President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (r) talks to reporters who accompanied him during his provincial visits.

TEHRAN, July 9--President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday enemies wanted to threaten Iran with gasoline.
Talking to reporters who accompanied him during his provincial visits, the chief executive noted that gasoline use should be optimized and reduction of gasoline consumption needs improvement of public transportation, IRNA reported. Noting that gasoline consumption should be reduced, Ahmadinejad said high gasoline imports create many problems, including gasoline smuggling, excessive consumption and unnecessary journeys.
“We do not agree with selling gasoline in the free market. We believe that gasoline should be imported in the right manner because gasoline accounts for 80 percent of journeys taking place in the country,“ he said.
He pointed out that reducing gasoline consumption can help the government build 1,000 kilometers of railroad annually.
Asked whether he believes his rivals will use the issue of rationing gasoline against him, the chief executive said the people elected him to serve them and he is nobody’s rival.
“Setting free market price for gasoline is harmful to the economy, under the present circumstances,“ he said.
The president noted that the gasoline rationing scheme saves a minimum 100 billion rials per day, which will exceed 40 trillion rials per year.
He enumerated establishment of gasoline refineries and railroads, strengthening social security insurance and paying financial aid to the unemployed as cases that can be promoted from the gasoline saved.
Commenting on the possibility of holding the second round of Iran-US talks on Iraq, Ahmadinejad pointed out that he will do whatever he can to assist the Iraqi people.
“The notion of justice and strengthening the spirit of serving people depends on the national will and on adopting a national perspective toward the country’s media,“ he said.
Referring to his visit to 29 provinces, Ahmadinejad pointed out that more than 780 sessions were held for provincial tours and a total of 29,000 person-hour of work was accomplished.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 9--Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on Monday invited Iranian and the US officials to attend the second round of talks on Iraqi security.
He extended the invitation in a press conference following a consular meeting with five Iranian diplomats kept in Baghdad, IRNA reported.
The US forces kidnapped five Iranian diplomats from the Iranian Consulate in Irbil, Iraq, last January.
Expressing satisfaction with the continued talks, he said the Iraqi government welcomes resumption of talks that were held on May 28.
He expressed hope the upcoming meeting would help ease tension in Iraq.
Zebari pointed out that the Iraqi government strived to arrange a meeting between Iranian officials and the five abducted Iranian diplomats.
He stressed that Baghdad calls for intensive dialogue between Iran and the US on Iraqi developments.
“I assume that the recent meeting between Iran’s ambassador with the five kidnapped diplomats would help resume these talks,“ he said.
He said Iraq believes that after the first round of talks between Iran and the US, the two sides are more willing to resume these talks.
No specific date has been designated for the second round of talks.
On the torture of Iranian diplomats, he said according to reports they were exposed to torture in the early days of abduction. “But we do not know to what extent,“ he said.

TEHRAN, July 9--Iran’s Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency Ali Asghar Soltaniyeh said on Monday the IAEA team to visit Tehran on July 11 has been finalized.
Talking to IRNA, Soltaniyeh stressed that the IAEA team is of a technical, legal and political nature.
The team, led by IAEA safeguards Chief Olli Heinonen, is to visit Iran on Wednesday for discussing Tehran’s disputed nuclear activities.
The Iranian envoy announced that the agency’s director for safeguards operations, Herman Nackartes, the IAEA legal advisor, Johan Rautenbach, and director in charge of the agency’s external relations and policy coordination, Vilmos Cxerveny, are other members of the IAEA team.
“The IAEA delegation will discuss with Iranian negotiators the drawing up of a modality and framework to settle remaining issues in Iran’s peaceful nuclear case,“ he said.
Soltaniyeh pointed out that the delegation will not conduct any inspection of Iran’s nuclear installations and only hold talks with Iranian officials.
“The IAEA delegation will probably meet with Secretary of Supreme National Security Council Ali Larijani on issues related to Iran’s peaceful nuclear program,“ he said.
Meanwhile, IAEA Chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran has slowed the expansion of its uranium enrichment work in a move that could herald a breakthrough in the international crisis over its nuclear activities.
“We have seen a fairly slow development in commissioning new cascades,“ ElBaradei told reporters, referring to the installation of centrifuges which enrich uranium into fuel for civilian reactors.
ElBaradei has called on Iran to freeze uranium enrichment at the current level, in return for the UN holding off on new sanctions.
The UN Security Council has already imposed two rounds of sanctions over Tehran’s refusal to halt all uranium enrichment work.

TEHRAN, July 9--Iran and Venezuela will cooperate on building 11 industrial townships under an agreement signed earlier, deputy minister of industries and mines said on Sunday.
Mohammad Reza Notash said the executive works to design and build the industrial townships will be conducted as per a timetable.
He said coordination has been made with visiting Venezuelan Minister of Basic Industries and Mining Jose Salamat Khan Fernandez to draw up a timetable for constructing townships for industrial plants, IRNA reported.
“Iran will dispatch a delegation to Venezuela to follow up the implementation of agreements signed between the two countries,“ he said.
Notash said that a number of Iranian small- and medium-size companies involved in manufacturing machinery have begun good cooperation with Venezuela.
“Iran has economic and industrial cooperation with a large number of countries, including Sudan, Tanzania, Ghana and Albania,“ he said, adding that the partnerships also included technical and vocational training.
“If Venezuelan officials make their needs known in different economic and industrial sectors, we will try to help them.“
The Venezuelan minister said his country has problems in extracting and processing raw materials, adding that Venezuela has one million hectares of forests and needs expertise to make optimum use of them.
Fernandez noted that the two countries have increased joint investments in various sectors, which will help speed up economic cooperation in future.

