"This lie has now become clear and obvious, and the Iranian nation will not keep silent ... and people from different walks of life in Iran are unanimously stressing country's access to the nuclear technology," Substitute Friday Prayers Leader of Tehran, Mohammad Emami Kashani, was quoted as saying in a sermon.

Kashani said the United States is actually intended to "undermine the world of Islam and to make the Islamic establishment exhausted" by picking up the accusation over Iran's nuclear program, stressing that the (Iranian) "nation avoids any hesitation and is stressing its right."

Kashani's comments came as a statement on the Iranian nuclear issue drafted by Britain and France is being discussed among the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.

The statement sets a two-week deadline for Iran to suspend all activities for building nuclear fuel reactor and to fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but Russia and China fear that tough rhetoric of the statement would radicalize the tension.

The 15-member U.N. Security Council had indefinitely postponed a meeting originally due on Tuesday to discuss the Iranian nuclear issue, a move aimed at giving the "Permanent Five" enough time to reach consensus.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Wednesday in Qatar that even the Security Council can not pressurize Iran to give in on its nuclear program.

On March 8, the IAEA handed over the Iran's nuclear issue to the U.N. Security Council after the agency's board of governors meeting.

Iran has denounced the involvement of the Security Council, vowing never to give in to pressure and bully.

"There are discussions going on, and clearly, we haven't reached a final agreement on text. So we're going to have to continue with our diplomacy," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said at a briefing.

"We believe it's moving in the right direction," McCormack said.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has expressed optimism that the United States will find the right language on this issue, McCormack said.

The blast occurred at around 1:15 p.m. (1015 GMT) outside the Saad bin Abiwaquas mosque in Khalis, a town 80 km northeast of Baghdad, said the source from the Joint Coordination Center in Baquba.

The bombing caused many casualties as worshippers were leaving the mosque after midday prayers, he added.

Also on Friday, the Iraqi police found five bodies in execution-style in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad.

The latest deaths brought the number of bodies found in Baghdadon Friday to 12.

Earlier in the day, the police said that seven bodies were found at the entrance of the al-Bunoug neighborhood in northern Baghdad.

A wave of sectarian reprisal attacks between the main Iraqi Shiite and Sunni communities swept the country in the wake of a bombing attack that destroyed a major Shiite shrine in northern Iraq on Feb. 22.

It comes from the Iraq section of a congressionally mandated annual compilation, "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices," produced by the State Department and released at a press conference March 8.

The main focus of the report for Iraq, as with all other nations listed, is on that government's own human rights record. But the report also briefly catalogues the overall atmosphere in Iraq in order to provide context.

Here are some salient excerpts.

· In Iraq, "A climate of extreme violence in which people were killed for political and other reasons continued."

· "Insurgents and terrorists killed thousands of citizens … Using intimidation and violence, they kidnapped and killed government officials and workers, common citizens, party activists participating in the electoral process, civil society activists, members of security forces, and members of the armed forces, as well as foreigners."

· "Bombings, executions, killings, kidnappings, shootings, and intimidation were a daily occurrence throughout all regions and sectors of society. An illustrative list of these attacks, even a highly selective one, could scarcely reflect the broad dimension of the violence."

· "Bombings took thousands of civilian lives across the country during the year."

· "Former regime elements, local and foreign fighters, and terrorists waged guerrilla warfare and a terrorist campaign of violence impacting every aspect of life. Killings, kidnappings, torture, and intimidation were fueled by political grievances and ethnic and religious tensions and were supported by parts of the population."

· "Insurgents and terrorists targeted anyone whose death or disappearance would advance their cause and, particularly, anyone suspected of being connected to government-affiliated security forces."

· "All sectors of society suffered from the continued wave of kidnappings. Kidnappers often killed their victims despite the payment of ransom. The widespread nature of this phenomenon precluded reliable statistics."

In several important respects, this report contradicts the thesis of the current White House public relations campaign on Iraq - to convince Americans that the "reality" in Iraq is far better than the constant stream of bad news they see on their televisions every night.

If anything, the State Department's candid assessments would seem to indicate that things might be far worse than the press is currently able to report.

But the State Department is not alone. A recent assessment by the U.S. Agency for International Development painted a similar picture of Iraq. It was included as a part of a bid solicitation seeking contractors for a 28-month effort to implement "a social and economic stabilization program" in 10 Iraqi cities.

First reported by The Washington Post earlier this year, the Jan. 2 assessment summed things up this way, according to a copy:

"Former regime elements, foreign fighters and Islamic extremists continue to conduct terrorist attacks with devastating effect upon Iraqi civilians … Moreover, these attacks significantly damage the country's infrastructure and cause a tide of adverse economic and social effects that ripple across Iraq."

