Iran says it will work with IAEA but inspections may be risky
Iran plans to cooperate with the U.N. nuclear watchdog despite restrictions imposed by its parliament, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Saturday, while stressing that access to its bombed nuclear sites posed security and safety issues.
A new law passed in Iran following last month's Israeli and U.S. bombing campaign stipulates that inspection of Iran's nuclear sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) needs approval by the Supreme National Security Council, Iran's top security body.
The Israeli and U.S. strikes targeted a nuclear program which Western countries have long said was aimed at building an atomic weapon. Iran has long said its nuclear program is purely peaceful.
Any negotiations over Iran's future nuclear program are likely to require its cooperation with the IAEA, which angered Iran last month by declaring on the eve of the Israeli strikes that Tehran was violating non-proliferation treaty commitments.
"The risk of spreading radioactive materials and the risk of exploding leftover munitions ... are serious," state media cited Araqchi as saying. "For us, IAEA inspectors approaching nuclear sites has both a security aspect ... and the safety of the inspectors themselves is a matter that must be examined."
While Iran's cooperation with the nuclear watchdog has not stopped, it will take a new form and will be guided and managed through the Supreme National Security Council, Araqchi told Tehran-based diplomats.
"The IAEA's requests for continued monitoring in Iran will be ... decided on a case-by-case basis by the Council with consideration to safety and security issues," Araqchi said.
Iran will not agree to any nuclear deal that does not allow it to enrich uranium, Araqchi reiterated. Iran would only agree to talks limited to its nuclear program and not encompassing defense issues such as its missiles.
Axios cited sources on Saturday as saying Russian President Vladimir Putin had voiced support for the idea of an accord in which Tehran would be barred from enriching uranium. Iran's semi-official news agency Tasnim quoted an "informed source" as saying Putin had not sent any such message to Iran.
Speaking to the state news agency IRNA, Araqchi said Iran was carefully considering the details of any renewed nuclear talks with the U.S. and seeking assurances that Washington would not again resort to military force. "We are in no hurry to enter into unconsidered negotiations," he added.
Araqchi also said any move by Britain, France and Germany to reimpose international sanctions on Iran through a so-called "snapback" mechanism under an earlier nuclear deal would "end Europe's role" in Iran's nuclear issue.
Under the terms of a U.N. resolution ratifying a 2015 nuclear pact, the three European powers could reimpose United Nations sanctions against Tehran by October 18, 2025.
© Thomson Reuters 2025.
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Yomiuri Shimbun
an hour ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Democratic Fissure over Israel Hits a Moderate Swing State
Democrats in North Carolina are engaged in a bitter fight after the state party condemned Israel for 'apartheid rule,' exposing an internal rift in a moderate swing state that is festering nationally and could complicate the party's plans for the 2026 midterm elections. The narrow approval of a strongly worded party resolution late last month calling for an arms embargo on the U.S. ally comes after two other state parties adopted similar measures and Democratic voters in New York chose a longtime critic of Israel as their nominee for mayor. A crowded Senate primary in Michigan, where many Democrats withheld their votes to protest Israel policy during last year's presidential primary, could open another avenue for the party's disputes to emerge. The disparate places where the debate is flaring – Southern and Midwestern states as well as deep-blue coastal cities – reveal a deepening tension between the party's base and its elected leaders. Some are warning that the intractable foreign policy issue threatens to distract the party from developing a coherent message about the economy and other issues that connect with the largest swath of voters. 'Any time Democrats are dealing with this issue, they're not working on electing other Democrats,' said Amy Block DeLoach, a vice president of the Jewish caucus of the North Carolina Democratic Party. 'It's a problem.' The state party's executive committee passed the resolution June 28, the same weekend Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) broke with President Donald Trump on his tax and immigration bill and announced he would not run for a third term. Democrats seized on the announcement but didn't put as much attention on it as they otherwise might have because they were still squabbling with one another over the Israel resolution. Trump has offered near-unconditional support to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government, claiming last year that any Jewish person who votes for Democrats 'hates their religion,' while using a broad fight against antisemitism to clamp down on universities and protesters. Internal Democratic divisions over Israel hampered party unity and depressed young voter enthusiasm during last year's presidential campaign as Israel struck back at Hamas for its surprise attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Critics of Israel occupied college campuses across the United States. Demonstrators heckled Democratic candidates. Activists called for Democrats to cast protest votes during the presidential primaries. In Michigan, more than 100,000 Democrats – 13 percent of primary voters – declared themselves 'uncommitted' in the state's presidential primary to signal their displeasure with President Joe Biden's policy on Israel. Trump went on to win Michigan and every other battleground state. Democrats' differences over Israel have continued to smolder. They ignited last month as some Democrats expressed dismay that their party nominated Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York. Mamdani, who is Muslim, declined to condemn the slogan 'globalize the intifada,' which some Jews view as a call to violence against them and many Palestinians see as support for their struggle for a homeland. Critics have called such language particularly troubling after Jews were attacked in D.C., Boulder and elsewhere. Republicans have had their own intraparty fights over Israel and the United States' role on the world stage, particularly after Trump authorized the bombing of Iran last month. Trump announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran soon afterward and hosted Netanyahu at the White House this week as he sought a ceasefire in Gaza. In a March poll by the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of U.S. adults expressed an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42 percent in March 2022, before the conflict began. Democrats had a worse view of Israel than Republicans, with 69 percent of Democrats expressing an unfavorable opinion compared with 37 percent of Republicans. Democrats in a May survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs gave Israel an average rating of 41 on a 100-point scale, an 11-point decline since 2022 and the lowest rating in 47 years of polling. More than two-thirds of Democrats said the United States should not take a side in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, 20 percent said it should take the Palestinians' side and 10 percent said it should take Israel's side. Reem Subei, who heads the Arab caucus of the North Carolina Democratic Party, said she pushed for the arms embargo resolution because it is not only morally correct but also sound politics. 'We see this as an issue that is uniting and bringing in more voters to the Democratic Party,' Subei said. 'This vote here at [the] North Carolina Democratic Party is an invitation to those that have walked away from the party or have walked away from voting altogether in the past election.' Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, disputed such claims, noting that Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) and Cori Bush (D-Missouri) lost their primaries last year to candidates who backed Israel. Soifer's group supported their opponents, as did the super PAC of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 'It's actually this resolution that is more the outlier than anything else,' Soifer said of the North Carolina measure. At least two other state parties have passed resolutions similar to North Carolina's, though in more measured tones. The Wisconsin Democratic Party adopted one last month that said its base is 'overwhelmingly supportive of restricting weapons to Israel.' The Washington State Democratic Party approved one last year that called on the state's congressional delegation to demand that military assistance to Israel fully comply with a law that bars aid to countries that violate human rights. The resolution in North Carolina said the state party supports 'an immediate embargo on all military aid, weapons shipments and military logistical support to Israel' that should remain in place until Amnesty International and other rights groups 'certify that Israel is no longer engaged in apartheid rule.' Supporters said the party's executive committee approved it 161-151; opponents said they believed there were three more votes against the measure but acknowledged it had passed by a small margin. The resolution is nonbinding, and opponents said its only effect was to put the Democrats' infighting on display. Democratic candidates and officeholders won't change their positions on Israel, and the resolution takes energy from campaigning against Republicans, said former congresswoman Kathy Manning (D-North Carolina), chair of the Democratic Majority for Israel. Supporters of the resolution need to reflect on what happened when opponents of aid to Israel gained momentum during Michigan's presidential primary, she said. 'The end result in part is Donald Trump won the state of Michigan,' Manning said. 'And how are people feeling about that? Republicans, meanwhile, are reveling in the Democrats' divisions and painting them as opposing the United States' chief ally in the Middle East. 'The radical Left continues to drive misguided anti-Israel and America Last policies,' Matt Mercer, a spokesman for the North Carolina Republican Party, said in a statement. 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Cooper, who declined to comment, has not had to take a detailed position on Israel because he hasn't served in Congress, and the party could avoid a messy primary clash over Israel if he clears the field. That may not be true in Michigan, where four Democrats are vying for the nomination to replace Sen. Gary Peters (D), who is retiring. The candidates include Rep. Haley Stevens, a longtime champion of Israel, and Abdul El-Sayed, the former health director of Wayne County who has described Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide. Before the Senate primaries play out, Mamdani will stand for election this fall in New York's general election. That will offer a test of how his views on Israel play in an overwhelmingly Democratic city with the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel. Mamdani received the most primary votes for mayor in the city's history, but party leaders did not rally around him. Instead, several moderate Democrats came out against him. Rep. 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Yomiuri Shimbun
2 hours ago
- Yomiuri Shimbun
The Lingering Mystery of the Trump Shooting: Why Did This Young Man Do It?
