unleash vastly superior firepower if it attacked Iran but Tehran could strike back against its forces in Iraq and threaten oil supplies crucial to the world economy. Speculation is growing that President George Bush could launch military action before he leaves office in January 2009 even though Washington says it is committed to resolving the crisis.
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/ 18 October 2007
Iran on Thursday shrugged off a warning by United States President George Bush that its nuclear programme could lead to ”World War III”, saying his remarks only served to show up Washington’s failures. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the ”war-mongering” policies of neo-conservatives in the US had reached a dead end.
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/ 17 October 2007
President Vladimir Putin made clear to Washington on Tuesday that Russia would not accept military action against Iran and he invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Moscow for talks. Putin made the invitation to Ahmadinejad, shunned by the West which fears his nuclear programme is a cover for building atomic weapons, after meeting him and leaders of other Caspian Sea states.
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/ 15 October 2007
Russian President Vladimir Putin will arrive in Tehran as planned on Monday evening, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said, after reports about a possible plot to assassinate him during his visit for a Caspian Sea summit. Iran has dismissed as baseless reports of a possible plan to kill Putin, branding the allegation as ”pyschological warfare” calculated by Tehran’s enemies.
Iran’s president accused Israel on Friday of using the Holocaust as a pretext for ”genocide” against Palestinians. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who outraged the West in 2005 by calling Israel a ”tumour” to be wiped off the map, said the truth should be told about World War II and the Holocaust.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the world could not stop the Islamic state’s nuclear programme, which the West fears is a cover to build nuclear bomb, the official IRNA news agency said on Thursday. Ahmadinejad was speaking the day after French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called on the European Union to take the lead in widening financial sanctions on Iran.
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/ 19 September 2007
Iran on Wednesday said the military has drawn up a plan under which its fighter jets could bomb Israel if the Jewish state launched a military attack against the Islamic republic over its atomic drive. ”Iranian bombers can carry out an attack in retaliation against Israeli soil,” deputy air force commander Mohammad Alavi said, quoted by the Fars news agency.
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/ 12 September 2007
Iran will not stop uranium enrichment, chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani said on Wednesday, despite a call by the European Union and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to halt sensitive nuclear work. ”We heard about this EU demand and we said our view,” Larijani told a news conference.
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/ 3 September 2007
Police in Tehran have closed two dozen barbers and hairdressers in a fortnight in the latest phase of a ”morals” crackdown aimed at enforcing Islamic dress codes among young Iranians. The businesses were shut after being identified as purveyors of decadent ”Western” culture.
An Iranian minister said he believed the United States had dropped the idea of attacking Iran but wanted to topple its leadership through what he called a ”soft revolution”. Intelligence Minister Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, a cleric, said Iran’s enemies had waged ”psychological warfare” to prepare for military action against the Islamic Republic.
Two men convicted of murdering a top Iranian judge in 2005 were hanged in public in central Tehran on Thursday, the first such public executions in the Iranian capital in five years. The men were executed for the murder of Hassan Moghaddas, a hardline deputy prosecutor and head of the ”guidance” court in Tehran
The death-sentence fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie by Iran’s revolutionary leader 18 years ago is still valid and will remain so, a leading cleric said on Friday following Britain’s knighting of the controversial author. ”In Islamic Iran, the revolutionary fatwa issued by Imam Khomeini remains valid …,” Hojatoleslam Ahmad Khatami said.
Iran will tell the United States and Britain to get their troops out of Iraq and leave the problem for neighbouring countries to sort out when regional and Western foreign ministers, including the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, meet at a special Iraq summit in Egypt starting on Friday.
Iran’s army will ”cut off the hand” of any attacker and is at the ready to fulfil its defensive duties, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday during an annual military parade. Iran is embroiled in a row with the West over its nuclear ambitions.
Iran said on Tuesday it is still seeking to hugely expand its nuclear programme by installing 50 000 uranium-enriching centrifuges at a nuclear plant after announcing its atomic drive had entered an industrial phase. Iran said on Monday it could now enrich uranium on an industrial scale.
Iranian newspapers wrote with glee on Thursday about the release of 15 British sailors and marines but some moderate dailies questioned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his handling of the issue. Ahmadinejad announced on Wednesday the release of the Britons held since March 23 for what Tehran insists was a violation of its territory.
The 15 British military personnel who had been held by Iran flew out of Tehran for England on Thursday, ending a two-week stand-off that strained already tense relations between Iran and the West. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a news conference broadcast round the world on Wednesday he had decided to forgive and free the 15 sailors.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday he would free 15 British sailors and marines as a ”gift” to Britain. In a dramatic announcement, Ahmadinejad said while he was ”saddened” by Britain’s violation of Iran’s borders and felt the country was not ”brave enough” to admit it made a mistake, he was willing to forgive.
Iran broadcast video on Friday of a captured British sailor who said he and 14 colleagues had entered Iranian waters illegally, ramping up tension over the week-long crisis. British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed disgust at the broadcasting of footage of three of the captives and said Iran risked further isolation unless it released them.
Iran on Saturday insisted that 15 British sailors it seized had illegally entered Iranian waters, denouncing what it called a ”blatant aggression”. The Britons were being taken to the capital for questioning, Iranian media reported. Iran’s tough comments came after Britain demanded the return of the sailors and denied they had strayed into Iranian waters.
Iran’s president voiced defiance on Wednesday as world powers prepared to put the finishing touches to new sanctions against the Islamic Republic, saying his country would not surrender. His tough language was echoed by another senior official, who said mastering the nuclear fuel cycle was a ”red line” from which Iran would never retreat.