Mottaki made the declaration on the sidelines of a welcoming ceremony of Armenian President Robert Kocharian who is in Iran ona two-day official visit..

"There will be no negotiations between Larijani and Solana today," the minister was quoted as saying, without giving further details.

Larijani and EU foreign policy chief Solana had been due to explore whether Iran is ready to respond to a package agreed on by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany over its nuclear issue, which demands Iran suspend uranium enrichment in return for economic and political incentives.

Meanwhile, an EU statement said that Larijani would meet Solana on Thursday and on July 11.

"I was surprised to hear that Dr. Ali Larijani has decided at the last minute to postpone his trip to Brussels as previously agreed with him to take place today," Solana said in the statement.

"I have just spoken to Dr. Larijani on the phone and we decided to meet tomorrow in Brussels, then continue the discussions on July 11," the statement added.

Western powers have recently mounted pressures on Iran, asking the country to formally respond by mid July to the six-nation package.

During a Moscow meeting last Thursday, foreign ministers of the Group of Eight industrialized countries urged Iran to give "a clear and substantive response" to the package at the upcoming meeting between Larijani and Solana.

But Larijani said on Monday that he would not give a response to the package in his meeting with Solana, saying it was not "reasonable" for the West to demand a suspension of Iran's nuclear program.

A senior U.S. official said on Monday that Iran must respond to the offer by July 12 or it would face action by the UN Security Council.

"If Iran has not responded by July 12, then I think the pressure will be enormous on the Iranians from all the international community," said U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns.

On June 6, Solana presented Iran with the package, which includes both incentives aimed at persuading Iran to suspend uranium enrichment and possible sanctions if Iran does not comply. The United States has accused Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons under a civilian front, a charge categorically denied by Tehran.

"Therefore today's trip of Mr Larijani and the accompanying delegation to Brussels was cancelled," it added.

"After the European side gave the necessary guarantees to secure the lives of the Iranian delegation, it was decided that the session would be held next Tuesday," said IRNA, quoting an informed source.

It added, however, that Larijani had "in order to show goodwill accepted a dinner invitation" for Thursday, in line with a demand from the EU's top diplomat Javier Solana.

Earlier, Solana rejected Iranian attempts to buy time to respond to the international offer on its nuclear programme, giving Larijani one more day to meet for talks that were due to have taken place on Wednesday.

Officially, Iran decided to delay the Brussels meeting due to the possible presence in the Belgian capital of a loathed exiled opposition leader, according to Iran's ISNA news agency.

The reference was to Maryam Rajavi, leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a banned opposition group connected to the
Iraq-based armed People's Mujahedeen.

The group is also outlawed in the EU and the United States.

Rajavi, based in France and one of the fiercest critics of Iran's clerical regime, cancelled a planned address to the European Parliament, saying that she did not want it serve as a "pretext" to halt the nuclear talks.

The UN Security Council is awaiting Iran's answer to an offer of economic and political incentives in exchange for a suspension of uranium enrichment. Tehran could face sanctions if it rejects the proposal.

"I had made clear to the Iranians and to Dr Larijani that we want to proceed rapidly to examine together the ideas I put to him early last month," Solana said, after the Iranians delayed the talks at the last minute.

The EU diplomat's spokeswoman, Cristina Gallach, said that Solana told Larijani that "waiting another week was impossible" and that "there had to be a contact before that".

A further round of talks has already been pencilled in for next Tuesday, the spokeswoman said.

Leaders of the Group of Eight major industrial powers had been expecting to examine Iran's response at a meeting in Saint Petersburg starting on July 15, but Iran has resisted all attempts to set a calendar.

Rice said Wednesday that "we still intend to have a substantive response from Iran before the middle of July when the heads of state will meet in Saint Petersburg...

"If, indeed, Iran is trying to stall, it's not going to work. The international community has said that we need to get an answer, an indication of where Iran is going with this," she said.

