[Ahmadinejad] said the Islamic republic isn't a "threat" to any nation, including Israel, as he opened a heavy-water production plant that is part of the country's nuclear program.

Iran's nuclear ambitions are "at the service of peace and justice," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the Iranian Students News Agency, at the opening of the Arak plant, which will produce heavy water used in nuclear reactors.

[Don't believe he said it? Find out for yourself. Contact the reporter on this story - Ladane Nasseri in Tehran (lnasseri@bloomberg.net). Presumably, he/she either heard it first hand or spoke with people who did.]

You will, however, keep hearing the oft-repeated distortion about 'wiping Israel off the map,' which some contend was merely a figurative suggestion for a political end to the apartheid Zionist state, and others insist was an outright lie - a manipulative English distortion of what Ahmadenijad said in Persian.

The U.S. and some European countries suspect Iran of seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The Islamic republic, which has the world's second-largest crude oil reserves, says it only wants nuclear energy.

Iran doesn't recognize Israel and Ahmadinejad has called for the nation to be "wiped off the map" or relocated elsewhere.

See! There it is again.

"Without abandoning the demand to suspend sensitive activities, France is also ready to renew dialogue," he told an annual meeting of French ambassadors.

"But it must be a clear, concrete and responsible dialogue," Douste-Blazy said. France hoped for an early dialogue to finally solve the Iranian nuclear problem.

"At the moment, Tehran's response to proposals from the international community is unsatisfactory," said the French minister. "It remains ambiguous and seems to continue to ignore the essential questions of uranium enrichment and reprocessing.

"This move is essential to re-establish the confidence for all the parties during the negotiations," he said.

Tension has escalated with Iran refusing to suspend uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities, as demanded by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russia and United States) plus Germany. The U.N. Security Council has given Iran the ultimatum of suspending activities on August 31 or face the threat of sanctions.

According to the French foreign ministry, Douste-Blazy met on Tuesday with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier and they considered it was necessary to restart dialogue with Iran.

The Iranian president, meanwhile, complained about the U.S. and British role in the world affairs, saying "the U.S. and Britain are the source of many tensions."

"At the (UN) Security Council, where they have to protect security, they enjoy the veto right. If anybody confronts them, there is no place to take to complaints," said Ahmadinejad.

However, Ahmadinejad expressed that Tehran still expects a positive outcome of its response to a six-nation nuclear package.

But he warned that Iran will react in its proper ways if the UN Security Council imposes sanctions on it, saying "we have said everything in our response. I think the time to use the instrument of the Security Council has expired."

"I see it as unlikely that they want to use it (the Security Council). Using nuclear energy is Iran's right and we want to use it according to international law," said the president.

The Security Council adopted the resolution late July, urging Tehran to suspend by Aug. 31 all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, or face prospect of sanctions.

Iran has rejected the resolution as having no legal basis.

"There is no evidence (against them)," he said, adding that there is no agreement with Washington obliging Saudi Arabia to keep them incarcerated. He gave no more details.

About 95 of the 450 men still held at Guantanamo are Saudi citizens and the government has said it hopes to bring all of them back within a year.

Many of the men held at the prison in Cuba were captured in
Afghanistan in the U.S.-led war to oust the Taliban after al Qaeda carried out the September 11, 2001, attacks against U.S. cities.

Two Saudis are among 10 Guantanamo prisoners who have been charged with war crimes in a tribunal system which the
U.S. Supreme Court struck down in June.

Public anger over the treatment of the Saudi detainees has been high. Two Saudis were among the three prisoners who hanged themselves in June at the controversial prison, which lies outside the jurisdiction of international law.

Many Saudis suspect they died from maltreatment.

The authorities have organized a wedding for one of the returnees and have supported the education of their children.

"At one point I was put in a tiny cupboard of a cell, where I could not lie down or stand up straight," says Hill, who anglicised his name in 2003. "I was in there for four, maybe five days. I was rescued from the camp in Iraq by the Kurds but then I had to fight with them for three years before I left the Middle East."

He spent years running and hiding from the Iranian army before arriving in the UK. His problems did not end when he arrived and he has been treated for psychiatric problems. He was sectioned after starting a fire at a hostel in London, an incident he now deeply regrets. He received a probationary jail sentence, attempted suicide, and spent six months receiving psychiatric treatment.

In recent years he has turned his life around; he has a young son and now works as the full-time carer of a screenwriter with multiple sclerosis. Their meeting inspired Hill to develop his own interest in writing.

Hill is also one of scores of torture survivors from all over the world who have taken part in the Write to Life project, a writing therapy group created by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, a national centre based in Finsbury Park, north London. The scheme has been running for seven years. Last week some of the writers read from their own work for the first time at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Through writing, many of the survivors are able to express personal experiences that may be too painful or traumatic to relate directly.

The screenwriter and novelist Sheila Hayman, who has coordinated Write to Life for more than two years as a volunteer, says: "The people in the group come in smiley and cheerful but that, in a way, is a coping device. They have all had the most horrendous experiences in their lives and in a sense have had living nightmares."

She says it is as if people in the group are living in a haunted house. "The ghosts only have power over you if you let them. So what we try and get them to do is to take control of the ghosts. If they have a nightmare we say write it down and then the ghosts are on the paper, not in their head and they can then start to turn them into a piece of work which they can shape.

"Of course the force of their experiences remains and that's what gives the writing its power."

On the inside cover of a pamphlet of some of the torture survivors' recent work are the words: "Uprooted and transplanted, lopped and scattered, these writers have come to Britain hoping for fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of a new life."

Mark Hill has written two novels in Farsi and a screenplay, which has been translated into English. One of his stories is about an American who is imprisoned in Iran and endures a nightmare that sounds similar to the real one he experienced.

When I meet Hill and some of the other people in the writing group at Hayman's home in north London, I ask him whether he is making a political point by writing the character as an American.

He smiles. "No I was thinking of the film. Hollywood. So the main character has to be an American."

Hill knows how difficult it is to get published or interest someone in his work; he is currently struggling to find someone who might translate his work into English, which is usually very expensive.

He and the other writers are excited by a new website, Lots of Big Ideas, which has been created to provide a platform for their work and that of other people with similar stories to tell.

Sophie Nicholls - a former Write to Life mentor - says she set up the site to try to give the torture survivors a voice, and as an antidote to negative coverage of asylum seekers in parts of the media. "It is very important that they feel witnessed and that we get these stories out to a wider audience," she says.

Lots of Big Ideas was partially inspired by Global Voices, the successful global citizens' journalism site. The new site uses a wiki interface and each of the writers can have their own page with links to their work. Ms Nicholls hopes that the site will also become a useful space for writing by people who have been displaced from places like China and Iran.

Some of the Write to Life group have had no education, while others have degrees and are accomplished writers, such as Hassan Bahri, a Syrian who was a political prisoner for more than eight years and now works as a translator. What they all have in common is a desire to move on from their past experiences. She says one woman from Somalia who is in the group wants to be a journalist; another wants to be a barrister. Hayman says some writers are very politically motivated and were kept going through their imprisonments by their "anger and fury" at injustices, which now feeds into their work.

She welcomes the creation of the website as a way of bringing their work to a wider audience and as a forum for getting across their messages about injustices. "There is a second, subtler, thing which I am not sure that they are yet aware of. Many of our clients have no home, they just have places that they are put by the authorities. Often they do not have any place where they can put down roots, they have no fixed address but they have a mobile phone. They have the most amazing ring tones and they have images on them, because in a way the phone is the only thing that is theirs and always theirs.

"For me, this website is an extension of that; an online version of a home where they can put their writing and say, 'here I am, come and find me'."

- You can read some of Mark Hill's work on his page on Lots of Big Ideas. To find out more about the site and Write to Life, listen to today's Guardian Unlimited newsdesk podcast. Hassan Bahri and Faraidon Mohammed Said, a writer from Iraqi Kurdistan, speak to Mark Oliver and read extracts from their work.

In a separate development, a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into the Interior Ministry in Baghdad during the midmorning rush hour, killing 16 people, including 13 policemen, and wounding up to 62.

On Sunday, a further 60 people were killed in attacks across the country from Kirkuk in the Kurdish-held north to Basra in the south.

The latest violence was a reminder of how easily Iraq could slip back into the type of endemic sectarian violence that characterised much of the first half of this year after the destruction in February of a Shia shrine in the town of Samarra.

More than 10,000 Iraqis - the vast majority in Baghdad - have been killed in the past four months alone, a figure that would send shockwaves through the international community were it in any other part of the world.

The US military admitted that there had been a spike in violence in Baghdad, but insisted that things were improving since US-led forces launched Operation Forward Together last month in an attempt to pacify the capital.

Maj-Gen William Caldwell, a US military spokesman, said violence in Baghdad had dropped by half since July, and that life was returning to normal in some areas of the capital.

The British Defence Secretary, Des Browne, echoed such sentiments during a visit to Iraq yesterday to meet key Iraqi politicians including the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

"I recognise there are continuing challenges and I've seen some violence over this weekend which suggests there's much more work to be done," Mr Browne told a joint news conference with the Iraqi Defence Minister, Abdul Qader Jassim. "But as Prime Minister Maliki said in an interview this weekend, things are improving and the challenge is to maintain that improvement."

The intense fighting in Diwaniyah will be of particular concern to British forces stationed in the Shia-dominated south of Iraq. Reports suggested that militiamen had driven government forces out of the city and had set up checkpoints in the suburbs. If the Mehdi Army has pushed the government out of the Shia-dominated city it will be a major snub to Mr Maliki, who has promised to rid Iraq of militias.

Confronting Mr Sadr's Shia militias was never going to be an easy task. His movement holds 30 parliamentary seats and five cabinet posts, and his militiamen are well-armed and dedicated. The cleric is also undeniably popular among Iraq's Shia majority, particularly the poorer classes.

In 2004, Mr Sadr led an uprising against the American-led coalition which threatened to draw the post-Saddam government and US military into a bitter conflict with Iraq's Shia while simultaneously trying to subdue what was then an emerging Sunni insurgency. The fighting was only stopped when the head of Iraq's Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, ordered the Mehdi Army fighters to lay down their arms.

He said at least 34 people had been killed and dozens injured. The reason for the explosion was not immediately clear.

Police say the massive fire in the area is hampering rescue efforts, and that Iraqi and coalition forces have cordoned off the area.

The town was the scene of fierce clashes between the Iraqi army and Shia militia on Monday that left 40 people dead, but the situation on Tuesday was calm, the army said.

The latest attacks came a day after a suicide bomber killed at least 17 civilians, including several children, in a crowded bazaar in the southern province of Helmand, neighboring Kandahar and Afghanistan's main drug growing area.

Since their overthrow in 2001, the Taliban and their Islamic allies have carried out scores of suicide attacks against Afghan and foreign forces, often killing many civilians as well.

Fighting across Afghanistan is now at its worst since 2001, mostly in the south and east bordering or near Pakistan, the Taliban's one-time backer accused by some Afghan leaders and intelligence officers of still supporting its former protege.

About 2,000 people, most of them militants, but also civilians, aid workers, Afghan forces and more than 90 foreign soldiers, have been killed this year.

The violence is a mix of opposition to Afghan authorities and foreign forces, the drugs trade, tribe wars and crime.

NATO said in a statement on Tuesday one of its soldiers had been killed in a gunbattle with suspected insurgents in Helmand on Sunday morning. It did not give the victim's nationality.

