Before sparks began flying between me and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, he began my interview with an unusual olive branch: “I would like to, with your permission, greet all of your readers as well as Web viewers and wish all of them the success and blessings of the Almighty.” 
 
 Mr. Ahmadinejad is a complex, even bizarre, figure. A firebrand with a penchant for making explosive public statements, he is small in person, subdued and very soft-spoken. Even when I pushed him hard on human rights abuses and nuclear deceptions, he responded in even tones while claiming that Iran is manifestly more democratic than the United States. 
 
 Another olive branch came hours after our conversation with the release of the two American hikers who had been imprisoned unjustly for two years in Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad didn’t even attempt to suggest that they were spies, but he bristled at my questions about them. He claimed that they had entered Iran illegally and would have merited punishment in any country. 
 
 This was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s only print interview on his visit to the United Nations General Assembly, and he made a significant effort to be friendly and conciliatory. Most important, he repeated an offer made in a Washington Post interview this month to stop all nuclear enrichment if the West would supply nuclear fuel enriched to a 20 percent level. He insisted that Iran will happily give up its enrichment processing if it can get this enriched uranium for “cancer treatment medication.” 
 
 “If they were willing to sell us the 20 percent enriched uranium, we would have preferred to buy it,” he said. “It would have been far less expensive. It’s as though you wish to purchase a vehicle for yourself. No one is willing to sell it to you, then you must set up your own production line to produce your own vehicle.” 
 
 This sounds very much like an incipient deal that Mr. Ahmadinejad initially welcomed two years ago but was later scotched by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The chief of Iran’s nuclear program, Fereydoon Abbasi, seemed to reiterate recently that any such deal was dead. 
 
 But when I raised those points, Mr. Ahmadinejad insisted that there had never been any daylight between himself and the supreme leader on the nuclear issue and that Mr. Abbasi was not opposed today. When I asked skeptically if Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke for the full Iranian leadership, there was a flash of resentment at the question. He insisted that he did, indeed, have full authority. 
 
 Is this a real offer to stop all enrichment? I don’t know, but it’s worth it for the West to pursue it — without easing sanctions in the meantime. One question is how the West could verify an end to enrichment. I asked Mr. Ahmadinejad about that and noted Iran’s history of deceptions. 
 
 “We have done nothing wrong,” he said, denying sharply that his country had hidden anything. 
 
 Mr. Ahmadinejad called for Syria, his ally, to stop its violent crackdown on protesters, cautioning that “with clashes and confrontations problems will not be solved. They will be multiplied.” 
 
 Oh? What’s the difference with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s own harsh crackdown on dissidents? 
 
 “In Iran, things were quite different,” he insisted, a bit testy. Many of the dead in Iran were members of security forces, he claimed, suggesting that protesters were not deliberately targeted. 
 
 I asked Mr. Ahmadinejad what he thought when he saw the famous photos of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, lying on the ground and bleeding to death after she had been shot in the chest. 
 
 A hint of sadness crossed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s face. I thought, for a moment, that he was going to apologize. Instead, he constructed his own reality: He suggested that she had been murdered by his opponents, working with the BBC, as part of a bizarre snuff film. 
 
 “We do search for those who are truly guilty of murdering this young lady,” he said. 
 
 Our interview became more confrontational, and we tussled over Iran’s repression of the Bahai faith and other human rights issues. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s minders were signaling that the interview was ending, but he seemed to enjoy the give-and-take and ignored them. 
 
 Mr. Ahmadinejad also indulged in a bit of triumphalism. He acknowledged that the West’s “crippling” sanctions against Iran had “worked well.” But he added: “Does Iran face more problems or the United States of America?” He referred to the “collapse” of the American financial system and suggested that Iran’s economy is in better shape. 
 
 He added that the West will be driven by its weakness to “seek a rapprochement with Iran.” 
 
