Free Republic

ASSOCIATED PRESS BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Al-Qaida in Iraq's leader, in a chilling audiotape released Thursday, called for nuclear scientists to join his group's holy war and urged insurgents to kidnap Westerners so they could be traded for a blind Egyptian sheik who is serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison. The fugitive chief of the terrorist group said experts in the fields of "chemistry, physics, electronics, media and all other sciences -- especially nuclear scientists and explosives experts" -- should join his group's jihad, or holy war, against the West. "We are in dire need of you," said the...

MOSCOW: Russia has trained 600 Iranian experts to work on its first nuclear power station, which Washington fears is being used to develop atomic weapons, the ITAR-TASS news agency reported on Wednesday. An Iranian nuclear official told the agency that the experts had undergone training at the Novovoronezh Centre in Russia, which is to prepare some 700 specialists for work in the Bushehr plant. Russia faced intense pressure from the United States over helping Iran in construction of the Bushehr reactor. The US fears that Iran could use fuel from the reactor for a programme for developing nuclear weapons. Washington...