Category World News

Tehran, Iran – Iran and the United States are expected to hold more nuclear negotiations mediated by Oman amid efforts to shape an agreement to avoid the US attacking Iran.

The Iranian delegation will arrive in Muscat on Friday evening in advance of political and, for the first time, technical talks on Saturday.

Let’s take a look at what we can expect, as well as all the latest developments and context.

Who’s at the talks?

Like the two previous rounds of talks in Italy and Oman, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and White House special envoy Steve Witkoff will lead the delegations.

But the experts leading the technical talks are also crucial, as they will iron out the details and wording of any agreement.

For Tehran, Araghchi’s political deputy, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, and deputy for legal and international affairs, Kazem Gharibabadi, are heading the expert-level delegation.

Takht-Ravanchi is a Western-educated diplomat who led Iran’s mission to the United Nations and was ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

Gharibabadi led Iran’s representative office to international organisations in Vienna and represented the Iranian judiciary internationally.

He was also involved in indirect nuclear negotiations between the administrations of late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and former US President Joe Biden.

The chief technical expert whom US President Donald Trump selected is Michael

Anton, the newly appointed director of policy planning at the US Department of State.

Anton was a speechwriter for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice during the George W Bush administration.

He also held managerial roles in the private sector, including at Citigroup and BlackRock investment firms. During the first Trump administration, he served on the National Security Council to shape government messaging.

Anton’s work may be eased by the fact that he has not yet publicly adopted a stance on Iran’s nuclear programme.

What will they discuss?

Iran has emphasised it will not discuss its defence capabilities or regional influence, but is ready for an agreement that ensures it won’t build a nuclear bomb, which it has repeatedly stated it doesn’t want.

The technical talks aim to set the steps Tehran would take to curb its nuclear programme, and how Washington and Europe would lift their devastating sanctions, which have continued despite the US calling the talks with Iran “constructive”.

Iran, for its part, wants to lift at least part of the comprehensive sanctions against its oil, banking and related industries, some of which are imposed under multiple designations.

A deal could unfreeze some of Iran’s billions of dollars of export revenue that remain blocked in foreign banks by sanctions.

Negotiators may also attempt to nail down waivers, orders to allow Iran to sell oil or access the global payments system.

Iranian officials like President Masoud Pezeshkian have gone a step further, saying Iran would even welcome direct, large-scale investment by US companies in its market, which is brimming with financial opportunity.

On the agenda will also be a cap on Iran’s uranium enrichment, which is now at up to 60 percent, a short step from the 90 percent required for a bomb.

Under the terms of an earlier nuclear agreement with world powers (the JCPOA), Iran had committed to a cap of 3.67 percent enrichment, sufficient for civilian uses like power generation.

However, when Trump unilaterally abandoned the JCPOA in 2018 and slapped punishing sanctions on Iran, Tehran started enriching at much higher levels and using more advanced reactors than those specified in the JCPOA.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN watchdog that will again monitor Iran’s commitments, is expected to send a team to Iran in the next few days for talks.

Will there be an agreement soon?

While likely to advance the positive atmosphere surrounding the talks, Saturday’s meetings are only a step among many required for any deal.

But time is of the essence, especially in the months leading up to an October deadline, &nbsp, when the 2015 nuclear deal’s “snapback” mechanism expires.

It allows any of the signatories to initiate a process to reinstate all UN sanctions on Iran in the case of significant noncompliance, like enriching uranium at levels higher than 3.67 percent. Iran wants to avoid snapback.

Iran’s Araghchi has visited China and Russia to coordinate a position, while accusing Israel of “undermining” the negotiations.

Witkoff was also in Moscow on Friday to discuss the talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Araghchi has said he is ready to visit Paris, Berlin and London for direct talks with the three European JCPOA signatories.

“I was ready to do it before Iran commenced its indirect dialogue with the U. S., but the E3 opted out”, he wrote on X.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei signalled to his followers, using religious symbolism, this week, that they must not refuse a deal with the US.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Serhiy Parkhomenko’s two-storey apartment building stood right next to its twin that was struck and levelled by a Russian missile early on Thursday.

