Iran and major world powers hoping to revive the 2015 nuclear deal held another round of talks on Thursday. The negotiations followed Tehran’s decision to increase its Uranium enrichment to 60% purity in an apparent retaliation for an attack on its nuclear site in Natanz, which Iranian officials blamed on Israel.
Senior diplomats for the countries except for the United States, which are all signatories to the deal, met to set the tone for the discussions, though diplomats warned that reaching an agreement could prove harder moving forward.
Two expert-level groups tasked with creating a list of sanctions the U.S. could lift with nuclear obligations Iran could meet, also held a meeting this week.
Washington accused Iran-backed militias of dropping a drone filled with explosives near U.S. troops stationed at Iraq’s Erbil airport on Wednesday.
Iran-backed militia groups oppose the presence of the United States in Iraq, while Middle East analysts suggest that removing all U.S. troops from the country would ultimately lead to Iran gaining control of the state.
The attack in Erbil, which used an unmanned aerial drone to target U.S. troops, is believed to be the first of its kind. No casualties were reported.
And Iran’s State television channel was heavily criticized by football fans in the country after interrupting the coverage of Tottenham Hotspur’s Premier League football match against Manchester United, in an apparent effort to conceal the legs of a female referee wearing shorts on the pitch.
The footage was censored more than 100 times as Iranian officials scrambled to move away from referee Sian Massey-Ellis’s legs, diverting viewers to landscape shots of the Spurs’ Stadium and the London streets around the grounds.
Iranian women’s rights group, My Stealthy Freedom, said, “Censorship is in the DNA of the Islamic Republic of Iran. We should not normalize this practice. This is not our culture. This is the ideology of a repressive regime,” in a statement released by the campaign.
