Tehran  - Iran's economy will be able to cope oil prices going even as low as five dollars per barrel, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday.

"Our economy is internally-oriented and therefore we can even manage to run the country with low oil prices, even if they go down to eight or five dollars (per barrel)," Ahmadinejad claimed while visiting the Tehran press fair.

Due to the global economic crisis, oil prices have also fallen drastically, affecting countries such as Iran whose main income is from oil export revenues. On Friday, the OPEC cartel - to which Iran belongs - said its per-barrel price had dropped to just over 44 dollars.

Tehran - An Iranian charged with spying for Israel has been executed in Iran, the Fars news agency reported Saturday.

Ali Ashtari was hanged Monday after he confessed to spying for Iran's archenemy, a spokesman for the Iranian intelligence service said.

Ashtari was sentenced to death in June by a revolutionary court for spying for the "Zionist regime." The verdict was later confirmed by the Supreme Court.

Espionage convictions in Iran usually carry death sentences or heavy jail terms because, according to Islamic law, the convicts are "mohareb," or enemies of God.

Vienna  - A senior Syrian official indicated Friday in Vienna that his country was unlikely to allow further inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of alleged secret nuclear sites, as they were military installations.

On Wednesday, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei issued his first report after his organization's inspectors visited the al-Kibar site in Syria in June, where the US alleges Syria was constructing a nuclear reactor. The Israeli air force bombed the installation in September 2007.

"It think to follow up, there should be a good reason to say that there is something there, and in our opinion, this file should be closed," said Ibrahim Othman, the director general of the Atomic Energy Commission of Syria.

Vienna  - A senior United States diplomat in Vienna called on Syria on Friday to answer the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) questions about an alleged secret nuclear programme, and not to follow Iran's path of stalling a probe of its nuclear activities.

"Syria is not Iran, and we do not seek to make Syria into Iran," Gregory Schulte, the US ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna, said in a statement. "But this requires Syria to cooperate with the IAEA," he said.

Tehran - A senior Iranian cleric on Friday termed the requests by the United Nations nuclear watchdog from Iran as irrelevant and further criticized its head Mohamed ElBaradei for "ambiguous remarks."

"The IAEA should act impartially and within its defined framework and not follow accusations which have no documented proof," former president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani said at the Friday prayer ceremony in Tehran.

New York, Nov 20 : Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material, with added purification, to make a single atom bomb, The New York Times quotes nuclear experts, as saying.

The figures detailing Iran’s progress were contained in a routine update on Wednesday from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been conducting inspections of the country’s main nuclear plant at Natanz.

The report concluded that as of early this month, Iran had made 630 kilograms, or about 1,390 pounds, of low-enriched uranium.

Several experts said that was enough for a bomb, but they cautioned that the milestone was mostly symbolic, because Iran would have to take additional steps.