VIENNA/PARIS (REUTERS, BLOOMBERG) – The United Nations nuclear watchdog demanded an immediate reply from Iran on whether it would extend a monitoring agreement that expired overnight on Friday (June 25), prompting an Iranian envoy to respond that Teheran was under no obligation to provide an answer. The agreement continued the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) collection […]

CAIRO — The owner and insurers of the enormous container ship that blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March and disrupted global shipping have reached a settlement with the Egyptian authorities, one of the insurers said on Wednesday. The insurer’s statement did not specify the amount, but said that once the settlement was […]

TEHERAN (BLOOMBERG) – Iran said the United States had agreed to lift sanctions on Iran’s oil industry and banks but the main issues stalling efforts by world powers to revive the nuclear deal are linked to penalties that go back to 2015, during negotiations over the original landmark accord. Mr Mahmoud Vaezi, President Hassan Rouhani’s […]

Iran’s newly chosen president, in his first news conference, on Monday rejected the United States’ push for a broader deal with the Islamic Republic that would restrict its ballistic missiles program and curb its regional military policies in addition to containing its nuclear program. President-elect Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative cleric, said that Iran’s ballistic missiles […]

KIBBUTZ NIR DAVID, Israel — A whimsical chain of inflatable rafts tethered together by a flimsy rope floated along the Asi, a gentle stream that runs for a mile through a sunbaked plain in northern Israel. The boats were packed with residents of the area, their children and day trippers from farther afield, but this […]

Since Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar was a child, he has heard confident predictions that the hard-line government of his home country, Iran, was doomed. “There has been this conventional wisdom since the revolution that the regime will not survive,” he said. Even a few months into the revolutionaries’ 1979 takeover in Iran, “people said it would […]

PARIS (AFP) – Hardliner Iranian cleric Ebrahim Raisi’s victory on Saturday (June 19) in a presidential election has drawn mixed reactions, with Russia hailing it as a sign of greater regional stability but others decrying it as a farce. Russia “Relations between our countries have been traditionally friendly,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a […]

JERUSALEM — For months, rights campaigners have argued that Israel has a moral and legal duty to vaccinate millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. For months, Israel resisted that argument, vaccinating only about 130,000 Palestinians with permits to work in Israel. On Friday morning, the new Israeli government went some way toward answering its […]

GAZA CITY (AFP) – Israeli jets launched air strikes on Gaza overnight Thursday (June 17) to Friday after militants in the Palestinian territory again set off incendiary balloons into southern Israel, the army and AFP journalists said. The fire balloons and air strikes are the latest violence heaping pressure on a fragile ceasefire between Israel […]

GAZA CITY — As Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza City for the sixth night running, Dr. Ayman Abul Ouf climbed the stairs of the apartment block that his family built four decades ago, calmer than he had seemed all day. The Abul Ouf Building, nestled in a wealthy shopping district on Al Wahda Street, was the […]