An informal Dec. 31 deadline set by the Obama administration came and went, but little progress has been made in breaking the logjam over Iran's nuclear program one way or the other. 

Tehran appeared to deny reports by some Western news agencies that it had even submitted a formal counterproposal to the once-ballyhooed proposal to swap Iran's enriched uranium for nuclear fuel plates for a medical research reactor that's about to sputter out.

"Iran has offered no new proposal concerning the supply of fuel to the Tehran research reactor," Mehr news agency quoted Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast as saying today, in a report cited by the website of Iran's state-owned Press TV channel. "Our views are the same as what was previously announced and basically there has been no new development regarding the issue."

A spokesman for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, also told The Times there had been no new developments since the new year. 

"The proposal made by the IAEA in October 2009, which was supported by France, Russia and the United States, continues to be on the table," Gill Tudor, a spokesman for the agency, said in reference to the fuel-swap proposal.