The unbearably red, eardrum-rupturing explosion killed 12, wounded 87, gouged out windows and damaged roofs in dozens of nearby buildings of the tranquil, leafy neighbourhood in northwestern Kyiv.

The shockwave caused Pakhomenko’s steel entrance door to fly through his living room, flattening a cosy armchair he or his wife used to sit in during hundreds of earlier shellings.

Luckily, they were in bed during the 1am [23:00 GMT on Wednesday] strike, the largest in Kyiv since the July 2024 bombing that damaged Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital and killed 34.

The Parkhomenkos hastily grabbed their documents and rushed outside. Serhiy also managed to drag his 68-year-old next-door neighbour out of the debris of his apartment.

“I have been really lucky,” Parkhomenko, 60, a telecommunications expert, told Al Jazeera, standing next to his broken furniture and a flatscreen TV that somehow remained intact.

What most confounds him has been the White House’s inaction over the death and destruction caused by Russia in Ukraine since Donald Trump’s re-election as United States president.

Trump turns a “blind eye” to what Russian President Vladimir Putin does in Ukraine, Parkhomenko insisted.

The neighbour he had saved was sitting on a bench wrapped in a blanket, his face cut and bruised, and kept repeating: “You won’t frighten us.”

Even though Trump wrote “Vladimir, STOP!” in a social media post on Thursday, US Vice President JD Vance said a day earlier that Washington would refuse to mediate peace talks if Kyiv and Moscow don’t start them within days.

“We’ve shown them the finish line,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday in the Oval Office after news of the strike on Kyiv. “We need both of them to say yes, but what happened last night with those missile strikes should remind everybody of why this war needs to end.”

Close to Parkhomenko was an American who arrived in Kyiv to teach Ukrainian servicemen English and join Dobrobat, a volunteer group that rebuilds houses all over the war-battered nation.

“I feel a moral obligation to come and help,” Tom Satterthwaite, who once led researchers on salmon spawning in Oregon’s dammed rivers, told Al Jazeera while hauling broken bricks and stucco downstairs.

He said the White House had failed to uphold its security guarantees to Kyiv, according to the Budapest Memorandum.

The 1994 deal prohibited Moscow, Washington and London from using military force against Ukraine in return for its abandonment of nuclear weapons.

Kyiv inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear stockpile from the Soviet Union after its 1991 collapse but agreed to transfer it to Russia in return for the security guarantees.

“Ukraine got the shaft on the deal,” Satterthwaite said.

Saved by her glasses

The destruction and debris after the shelling seemed shocking to some foreign volunteers. But to the head of the Dobrobat volunteer group that invites and hosts them, the scene was familiar.

“We got used to it,” Dmytro Ivanov told Al Jazeera as other volunteers ran up and down the stairs in Parkhomenko’s building. “We see it every day.”

Russia’s strike on Ukraine on Thursday involved 70 missiles and 145 explosives-laden drones.

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, claimed that the strike had targeted “military and military-adjacent sites”.

But the destroyed house next door to Parkhomenko was about a kilometre away from the Antonov Serial Production Plant, a century-old aircraft manufacturer that once produced Mriya (Dream), the world’s largest plane. The plant was burned down by Russian troops in February 2022.

But the strike on Thursday did not hit the plant if that was indeed the target. Instead, it damaged a dozen apartment buildings in the area.

Most of the victims were in the building next to Parkhomenko’s, which was almost completely levelled.

One of the survivors was Yelena, a blonde woman in her 40s whose impeccable hairdo, makeup and glasses contrasted with everything around her.

The glasses are what saved her, seconds after the strike when she moved to grab them – and her upstairs neighbour’s gas stove fell on the spot she’d just been standing in.

The blast collapsed the inner walls and ceiling of her first-floor corner apartment, while her husband Viktor saved his upstairs neighbour’s two-year-old girl from the debris.

She and her husband crawled outside to see their car mauled by the shockwave, while natural gas pipes in the building were “bursting like ropes” and neighbours yelled for help, she told Al Jazeera.

