Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said Friday that the country neither believes in atomic bombs nor is it seeking to develop such weapons.

The Leader said the continuation of allegations by the West that the country is pursuing military objectives in its civilian nuclear program signals that the propaganda campaign against Iran has failed.

Iran has announced many times, he said, that its fundamentals and religious principles consider weapons of mass destruction as “illegal and haraam” — meaning forbidden and prohibited according to Islamic rules.

The West accuses Iran, a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of seeking a nuclear weapon. Tehran, however, rejects the allegation and says its program is aimed at the civilian applications of the technology.

Iran in no way believes in an atomic bomb, and it does not seek one, Ayatollah Khamenei said.

The Leader made the remarks during the inauguration ceremony of Iran’s first domestically-built destroyer.

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=118988&sectionid=351020101

Iranian researchers have announced the birth of Iran and the Middle East’s first transgenic animals in the Rouyan Research Institute in Isfahan.

A transgenic animal is one that carries a foreign gene, constructed using recombinant DNA methodology, in its genome. Sheep and goats produced through this method express foreign proteins in their milk and are, therefore, considered valuable sources of protein for human therapy.

Such animals are commonly produced in countries such as the US, France, the UK, Japan, Denmark, Canada, Scotland, the Netherlands, and China to extract alpha-antitrypsin, plasminogen activating factor, factor VIII, fibrinogen, lactoalbumin, lactoferrin, human albumin, collagen I and II, and monoclonal antibodies from their milk.

The two Iranian transgenic kids named ‘Shangoul’ and ‘Mangoul’, the leading characters of a famous traditional children’s story in Iran, were born in Rouyan Institute on Saturday morning.

“The two kids are in a good health condition,” said Hamid Gourabi, the head of Rouyan Research Institute.

Tests revealed high concentrations of human factor IX, an anticoagulant agent used to treat patients with hemophilia B, in their blood. More time, however, is needed to study the availability of the factor in their milk.

A lamb named ‘Royana’, a kid named ‘Hanna’ and two calves named ‘Bonyana’ and ‘Tamina’ were the first animals successfully cloned in the country.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=117456&sectionid=3510208

Iranian skier Marjan Kalhor will be the first woman to represent Iran at next month’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

The Iranian skier managed to earn 112 points in slalom and 124 points in giant slalom.

Three other Iranians, Pouria Saveh-Shemshaki, Hossein Saveh-Shemshaki and Seyyed Sattar Seyd had already earned Winter Olympic berths.

The 2010 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XXI Olympic Winter Games or the 21st Winter Olympics, will be held on February 12-28 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

It will be the third Winter Olympics hosted by Canada, and the first by the province of British Columbia.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=117213&sectionid=3510211

Iran’s first 3-D film The Secret of Taran Desert will premiere at the 28th edition of the Fajr International Film Festival.

Directed by Hatef Alimardani and Mohammad Lotfali, the film is the first 3-D production with real characters, the Tehran Times reported.

According to Iran’s Shokufa Films company, the film has been produced using the same techniques employed in the production of Harry Potter and the Spider Man series.

Taraneh Alidousti, Reza Shafiee-Jam and Arzhang Amirfazli are the main actors of the fantasy film.

The 28th Fajr Film Festival will be held from Jan. 25 to Feb. 4, 2010 in the capital city of Tehran.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=114313&sectionid=351020105

Twitter has been hit by an embarrassing security breach.

A group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army managed to redirect Twitter users to its own site displaying a political message.

Twitter said the attack had been carried out by getting at the servers that tell web browsers where to find particular sites.

The site said it would start an investigation into what allowed the “unplanned downtime” to take place.

Address books

Twitter was hit by the security breach at 2200 PCT (0600 GMT) which led to users being redirected to a page showing a message declaring it had been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army.

It showed an image of Farsi text overlaid on a green flag carrying the name of the third Shi’i Imam, Imam Husayn (AS).

It also included a poem in Persian which said: “We shall strike if the leader orders, we shall lose our heads if the leader wishes.”

Also included were the words: “Those that wage fight on the path of God win.”

Some have suggested the attack is retaliation over the use made of Twitter during protests surrounding the Iranian election.

Soon after the images appeared Twitter went offline. About an hour later the site came back to life and appeared to be working normally.

