Category: News

Islamabad, Pakistan – Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, is expected to fly into Pakistan’s capital on Friday night with a small delegation, in what officials said was a key step towards  the resumption of direct talks with the United States aimed at ending their war.

Senior government officials in Islamabad confirmed the development to Al Jazeera, soon after a series of phone calls between Araghchi and Pakistani leaders on Friday.

For the moment, the Iranian state news agency IRNA said Araghchi’s visit to Pakistan was bilateral in nature — to speak with Pakistani officials, rather than for talks right away with the US. Araghchi, IRNA said, would travel to Moscow and Muscat after Islamabad.

Still, one Pakistani official said there was now a “high likelihood of a breakthrough” between the US and Iran, after days of escalating brinkmanship and rising tensions in the Strait of Hormuz.

A US delegation led by Vice President JD Vance was expected to arrive in Islamabad at the start of the week for talks, but Iran then said it was not prepared to return for talks, citing the naval blockade of its ports. Donald Trump enforced the blockade on April 13, two days after the first round of negotiations between the US and Iran in Islamabad ended inconclusively.

Since then, the prospects of further talks have been in limbo – with Iran insisting that the US needed to lift the blockade before it would return. Trump has so far refused to lift the blockade – even after Araghchi said that Iran would reopen the strait, which it had effectively blocked for most ships since early March.

Against the backdrop of that standoff, tensions have soared in recent days in the strait, where the US first captured an Iranian-flagged ship, only for Iran to also capture two ships and fire at a third.

By the middle of the week, it was uncertain whether the second round of US-Iran talks would happen.

That dynamic changed on Friday morning.

Flurry of calls

Araghchi spoke by phone with Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Ishaq Dar, on Friday morning.

Dar underscored the importance of sustained dialogue, while Araghchi appreciated Pakistan’s “consistent and constructive facilitation role”, according to Pakistan’s foreign ministry.

Iran’s state news agency, IRNA, reported a separate call between Araghchi and army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, though Pakistani authorities neither confirmed nor denied it.

So far, the US has not confirmed whether and when the Trump administration will send a delegation to meet Araghchi and his team, or who it will be. Vance was joined by Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in the April 11 talks in Islamabad.

But Iran’s delegation in those talks was led by parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, widely seen as closer to the influential Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) than Araghchi and Iran’s political leadership under President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Though talks initially planned for the start of the week were postponed, the US remains prepared to attend the second round of talks, say officials.

At least nine US aircraft have arrived in the city this week, carrying communications equipment, vehicles, security staff and technical personnel in preparation for the dialogue, whenever it happens.

It is unclear whether Iran’s apparent willingness to re-engage in talks is the result of economic pressure from the US naval blockade – which has stopped Iranian tankers from exporting to Asian economies – or the outcome of back-channel talks that have yielded a meaningful breakthrough.

Iran’s nuclear programme, US sanctions and the future of the Strait of Hormuz are key sticking points that in recent days have threatened to rupture Pakistan’s mediation efforts.

For the residents of Pakistan’s capital, the equation is simpler – if frustrating: They want the talks to be over and done with as soon as possible, because of the disruption to their lives and the limbo over whether negotiations would be held or not.

‘It is like living in purgatory’

Maheen Saleem Farooqi starts each morning the same way these days. She checks her phone before getting out of bed. Not for news, but for instructions: whether her office has changed plans, whether her children’s school has gone online, whether the road she uses to get to the bakery is open or sealed behind another security cordon.

“Your entire day is held upright by a carefully planned structure,” the 41-year-old consultant and mother of two told Al Jazeera. “Recalibrating it due to any level of uncertainty is tantamount to chaos. These past few weeks have been non-stop recalibrating”.

Ahead of the expected second round of talks early this week, authorities severely curtailed movement within the capital. The negotiations are expected to be at the Serena hotel, where the first round of talks was held inside the high-security Red Zone.

Even though Iran appeared to walk away from talks before showing willingness to negotiate on Friday, the security restrictions remained throughout the week.

Raja Talha Sarfraz, a 26-year-old advocate at the Islamabad High Court, has not appeared before a bench in over a week.

The court, inside the Red Zone, has been sealed since last Thursday. Fridays are already a day off under government fuel austerity measures, leaving a full week without a single working court day and no indication of when proceedings will resume.

For Sarfraz, the disruption has been particularly acute. One of his clients, convicted and sentenced to death, had an appeal listed after a ten-month wait.

The court was closed when the date arrived. The client has been in jail for four years.

Another client’s appeal, listed for Wednesday for the first time since September 2025, also went unheard. Sarfraz does not know when it will be rescheduled.

“My second client has been in jail since 2017,” he said. “Before September, there were four instances when the appeals were put to the roster but were cancelled for various reasons, and now this”.

Sarfraz also teaches law, but his university lectures have been moved online, an arrangement he finds inadequate. An exam he was due to invigilate has been postponed.

Living in Islamabad’s suburbs, he has also felt the impact of road closures, choking supply chains into the city since April 19, making even routine grocery runs unreliable.

With courts closed and classes confined to a screen, he has largely stayed home, relying on whatever supplies were available. “Life is in a limbo,” he said. “It is like living in purgatory, not knowing when it will end”.

Across Islamabad and neighbouring Rawalpindi, that sense of suspension has settled into daily life.

In residential areas near Nur Khan Airbase, several roads have been sealed since April 19. The airport is where major foreign dignitaries land when they visit Islamabad.

The wider city reflects the same strain. The Blue Area, usually Islamabad’s commercial hub, has seen subdued activity throughout the week.