Relations between Washington and Caracas are tense after the United States banned arms sales, citing Chavez's close ties to Iran and Cuba. U.S. officials say the populist Chavez is destabilizing the region, a charge he rejects as propaganda.

Chavez, a former army officer, is seeking to buy 24 of the high-performance Sukhoi fighters to replace his government's F-16 jets in a deal analysts estimate would cost nearly $1 billion. He has already bought Kalashnikov rifles and attack helicopters from Russia.

"The U.S. government has sabotaged us, failing to meet contracts and agreements, delaying or not sending parts for U.S.-made aircraft," Chavez said. "See now how our air force is recovering operations, especially with these Sukhoi, the most powerful combat jets in the world."

Joining Chavez at the ceremony was Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Russian who designed the original weapon to bear his name, the AK-47. Venezuela has purchased 100,000 new AK-103 rifles to replace its military's aging FAL weapons.

Critics question why Venezuela would need an advanced jet like the Sukhoi and U.S. officials, who opposed sales of Spanish and Brazilian arms to Caracas, have already said they will seek to dissuade Russia from the sale.

Chavez, who says he is battling U.S. imperialism, travels to Moscow at the end of this month to sign a deal for the combat aircraft. He has curbed military cooperation with the United States and this year expelled a U.S. naval attache he charged was spying.

Chavez often accuses the White House of preparing to invade his oil exporting country and has ordered troops and civilian reserves to train for a resistance war. U.S. officials say that is merely saber-rattling before elections in December.

"This is a charter for people who have a lot to hide. I think there is great scope for abuse of this legislation," said Mr McAleese.

"People who have got away with wrongdoing in the past are now being told they can no longer use the libel laws. So those in the business of dodgy libel laws are always going to use the next action available to them, which is this privacy law.

"This is what happened in the UK - judges became less tolerant of libel actions and juries became more astute about the size of the awards, so people have started using privacy and European law."

Mr McAleese said the body of common law in Ireland, like the UK, already amounts to a privacy law and there was no need to introduce new proposals.

The proposed new privacy legislation, which has taken editors by surprise, was announced late on Tuesday night in conjunction with proposals to introduce a statutory press council and reforms to the 1961 libel and slander laws.

Proposed changes to Irish libel laws have been welcomed by the newspaper industry, but there are fears that the privacy legislation is flawed.

"The notion that this is being brought in as a quid pro quo for reforming libel law is slightly repugnant," said Mr McAleese.

"If you look at the cabinet, there are very few who haven't resorted to litigation in their time. The idea that there can only be reforms to the libel law if there is a privacy law raises questions."

He added that the proposed privacy legislation was draconian and will enable individuals to launch privacy actions if they are suffering distress as a result of phone calls, general inquiries and robust questioning by journalists.

"Incredibly, they can also apply for this to be heard in private," he said.

Seamus Dooley, the Irish secretary of the National Union of Journalists, has called on the government to delay the introduction of any privacy legislation until the new statutory press council beds down.

"That this was published without any consultation whatsoever is amazing. There needs to be a public debate on what privacy is and what the full implications for the press are," Mr Dooley said.

"There is a danger that the benefits from new libel laws will be nullified by the injunctive powers of the privacy law."

Actions that will be deemed to be breach of privacy include any form of surveillance, disclosure of material obtained by surveillance, the use of a person's likeness for financial gain without consent, the disclosure of letters, diaries, medical records or other personal documents and harassment.

Even material already in the public domain or information passed on to a third party without a person's consent could be deemed a breach of privacy under the new proposals.

The new libel law, also announced on Tuesday, is designed to stop court cases similar to those brought by Jeffrey Archer or Jonathan Aitken, who ended up in prison after the bases for their libel actions were found to be untrue.

Under the proposals, litigants will have to submit a sworn affidavit and verifiable evidence to support it to demonstrate the offending article is not true.

The press council will also be available to give redress in a similar fashion to the UK's Press Complaints Commission, but its sanctions will be legally binding and its board dominated by representatives of the public.