A post on the Twitter status blog said: “We are working to recovery from an unplanned downtime and will update more as we learn the cause of this outage.”

Later, Twitter admitted that its DNS records had been “temporarily compromised”. It said it was looking into what happened.

THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMYiRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To…. NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA? WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST Take Care. Twitter hack text

DNS, the Domain Name System, acts as the address books for the internet. It tells browsing software where to find the computers hosting a particular webpage.

By attacking the DNS servers the hackers were able to re-direct Twitter users.

“These changes mean that when you or I type a website address into our browsers, we are directed not to the real website but to a second site, set up by the hackers, in this case the ‘Iranian Cyber Army’,” said Rik Ferguson from security firm Trend Micro. “This has the net effect of making it look like, in this example, servers belonging to Twitter were compromised when in reality that was not the case.”

Mr Ferguson said such attacks were typically a result of politically motivated hacking or “hacktivism”.

However, he added, some cyber criminals also try the ruse using a replica of a website in an attempt to trick people into handing over login details.

The attack is the latest in a series of security embarrassments that Twitter has suffered.

In August, Twitter was offline for two hours as it struggled to cope with an attack aimed at a Russian blogger.

In July many of Twitter’s confidential business documents were stolen in a hack attack and published online.

Many spammers and scammers are also targeting the service in a bid to hijack accounts and piggyback on the popularity of some Twitter users.

An Iranian university has introduced a scholarship to support Muslim women who have been banned from studying in European universities for observing the Islamic Hijab.

The scholarship at Kashan University is named after Marwa el-Sherbini, an Egyptian woman who was killed in Germany in July for wearing a headscarf.

“Kashan University will award the scholarship to women who have been banned from studying in universities, especially in Europe, only for observing Hijab (Islamic dress code),” Seyyed Javad Sadatinejad, the Head of Kashan University told Fars news agency on Wednesday.

The circumstances of the death of el-Sherbini, who was pregnant at the time of her murder, resulted in widespread reactions.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=113338&sectionid=351020105

A man who as a baby survived a chemical attack on the Iraqi city of Halabja in 1988 has been reunited with his mother.

Ali Pour was taken to Iran by Iranian soldiers who stormed the Kurdish city days after the gas attack by Saddam Hussein’s forces.

Mr Pour, now 21, had to wait for the results of a DNA test before it could be determined whose son he was.

His mother, whose husband and six other children had all died in the attack, fainted when she heard.

Five thousand people were killed in the Halabja attack, considered one of the worst atrocities of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Five other families were waiting to hear from a judge whether Mr Pour was their missing son, but Fatima Mohammed Salih, 58, was found to be his real mother.

“I’m in a dream,” Mr Pour said as he comforted her, according to Associated Press news agency.

Mr Pour had been adopted by an Iranian woman and named Ali.

I wonder if it is a dream or a gift from God Fatima Mohammed Salih

He grew up in eastern Iran speaking Persian, although he always knew he was from Halabja.

Co-operation between the Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish regional governments led to this week’s reunification - the first time a long-lost son of Halabja is known to have been reunited with his family.

Mr Pour, know as Zimnaku to his birth mother, has said he plans to stay in the region to study and learn the local language.

He is proud of his Kurdish identity, and is going to move in with his mother, he said.

“I wonder if it is a dream or a gift from God,” his mother said.

Forty-one people - children at the time of the attack, are still registered as missing, the assistant chief of the Directorate of the Martyrs of Halabja said, according to AP.

As a four-month-old baby, Ali Pour managed to survive three days after the gas attack while his family died around him.

His mother remembers the gas burning her children, collapsing herself and then waking in a Tehran hospital.

An Iranian woman offered to adopt him.

When Mr Pour’s adoptive mother died in a car accident four months ago, he said: “I felt lonely and I felt a strange feeling calling me to return to the arms of my relatives.

“I decided to go back.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8397547.stm

After Israel released photos it said proved that a huge shipment of weapons for Hezbollah came from Tehran, Iranian news agencies publish evidence showing that the photos are forged.

Israeli naval sources recently claimed that they found a large cache of Iranian-made arms when they stormed a vessel near Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea.

They claimed that the ship was heading for the Hezbollah resistance movement, either in Lebanon or Syria.