(c) 2025 , The Washington Post · Carol D. Leonnig · NATIONAL, POLITICS · Jul 13, 2025 – 3:32 AM On the morning of Sunday, July 14, just 16 hours after a gunman tried to kill Donald Trump, top officials gathered in the White House Situation Room to brief President Joe Biden on what the FBI knew about the would-be assassin. Could Iran be behind this plot to murder the former president, Biden asked? Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told Biden they were indeed concerned Iran might have recruited the man who fired at Trump during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, according to three people with knowledge of the briefing. Hours earlier, in fact, FBI agents had rushed to Texas in the middle of the night to interview an alleged Iranian operative the bureau had arrested Friday on suspicion of recruiting hit men to kill U.S. politicians, two said. Wray, appearing by video feed, said they had found no clear link between the shooter and the Iran plot, but they continued to run down every possibility. This account reveals previously unreported details about the urgent efforts to find any possible Iran connection – though after months of investigation and extraordinary steps, the bureau ultimately concluded there was none – and determine what motivated the shooter. A year later, largely by process of elimination, investigators have concluded that Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, acted alone. Crooks left no writings explaining his actions, but officials said he fit a profile of assassins the bureau has studied: socially isolated, educated but friendless, motived not by politics or ideology but by a sense of insignificance and a desire to become known. He was fatally shot by a Secret Service countersniper after he wounded Trump and killed rally attendee Corey Comperatore. 'The most frustrating thing in the world for law enforcement is not getting an answer on what caused this,' said one former FBI official, who like some others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. 'We just can't quite say for certain, but that's where all the evidence points to.' The case remains classified as open, but a current senior FBI official said no new leads are being actively mined. 'Absent anything new, there's not much to do,' the official said. The lack of a clear, definitive motive has spawned numerous conspiracy theories and led to suspicions among some Trump supporters that the FBI was withholding information about the gunman, a registered Republican who also donated $15 to a Democratic organization and spent weeks planning an attack on the once and future Republican president. As a high school student, Crooks scored a 1530 on his SAT, putting him in the top 1 percent of all test takers. He earned straight A's at his community college near Pittsburgh and won plaudits from teachers, as when he designed a complex Braille chessboard. Yet starting in the month he turned 16 he was searching online for information about explosives, and in the year before the shooting he was trying to buy chemicals for homemade bombs. He also searched the internet for information about major depressive disorder. The investigation ran around-the-clock in the early weeks, with Wray getting briefed at all hours by his deputy director, Paul Abbate, and chief of staff, Jonathan Lenzner. It consumed FBI agents and analysts from half of the bureau's field offices, nearly every headquarters division and some international offices. Early on, in the hopes of tamping down baseless speculation, FBI leaders decided to share far more details about the probe than they typically would. Within two weeks, the FBI had conducted over 450 interviews, including with witnesses, neighbors, classmates, teachers and family members, and had served legal requests on 64 companies to obtain phone, email, gaming and other accounts linked to Crooks. By late August, six weeks after the shooting, agents had interviewed about 1,000 people, accessed Crooks's communications on three encrypted applications, and gained an understanding of his interests and obsessions as revealed through hundreds of his computer searches. Yet in some respects, Crooks remained a cipher. 'I remember thinking, 'We have all of the tools and investigative power of the mighty United States trained on this 20-year old kid. And we just don't know,'' said one former law enforcement official involved in the probe. 'That's kind of scary.' Just before 11 p.m. on the night of the shooting, Matthew Crooks called 911 to report that his son had not returned home nearly 10 hours after saying he was going to the shooting range. Federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, along with local police, were already stationed outside the Crooks home in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles south of the Butler fairgrounds, surveilling it and waiting for a warrant. ATF agents had been dispatched to the home about 9:20 p.m. after determining that Matthew Crooks owned the rifle that was used in the shooting. But while the agents were en route, investigators found that the driver's license picture for his son, Thomas Crooks, appeared to match the dead shooter. When the father called 911 for help, the agents changed their strategy and walked up to his front door, according to an account one gave to a House task force that investigated the attack. The father opened the screen door and said instantly: 'Is it true? Did Thomas shoot Trump?' 