President Robert Mugabe welcomed Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on a state visit to Zimbabwe yesterday, a meeting of two leaders united in fierce opposition to the West.

A group of ultra-Orthodox Jews passionately opposed to the existence of the state of Israel burned the national flag and draped black standards of mourning outside their homes yesterday, as ordinary Israelis reflected on the state's growing isolation abroad.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iran's military is so powerful today no one would dare attack the country.

Iran's leaders issued a strong challenge to the United States and Britain today accusing them of using their nuclear weapons to 'bully and intimidate' countries without the bomb.

China is being privately reassured that its supplies of oil would be guaranteed in the event that it supports tough new UN sanctions on Iran, its third largest supplier of crude.

International inspectors are preparing to search for two new uranium enrichment sites in Iran, which the country says it plans to build in defiance of United Nations demands. According to reports, the UN inspectors are taking seriously claims by the head of Iran's atomic energy organisation that Tehran has ordered work to begin on new plants, and are trying to avoid a repeat of the debacle over the enrichment site at Qom, which Iran was able to keep hidden until last year.

The wife of Iranian opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi is claiming that her son was savagely beaten during last week's protests and accuses the nation's supreme leader of tolerating such abuses. In an open letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Fatameh Karroubi says her son Ali was beaten inside a mosque by hard-line militiamen.

Events in Iran yesterday showed the determination of both the regime and the opposition, but should also provide a lesson for Western governments: unless the outside world aids the opposition, the regime could continue to rule indefinitely through brutal force without an inch of reform to the system.

Hundreds of thousands of government supporters today massed in central Tehran to mark the anniversary of the revolution that created Iran's Islamic republic - while president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chose the day to proclaim his nation is now a "nuclear state".

Iran has produced its first consignment of 20 per cent enriched uranium, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today, two days after the Islamic state announced it had started making higher-grade atomic fuel.