Beyond the havoc unleashed by terrorists, the USAID assessment also stated that "criminal elements within Iraqi society have had almost free reign."

Although this report might not have been intended for widespread public consumption, its conclusions are even more interesting given that USAID has been perhaps the most notoriously upbeat agency inside the federal government when it comes to reporting publicly on Iraq.

Respected Washington analyst Anthony Cordesman, of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, once suggested that USAID's Iraq reports bordered on pure propaganda, calling its first-year assessment of reconstruction efforts inside the country (released in 2004), "little more than 25 pages of glossy, self-congratulatory rubbish."

Beyond the assessments being released publicly by the administration, the depressing weight of the ongoing violence in Iraq also offers evidence enough that it would be nearly impossible for the news media to over-emphasize how bad things really are there.

According to statistics compiled by the Brookings Institution, bombings alone claimed an average of 62 lives each and every week during the last 12 full months in Iraq (excluding the 167 people killed in bombings this month, as of March 19).

That means every week, for the last 52 weeks, bombings in Iraq averaged a yield of more fatalities than the infamous London transit bombings in July 2005.

Or consider the numbers this way: In just the past 10 months, more people died in Iraq from terrorist bombings than all of those who died during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S.

In all, Brookings says bombings alone (it only counts a bombing if it kills at least three people) have so far killed 5,746 people in Iraq and wounded 11,473 as of March 19.

Thousands more, of course, have been killed or disappeared by other means.

The French intelligence and the CIA used a third-country intermediary to get information about Iraq's weapon programs and Saddam's inner circles from Naji Sabri, when he served as the Iraqi foreign minister before Saddam's government was toppled by U.S. troops in 2003, the report quoted former U.S. intelligence officials as saying.

In September 2002, the French arranged a meeting between a CIA middleman and Sabri at a hotel room in New York, when the latter was attending a UN. meeting there.

At the meeting, the then Iraqi foreign minister sold intelligence on Iraq's alleged secret weapon programs to the CIA for 100,000 U.S. dollars.

He told the CIA's middleman that Saddam possessed chemical weapons and wanted a nuclear bomb, but needed much more time to build one than the CIA estimate of several months to a year.

The information provided by Sabri was thought to be more accurate than the CIA's own assessment on Saddam's arsenal.

However, Saddam's alleged nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs were proved to be nonexistent after the war.

Sabri later broke off the secret contacts with U.S. intelligence agents after refusing to accept the CIA's proposal that he should defect to the United States and publicly renounce Saddam.

After the U.S. troops toppled the Saddam regime, Sabri was neither arrested nor included in the notorious "deck of cards" of the U.S. military's most wanted Iraqi suspects.

He now lives in Qatar teaching journalism. During a telephone interview with U.S. media Wednesday, the former Iraqi top diplomat flatly denied being a CIA spy.

A study by the epidemiologist John Urquhart, to be presented at a conference at City Hall in London marking the 20th anniversary of the disaster, suggests that infant deaths may have risen by 11 per cent between 1986 and 1989 in those areas compared with 4 per cent in other areas, a correlation that Mr Urquhart describes as very significant.

Mr Urquhart - the author of a previous study which suggested that 2,000 more children than normal died before their first birthday between 1986 and 1989 - obtained infant death figures from 1983 to 1992 for 200 hospital districts across Britain. Areas across which cloud passed such as Liverpool, Bradford, Leicestershire, and Bristol, showed higher than average infant mortality which, he suggests, cannot entirely be explained by social factors.

The study also suggests that a downwards infant mortality trend was interrupted in the four years after the disaster at the Ukrainian power station and continued to rise until 1992 in the most contaminated areas.

Mr Urquhart argues that a plume of fallout from Chernobyl arrived near the Isle of Wight and passed over Bristol into south Wales. Another plume clipped the coast of Kent and then covered most of East Anglia and part of Essex. Another worked its way from east London to Hertfordshire, resurfacing in parts of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire.

Parts of West Yorkshire and most of the West Midlands, Wales, Merseyside, Lancashire, and Cumbria were significantly affected.

Mr Urquhart, who gave evidence in the 1980s to the Government investigation led by Sir Douglas Black into evidence of a leukaemia cluster near Sellafield, Cumbria, said: "Previous research has established that there has been an increase in thyroid cancers in the young in the north of England for which Chernobyl is the probable cause.

"This new study shows that the infant mortality trend, which was otherwise downwards, rose for a period of four years in England and Wales after Chernobyl. The results based on such a large population suggest that the effect of radioactive fallout could be two orders of magnitude greater than previously suspected."