Tehran - Iran on Sunday exhibited its missiles and other military hardware at the annual parade marking the Iraqi invasion in 1980, which led to a devastating eight-year war.

Military parades and war games have increased in the face of perceived threats from the United States and Israel against the country's nuclear sites, after Tehran has rejected calls by world powers to suspend its uranium enrichment programme.

Tehran - Iran's Central Bank Chief Tahmasseb Mazaheri has resigned and is to soon be replaced by the bank's general secretary Mahmoud Bahmani, Fars news agency reported Saturday.

Mazaheri, who declined to comment on the report but did not deny it, is said to have had grave differences with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over economic policies, and observers had considered him as the most likely next official to leave Ahmadinejad's administration.

Tehran- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday continued his tirades against Israel by saying that "all crimes and criminals in history" were summarized in the Israeli regime.

"The Zionist (Israeli) regime's spirit is the summation of all ugliness in the world and the continuation of its existence is based on aggression and occupation," Mehr news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

"We see in this regime the summation of all crimes and criminals in history," he added.

Tehran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday that Iran had nothing against Israeli Jews but called on them to return to their "countries of origin."

"Although we distinguish between the people (Jews living in Israel) and the Zionist (Israeli) regime, but we neither acknowledge an Israeli government nor a nation," Ahmadinejad said in a press conference in Tehran.

Tehran  - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday criticized European Union policies in the Caucasus crisis.

"The Europeans should have studied more carefully and made a better assessment of the regional situation and eventually not allowed the crisis to happen at all," Ahmadinejad said at a press conference in Tehran, referring to Europe's support for Georgia's NATO membership.

Referring to Afghanistan, Ahmadinejad said that whenever NATO was involved, "The situation got worse and tensions increased."

Tehran - Iran is not afraid of new financial sanctions and would go on with its nuclear programmes, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday.

"Sanctions are not important at all, and we ignore them as they [the world powers] have made such threats in the last three years and nothing happened," Ahmadinejad said at a new conference in Tehran.

The president was referring to US and European threats to impose further sanctions on Iran after the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency