Reuters: Iran is forging ahead with a program to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons while the European Union focuses its energy on shutting down Tehran’s uranium enrichment activities, an Iranian exile said on Friday.

AFP: Iran’s Islamic regime is as “solid as a mountain” and can easily stand up to international pressure for it to abandon sensitive nuclear activities, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Friday. In a sermon at Tehran University, Iran’s top cleric accused the West of trying to bully the Islamic
republic into abandoning atomic energy technology but said its campaign did not have the backing of the wider international community.

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Aug. 19 – Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman in an interview with a Saudi newspaper on Friday stated that “Tehran is not afraid of its [nuclear”> file being sent to [the United Nations’”> Security Council”.
Hamid-Reza Asefi told the daily Okaz, “Sending Iran’s case to the Security Council will not make us abandon our peaceful nuclear activities”.

Bloomberg: Iran has continued to produce centrifuges, which are used in the uranium enrichment process, in contravention of a November 2004 agreement with the U.K., France and Germany to suspend all such activities, the exiled opposition National Council for Resistance in Iran said. Iran this month removed United Nations seals on equipment used in uranium enrichment at its Isfahan plant, after rejecting an offer from the so-called EU-3 of technology and economic incentives in
exchange for halting processing activity.