Iran yesterday rejected a White House accusation that Tehran had long been in breach of the terms of its nuclear deal with world powers, after the Islamic Republic said that it had amassed more low-enriched uranium than permitted under the accord.
“Seriously?” Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Twitter, after a statement by White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham that said: “There is little doubt that even before the deal’s existence, Iran was violating its terms.”
Tehran’s announcement drew a warning from US President Donald Trump that Tehran was “playing with fire.”
The move marked Iran’s first major step beyond the terms of the pact since the US pulled out of it more than a year ago.
However, Zarif said that the move was not a contravention of the accord, arguing that Tehran was exercising its right to respond to the US walkout.
However, the step could have far-reaching consequences for diplomacy at a time when European countries are trying to pull the US and Iran back from confrontation.
It comes less than two weeks after Trump said that he ordered air strikes on Iran, only to cancel them minutes before impact.
Iran’s Fars News Agency reported that the country’s enriched uranium stockpile has now passed the 300kg limit allowed under the deal.
UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors Iran’s nuclear program under the deal, confirmed in Vienna that Tehran had breached the limit.
Trump, asked if he had a message for Iran, said: “No message to Iran. They know what they’re doing. They know what they’re playing with, and I think they’re playing with fire. So, no message to Iran whatsoever.”
European powers, which remain party to the accord and have tried to keep it in place, urged Iran not to take further steps that would break it, but they held off on declaring the agreement void or announcing sanctions of their own.
The White House charge that Iran was likely breaking the nuclear deal before and after it was reached in 2015 contrasts with CIA Director Gina Haspel’s testimony in January to the US Senate Intelligence Committee, saying: “At the moment, technically, they are in compliance.”
Arms Control Association executive director Daryl Kimball said the White House charge was “illogical.”
He said that at the time that the nuclear deal was concluded, Tehran and the IAEA agreed on a “roadmap” through which Iran is addressing the nuclear watchdog’s unanswered questions about the nuclear weapons research program, which the IAEA assessed ended in 2003.
“The process is still under way,” he said.
Kimball said that no international standard prohibits Iran from enriching uranium, as asserted by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, adding: “That is not the case. That is an American position.”
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
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.