'What makes you say that?' the agent asked. 'The news called me,' Crooks said, then invited them inside to conduct a sweep of his tidy brick home. Inside, the ATF agent opened the door to Thomas Crooks's bedroom. He saw at the foot of the bed a .50-caliber military-grade ammunition can with a white wire coming out of it, which he suspected was a homemade bomb. He spotted a one-gallon jug with a black label reading 'nitromethane,' a volatile fuel, in an open closet. The agent ordered the house evacuated and summoned the county bomb squad. Close to midnight, agents began interviewing Thomas Crooks's parents. Agents asked Matthew Crooks run-of-the-mill questions: names of his son's friends, if his son ever had a girlfriend, if he knew about his son's co-workers or workplace. The father said that he didn't know anyone in his son's life and that he and his son didn't talk about friends or work. 'No, I don't know anything about my son,' the agent recalled the father saying. That same night, prosecutors at the U.S. attorney's office in the Western District of Pennsylvania were busy opening a grand jury probe to gather as much evidence as possible about Thomas Crooks and his communications, even though he was dead and it wasn't clear that anyone would face charges. About 2 a.m., prosecutors in the Pittsburgh-based office were drafting a search warrant for the Crooks house, the first in a series of searches they would use to obtain the gunman's phones and laptop so they could better trace his activity in the weeks leading up to the shooting. From the earliest moments of the probe, investigators viewed the possibility of an Iran connection as urgent to figure out. Tehran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had vowed revenge against Trump and his top advisers for the U.S. government's 2020 drone strike that killed Gen. Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. Senior government leaders braced for fallout if the FBI were to learn Iran had orchestrated the hit, three administration officials said. 'It would mean war,' one said. Alarm that Iran may have been involved was heightened by the arrest – one day before the assassination attempt – of Asif Merchant, the alleged Iranian operative accused of plotting to kill U.S. politicians. Merchant, a Pakistani national, had boasted to undercover FBI agents posing as hit men that he was recruiting others like them, according to court documents. Merchant had told the undercover agents he planned to leave the U.S. and would relay instructions to them about whom to kill and where after he was gone. Agents arrested him midday on Friday, July 12, in Houston as he was loading his luggage to go to the airport. He has since pleaded not guilty. Before dawn on Sunday, July 14, just hours after the Butler shooting, FBI agents were dispatched to Merchant's jail cell in Texas and took the extraordinary step of interviewing him without his lawyer to determine whether he knew Crooks, according to one person briefed on the interview. Citing a potential threat to public safety, they invoked special authority under Justice Department policy to question him while he was in custody and without some standard legal rights, according to two people familiar with the interview. Agents continued questioning Merchant after he was formally charged with a murder-for-hire plot and transferred to federal detention in Brooklyn. An FBI summary of a July 17 interview was leaked to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who briefly posted it online before the FBI asked that it be removed. The Washington Post retrieved the summary, which is partially redacted, from internet archives. According to the FBI document, Merchant said he had agreed to help the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps arrange to recruit hit men and pay up to $1 million to kill American political figures. Though his Iranian handler had not said so outright, Merchant said he inferred that the ultimate target was Trump and that the plot was connected to Soleimani's death. Merchant said he reported back to his handler his assessment of Trump security after watching videos of a Trump rally: 30 security guards, 20 cameras, four to five areas where audience members had to be scanned for weapons. The Justice Department arranged to keep Merchant separated from other prisoners in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to prevent him from communicating with anyone other