Iran, Middle East | featured news

Iran is finishing construction of a new space center that will allow it to soon launch more domestically made satellites into orbit, the country's defense minister said Saturday.

U.N. nuclear inspectors displayed new satellite imagery on Wednesday indicating that some small buildings had been dismantled and other possible clean-up work undertaken at an Iranian military site they want to visit.

The chief of the U.N. nuclear agency said Tuesday that he has reached a deal with Iran on probing its suspected work on nuclear weapons and that the agreement will "be signed quite soon."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will use a two-day visit to India this week to urge further reductions in Indian imports of Iranian oil.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has suffered a major setback after his supporters fared badly in Iranian parliamentary elections.

An Iranian envoy voiced hope on Monday that talks with the U.N. nuclear watchdog in mid-May would help resolve "outstanding issues", but he again ruled out any halt to Tehran's controversial uranium enrichment program.

In what would be a significant concession, Obama administration officials say they could support allowing Iran to maintain a crucial element of its disputed nuclear program if Tehran took other major steps to curb its ability to develop a nuclear bomb.

Iran claimed Sunday that it had recovered data from an American spy drone that went down in Iran last year including that it was used to spy on Osama bin Laden's house weeks before he was killed by U.S. forces. Iran also said it was building a copy of the surveillance aircraft.

After a 15-month break, Iran and the world's major powers are about to start a new round of nuclear talks. During the last round of negotiations held in January 2011, Iran and the world powers agreed on almost nothing. In recent weeks, negotiators struggled even to agree upon where they should meet for this new round - for a while, Iran held out for Baghdad as a venue.

Kofi Annan appealed on Wednesday to President Bashar al-Assad’s Iranian backers to support a peace effort.