All eight British Apache helicopters are being flown on a daily basis, even though it was intended that only six should fly every day, the newspaper said. A number of them have been hit by Taliban shooters, but none have been seriously damaged.

The defense ministry was given one billion pounds (1.5 billion euros, 1.9 billion dollars) for the Afghanistan mission, money that is being used up at a much faster pace than expected, according to The Daily Telegraph's unnamed sources, and it may have to ask the Treasury for more money.

The defence ministry disputed the claims, however, with a spokeswoman telling AFP: "There's no problems with re-supply."

"The force package in Afghanistan is a full and robust package which was asked for by commanders on the ground. They are content with the package." "Of course, its always kept under review."

Some 21 British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan -- 14 in combat -- since the start of operations against the Taliban in November 2001 following the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Some 4,000 British troops are currently in Helmand province, with the figure set to rise to around 4,500. A further 1,000 are in the capital Kabul and a few hundred are in the southern city of Kandahar.

There are about 30,000 foreign troops from 30 countries in Afghanistan.

Although the Taliban were ousted from power five years ago, supporters of the extremist movement have this year stepped up attacks on foreign and Afghan troops.

Three people were killed and as many as 50 injured in the most serious of the blasts, which wreaked havoc in the southern city of Antalya yesterday afternoon.

Earlier in the day 10 Britons, including four children, were hurt when a bomb exploded on a bus in the popular south-western coastal resort of Marmaris, and on Sunday evening there was an explosion in Istanbul.

In the major port city of Izmir, police yesterday detained a suspected member of the Kurdish separatist guerrilla group PKK they claimed was planning an attack there, and seized plastic explosives, the state news agency Anatolian reported.

The bombings are a blow to the Turkish tourist industry, which is worth £10bn a year. Almost 2 million Britons visit the country annually and there are currently thousands in the area around Marmaris. Beaches in the resort were quieter than usual yesterday as many people decided to stay in their hotels, and some began making plans to abort their holiday.

The series of blasts began on Sunday evening when a bomb exploded near a government building in an Istanbul suburb. Six people were hurt, one of them critically. Shortly after midnight yesterday there were three explosions in Marmaris. The most serious was on one of the many minibuses which ferry visitors around the resort and surrounding areas.

Ten Britons who were on board were injured. The 10, aged between seven and 73, were treated for burns and shrapnel-like wounds. Four were seriously hurt.

Among them were Sarah Wilson and her two sons, Jamie, eight and Adam, seven. Ms Wilson told the Guardian: "All of a sudden there was a flash and a hot wind against the back of my legs and a pain. There was lots of noise, lots of screams, lots of shouting." Her son Adam suffered burns to his hand and cheek and shrapnel wounds

A 13-year-old British girl, Jennifer Smith, needed an operation and 11 local people were also hurt.

The most destructive blast happened yesterday afternoon in the southern city of Antalya, another tourist centre more popular with visitors from Russia and continental Europe. Two people were killed and many injured in the explosion which happened in or near a building housing restaurants and cafes.

One witness reported hearing a loud blast which shattered windows and caused a fire. "A parked motorbike exploded and pieces were shattered all around," he said. "A man who was a street vendor was dead."

Even before the bombings the Foreign Office had warned of a "high threat from terrorism" in Turkey. "We believe that international terrorist groups, as well as indigenous ones, are currently active in Turkey. Further attacks, including in tourist areas, could well occur," it said.

Keith Betton of the Association of British Travel Agents said almost all tourists booked to leave the UK yesterday for Marmaris had gone. He said: "I do not envisage that people will react negatively to this - this is something like the 15th attack in Turkey in less than a year."

Britain's ambassador to Turkey, Peter Westmacott, said: "The people who set off these bombs have reminded us how vulnerable we are to the scourge of terrorism and the need for all governments to work together to defeat it."

The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, also known as the Liberation Hawks, claimed responsibility for the blasts in Istanbul and Marmaris. Nobody immediately claimed responsibility for the blast in Antalya.