US envoys yesterday headed to Islamabad to start a new round of peace negotiations with Iran, although Iranian state media said Tehran’s envoys had no immediate plans to hold face-to-face talks.
As Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner set off for the Pakistani capital, the White House said they would hold an “in-person conversation” with Iranian representatives.
Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi on Friday arrived in Islamabad and met Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir, a key figure in the country’s mediation efforts. The pair appeared together in a brief video posted by Tehran’s embassy.
Photo: the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs via EPA
Sealing a deal to end the Middle East war remains a difficult proposition, even as urgency mounts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital conduit for the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supply.
Witkoff and Kushner would be in Pakistan “to engage in talks ... with representatives from the Iranian delegation,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
“The Iranians reached out, as the president called on them to do, and asked for this in-person conversation,” Leavitt said, adding that the talks would “hopefully move the ball forward towards a deal.”
US Vice President J.D. Vance, who led a first round of negotiations in Islamabad two weeks ago, would not be joining for the time being, but was on “standby to fly to Pakistan if necessary,” Leavitt said.
It remained unclear whether the Iranian side would meet directly with the US envoys.
Araghchi has no plans to meet with the Americans, and Islamabad would serve as a bridge to “convey” Iranian proposals, Iranian state television said.
Araghchi had arrived in Islamabad to discuss “ongoing efforts for regional peace and stability” with Pakistani officials, Islamabad’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, without directly referencing talks with Witkoff and Kushner.
An Iranian spokesman said Araghchi would later visit Oman and Russia to discuss efforts to end the war, which was launched against Iran by Israel and the US on Feb. 28.
the Iranian Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics in a statement carried by news agency ISNA said that “the enemy is looking for a face-saving way to escape the war quagmire it has become trapped in.”
Since the last round of talks, efforts to bring the two sides back to the table have hit an impasse, with Iran refusing to participate as long as a US naval blockade on its ports remains in place.
Iran has imposed a de facto blockade of its own on the Strait of Hormuz, allowing only a trickle of ships to pass through the vital waterway, throwing global energy markets into turmoil.
Oil prices on Friday slid amid hopes that fresh peace talks would see an end to Tehran’s disruption of trade through the strait.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS