Iran is to take another step to reduce its compliance with a landmark 2015 nuclear deal, Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Saturday without elaborating, according to parliamentary news agency ICANA.
Iran has repeatedly said that it would reduce its commitment to the nuclear accord in stages and might even withdraw from the pact altogether unless the remaining signatories find ways to shield its economy from US sanctions.
Washington pulled out of the deal last year.
“The third step in reducing commitments to [the nuclear deal] will be implemented in the current situation,” Zarif said.
“We have said that if [the deal] is not completely implemented by others then we will also implement it in the same incomplete manner — and of course all of our actions have been within the framework of [the deal],” he said.
Iran last month said that it would restart deactivated centrifuges and ramp up enrichment of uranium to 20 percent purity in a move away from the nuclear deal.
Iranian officials have said that all of Tehran’s moves in reducing its commitments to the nuclear deal are reversible, as long as the remaining signatories uphold their commitments.
Fears of a Middle East war with global repercussions have risen since US President Donald Trump withdrew last year from the 2015 deal and revived a panoply of sanctions meant to push Tehran into wider security concessions.
The US on Wednesday imposed sanctions on Zarif himself, blocking any property or interests that he has in the US, although Zarif said he has none.
He added at a charity event on Friday that he is proud to be sanctioned by the US governement for defending the rights of Iranian people, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting reported.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS