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Key events
US and Iranian negotiators meet for crunch nuclear talks
Taz Ali
Iran and US negotiators will be meeting in the Swiss city of Geneva today for a third round of indirect nuclear talks. The Oman-mediated discussions will take place amid a massive buildup of US warships and aircraft in the Middle East to pressure Iran into a deal.
This is the third meeting between the US and Iran since June last year, when Israel launched attacks on Iran that sparked a war marked by tit-for-tat airstrikes.
Ahead of today’s talks, the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has banned weapons of mass destruction, which “clearly means Tehran won’t develop nuclear weapons”. Khamenaei, who has the final say on all state matters in Iran, is thought to have issued a fatwa – or religious edict – banning the Iranian use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, some time before or in 2005.
In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, US president Donald Trump accused Iran of seeking to rebuild its nuclear weapons programme, but gave no clear indication of his intentions regarding a possible military strike against Tehran. He did, however, say he wanted to resolve tensions diplomatically.
Iran has maintained that it will continue to enrich uranium, a component of a nuclear weapon, for peaceful purposes and has long argued that uranium enrichment is a sovereign right. It has threatened to retaliate in kind if the US were to launch a strike, and said that it would also attack Israel.
You can follow our live blog on the talks here:
Rubio says US will ‘respond accordingly’ after Cuba kills four in speedboat shooting
US Secretary of state Marco Rubio has refused to speculate on what happened after Cuba said its soldiers killed four people and wounded six others aboard a Florida-registered speed boat that had entered Cuban waters and opened fire.
He said that it could be a “wide range of things,” and that the US will not solely rely on what the Cuban authorities have provided thus far.
“Suffice it to say, it is highly unusual to see shootouts in open sea like that. It’s not something that happens every day. It’s something, frankly, that hasn’t happened with Cuba in a very long time,” Rubio said.
Cuba’s government said that the 10 passengers on a boat that opened fire on its soldiers were armed Cubans living in the US who were trying to infiltrate the island and unleash terrorism.
“The majority of the facts being publicly reported are those by the information provided by the Cubans. We will verify that independently as we gather more information, and we’ll be prepared to respond accordingly,” Rubio said. “We’re going to have our own information on this. We’re going to figure out exactly what happened.”
He said it was not a US government operation and that he wasn’t “going to speculate about whose boat it was, what they were doing, why they were there, what actually happened.”
Hillary Clinton to testify in US House panel’s Epstein probe
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton is to testify behind closed doors later today before a congressional committee investigating the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Former president Bill Clinton is scheduled to answer questions tomorrow from the Republican-led House Oversight Committee about his relations with Epstein, who died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial.
The Clintons had initially rejected subpoenas ordering them to testify in the panel’s probe, but the Democratic power couple eventually agreed to do so after House Republicans threatened to hold them in contempt of Congress, AFP reported.
The proceedings will take place behind closed doors but will be recorded, with footage expected to be released later – an arrangement reminiscent of what happened with Clinton’s 1998 grand jury testimony, which was made public the following month.
Bill Clinton has denied any wrongdoing but is under scrutiny over admissions that he flew on Epstein’s private plane several times. Photos in the recently released files show the ex-president in potentially compromising poses – particularly one with him in a hot tub with Epstein and a woman whose identity is redacted. Hillary, for her part, denies ever having met Epstein but acknowledges meeting Ghislaine Maxwell, his partner and convicted co-conspirator.
For Republicans, putting a searchlight on the Clintons has the advantage of deflecting attention from Donald Trump’s relationship with Epstein.
The Clintons called for their depositions to be public but the committee insisted on questioning them behind closed doors, a move Bill Clinton denounced as “pure politics” and akin to a “kangaroo court.”
He wrote on X:
If they want answers, let’s stop the games + do this the right way: in a public hearing, where the American people can see for themselves what this is really about.
In other developments:
The FBI fired at least 10 people this week who worked on the special counsel’s investigation of Donald Trump for illegally taking classified documents after he lost the presidency and left office in 2021.
A federal judge in Boston ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s third-country removal policy, deporting immigrants to countries to which they have no ties, is unlawful.
Dr Jerome Adams, who served as the US surgeon general during Donald Trump’s first term, denounced the president’s nomination of Dr Casey Means, a wellness influencer without a medical license
Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, said to the Trump administration’s decision to withhold $259m in federal Medicaid funds from his state “has nothing to do with fraud”, but is instead about Trump “weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states”.