CAIRO, Egypt,
July 9--The leader of an Al-Qaeda umbrella group in Iraq threatened to wage war against Iran unless it stops supporting the democratically-elected Shiite government of Iraq within two months, according to an audiotape released Sunday.
Abu Omar Al-Baghdadi, who leads the group Islamic State in Iraq, said his Sunni insurgents have been preparing for four years to wage a battle against Iran, AP reported.
“We are giving the Persians, and especially the rulers of Iran, a two-month period to end all kinds of support for the Iraqi Shiite government and to stop direct and indirect intervention...otherwise a severe war is waiting for you,“ he said in the 50-minute audiotape.
The tape, which could not be independently verified, was posted on a website commonly used by insurgent groups.
Iraq’s Shiite-led government is backed by the US but closely allied to Iran.
In the recording, Al-Baghdadi also gave Sunnis and Arab countries doing business in Iran or with Iranians a two-month deadline to cease their ties.
“We advise and warn every Sunni businessman inside Iran or in Arab countries, especially in the Persian Gulf not to take partnership with any Shiite Iranian businessman--this is part of the two-month period,“ he said.
Al-Baghdadi said his group was responsible for two suicide truck bomb attacks in May in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region. He said the attacks in Irbil and Makhmur showed “the holy war“ was progressing in the Kurdish areas.
At least 14 people were killed when a suicide truck bomb struck a government building in Irbil, Kurdistan’s capital, on May 9. Four days later in Makhmur, another suicide truck bomb tore through the offices of a Kurdish political party, killing 50 people.
In the recording, the extremist group’s leader did not mention Saturday’s deadly truck bomb in Armili, a Shiite town north of Baghdad, which killed more than 100 people.
The attack was among the deadliest this year in Iraq and reinforced suspicions that Al-Qaeda extremists were moving north to less protected regions beyond the US security crackdown in Baghdad.
Al-Baghdadi criticized Kurdish leaders for their alliance with Shiites in Iraq’s government and accused them of encouraging unsavory morals.

BRUSSELS, Belgium, July 9--United Nations Chief Ban Ki-moon will open an international forum in Brussels on Tuesday for improving the way migration and development policies interact.
The forum, with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso as keynote speaker, will involve some 600 officials from more than 140 countries and groups like the African Union and the International Organization for Migration, AFP reported.
The informal gathering, to run until Wednesday, will allow policymakers to share ideas regarding migration and development policy, and examine new possibilities for international cooperation and partnerships.
“What we are really looking for is to work out what sort of mutually profitable and concrete measures have to be taken to contribute to development,“ a Belgian diplomat said.
Discussion on Wednesday will focus on temporary labor migration and how it contributes to development, and how to better manage the “brain drain“ of highly skilled workers from developing countries.

MOSCOW, July 9--A Russian nuclear expert said on Monday with as many centrifuges as the head of the international nuclear watchdog says Iran has, it would take Iran five to 10 years to create a bomb.
“Of course, you might try to enrich enough uranium for a nuclear bomb with 1,600 centrifuges [as IAEA Chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Iran had in May] but that will take time--perhaps five to 10 years. For example, to enrich enough uranium for a bomb within a year, you need a cascade of at least 10,000 centrifuges,“ said the expert, who asked not to be named, RIA-NOVOSTI reported.
Iran has rejected UN resolutions against its nuclear program since last year, with the six negotiator countries (UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany) demanding that Tehran suspend all enrichment prior to negotiating a solution to its controversial program, which Western powers suspect is aimed at developing nuclear weapons.
Iran has denied the accusation, saying its nuclear program would only help generate electricity.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the new British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary David Miliband declined to make any comment on a suggestion by a senior FT editor that “If [Iran] had 3,000 centrifuges, it could conceivably get enough nuclear material for a bomb within a year.“
“While we can get into that, I don’t particularly want to. I don’t want to leave on the record that it’s necessarily 100 percent correct what you’ve said,“ the foreign secretary said.

DAMASCUS, Syria, July 9--Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced that talks with Hamas are possible, provided it accepts five preconditions.
The conditions were submitted in a letter to Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus by Mohammad Jasem Al-Saqr, speaker of the transitional Arab parliament, QODSNA reported.
Abbas’s conditions are: Hamas reconsideration of what they call ’revolution’ in Gaza, recognizing the legitimacy of Palestinian Authority, recognizing Salam Fayyad’s emergency government, apologizing to the Palestinians and the international community over the recent disputes and agreeing to early parliamentarian elections.
Al-Saqr said it’s unlikely that Hamas would accept these conditions.
“It is unlikely that Hamas would accept the preconditions but the Arab parliament will do its best to end disputes among Palestinians,“ he said.