logo
IAEA officials will visit Iran for the first time since 12-Day War

IAEA officials will visit Iran for the first time since 12-Day War

Yahoo3 days ago
The hope is that the talks will open the door for high level talks between IAEA's Director-General Rafael Grossi and senior Iranian officials.
For the first time since the Israel-Iran War, a delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will visit Iran next week, according to a source familiar with the details.
IAEA technical experts will start talks with the Iranians in order to restore oversight of the nuclear sites.
The hope is that the talks will open the door for high level talks between IAEA's Director-General Rafael Grossi and senior Iranian officials.
The inspectors are aiming to see the nuclear sites destroyed during the 12-day war. However, Tehran has made it clear that as of now, they will not permit the inspectors to visit these sites.
Recent satellite images show that Iran has been conducting work at some of the nuclear sites that were damaged/ However, various sources estimate that the reconstruction is not dramatic and does not involve the removal of enriched uranium from the bombed facilities.
IAEA to return to Iran
A few days after the conclusion of the war, IAEA inspectors who had been in Iran left the country out of "concerns for their lives."
Last Friday, the deputy foreign ministers of Germany, France, and the UK – countries that are signatories to the Iranian nuclear agreement – met with senior Tehran officials in an attempt to resume talks to reach a new deal.
Western diplomats told The Jerusalem Post that the European officials left the meeting frustrated. "The Iranians insist on continuing uranium enrichment in any new agreement. There is little room for progress as long as this demand remains," said the diplomats.
After the meeting, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi stated that he had criticized the European stance regarding the 12-Day War and discussed the snapback mechanism to reimpose sanctions. "It was agreed that consultations on this matter will continued," he added.
European countries have made it clear that if the Iranians do not reach new agreements on the nuclear program by October, they will activate the snapback mechanism, which will impose significant sanctions on Iran through the UN Security Council. This mechanism was established as part of the nuclear deal, and the ability to use it will expire in mid-October.
Meanwhile, Western diplomats have told the Post that the US administration is refusing to try to convince Iran to return to the negotiation table.
"If the Iranians want to hold talks, they know where to find us," US President Trump stated.
This week, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, reiterated Iran's position that it would resume indirect talks with the United States if its national interests required it, but stated that there are currently no plans to hold a sixth round of nuclear negotiations with Washington.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Israel's left and right are both making Jewish state a global pariah
Israel's left and right are both making Jewish state a global pariah

