US warns Iran to meet nuke deal deadline

Responding to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's defiance over a year-end deadline to accept a uranium-swap deal, Gibbs said while Ahmadinejad "may not recognize ...the deadline that looms, but that is a very real deadline for the international community."
Ahmadinejad appeared on TV earlier in the day, dismissing the US backed deadline for Iran to accept a deal for swapping enriched uranium with nuclear fuel.
"(You should) know that if we wanted to build bombs, we would have enough courage to announce that we were making bombs," Ahmadinejad said.
"The problem is that the US seeks to dominate the Middle East but the Iranian nation is an obstacle," and issues such as Iran's nuclear program were nothing but "pretexts," he said.
The United States and its Western allies have been accusing Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons under the disguise of civilian nuclear power. Iran has denied the accusation and stressed its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes.
Under a draft deal brokered by UN nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), most of Iran's existing low-grade enriched uranium would be shipped to Russia and France by the end of the year, where it would be processed into fuel rods with the purity of 20 percent.
The higher-level enriched uranium would be transported back to Iran to be used in the research reactor in Tehran for the manufacture of medical radioisotopes.
Iran has rejected the deal, demanding a simultaneous exchange between low and higher level enriched uranium inside the country; Kazinform cites China Daily.
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