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Iran has arrested four people who it says were intent on sabotaging facilities in its nuclear program. The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran says the four are now being questioned.

"Some time ago, a number of people were arrested in one of the (nuclear) facilities when they were involved in planning activities," Ali Akbar Salehi said Sunday, according to Iran's state-run Tasnim News Agency.

Before their arrest, the suspects' activities had been monitored, Salehi said. He added that their interrogation is now under way.

"We let them do their activity to some extent, so that they would be arrested at the right time," he said, according to Tasnim.

He added that Iranian authorities had also identified "a number of other sabotage plots."

As for who Iran might hold responsible for the alleged plot, the AP reports that Salehi told the semi-official Fars news agency, "Hostile countries are not interested in finding [a] way out of [the] current situation and they are trying to block agreement on the nuclear case though acts of sabotage."

Decoding the possible meaning of that statement, the AP says, "In Iranian official terminology, hostile countries are usually a reference to Israel and the United States. But the attempts at historic diplomacy ... with Washington suggested the term was aimed at Israel."

Salehi also said that Iran has taken steps to protect itself from cyber attacks such as the Stuxnet virus, which struck the country's uranium enrichment facilities in 2010.

"We have carried out the necessary measures in this field, and since the outbreak of the Stuxnet virus, the Atomic Energy Organization has embarked on countering such malwares," he said, according to Tasnim. "To this end computer protection systems were upgraded, and we also separated the systems that were connected to the Internet."

The U.K.'s Oxford Internet Institute has put together an interesting illustration of the most popular websites around the world. Not surprising, Google and Facebook dominate the globe.

We're not quite sure what the data mean, if anything, but you can be the judge.

The institute, using data from the Web analytics site Alexa, crunched the numbers and came up with this: In North America and Europe, parts of South America, South Asia and Southeast Asia, Google is tops. But Facebook predominates in much of Latin America. North Africa is Facebook territory, but Internet users in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa are first and foremost Googling. Search engines in China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex) predominate in those countries. Japan is another outlier with Yahoo! Japan.

Even so, as the Oxford Internet Institute notes:

"The power of Google on the Internet becomes starkly evident if we also look at the second most visited website in every country. Among the 50 countries that have Facebook listed as the most visited website, 36 of them have Google as the second most visited, and the remaining 14 countries list YouTube (currently owned by Google)."

In Syria, a team of international weapons experts has begun the process of destroying the country's chemical weapons arsenal.

"The inspectors used sledgehammers and explosives to begin the work," NPR's Deborah Amos reports for our Newscast unit. "They are on a tight deadline to destroy more than 1,000 tons of nerve gas and banned weapons within a year."

Personnel from the U.N. and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons make up the team. On Friday, a U.N. spokesperson said the team hoped to begin onsite inspections and destruction of production facilities in the coming week.

The inspectors' progress comes as Syrian President Bashar Assad maintains his government did not use chemical weapons on its citizens. In recent weeks, a U.N. report found that the poison gas sarin was used in an attack that killed hundreds of civilians — U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the incident a "war crime."

In an interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Assad admitted that he has made mistakes. And he said he would like for Germany to help mediate an end to Syria's civil war, which has lingered for more than two years. Amos reports:

"Stepping up interviews to Western news outlets, Assad told Der Spiegel magazine he wants negotiations, but [he] limited the partners. Not with rebels unless they put down their weapons, he said. Assad again denied his military had used chemical weapons, despite his pledge to allow a U.N. team to dismantle his arsenal."

Stock investors and business journalists unite each month for one shared, suspenseful moment — the 8:30 a.m. release of the Labor Department's employment report.

The unveiling of the report — so rich with data on job creation, unemployment, wages and hours — can be counted upon to set off a tsunami of tweets. Economists jump in with instant analysis and politicians fire off press releases with reactions.

That market-moving report was due this Friday.

But it won't come out — leaving Federal Reserve policymakers, investors and job seekers scratching their heads about labor-market conditions.

Because of the federal government's partial shutdown, the Labor Department is not releasing its most closely watched report. "An alternative release date has not been scheduled," the Labor Department said Thursday.

Economists will have to try reading tea leaves — or at least examining less-reliable private reports — to get a sense of what the job market did in September.

"You hate to have data delayed because that creates uncertainty," said John Canally, an economist for LPL Financial, a Boston-based financial services firm. Not getting that jobs report "deprives the markets of important information," he said.

Among economists, the monthly jobs report, compiled by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, is considered a "gold standard" report. It has a long history and a broad reach, including information from both employers and members of households.

On Thursday, economists did get one government-generated report with the release of data on initial claims for unemployment compensation. The first-time claims increased by 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 308,000 last week. Economists had forecast 314,000 new claims would be filed, so the report suggests the job market was a bit stronger than most people had thought.

The Two-Way

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