than his attorney and guards who delivered his food, according to a person familiar with his detention. In a memo months later about the restrictions on Merchant, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco asserted that he was trained to use coded messages to arrange hits on high-profile political figures and that 'there is substantial risk that his communications or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury.' She wrote that he 'could continue to pass valuable information regarding his efforts in organizing the assassination scheme.' Upon searching Thomas Crooks's phones, investigators discovered several encrypted messaging and email applications. His use of encrypted communications didn't prove anything nefarious, but it amped up investigators' suspicion that Crooks may have been exchanging messages with a co-conspirator or helper, former law enforcement officials said. By late August, Republican members of Congress were registering concern about the apps. 'Why does a 19-year-old kid who is a health care aide need encrypted platforms not even based in the United States, but based abroad, where most terrorist organizations know it is harder for our law enforcement to get into?' Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida), who served on the House panel investigating the assassination attempt and later became Trump's national security adviser, said in an interview with reporters Aug. 21. In one of the update calls with reporters a week later, Kevin P. Rojek, the head of the FBI's Pittsburgh field office, said investigators had pierced the applications and read the encrypted messages but found no indications of collaborators or ties to foreign adversaries. Rojek also described how Crooks had searched online for information about improvised explosives, including 'how remote detonators work' and 'how to make a bomb from fertilizer.' Rojek said Crooks had searched more than 60 times for information about Trump and Biden and events for both candidates before becoming 'hyper-focused' on the Butler rally after it was announced July 3. Rojek laid out Crooks's movements and computer searches before the shooting: On July 6, Crooks registered for the Butler rally and searched 'how far was Oswald from Kennedy'; on July 7, he visited the site; on July 8, he searched 'AGR International,' the building he would eventually use as his shooting platform; on July 12, the day before the rally, he went to a gun range and practiced shooting. The FBI also obtained details of Crooks's internet usage and emails from the Community College of Allegheny County, where he majored in engineering science and had graduated with honors in May. The emails suggested he received occasional attaboys from teachers but had little connection to other people. When an assignment required that he speak in front of five adults, Crooks asked whether he could enlist two or three instead. He said in an email that he did 'not have access to any other adults' besides his parents and older sister. In January, he made plans to take his community college credits and transfer to Robert Morris University, a private four-year college just 40 minutes from his home, to get an engineering degree. But at roughly the same time, he placed an online order for about $100 worth of nitromethane, a fuel for racecars that can also be used to make explosives. Twelve days later, he used his community college email to ask the chemical retailer when his order would arrive. 'Hello, my name is Thomas. I placed an order on your website on January 19. I have not received any updates of the order shipping out yet and I was wondering if you still have it and when I can expect it to come,' Crooks wrote in the email, which was obtained by CBS News. Investigators learned that Crooks had been overheard chanting or talking to himself at times, one former law enforcement official said. The official noted that the one activity he and his father appeared to bond over was shooting at a gun range where Crooks had recently become a member. After interviewing family members, teachers, classmates and others who knew Crooks, they found no one who had witnessed any signs of a clear psychological break or personal crisis that could have sparked his plot, according to three officials briefed on the probe. 'He was not formally diagnosed,' said one former investigator. 'Something was not quite right with him though.' Crooks's parents and their attorneys declined to comment for this report. Sometime between late August and mid-September, the Justice Department received a startling tip that set off new alarm bells. A confidential source overseas relayed that they believed Crooks had been tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' plots to kill Trump, according to two people briefed on the intelligence. But after sifting through mountains of classified intelligence obtained through the National Security Agency and foreign allies, national security officials concluded the tip could not be corroborated and was deemed not to be credible. 