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

Israel's left and right are both making Jewish state a global pariah

Israel's international standing is being battered from both ends of its political spectrum. The far Right undermines it with reckless belligerence; the far Left corrodes it with moral preening. It's a story that could be written even before it unfolds. On Tisha B'Av, the fast day marking the destruction of the two ancient Temples in Jerusalem, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir will go up to the Temple Mount. Once there, he will make some provocative statement that will be beamed worldwide. Shortly afterward, the Prime Minister's Office will issue a statement walking it back. On Sunday, that script — predictably — played itself out yet again. Ben-Gvir ascended the Temple Mount, led prayers there — in violation of the status quo that forbids public Jewish prayer — and said the following: 'I say this precisely from here - from the Temple Mount, where we've proven sovereignty is possible - that a clear message must be sent: The entire Gaza Strip must be conquered, sovereignty declared, every Hamas member taken down, and voluntary emigration promoted. Only then will we return the hostages and win the war.' The furious reaction from Jordan and Saudi Arabia quickly followed. As did this clarification from the Prime Minister's Office: 'Israel's policy of preserving the status quo on the Temple Mount has not changed, nor will it change.' Another predictable part of the ritual followed as well: people asking themselves, or their friends, why Ben-Gvir doesn't just keep quiet already, why Netanyahu doesn't muzzle him, and whether they both don't realize the damage these comments cause to Israel's standing internationally. Words that harm Israel's image Ben-Gvir is not the only far-right minister whose careless words irreparably harm Israel's image. Just last week, Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, responding to an interviewer who noted Israel was racing toward a hostage deal, said that Israel was instead racing ahead 'for Gaza to be wiped out.' He added that all of Gaza will be Jewish, and that — unlike Israel's prior settlements in Gush Katif — 'there will not be settlements inside cantons, closed up behind a fence.' At a time when Israel is facing a diplomatic backlash of the kind it has rarely experienced — when it is being accused of starving the Gazan population, committing ethnic cleansing and even genocide — statements like these are seized upon by the country's harshest critics to validate their claims. The harm is real and lasting. In the torrent of commentary last week from politicians and pundits trying to understand and explain the West's growing hostility toward Israel — in the avalanche of countries announcing plans to recognize a Palestinian state and essentially reward Hamas — many pointed directly to statements like these. Not just isolated comments by Ben-Gvir or Eliyahu, but a steady stream of similar remarks over recent months from figures like Bezalel Smotrich, Orit Struck, and others. So much so that some diplomatic officials are urging Netanyahu to freeze all Gaza-related media appearances by government ministers — whether to international or domestic outlets — because even a seemingly minor interview with an obscure local radio station can and will be translated, circulated, and weaponized abroad. But here's the rub: it's not only the extreme Right that's damaging Israel's standing. Just look at the far Left. The international media is now running wild with an interview that author David Grossman gave to an Italian daily in which he described Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide. In a Friday interview with La Repubblica, Grossman said he was leveling the genocide accusation with 'intense pain and a broken heart.' 'For many years I refused to use this word,' he said. 'But now, after the images I've seen, what I've read, and what I've heard from people who were there, I can't help but use it.' Do you think Eliyahu's rhetoric was damaging? It pales in comparison to Grossman accusing Israel of genocide. As a celebrated author who lost his son in Lebanon, Grossman's words carry tremendous moral weight abroad. If he says Israel is committing genocide, then who are La Repubblica's readers — or anyone else — to argue? Grossman's defenders will say that it's the statements from Eliyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich that are isolating Israel internationally. But so are Grossman's. He may believe that by saying what he did, he's presenting the moral, compassionate face of Israel. But many abroad will simply take his words and use them — deliberately and gleefully — to portray Israel as an irredeemable villain, as a perpetrator of genocide. And Grossman is far from alone. Worried that Ben-Gvir is turning Israel into a pariah state? Consider this editorial last week by Yuli Novak, head of B'Tselem, published in the ever-hostile Guardian. The headline: 'I lead a top Israeli human rights group. Our country is committing genocide.' That headline is an echo of a recent New York Times op-ed written by an Israeli academic who has taught in the US since 1989 — Omer Bartov — titled: 'I am a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it.' His conclusion: Israel is committing genocide. All this is to say nothing of the Ehud Olmerts and Moshe Ya'alons -- the former accusing Israel of war crimes, the latter of ethnic cleansing. Their harsh words are picked up with enthusiasm by the international press, often stripped of context. Context, like Ya'alon's personal grudge as a frustrated former defense minister pushed out by Netanyahu, or Olmert's bitterness as a disgraced former prime minister who served 16 months in prison. In May, Olmert wrote in Haaretz: 'What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. We're not doing this due to loss of control in any specific sector, not due to some disproportionate outburst by some soldiers in some unit. Rather, it's the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.' That op-ed has been cited and quoted repeatedly since its publication, used by critics as authoritative evidence to support the most vile charges being leveled against the Jewish state. So what's the point? The point is simple: Israel's international standing is being battered from both ends of its political spectrum. The far Right undermines it with reckless belligerence; the far Left corrodes it with sanctimonious moral preening. One declares that Gaza should be wiped out, the other accuses Israel of genocide. One shouts, the other indicts. Both hands of ammunition to those eager to delegitimize the country. Both feed the same narrative: that Israel is evil. And left to pay the price and bear the consequences for these over-the-top and irresponsible remarks are the millions of Israelis in the middle — the vast majority — who are being defined in the eyes of the world by the rhetoric and portrayals of those on the country's extremes. Solve the daily Crossword

