RIYADH(AFP) – Saudi budget carrier flyadeal has withdrawn a provisional order for Boeing’s grounded 737 Max jets, the US plane maker said Sunday (July 7), as the airline confirmed it will operate an entirely Airbus fleet. “We understand that flyadeal will not finalise its commitment to the 737 Max at this time given the airline’s […]

US Secretary of State warns of consequences after Tehran looked set on exceeding nuclear deal cap. Iran will face further sanctions in response to its expected breach of a uranium enrichment cap, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said. On Sunday, Iran said it was hours away from breaching the cap set by an endangered […]

Is the Iran nuclear deal dying by a thousand cuts, or is it actually dead already and nobody will quite admit it? The United States abandoned the agreement just over a year ago. Iran is now progressively breaching its terms, first by storing more low-enriched uranium than it is allowed to hold, and now by […]

Tehran says it wants landmark nuclear deal to be salvaged, demands other parties fulfil their obligations. Iran has announced it will begin enriching uranium beyond the 3.67 percent cap set in its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers “in a few hours”.   The move on Sunday is part of an Iranian effort to press Europe […]

Last week’s seizure of an Iranian oil tanker bound for Syria by British commandos off Gibraltar is the latest episode in the long and disastrous history of economic sanctions in the Middle East. The UK claims that it is implementing EU sanctions on Syria, but Spain said the seizure came at the request of the […]

DUBAI (REUTERS) – Iran will announce on Sunday (July 7) that it will raise its uranium enrichment level to 5 per cent, a concentration above the limit set by its 2015 nuclear deal with six major powers, an Iranian official told Reuters. “The main announcement tomorrow will be the increase of the level of enrichment […]

Turkish authorities say the blast, which killed at least three people, appears ‘terror-related’ At least three people have been killed in a car bomb blast in the southern Turkish town of Reyhanli, located close to the Syrian border. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul on Friday that initial findings showed the incident in […]

Six months of exemptions from US sanctions for countries still buying oil from Iran ended on Thursday. President Donald Trump reinstated the sanctions last year after abandoning a landmark nuclear accord, which he wants to renegotiate. Iran’s leaders have remained defiant in the face of the sanctions and vowed to overcome them, but the substantial […]

Iranian hard-liners have long mocked their foreign minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, as the make-believe American, after a character in a comic Iranian movie who puts on an accent, wardrobe and lifestyle to live out a fantasy of American life. A resident of the United States on and off for nearly 30 years, Mr. Zarif was […]

Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, the Iranian most closely associated with the 2015 nuclear agreement, has come under fire in Tehran and Washington as the deal approaches collapse. Hard-liners in Tehran accuse him of falling for false promises from the Americans. Trump administration officials call him a trickster who acts like a moderate while remaining […]