Eurasia Press & News

KABUL, Afghanistan – The International Committee of the Red Cross has established contact with the armed group that kidnapped four of its workers but no progress has been made, officials said Friday.

As of Friday, Sept. 28, 2007, at least 375 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures Sept. 22, 2007.

Undersecretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Javad Vaeedi rejected reports about the existence of a secret nuclear center in his country as baseless.

The stances voiced by the Iranian president during his address to the United Nations General Assembly was a source of pride for the world of Islam, Tehran’s provisional Friday Prayers leader Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said here today.

Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, in a meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York, said that the whole world endorses the righteousness of Ahmadinejad’s address to the US Columbia University.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks at the US Columbia University underlined the righteousness and truthfulness of the Islamic Republic’s stances.

Commander of the Qods Corps of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) General Ghasem Soleymani warned West that any kind of military invasion of the Islamic Republic is doomed to defeat and failure.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki met his Romanian counterpart Adrian Cioroianu on the sidelines of the 62nd annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Russia and China refuse to discuss possible new sanctions against Iran until the UN nuclear agency reports on Tehran’s answers to a series of questions about its past nuclear work at the end of the year, France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said.

Oil and other petroleum futures surged amid supply concerns sparked by a decline in crude inventories at a key Oklahoma terminal.