This Is the News From TikTok
This Is the News From TikTok

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

This Is the News From TikTok

The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When he learned one night this summer that the United States had bombed Iran, the content creator Aaron Parnas responded right away, showing what's bad and what's good about using TikTok for news. Shortly after 7:46 p.m. ET on June 21, he saw Donald Trump's Truth Social post announcing the air strikes. At 7:52, according to a time stamp, Parnas uploaded to TikTok a minute-long video in which he looked into the camera; read out the president's post, which identified the suspected nuclear sites that the U.S. had targeted; and added a note of skepticism about whether Iran would heed Trump's call for peace. As traditional media outlets revealed more details that night, Parnas summarized their findings in nine more reports, some of which he recorded from a car. Parnas wasn't adding elaborate detail or original reporting. What he had to offer was speed—plus a deep understanding of how to reach people on TikTok, which may not seem an obvious or trustworthy source of news: The platform is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which lawmakers in Washington, D.C., fear could be manipulated to promote Beijing's interests. TikTok's algorithm offers each user a personalized feed of short, grabby videos—an arrangement that seems unlikely to serve up holistic coverage of current events. Even so, according to a Pew Research Center poll from last fall, 17 percent of adults—and 39 percent of adults under 30—regularly get informed about current affairs on the app. Fewer than 1 percent of all TikTok accounts followed by Americans are traditional media outlets. Instead, users are relying not only on 'newsfluencers' such as Parnas but also on skits reenacting the latest Supreme Court ruling, hype videos for political agendas, and other news-adjacent clips that are hard to describe to people who don't use TikTok. Last summer, after the first assassination attempt on Trump, one viral video fused clips of the bloody-eared Republican raising his fist with snippets of Joe Biden's well wishes. Simultaneously, Chappell Roan's ballad for the lovestruck, 'Casual,' played, hinting at a bromance. On my For You page in June, as U.S.-Iran tensions flared, I saw a string of videos known as 'edits'—minute-long music montages—on the general topic. One spliced together footage of zooming F-16s, Captain America intimidating his enemies in an elevator, and bald eagles staring ominously while AC/DC's 'Thunderstruck' blared. Skeptics might wonder: When people say they get their news from TikTok, what exactly are they learning? [Read: The internet is TikTok now] Frequent consumers of current-affairs content on TikTok insist that they can decipher what's going on in the world—that, even if they have to extrapolate facts from memes, the brevity and entertainment value compensate for a lack of factual detail. 'A lot of things are in simpler terms on TikTok,' Miles Maltbia, a 22-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Chicago, told me. 'That, and convenience, makes it the perfect place to get all my news from.' And as more and more users turn to TikTok for news, creators such as Parnas are finding ways to game the algorithm. Parnas, who is 26, is a lawyer by trade. He told me that he monitors every court case he deems significant with a legal tracker. He was immersed in politics at an early age. (His father, Lev Parnas, gained brief notoriety as an associate of Rudy Giuliani during Trump's first term. 'I love my dad,' Aaron Parnas has said. 'And I'm not my dad.') C-SPAN is on 'all day every day.' And he's enabled X and Truth Social notifications for posts from every member of Congress and major world leader. When he decides that his phone's alerts are newsworthy, he hits the record button. His rapid-reaction formula for news has made him a one-man media giant: He currently has 4.2 million followers on TikTok. He told me that his videos on the platform have reached more than 100 million American users in the past six months. His Substack newsletter also has the most subscriptions of any in the 'news' category, and he recently interviewed Senator Cory Booker, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and this magazine's editor in chief. Still, Parnas's TikTok model relies heavily on reporting by other outlets. And Parnas's 24/7 information blitz may be jarring for those whose media-consumption habits are not already calibrated for TikTok. There's no 'Good evening' or 'Welcome.' But he's reaching an audience who other media don't: Many of his viewers, he thinks, are 'young people who don't watch the news and never have and never will.' He added, 'They just don't have the attention span to.' Ashley Acosta, a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania, told me she liked the fact that Parnas is his own boss, outside the corporate media world. She contrasted him with outlets such as ABC, which recently fired the correspondent Terry Moran for an X post that called Trump a 'world-class hater.' Nick Parigi, a 24-year-old graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, also sees Parnas as a valuable news source. 