A nationwide protest movement has sprung up over plans to expel thousands of illegal immigrant families whose children are in French schools, with left-wing politicians, media and sports stars among tens of thousands to sign a petition pledging to protect them from what they call a "manhunt."

The children are from families who entered France illegally and were facing expulsion with their parents at the end of the school year, but campaigners say that most of them know no other country and that deportation would be inhumane.

Bowing to pressure last month, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy - the centre-right frontrunner for next year's presidential election - told regional authorities to reconsider cases on the basis of new criteria, such as whether a child has "strong ties" to France.

Thousands of parents have since been queuing up outside processing centres - clutching their children's report cards and sports trophies - in hope of qualifying for residency papers.

The new requirements include showing that one of their children was born in France or arrived before the age of 13, has been at school in France for two years, or has no link with the country of his or her parents.

Blanc said 2,300 families had so far been given appointments, with more to come, although he warned that not everyone would qualify.

Because French schools are obliged to take in children regardless of whether they are in the country legally, the government says that to give residency rights to all pupils' families would encourage illegal immigration.

The Education Without Borders Network (RESF), which has coordinated the protest campaign, estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 children of illegal immigrant families are in the French school system.

RESF says the government's move concerns only a fraction of families facing expulsion and has vowed to keep up the pressure.

Blanc said the campaigners' fears that children would be tracked down over the summer months were "illegitimate" and "verging on slanderous" towards the police, saying officers in the capital did not arrest minors.

Under fire from critics who draw a parallel with the hunt for Jewish children during World War II, the government has symbolically appointed lawyer Arno Klarsfeld - son of the French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld - as mediator with the families concerned.

Blanc stressed there were no plans for a blanket amnesty of France's estimated 200,000 to 400,000 clandestine immigrants - as under the Socialist government in 1997-1998 when 80,000 people benefited from the measure.

Under Sarkozy's authority, France has vowed to step up the rhythm of illegal immigrant deportations to 26,000 this year.

Parliament also last month approved a new immigration law - attacked by the left-wing opposition - which seeks to encourage more qualified workers to come to France and tightens entrance rules for other foreigners.

Milton knew these facts because he had met Galileo, "grown old, a prisoner of the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought". Talking to Galileo and other Italian authors, he was proud to find they looked to England as a land of freedom, and was disturbed by their bleak analysis of "the servile condition into which learning among them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits".

Milton's claim that censorship and religion killed the Italian Renaissance contrasts with modern intellectuals' readiness to doubt democracy, and even envy those who live in totalitarian regimes. In the 1970s, western writers wondered aloud if censorship was a creative goad for Czech novelists and poets. Today, we hesitate to defend free speech unequivocally and respect its religious enemies.

The thing is, Milton was right. The Italian Renaissance was killed by the counter-reformation. It is a disturbing historical example of what can happen when religion gets its own way. Yet to see this, we need to see how Galileo himself was a Renaissance man - not a dry scientist, but one who was formed by Italian Renaissance art.

Galileo was the first person to practise the scientific method, never accepting any theory until it was confirmed by experiment. In the 16th century Copernicus hypothesised that instead of being at the centre of the universe, the Earth went round the sun. But Copernicus didn't offer any evidence; that came in the 1600s when Galileo made a telescope - not the first, but the best thus far - and turned it on the sky. He discovered sensational things: that the moon has a rough surface like the Earth's, disproving the medieval belief that celestial bodies are "perfect"; that Jupiter has moons, suggesting that the Earth with its moon is merely an ordinary planet.

The subversive implications of Galileo's observations were obvious. After he published his illustrated report The Starry Messenger in 1610, he had to work in dialogue with the church. He was so famous he negotiated at the highest levels. Galileo got permission - contested at his trial - to explain the Copernican theory, so long as he did not endorse it. He wrote his 1632 Dialogue, too, in a way that formally obeys the church, giving the Copernican view through the mouth of a speaker who is answered by a champion of God's intelligent design. And yet his true beliefs blaze through. The defender of church-sanctioned philosophy is called Simplicio, "simpleton"; the book that brought the Inquisition down on Galileo is an act of deliberate transgression, dripping with contempt.

