Six to meet this week on UN Iran sanctions: Clinton

Member nations of the P51 group, which seeks to persuade Iran to renounce its nuclear ambitions, may soon meet to discuss the next steps as it becomes apparent that Iran shows no sign of reversing course, the State Department said.The United States, Russia, China, Britain France and Germany will meet late this week to discuss sanctions over Iran's nuclear program, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. Talking to reporters on a flight to Hawaii, she said the administration was contemplating sanctions that would target the Tehran leadership's political and commercial base, but added no decision had been made. The P51 will reconvene in New York at the end of this week, and they will be exploring the kind and degree of sanctions that we should be pursuing, Clinton told. The P51 are the five permanent veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, the group that has been reaching out to Iran in a bid to force the regime to halt its uranium enrichment. At the end of last year, Clinton and other senior US officials signaled growing impatience with Iran's continued balking at a United Nations nuclear watchdog offer to build confidence with the international community. The United States has backed the offer, a UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) proposal to ship abroad low-grade nuclear fuel so it can be further enriched and returned to refuel a Tehran medical research reactor.