'You're getting less propagandized,' he told me. 'It's not pushing an agenda.' Last year, Parnas explicitly supported Kamala Harris's presidential candidacy, but he prides himself on delivering basic information in a straightforward manner. 'I wish we would just go back to the fact-based, Walter Cronkite–style of reporting,' he told me. 'So that's what I do.' For Parnas to sound like the CBS News legend, you'd have to watch his TikToks at half speed. If Parnas is a genre-defining anchor, Jack Mac is the equivalent of a shock jock. A creator with 1.1 million followers, he uses the term 'journalisming' to describe his work, which amounts to commenting on stories he finds interesting or amusing—such as a 'patriot' New York firefighter being suspended for letting young women ride in his firetruck. 'Do I think TikTok is the best source for news? No,' Olivia Stringfield, a 25-year-old from South Carolina who works in marketing, told me. But she's a fan of Mac because he offers 'a more glamorous way to get the news'—and a quick, convenient way. 'I don't have time to sit down and read the paper like my parents did,' Stringfield said. Robert Kozinets, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied Gen Z's media consumption on TikTok, told me that users rarely seek out news. It finds them. 'The default position is: Algorithm, let the information flow over me,' he said. 'Load me up. I'll interrupt it when I see something interesting.' On a platform where little content is searched, creators dress up the news to make it algorithm friendly. The Washington Post is one established media brand that has leaned into the growing format of TikTok news skits. In one video about the Supreme Court, a Post staffer wearing a college-graduation robe wields a toolbox mallet as a gavel to channel Chief Justice John Roberts, and when she mimics him, her background turns into red curtains. 'South Carolina can cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood,' she says. Dave Jorgenson, who launched the Post's TikTok channel in 2019, announced recently that he's leaving to set up his own online-video company—a testament to the demand for this new style of content. [From the January 2025 issue: The 'mainstream media' has already lost] The Post's embrace of TikTok has been unusual for an outlet of the newspaper's stature. The prevalence of vibes-based content on the video platform raises obvious questions about truth and accuracy. Many users I spoke with trusted crowdsourced fact-checking to combat misinformation, via the comments section. I asked Maltbia, the analyst from Chicago, how he knows which comments to trust. 'I'll usually look at the ones that are the most liked,' he said. 'But if it still sounds a little shady to me, then I'll probably Google it.' Parnas defended the integrity of TikTok news. 'There's no more misinformation on TikTok than there is on Twitter, than there is on Fox News, than sometimes there is on CNN,' he told me. That claim is impossible to verify: TikTok's factual accuracy is under-researched. One assessment by the media watchdog NewsGuard found that 20 percent of TikTok's news search results contained misinformation—but no user I spoke with bothers with the app's search function. Whether TikTok will continue to gain popularity as a news outlet isn't yet clear. Citing fears of hostile foreign control over a major communications platform, Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation aimed at forcing TikTok's Chinese owners to sell. But Trump has now delayed implementation of the law three times since he took office. In the meantime, users of the platform keep stretching the definition of news. On TikTok, 'news is anything that's new,' Kozinets, the USC professor, told me. Entrepreneurial creators who care about current events will keep testing delivery formats to gain more eyeballs on the platform. And even if TikTok is sold or shuts down, similar apps are sure to fill any vacuum. The challenge of packaging news for distribution by a black-box algorithm seems here to stay. Article originally published at The Atlantic

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store