TEHRAN — Head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (IAEO) Ali Akbar Salehi said on Tuesday that Iran began to produce 20 percent enriched uranium at a Natanz facility, the official IRNA news agency reported.

“From today we started the 20 percent (uranium) enrichment in a separate cascade in Natanz (nuclear enrichment facility),” Salehi was quoted as saying by the IRNA.

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ANKARA — Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is expected to pay a visit to Iran for nuclear talks, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported on Tuesday.

Davutoglu said his office is working to arrange for him to visit Tehran later Tuesday or after a two-day trip to Kazakhstan on Feb. 10-12.

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KHARTOUM — Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno on Tuesday urged rebels in the restive western Sudanese region of Darfur to abandon violence, saying that the peace talks currently underway in Doha, Qatar, were the ideal platform to resolving the Darfur conflicts.

Addressing a gathering of Sudanese politicians and representatives of the Chadian community in Sudan, and with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir standing beside him, the Chadian president noted that “the Darfur crisis can not be resolved through military ways, and I urgently call on the armed men in Darfur to stop the hostilities”.

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KHARTOUM — Sudan and Chad Tuesday officially declared that they had overcome all issues of difference and agreed to end the tension between the two countries which lasted for five years.

“All suspended issues, which have been a toppling stone before improvement of the bilateral ties, have been surpassed. All security and political files have been settled,” said a joint communique issued at the end of the visit of the Chadian president to Sudan Tuesday.

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ANKARA — Floods triggered by torrential rains on Monday killed three people in south Turkey’s Mediterranean coastal region, with one person missing, Turkish media reported on Tuesday.