Iran postpones talks

Iran postponed crucial nuclear talks with the European Union on Wednesday in apparent anger at an exiled opposition leader's visit to the European Parliament, but the meeting will go ahead on Thursday.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who last month put to Tehran a package of incentives offered by major powers for it to give up uranium enrichment, voiced surprise and impatience after a phone call with the chief Iranian nuclear negotiator. "I was surprised to hear that Ali Larijani ... has decided at the last minute to postpone his trip," Solana said.
"I have made clear to the Iranians and to Dr Larijani that we want to proceed rapidly to examine the ideas I put to him early last month," he added in a statement.
Solana said he would meet Larijani in Brussels on Thursday and again on July 11, keeping up Western pressure for a clear answer before leaders of the Group of Eight industrial powers meet in St Petersburg on July 15.
Larijani's deputy, Javad Vaeedi, told Reuters the Iranian negotiator had accepted an invitation to a private dinner with Solana on Thursday, and they would hold official talks in Brussels next Tuesday. He gave no reason for the postponement.
But an EU diplomat said the Iranians had cited a visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on the same day by the leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, described by Tehran as a terrorist group.
Asked whether the visit by Maryam Rajavi was the reason for the sudden postponement, an Iranian official told Reuters: "It could have had a negative impact on the meeting."
Rajavi, who is based in France and whose organisation is the political wing of the outlawed People's Mujahideen armed group, was invited to the legislature by a cross-party group of EU lawmakers who call themselves "Friends of a Free Iran".
Rajavi held a news conference at the EU legislature in the eastern French city but cancelled plans to meet parliamentary groups in what she said was an attempt to avoid giving the Iranian authorities an excuse to stop the nuclear talks.
"I wish to remove any pretext that the mullahs might have," she told journalists.
But Rajavi, whose group was the first to publish details of Iran's clandestine nuclear enrichment programme in 2002, still compared Western efforts to find a solution with Iran to moves to placate Nazi leader Adolf Hitler before World War Two.
"The solution to this crisis is neither appeasement nor war. It is to be found in democratic change in Iran," she said, referring to Europe's bid in 1938 to giving Hitler part of Czechoslovakia in exchange for peace. A German Foreign Ministry spokesman told a regular briefing in Berlin there were "high expectations" for Thursday's meeting.
But diplomats say that as Russia and China are unlikely to back any UN sanctions against Iran at this stage, there was little pressure on Tehran to respond either at the Brussels meetings or before the G8 summit in Russia.