The fate of Galileo is one of the iconic stories of modern times. We think of it as a story about science. But in Renaissance Italy, there was no separation between art and science. Artists were at the forefront of scientific research - Leonardo da Vinci championed experiment a century before Galileo, and even anticipated, without a telescope, his observation that light reflected off the Earth illuminates the moon. Galileo refers to Da Vinci's Precepts on Painting, which means he had access to Da Vinci's notebooks. He praises Raphael and Titian, and uses Michelangelo as an image of the mystery of creation.

Galileo's science is itself visual. What is his great innovation? His use of the telescope. He put visual observation at the centre of science. His book The Starry Messenger tells its news in pictures, with engravings of the moon based on Galileo's watercolours. It has pages full of pin-point black engravings of stars. You can see it on display next to Da Vinci's notes at the British Library. And this week an exhibition opens at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, The Starry Messenger, which takes Galileo's book as a starting point for an exploration of cosmic imagery in art.

Galileo was an art lover - and when he came before the Inquisition in 1633, he was prosecuted by other art lovers. The centrality of this story to the world of baroque Rome has been censored from cultural history. Galileo was confronted by the Barberini family, patrons of Bernini, of the florid ecstatic style of the baroque. Maffeo Barberini, Pope Urban VIII, commissioned Bernini's Disney excesses that give the finishing touch to the interior of St Peter's; and it was this Barberini Pope who took personal offence at Galileo's Dialogue, believing some of Simplicio's words parodied him. Which they doubtless do.

When Galileo was silenced, you could see this as the triumph of the baroque way of seeing the world over the scientific tradition of the Renaissance. Look at Roman baroque art in this light. Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is an image of the universe: those blades of gold light that shoot from heaven manifest a divine truth that irradiates awkward evidence.

Galileo's ideas initially fascinated painters; Guercino depicts a telescope in his picture of the Sleeping Endymion. But with the condemnation of Galileo, art rejected science. The frescoes of counter-reformation Rome, overwhelming in their abundance and trompe l'oeil cleverness, create fictions of a divine universe, a mystical conception of space and time.

Baroque Rome is fantastic - but it killed Italian art. The effervescence of Bernini led nowhere. The art of baroque painters owes nothing to observation, nothing to that loving examination of the visible that makes the art of Da Vinci or Titian, and the science of Galileo, so alive. Baroque art looses itself from nature and, for a moment, that is liberating - but compare any of it with the Renaissance and it is a fall.

There is an exception. Caravaggio died just before the appearance of The Starry Messenger. His art is connected uncannily with the science of Galileo. Caravaggio restates, in his shocking art, the Renaissance scientific depiction of nature. (In fact, it seems very likely that he used some kind of lens or camera obscura, as David Hockney argues in his book Secret Knowledge.)

Caravaggio helps us understand how Christians felt when Galileo proved the Earth was nothing special. In his Boy Bitten by a Lizard in the National Gallery, a street kid is investigating some fruit. The reflection of - apparently - a window and door in the glass vase alludes to optics, and makes me think of telescopes. The boy's curiosity leads to a nasty discovery. I can't help seeing the boy as a scientist, an investigator of nature. He explores the real world of tangible things, just as Galileo did - and finds something that makes him recoil in pain and horror.

In 1633 Italy pulled back in fear from Galileo's evidence that the Earth did not stand still at the centre of the universe, that celestial bodies were not perfect, that it looked very much as if our world was just one body among others. Nowadays, the knowledge a religious world view has to confront is even more unsettling, yet we live in a new baroque age of extravagant, and violent, religious assertion. We have lessons to learn from the way religion, as Milton saw, "damped the glory of Italian wits".