EU has no Plan B as US gathers allies to talk tough on Iran

Iran walked away in June from indirect talks with the United States in Vienna on both sides returning to compliance with the deal.

The European Union is not thinking about a “Plan B” if diplomacy with Iran fails, EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell said on Friday in Washington, as opposed to a US statement that “every option” is on the table.

“It’s time to go back to the negotiating table. And I don’t want to think about Plan Bs because no... Plan B that I could imagine would be a good one,” Borrell said.

Iran walked away in June from indirect talks with the United States in Vienna on both sides returning to compliance with the deal, under which Tehran curbed its nuclear program in return for economic sanctions relief. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has so far refused to resume those negotiations.

Former US President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the deal in 2018 and re-imposed sanctions on Iran. Since then, Tehran has been rebuilding its stockpiles of enriched uranium, refining it to higher levels of purity and installing advanced centrifuges to speed up the enrichment process.

RANIAN PRESIDENT Ebrahim Raisi visits the Bushehr nuclear power plant earlier this month.

Western diplomats have said they are concerned Tehran’s new negotiating team – under a president known as an anti-Western hardliner, unlike his pragmatist predecessor – may make new demands beyond the scope of what had already been agreed.

Borrell’s comment against a Plan B came in contrast with remarks US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made two days earlier that the US “will look at every option to deal with the challenges posed by Iran."

Blinken, who was speaking at an event with Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Emirati Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed marking a year since the Abraham Accords, normalization and peace agreements between Israel and four Arab nations, added that “We continue to believe that diplomacy is the most effective way to do that, but it takes two to engage in diplomacy, and we have not... seen from Iran a willingness to do that at this point.”

The Secretary of State met last week with the top diplomats from the EU, Israel, and the UAE and with Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, with Iran as the top agenda item.

BORRELL SAID “time is pressing” for Iran to return to talks, and that the Islamic Republic's new government had had enough time to study the file and instruct its negotiating team.

The EU foreign policy chief indicated that not only is Tehran obfuscating on the question of when they will resume indirect talks with the US, but that Iran has not even committed to a time frame for preliminary negotiations it has asked to hold in Brussels.

“I am ready to receive them if needed,” Borrell said, adding that he did not think talks in Brussels were absolutely necessary but that he had to be willing to be somewhat “patient on this issue because we cannot afford to fail.”

EU political director Enrique Mora, the chief coordinator for the talks, was in Tehran on Thursday to meet members of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, four months after discussions broke off between Iran and world powers.

After Mora’s visit, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said it would hold talks in the coming days with the EU in Brussels.

Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s ambassador to the UN nuclear watchdog who tracks the nuclear talks for Moscow, suggested that Iran would be better served returning to Vienna.

“Isn’t it more prudent to discuss the texts with participants in the #ViennaTalks?” he asked on Twitter.

France’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre said negotiations should resume immediately from where they left off in June to reach a deal quickly.

Lapid called last week in Washington for the world to take a stand against the mullahs’ regime, which he warned was “dragging its heels” to advance its nuclear program while the parties to the 2015 nuclear deal wait to return to talks.

“If a terror regime is going to acquire a nuclear weapon, we must act. We must make clear that the civilized world won’t allow it,” he said.

If diplomacy between world powers and Iran fails, “other options will be on the table,” Lapid said, later adding: “When we say other options, I think everyone understands here, in Israel, in the Emirates and in Tehran, what it means.”

Source: The Jerusalem Post

Strange radio waves coming from the heart of the Milky Way stump scientists

A previously unknown stellar object was first spotted during a sky survey using the ASKAP radio telescope at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.

Space experts have detected unusual radio waves coming from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The energy signal is unlike any phenomenon studied before and could suggest a previously unknown stellar object, according to a new study.

The brightness of the object varies dramatically, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random, said Ziteng Wang, lead author of the new study in The Astrophysical Journal and a doctoral student in the School of Physics at The University of Sydney.

"The strangest property of this new signal is that it has a very high polarisation. This means its light oscillates in only one direction, but that direction rotates with time," he said in a news release.

The team initially thought it could be a pulsar -- a very dense type of rapidly spinning neutron (dead) star, or a type of star that emits huge solar flares. The signals from this new source of radio waves, however, don't match what astronomers expect from these types of stars.

The fickle object has been named after its coordinates in the night sky: ASKAP J173608.2-321635.

"This object was unique in that it started out invisible, became bright, faded away and then reappeared. This behaviour was extraordinary," said study co-author Tara Murphy, a professor at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy and the School of Physics at The University of Sydney, in the release. The object was initially spotted during a survey of the sky using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder radio telescope, known as ASKAP, which has 36 dishes that work together as one telescope at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. Follow-up observations were conducted with the the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales and South African Radio Astronomy Observatory's MeerKAT telescope.

However, the Parkes telescope failed to detect the source. "We then tried the more sensitive MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. Because the signal was intermittent, we observed it for 15 minutes every few weeks, hoping that we would see it again," Murphy said in the statement. "Luckily, the signal returned, but we found that the behaviour of the source was dramatically different -- the source disappeared in a single day, even though it had lasted for weeks in our previous ASKAP observations." Murphy said more powerful telescopes, such as the planned Square Kilometre Array, may help solve the mystery. The array is an international effort to build the world's largest radio telescope that's expected to be completed within the next decade.

Source: CNN

Taiwan warns of ‘catastrophic consequences’ if China tries to take island

Taiwan’s president has warned of “catastrophic consequences” if China tries to take over the island, as Beijing ramps up its military harassment towards the territory.

Over the last few days, China has flown more than 150 fighter jets and bombers close to Taiwanese air space, sparking worldwide condemnation.

Beijing claims that Taiwan, which lies 110 miles east across the Taiwan Strait, is a province of China, and views its government as “separatists”.

So where could this all lead?

Source: Channel 4