Iran said on Tuesday it was ready to start immediately what it called "serious" talks with six world powers about their offer to defuse Tehran's nuclear standoff with the West. Chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani delivered Iran's formal response to the offer at a meeting with foreign envoys from the six world powers in Tehran.No details of the response were immediately available. Iran has given no sign of heeding a key United Nations Security Council demand that it freeze uranium enrichment, and Western diplomats said they were expecting an "ambiguous" response."Although there is no justification for the other parties' illegal move to refer Iran's case to the Security Council,... the answer was prepared ... to pave the way for fair talks," Larijani said."Iran is prepared to hold serious talks from August 23," he was quoted by Iran's student news agency ISNA as saying....
http://news.yahoo.com
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Editor - 08:25:00 08-22-06
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 Fishermen detail Pacific ordeal |
Three fishermen who say they spent nine months adrift in the Pacific have been giving more details of their ordeal. The Mexicans told how two of their crew had died because they could not eat raw birds and fish. The three men arrived at the Marshall Islands two weeks after they were picked up by a Taiwanese tuna trawler. The men say their eight-metre (25ft) boat broke down on a shark fishing trip and denied suggestions they had set out to pick up a shipment of drugs. "That's wrong because we set out to catch sharks," survivor Jesus Vidana said. Mr Vidana, Salvador Ordonez and Lucio Rendon have undergone a medical check-up and been passed fit to travel. They are due to reach Mexico on Friday. Swollen feet The three men, from the Mexican town of San Blas, said they set off in October 2005 with two other crew members. Their fibreglass boat, equipped with two 200 horsepower outboard motors, ran into trouble soon after setting out from the state of Nayarit....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5273474.stm
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Editor - 08:23:00 08-22-06
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| Saddam trial hears of gas attack |
The first prosecution witness has appeared at the latest trial of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and six others on war crimes charges. The witness described a chemical weapons attack which he says was carried out on his village. Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants are being tried over the Anfal campaign in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq in the late 1980s. The prosecution alleges that up to 180,000 civilians were killed. The witness, Ali Mustapha Hama, said eight to 12 jets bombed his village of Balisan in April in 1987. Two of the defendants told the court that Anfal was a campaign targeting Iranian troops and Kurdish guerrillas supporting them. The Iran-Iraq war was not yet over. ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5274136.stm
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Editor - 08:16:00 08-22-06
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| Somali Islamists ban animal trade |
The Islamic courts that control large parts of Somalia have banned the export of charcoal and wild animals. The courts warned businessmen involved in the trade that they will be dealt with firmly if arrested. Charcoal exports have stripped areas of woodland, causing drought and soil erosion, while many wild animal species are becoming rarer. Somali companies and individuals run the trade, with exports going mostly to the United Arab Emirates. Birds of prey, trapped and exported live, form a significant part of the trade. The exports have been going on since the collapse in 1991 of Somalia's last effective national government...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5274620.stm
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Editor - 08:14:00 08-22-06
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| Mexico teachers extend protests |
Striking teachers seized 12 private radio stations in the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca and set buses on fire, as a long-running protest worsened. They acted after unidentified gunmen opened fire on a government radio station already under their control. The strikers used the stations to tell parents to ignore Monday's start of the school year and keep children at home. Teachers have been striking since May to demand higher wages and Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruiz's resignation. The shooting began at a government-owned radio station already in the hands of the striking teachers. ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5272462.stm
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Editor - 08:00:00 08-22-06
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| Reclusive Russian Wins, Then Refuses, Math's Highest Honor for Breakthrough on Study of Shapes |
A reclusive Russian won the math world's highest honor Tuesday for solving a problem that has stumped some of the discipline's greatest minds for a century but he refused the award. Grigory Perelman, a 40-year-old native of St. Petersburg, won a Fields Medal often described as math's equivalent of the Nobel prize for a breakthrough in the study of shapes that experts say might help scientists figure out the shape of the universe. John Ball, president of the International Mathematical Union, said that he had urged Perelman to accept the medal, but Perelman said he felt isolated from the mathematics community and "does not want to be seen as its figurehead." Ball offered no further details of the conversation. Besides shunning the award for his work in topology, Perelman also seems uninterested, according to colleagues, in a separate $1 million prize he could win for proving the Poincare conjecture, a theorem about the nature of multidimensional space. ...
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2342232
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Editor - 07:57:00 08-22-06
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