They spent hours helping them in the darkness and panic before finding out the girl’s mother had been killed.

‘There are still people down there’

At dawn, once the shock and adrenaline had worn off, Yelena realised her hair was full of broken glass, brick fragments and asbestos dust.

She rushed to her relative’s apartment to clean up and then came back to retrieve whatever was left of her belongings.

“No apartment, no car, no stuff,” she said with a sardonic smile, standing next to a dozen black garbage bags with her belongings and a microwave-sized power bank she’d been using during blackouts caused by Russia’s strikes on energy infrastructure.

Rescue workers kept excavating the debris looking for survivors, while officials registered the residents. Communal workers unfurled and cut pieces of transparent plastic film to replace broken window glass.

“There are still people down there,” Yelena said.

The strike took place on the 99th day of Trump’s second presidency whose boastful pledge to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II “within 24 hours” has proved futile.

The Kremlin has continued to produce conditions for a ceasefire – and continues the ferocious shelling of Ukrainian cities almost daily.

“They say they hit military sites, but keep striking civilian areas,” Viktor, a 59-year-old survivor whose face and scalp were cut by glass shards, told Al Jazeera as he stood next to his 90-year-old mother.

At the UN’s New York headquarters, Asaad al-Shibani, the country’s new three-star flag was raised. The new Syrian government’s action indicates that it wants to be released from Western sanctions.

Fort Worth, Texas – Witnessing the trauma that refugees she assists is the hardest part of Ana Maria Fores Tamayo’s job. When she and her husband met Venezuelans living in the United States last year, that trauma was apparent when they traveled to Aurora, Colorado.

The Refugee Support Network’s leader, Tamayo, 69, said, “Everyone is afraid.” Her organization provides assistance to people who are attempting to leave their home countries by requesting temporary protected status (TPS) in the US, among other services.

She described the people she met in Colorado as “they were leaving because things there were terrible.” The majority of them only mentioned how happy they were that they had the opportunity to live here legally.

The US government established TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to nations that have been designated as unsafe to return to from which they have been previously.

Nearly 300,000 Venezuelans would lose their TPS on Thursday, according to President Donald Trump’s announcement in February. However, a US federal judge halted the action the following month, citing racism in the Trump administration’s portrayal of the migrants as criminals.

Andres Pacheco, 64, Tamayo’s husband, claimed the status may soon no longer be an option for some people despite the fact that TPS has traditionally been a “relatively simple process” in comparison to asylum claims.

The only drawback of TPS is that it only lasts for 18 months, according to Pacheco, who provides legal assistance to immigrants in Texas. These are people who “live in uncertainty,” the statement goes on.

A “warzone” in Colorado

According to a Federal Register notice in March, the Trump administration announced that it would revoke the temporary legal status of 530, 000 people, including Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.

Trump’s campaign focused on migrant crime, making migrant crime a key focus despite studies consistently demonstrating that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens.

Trump also retorted unproven allegations about Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang during campaign rallies, including one in Aurora, where such suspicions had become public. He continued by calling the city a “warzone” and defending Democrats by claiming that “migrant criminals” would “rape, pillage, thieve, plunder, plunder, and kill the people of the United States of America.”

Do you notice what Colorado’s citizens are up to? Trump stated at a Pennsylvania rally that they are “taking over”. Without providing any proof, he continued, “They’re taking over real estate.” They work as Venezuelan real estate developers. They possess tools that the US military does not.

In the months that followed, Tamayo and Pacheco closely watched as Trump repeatedly attacked Nicolas Maduro, a president of Venezuela, while simultaneously demonizing illegal immigrants. Tamayo’s interpretation of those who they encountered in Aurora differed from that portrait.

They had no food, no medicines, and nothing because their country had completely collapsed. They were then forced to leave.

Many Venezuelans who live in the US voted for Trump despite his criticisms.

And despite a federal judge temporarily preventing the Trump administration from terminating TPS for Venezuelans, many are now grappling with the growing uncertainty of their futures.

