Iran says comments made by Israel's prime minister earlier this week are a confession that the Jewish state has nuclear weapons.

In the latest edition of its magazine, the human rights group Amnesty International focuses attention on the status of human rights in three countries: Iran, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sri Lanka. VOA's Catherine Maddux reports.

Washington is welcoming a new European-sponsored draft resolution that would impose targeted UN sanctions on Iran for refusing to halt uranium enrichment.

Israel has condemned an Iranian-sponsored conference on Germany's World War II Holocaust.

The German government has summoned an Iranian diplomat in Berlin to express opposition to a planned conference on the Holocaust in Tehran next week.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday she is ready for wide-ranging dialogue with her Iranian counterpart provided Iran halts uranium enrichment and returns to negotiations on its nuclear program. Rice was responding to calls this week by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group for the United States to engage Iran and Syria to help stabilize Iraq.

Kenneth Katzman, a noted specialist on Middle East affairs at the Congressional Research Service, spoke recently with RFE/RL about events in the region. The discussion focused on promoting stability in Iraq and on U.S. relations with Iran.

The head of a center for Iran's disabled war veterans announced on November 26 that Iraq's former Ba'athist regime used chemical weapons against civilians and soldiers some 300 times in the 1980s.

Tehran has protested at the deletion by France's most famous art and antiquities museum of the word "Persian" from descriptions of the Gulf in its guides.

The U.S. will not approve Georgia's long-term energy-related cooperation with Iran, but it seems it may turn a blind eye on short-term Georgian-Iranian deals envisaging emergency gas supplies during the winter period.