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Iran claimed Sunday it could now use domestically mined uranium to produce nuclear fuel , giving the country complete control over a process the West suspects is geared toward producing weapons. Tehran made the claim a day before a new round of nuclear talks with world powers that want to rein in Iran's uranium enrichment — a process that can be used either to make fuel for nuclear energy or nuclear weapons. The nuclear chief said Iran had for the first time delivered domestically mined raw uranium to a processing facility — allowing it to bypass U.N. sanctions prohibiting import of the material. Four rounds of U.N. sanctions have targeted Iran's uranium enrichment program. Nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi said the uranium ore concentrate , known as yellowcake , was produced at the Gachin uranium mine in southern Iran and delivered to the uranium conversion facility in the central city of Isfahan for reprocessing. Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, sa...

Any attack on Iran would lead to the destruction of Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said during a visit to the Gulf Arab state of Qatar on Sunday. "The U.S. and the Zionist entity will not be able to hit Iran right now. This is a wish ... Any Israeli attack against Iran means the elimination of the Zionist entity from the world map," he told a news conference in Doha. He spoke in Farsi through an Arabic interpreter. Ahmadinejad, in Western allied-Qatar for talks with Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, has often called for the demise of the Jewish state. Iran does not recognize Israel, which it refers to as the Zionist regime. Israel, believed to be the only nuclear-armed country in the Middle East, regards Iran's nuclear programme as a threat to its existence and has not ruled out military action to prevent Iran from building an atomic bomb. International sanctions have been imposed on Iran to force Tehran to halt sensitive nuclear work. ...