 Then the interview was over, and Mr. Ahmadinejad zoomed back from bombast to conciliation. He beamed and told me: “We truly like and love the people of the United States.” ||||| Iran is jamming satellite broadcasts in attempts to stop people seeing a new film telling the story of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who was shot dead during the mass protests that followed last summer's disputed presidential election. 
 
 Viewers in Tehran complained of jamming and power cuts on Wednesday and yesterday when the Voice of America Persian TV network broadcast the documentary For Neda, featuring the first film interviews with the family of the 27-year-old. 
 
 The 70-minute film, made by Mentorn Media for HBO and being screened in the US this month, has rapidly gone viral in Iran in the run-up to next Saturday's anniversary of the disputed elections that triggered the protests. It is available on YouTube so can be seen by anyone with access to the internet. 
 
 Street protests began shortly after the polls closed on 12 June last year, when the incumbent hardliner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed victory over the Green movement leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, triggering claims that the vote had been rigged. 
 
 Neda became an instant symbol of Iran's struggle for democracy. On 20 June, within hours of her killing – described as "probably the most widely witnessed death in human history" – mobile phone images of her bloodstained face were being held up by demonstrators in Tehran and all over the world. 
 
 The film was directed by Antony Thomas and co-produced by Saeed Kamali Dehghan, a former Guardian correspondent in Iran. Kamali Dehghan risked arrest to interview Neda's parents and siblings and obtain unseen footage of her life. 
 
 Witnesses have said that she was shot in the heart by a sniper with the Basij militia force, who has been named as Abbas Kargar-Javid. 
 
 Iran's intelligence ministry is reportedly due to release its own documentary to remove "ambiguities" surrounding her death and provide "new evidence" about what it calls the west's version of events. 
 
 Neda's family were under pressure to cooperate with the official documentary but refused. Two of her friends were forced to participate. 
 
 It is not clear whether the official film is the same as one produced earlier this year by Iranian state TV. That suggested that Neda was an agent of the US and Britain who staged her own death and poured blood on her face. BBC Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne was also blamed for her killing before being expelled. 
 
 HBO says it took the unprecedented decision to pre-release the film for Iranian audiences because of its relevance in the run-up to the anniversary of the polls. 
 
 Ahmadinejad today warned the opposition of tough measures, ahead of protests next week. "Those who want to tarnish the image of the country and its system will be removed from the [political] scene," he said in a speech marking the 21st anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, architect of the 1979 Islamic revolution, which toppled the shah. 
 
 "The election last year was the most democratic in the world as nowhere else would 40 million people turn up for elections," he claimed. Ahmadinejad pledged: "Whoever stands against the Islamic system will not survive." Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini's successor as supreme leader, boasted that Iran, facing new UN sanctions over its nuclear programme, was in a position to "see off any conspiracies". 
 
 Mehdi Karroubi, a defeated reformist candidate, was attacked and heckled by hardliners when he visited the shrine yesterday. "Whoever objects to fraud in the election is accused of being a Mossad or CIA agent," he said. "The fate of the election is in the hands of the Basijis and revolutionary guards." Karroubi warned on his website that the Islamic regime was being ruined. "They speak as if Imam [Khomeini] belongs to them only and others have broken path with the imam."
– In his only print interview during a visit to the UN, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared “complex, even bizarre,” writes Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. The “firebrand” in public was “subdued and very soft-spoken” in person, offering repeated “olive branches” to his interviewer: "We truly like and love the people of the United States," he noted. But after opening with a blessing for all Kristof’s readers, he grew testy over some of the journalist’s questions. Ahmadinejad renewed an offer to end Iranian nuclear enrichment if the West provided the country with fuel already 20% enriched. The material would be used for “cancer treatment medication,” he said. Meanwhile, the Iranian president appeared frustrated by questions over the American hikers held in Iran; while he didn’t call them spies, he said any country would have punished them. As for the mid-protest killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, Ahmadinejad “constructed his own reality,” Kristof writes. “He suggested that she had been murdered by his opponents, working with the BBC, as part of a bizarre snuff film.” Click through for the full article, or an interview transcript.