Washington, Oct 3: CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that The fragile state of North Korea and the booming, oil-rich trio of Iran, Venezuela and Russia have grown increasingly aggressive and pose some of the greatest security challenges for the next US President.

Hayden told FOX News that weakness and poverty have made North Korea more aggressive as it threatens to restart work on its nuclear weapons programme.

“This is a country in very, very desperate straits. But out of this weakness, out of this very fragility, there’s this danger of great chaos; they seem to have a knack for using that very fragility to the best of their ability to affect the nations around them - ourselves included,” he said.

Tehran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday dismissed Western allegations of discriminating religious minorities and said that all minorities were part of the "grand Iranian family," the news network Khabar reported.

"The enemies (of Iran) play some games by claiming discord between Iran and religious minorities but these games will have no impacts as we are all part of the grand Iranian family," Ahmadinejad said in a meeting with the parliament deputies representing the religious minorities in Iran.

Tel Aviv - Iran's nuclear ambitions need to be dealt with by the international community and not by Israel alone, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in remarks published Monday. 

"Iran is a large world power, which poses a threat to the international community. The one charged with handling the Iranian issue is, first and foremost, the international community," he told the Yediot Ahronot daily in an interview to mark the Jewish new year, which begins Monday evening. 

He said comments by Israeli leaders and analysts about what was needed in order to deter the perceived Iranian threat showed that Israel was "a country that has lost a sense of proportion about itself." 

Tehran - The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran has cancelled a scheduled trip to Vienna to attend the general assembly of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), local media reported Sunday.

Gholam-Reza Aqazadeh, who is also Iran's vice-president, was to address the assembly Monday and was also expected to meet with IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.

ISNA news agency however quoted an unnamed nuclear official as saying that Aqazadeh would not attend the assembly.

Tehran - The Iranian parliament speaker on Sunday warned of "new decisions" by Tehran following the latest United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the country, ISNA news agency reported.

"While the course of the talks in the recent weeks was going towards setting a new timetable for further negotiations, suddenly the 5+1 (Security Council permanent members plus Germany) came up with this new showpiece," Ali Larijani said.

The new resolution on Saturday called on Iran to "comply fully" with past UN demands to halt its uranium-enrichment programmes.

Washington/Tel Aviv - The United States has transferred to Israel a high-powered radar system that will improve Israel's reaction time to a possible Iranian missile strike, the Defense News magazine reported over the weekend.

Quoting US and German sources, the magazine said that more than one dozen aircraft transferred the X-band radar system and some 120 supporting personnel and equipment to Israel on September 21.

The high-powered, high-frequency system is designed to detect and track ballistic missiles soon after launch and can track an object the size of a baseball from 4,700 kilometres away.