Iran instantly dismissed the claims, issuing a statement with which it condemned Israel’s many acts of piracy in international waters.

But the Israeli government persisted in its accusations, releasing what it claimed to be photos and documents in an effort to implicate the Iranian government in the matter.

The photos and documents were carried by a number of leading newspapers in the West, including The Los Angeles Times.

“The Israeli regime has made a fool of itself with regards to what it claims to be evidence that Iran was sending weapons to Hezbollah,” IRNA news agency said on Monday.

“Take a close look at the photos, one of which merely shows a couple of boxes labeled ‘Ministry of Sepah’ without providing corroborative evidence that they came from Iran, and you will see the huge gaffe committed by Israel,” it added.

The article explained that Iran’s Ministry of Sepah gave its place to the Defense Ministry more than twenty years ago. “So this begs the question of what the emblem of a nonexistent body was doing on the cargo?”

“It seems the American daily has failed to get its facts straight, or on the other hand, maybe it is getting its cue from the Israeli leadership,” said the news agency.

“In any case, the newspaper should know that if a country plans to send a secret arms cargo to another, it will not brand the shipment with a full description of the batch.”

“Tel Aviv’s baseless claims [about Iran providing Hezbollah with military] are evidently designed to justify another Israeli attack on Lebanon.”

Yadollah Javani, the Director of the Political Bureau of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), said last week that the claims were intended to divert attention from a UN report detailing Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

“These accusations are nothing but an Israeli ruse to deflect international attention from the Goldstone report as they move closer to the war crimes tribunal [at the International Criminal Court (ICC)],” noted Brigadier General Javani.

He was referring to the 575-page report headed by Jewish South African judge Richard Goldstone, which detailed numerous acts of war crimes and human rights violations committed by Israeli soldiers during their incursion into Gaza.

“Israeli officials have a longstanding tendency to level baseless accusations against others when they are in serious trouble,” he added.

Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri also dismissed the charges, questioning why the Israelis had failed to detain the crew, if the ship was supposedly carrying weapons.

Berri said that while Hezbollah has the right to obtain arms from “anywhere in the world,” it is pretty obvious that Israel made the claims to fudge the issue of its war crimes in Gaza.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=111410&sectionid=351020101

US federal prosecutors have taken legal action to seize four mosques from a charity foundation, saying they are suspected of having ties with the Tehran government.

The prosecutors are also planning to seize the non-profit group’s 36-story building on Fifth Avenue in New York.

The seizure of the places of worship is seen as a blow to the very first amendment to the United States Constitution in which freedom of worship is enshrined and guaranteed as an inalienable right of all its citizens.

On Thursday, the US President, Barack Obama, renewed Washington’s economic sanctions against Iran for another year despite talks of trying to seek a ‘new beginning’ with the Islamic Republic.

“Our relations with Iran have not yet returned to normal,” the US President said.

The US sanctions are engineered to mount pressure on Iran in an attempt to halt its nuclear program.

Tehran has repeatedly declared that it will not give up the Iranian nation’s legitimate nuclear rights under Western pressure.

Iran has been under US sanction since the 1979 Islamic Revolution toppled the country’s US-backed monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=111169&sectionid=351020101

Iranian researchers have successfully managed to develop a safe and natural substitute for artificial sweeteners from an herb known as Stevia.

Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni, an herb which grows wild in parts of Paraguay and Brazil has been used to sweeten a native beverage called ‘mate’ since pre-Columbian times.

“Stevia is a safe natural substitute for sugar and artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sodium saccharine and cyclamate,” Mohammad-Reza Mofid Mohaqheq, a scientist involved in the project held at Isfahan’s Agricultural Jihad Organization, told IRIB News Agency.

Extracted from the Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni plant, the new lower calorie product is not only non-absorbable and non-digestible but also does not contribute to side effects commonly reported following the use of artificial sweeteners, said Mohaqheq.

He added that the product can lower blood sugar levels and blood pressure in the consumers.

Compared to refined sugar, crude stevia leaves and herbal powders are 10-15 times sweeter, said Mohaqheq, adding that the refined Stevia extracts, known as ’steviosides’, are 250-300 times sweeter than table sugar.

Mohaqheq said Iran would be able to mass produce the sweetener from this plant in the coming year whereafter the product would be available on the market.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=111268&sectionid=3510212