'Nothing credibly connected him to Iranian plots,' one of the two people said. 'If there was involvement from Iran we would have seen it here.' After Trump took office again in January, his new picks to lead the FBI – Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino – asked to be briefed on the investigative steps that had been taken before they arrived, they said in a televised interview. They personally visited the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, to view the evidence, including laboratory and ballistics evidence, and examined Crooks's rifle. Bongino, who in August had complained on his podcast that he didn't entirely trust the FBI's claim that Crooks had no political ideology, had a professional reason to be obsessive as he poked and prodded his briefers with questions. He had served as a Secret Service agent for 12 years, including on threat investigations and on the protective details for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bongino had a deep knowledge of the Secret Service's landmark Exceptional Case Study Project, which documented striking similarities among people who had tried to kill presidents and prominent political figures. In studying and interviewing 83 people known to have attempted or plotted such an assassination from 1949 to 1996, the research found they were overwhelmingly White males who were relatively well educated. They were also deeply isolated, often friendless and suffering from a mental health disorder. Often, after a personal crisis or break, they began to fixate on assassinating a high-profile figure as a route to fame or affirmation. After reviewing the evidence, Bongino firmly agreed with the conclusion of his FBI predecessors. Crooks was just 'a lost soul' akin to the many would-be assassins interviewed for the Exceptional Case Study Project, he told colleagues. There was 'no there there' to the conspiracy theories about an inside job or Iran. In a Fox News interview on May 18, Maria Bartiromo asked Patel and Bongino why the public had almost no information about what led to the shooting in Butler as well as an apparent attempted assassination of Trump on a golf course in Florida. Bongino stressed that there was no 'big explosive' evidence tying Crooks to an international conspiracy or any larger plot. 'I'm not going to tell people what they want to hear. I'm going to tell you the truth. And whether you like it or not is up to you,' Bongino told Bartiromo. 'The there you are looking for is not there. … It's not there. If it was there, we would have told you.'
The Mainichi
2 hours ago
- The Mainichi
Russian drone, cruise missile and bomb attacks kill at least 6 in Ukraine
Russia pounded Ukraine with hundreds of drones and missiles overnight and Saturday as part of a stepped-up bombing campaign that killed at least six people and wounded dozens, officials said. Two people died and 26 were wounded when Russian forces overnight attacked the Bukovina area in the Chernivtsi region of southwestern Ukraine with four drones and a missile, regional Gov. Ruslan Zaparaniuk said Saturday. He said that the two died from falling drone debris. Another drone attack in Ukraine's western Lviv region wounded 12 people, regional Gov. Maksym Kozytskyi said. Poland's air force scrambled fighter jets in areas bordering Ukraine in response to the overnight attacks, which targeted again a region that is a crucial hub for receiving foreign military aid. Three people alsos were wounded in Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine when the city was hit by eight drones and two missiles, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said. Russia fired 597 drones and decoys, along with 26 cruise missiles, into Ukraine overnight into Saturday, Ukraine's air force said. Of these, 319 drones and 25 cruise missiles were shot down and 258 decoy drones were lost, likely having been electronically jammed. Two people were killed Saturday morning in a missile strike in the Dnipropetrovsk region, according to regional Gov. Serhii Lysak. Two other people were killed Saturday in the Sumy region by a Russian guided bomb, local officials said. Russia has been stepping up its long-range attacks on Ukrainian cities. Earlier this week, Russia fired more than 700 attack and decoy drones, topping previous nightly barrages and targeting Lutsk near the border with Poland in western Ukraine. Russia's intensifying long-range attacks have coincided with a concerted effort to break through parts of the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line, where Ukrainian troops are under severe pressure. Russia's Defense Ministry said it shot down 33 Ukrainian drones overnight into Saturday. One person was wounded Saturday in a Ukrainian drone strike on Russia's Belgorod region and another in the Kursk region, both of which border Ukraine, local officials said. (AP)
