UN Security Council member Turkey insisted yesterday that diplomacy is the best way to resolve Iran’s nuclear crisis and offered to help break a deadlock over an atomic fuel deal for Tehran.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, on a visit to Tehran, reiterated that Ankara, which has resisted a US push for a fourth round of sanctions against Iran, favored negotiations to resolve the impasse.
World powers led by the US believe Iran’s nuclear program is masking a drive for atomic weapons. Tehran says the program is solely aimed at generating electricity to fuel its growing economy.
“The solution for Iran’s nuclear program is through negotiations and diplomatic process,” Davutoglu said at a media conference in Tehran in remarks translated through an interpreter.
Turkey, one of the 15 UN Security Council members and a regional ally of Iran, “is ready to act as an intermediary in the issue of uranium exchange as a third country and hopes to have a fruitful role in this,” Davutoglu said. “We will continue to try our best to see what we can do for this nuclear fuel swap.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who jointly addressed the press conference with Davutoglu, said Iran has been regularly consulting Turkey over its nuclear program, but did not explicitly react to Ankara’s latest offer.
“Turkey will do its part if Iranians deem fit,” Davutoglu said in response.
Western powers are particularly infuriated with Iran because it defiantly began work on high-grade uranium enrichment after a deadlock over a UN-drafted deal to supply Tehran with the material intended to power a research reactor.
The deal from last October envisaged Iran sending its low-enriched uranium to Russia and France for conversion into high-grade 20 percent enriched uranium, to be returned later to Tehran as fuel for the medical research reactor.
However, the deal stalled when Iran insisted that the exchange of the two materials happen simultaneously inside the country, a condition rejected by world powers.
Mottaki at the weekend said Tehran planned to talk to all the 15 members of the UN Security Council, including Washington, over the proposed fuel swap.
On Monday he went further and said he believed a deal was still possible.
“If the other side has serious political will for the fuel exchange formula, this can be a multi-lateral trust building opportunity, especially for the Islamic republic to trust the other side,” he said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion