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BERLIN -- Iran has answered more questions about the history of its nuclear program but is restricting access to its nuclear work and expanding its enrichment of uranium in defiance of the Security Council, a United Nations watchdog agency reported yesterday. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran has not provided "full transparency" about its current activities and now has nearly 3,000 operating centrifuges - the number required to produce enough enriched uranium in one year for a nuclear weapon.

FOR THE PAST 18 years, Iran appears to have successfully disguised its nuclear ambitions, according to a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency. And no one who has seen that IAEA report can confidently believe Tehran's insistence that its ambitions are purely peaceful. Indeed, the Bush administration views the report as damning proof of Tehran's true intention to build a nuclear weapons program and as reason to seek U.N. sanctions against the Iranian regime. It's an understandable response, but the United Nations needs to know more about Iran's capabilities, not less, and sanctions hardly seem likely to further that goal.

ISTANBUL, Turkey - International inspectors confirmed yesterday that particles of highly enriched uranium were discovered in two separate samples taken at a nuclear facility in Iran, raising the possibility that Tehran is further along in developing a nuclear weapon than experts had predicted. The finding was contained in a confidential report prepared by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, that provided detailed descriptions of numerous contradictions and misstatements by Iran in recent months.

CAIRO, Egypt -- Iran has slowed its nuclear activities and is cooperating more fully in clearing up questions about its efforts, but the country continues to expand its enrichment of uranium, according to a U.N. agency report cited by arms experts and news accounts. U.S. and European officials have said they suspect that Iran's civilian nuclear energy program masks a clandestine effort to obtain technology that could be used in the making of an atomic bomb. They have threatened to impose a fourth round of sanctions on Tehran when the U.N. Security Council takes up the issue again, probably next month.

VIENNA, Austria - The director of the agency responsible for detecting the spread of nuclear weapons is being hoodwinked while Iran moves perilously close to developing a nuclear bomb. Or he is quietly, systematically - and successfully - making the best of limited powers to prevent the world's ultimate weapon from getting into Iran's hands. Whatever the differing views about Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the importance of his efforts is nearly impossible to overstate.

The following is an excerpt of chief nuclear inspector Mohammed ElBaradei's report to the U.N. Security Council: I am able to report today that, in the area of nuclear weapons - the most lethal weapons of mass destruction - inspections in Iraq are moving forward. Since the resumption of inspections a little over three months ago - and particularly during the three weeks since my last oral report to the Council - the IAEA has made important progress in identifying what nuclear-related capabilities remain in Iraq, and in its assessment of whether Iraq has made any efforts to revive its past nuclear program during the intervening four years since inspections were brought to a halt.

VIENNA, Austria -- Iran has done next to nothing to respond to international demands to halt its uranium enrichment program and provide information about its nuclear activities, according to a confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The report, which is expected to be sent to the U.N. Security Council in two weeks for debate over possible sanctions, stops short of an outright condemnation of Tehran's activities. But it raises grave doubts about the intent of Iran's nuclear program and says the agency cannot rule out that Tehran may be breaching the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

VIENNA, Austria - Investigators for the United Nations atomic watchdog agency said in a draft report to be made public today that Iran has acknowledged experimenting with plutonium more recently than was known previously and has yet to fill in crucial information about its efforts to obtain sophisticated centrifuges. Plutonium can be used to make atomic bombs. The centrifuges that Iran was attempting to acquire can be used to purify uranium for civilian purposes such as electricity generation, but also for the more intensive processing used to manufacture weapons-grade fuel.

MOSCOW -- Many more people were bombarded by high doses of radiation from the Chernobyl accident than officially reported, and even those who received small doses are in jeopardy, a pioneering Russian-American study has found."

WASHINGTON - The Iranian government, confronted with new evidence obtained from the secret network of nuclear suppliers surrounding Abdul Qadeer Khan, has acknowledged that it possesses a design for a far more advanced high-speed centrifuge to enrich uranium than it previously revealed to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The centrifuge, called a Pak-2 because it marked Pakistan's second-generation design, would allow Iran to produce nuclear fuel far more quickly than the equipment that it reluctantly revealed to the IAEA last year.