After Trump controversially invoked wartime legislation to expel them, presidential actions like those taken in March, when the US flew more than 200 immigrants allegedly Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador, only serve to exacerbate those fears.

A Venezuelan-American voter for Trump who resides in Dallas, Luis, claimed to have “never thought” that Trump would attack the relief effort that protects more than half a million Venezuelans from deportation, including some of his cherished ones. He requested anonymity because he was concerned about retribution against his family when he chose to use only his first name.

Trump has acknowledged Venezuela is unsafe, and the 34-year-old said he does understand that he doesn’t want criminals. Why, then, does he want to eliminate the good, devout people? What does he want us to return to, exactly?

Second attempt

Trump has attempted to halt the program before, and this is not his first attempt.

The president attempted to evict people from El Salvador, Haiti, and other countries he infamously dubbed “s***hole countries” during his first term.

Marco Rubio, then a US senator and current Trump’s secretary of state, cosponsored the Venezuela TPS Act and personally advocated for Venezuelans in a letter to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, which led to his being sued by advocacy groups.

Rubio, however, took a different position on the subject this year.

He wrote, “Designating Venezuela under TPS does not put America and its citizens first or support core American interests.”

Few other Republicans have praised Venezuelans.

Maria Salazar, a representative from Miami, Florida, urged Trump to stop “punishing” immigrants by quashing their humanitarian parole, a process the Biden administration had set up to obtain legal status. Nearly one-fourth of Salazar’s constituents are not US citizens, and more than 70% of them are Hispanic.

According to Salazar, “They came here fleeing failed communist nations because they backed Biden’s empty promises.”

Salazar recently expressed her gratitude for the courts’ efforts to stop Trump from manoeuvring, even going so far as to claim to have “led the fight” to protect TPS. In reality, organizations like the National TPS Alliance, which filed the lawsuit that caused the courts to halt Trump’s actions, have spearheaded the conflict.

A “blessing for my life,” I say.

The National TPS Alliance’s coordinator, Jose Palma, claimed to have given TPS recipients advice in excess of tens of thousands.

He claimed that there are tales of Honduran or El Salvador residents who have spent the past 25 years in the country. Even though they have established a life in the United States, they run the risk of losing their immigration status and facing deportation.

Palma is particularly concerned about parents who have established families in the US and are TPS beneficiaries, making their children US citizens.

According to him, “their children will either need to stay in the United States without their parents or be forced to move to another country” if they are ultimately deported.

After a devastating earthquake, Liz, a native of El Salvador and now in her 50s, arrived in the US in 2001.

Liz, who chose to use her first name out of fear of reprisals, claimed she has since reapplied for TPS roughly a dozen times and that the program has allowed her to start a family and live in a neighborhood she now considers her home.

Although some costs have increased and some documents have become more complicated, the process has been trustworthy: you submit the necessary paperwork and, as long as your country is listed, you receive the status.

Liz said, “TPS is at least one of the many things we need to exercise our rights.”

According to Liz about TPS, “Even if it’s temporary, it’s created a lot of good for the American public.” “We have TPS holders who are leaders in their faith. We have TPS holders who work for US citizens as business owners.

Carmen, a Venezuelan woman who lives in Fort Worth, Texas, echoed Liz’s comments, calling TPS “a godsend” that helped her “start a life I didn’t know I would have.”

“It’s time for you to leave,”

Fort Worth-based Sindy Mata, a 30-year-old community organizer, has also given immigration and humanitarian parole, which is a temporary stay in the United States for urgent reasons.

She claimed that many people in temporary status have been receiving emails from the Department of Homeland Security that read, “It is time for you to leave the United States.”

The administration’s plan to encourage immigrants to begin “self-deporting” is a part of its strategy.

Mata claimed that the emails from the Homeland Security Department were not always the intended result.

“I know a person who said, “Who else got this? ” when they received the email? Who else in the community needs assistance or advice?

When she began establishing connections between people who wanted to keep TPS alive, such as Palma’s, and legal counsel.