Iran, Middle East | featured news

Iran has drawn back from its ambitions to build a nuclear weapon, Israel's defense minister was quoted as saying on Tuesday, while warning that his country may still have to decide next year whether to launch a military strike against it.

Iran said on Tuesday it would stop oil exports if pressure from Western sanctions got any tighter and it had a “Plan B” contingency strategy to survive without oil revenues.

While foreign policy became an unexpected pivotal point in last week's town-hall style presidential debate, Monday's final showdown will focus entirely on international affairs.

Iran followed the United States on Sunday in denying that the two countries had scheduled direct bilateral negotiations on Iran's controversial nuclear program. The New York Times, quoting unnamed U.S. administration officials, had said on Saturday that secret exchanges between U.S. and Iranian officials had yielded agreement "in principle" to hold one-on-one talks.

What the Republican nominee’s campaign billed as a major foreign policy address didn’t have much new in it and left some analysts unimpressed. The speech, they said, was much like Romney’s previous swings at laying out a foreign policy -- couched in broad ideology and big ambitions and lacking the specifics for how he’d bring any of them about.

The address mostly repackaged things Romney has said before, sometimes with greater precision. The Republican, who has stumbled in past efforts to articulate his foreign policy, offered few specific ways he would change the Obama administration’s current approach. Although he made broad critiques of Obama’s “passivity,” Romney did not call for any new armed intervention in any Mideast conflict.

Iranian authorities used aggressive measures Wednesday in an attempt to halt the nosedive of the country's currency, making arrests, vowing to stamp out sidewalk money changers and warning merchants against fueling the mounting public anger over the economy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that a firm ultimatum to Iran is the only peaceful way to stop the regime in Tehran from getting atomic weapons, increasing pressure on President Obama weeks before the U.S. presidential election.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will make his case against Iran before the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, arguing that time is quickly running out to stop the Islamic Republic from becoming a nuclear power and the threat of force must be seriously considered.

Syria’s civil war is straining sectarian tensions in Iraq nine months after American forces left, and it is causing Iraq’s Shiite-led government to move closer to Iran.