Islamabad is no stranger to disruption. The city has endured attacks by violent groups, political protests and visits by heads of state, each bringing road closures and cancelled routines.

What has worn residents down this time is the scale and repetition.

The first wave of restrictions came in early April for the initial round of talks, and some measures were never fully lifted before the next phase of uncertainty began.

‘Things will get worse before they get better’

Pakistan has found itself at the centre of one of the most consequential diplomatic efforts in recent years.

Hosting talks between Washington and Tehran carries weight for the country’s global standing and its relationships with creditors and investors.

But for residents, the cost of sustaining that role is becoming harder to ignore.

Pakistan remains under a $7bn International Monetary Fund programme. Petrol prices have risen by at least 14 percent, and rolling blackouts have returned. After years of economic strain, many are now confronting yet another layer of disruption.

For Farooqi, the uncertainty operates on multiple levels. There is a larger fear of a war that has unsettled the global economy since February.

Then there is the smaller, everyday version: whether the bakery route will be open, whether school will switch online with little notice, whether plans made the night before will hold.

“Every night was an exercise in checking emails and messages to see if anything had changed, if roads would be open, if the government had announced anything, if anyone knew anything new,” she said.

“We literally had a moment where my daughter’s school announced it would be physical, and then 30 minutes later, promptly recanted and went online, because there is never any clarity on what is happening,” Farooqi added.

She said she has tried to hold her routine together, explaining to her children why their school schedule keeps shifting, sometimes within the same morning.

“Sometimes just the simple act of being able to concentrate on your work is overshadowed by the reality of our times,” she said.

“Honestly, I can’t see things getting better anytime soon. If anything, it seems more likely that things will get a lot worse before they get better.”

Aaron Beggs says video of him and Brazilian Robson De Oliveira helping an exhausted competitor went viral due to a need for feel-good stories.

The Northern Irish runner who helped carry a collapsed competitor over the finish line of the Boston marathon says the world needed a feel-good story amid pervasive negativity in the news as he reflected on what prompted him to help and why the video of the incident went viral on social media.

The 130th edition of the race on Monday saw defending champions John Korir and Sharon Lokedi complete a Kenyan sweep, with Korir setting a new course record while Lokedi missed her previous record by one second.

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But another talking point from the race came from Aaron Beggs, of Northern Ireland, stopping to help exhausted runner Ajay Haridasse complete the race.

Videos filmed by bystanders from multiple angles show Boston native Haridasse, 21, collapse and attempt to stand repeatedly but buckle in exhaustion each time.

“I looked at my watch, I looked at him again, and my natural instinct was to just go and pick him up,” Beggs told Al Jazeera in an online interview.

Videos show Beggs extend both arms to Haridasse, who had collapsed near a race barrier, to pull him to his feet, with a visibly exhausted Haridasse struggling to stand. Brazilian runner Robson De Oliveira also came from behind to support Haridasse before the two men slid under his shoulders to help him cross the finish line.

“I think what I was telling myself in the previous two miles was why I went over and helped him, because it’s a journey,” Beggs said, adding his gratitude to De Oliveira for helping.

“For the three of us to continue our journey across the finish line like three strangers [from] three different countries – we’ll have a story for the rest of our lives,” he said.

Beggs emphasised the importance of a feel-good moment like this going viral “where every time we turn on the news it’s just negativity”.

“We all need just a nice story in our lives just to make us smile, bring a tear to our eyes with happiness – it’s nice to be nice.”

United States President Donald Trump has claimed Iran is “collapsing financially” and said the country is losing millions of dollars a day due to Washington’s naval blockade of Iranian ports.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday night, Trump wrote: “Iran is collapsing financially! They want the Strait of Hormuz opened immediately – Starving for cash! Losing 500 Million Dollars a day. Military and Police complaining that they are not getting paid. SOS!!!”

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The US blockade of Iranian ports began at 14:00 GMT on April 13. Since then, the US has fired on and seized an Iranian-flagged tanker near the Strait of Hormuz, and redirected ships in the open seas carrying cargo to or from Iran. Iran’s armed forces have called this “an illegal act” that “amounts to piracy”.

In response to the US naval blockade, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz to all foreign shipping and has captured several foreign-flagged ships. Previously, it had allowed some ships deemed “friendly” to Iran to pass.

On April 19, Iran’s First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref said the “security of the Strait of Hormuz is not free”.

“One cannot restrict Iran’s oil exports while expecting free security for others,” he wrote in a post on X.

“The choice is clear: either a free oil market for all, or the risk of significant costs for everyone,” he added. “Stability in global fuel prices depends on a guaranteed and lasting end to the economic and military pressure against Iran and its allies.”

In a statement on social media on Thursday, Iran’s parliamentary speaker and lead negotiator in the ceasefire talks, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said a full ceasefire could only work if the US naval blockade is lifted.

Analysts say the blockade is hurting Iran but believe the country has the economic and political will to sustain it.

How long can Iran survive the naval blockade?

Here’s what we know:

How is the naval blockade hurting Iran?

Iran exports oil, gas and other goods including petrochemicals, plastics and agricultural products by sea. Analysts say the US naval blockade of its ports, including in the Strait of Hormuz, could therefore affect this trade.

Soon after the start of the US-Israel war on Iran on February 28, authorities in Tehran implemented the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the only waterway out of the Gulf, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies were shipped from Gulf producers in peacetime.

The near-shutdown of the vital chokepoint sent global oil and gas prices soaring, and since then, Iran has controlled the strait. However, it has continued to export its own energy products through the waterway.

Iran’s oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz account for about 80 percent of its total oil exports. According to Kpler, a trade intelligence firm, Iran exported 1.84 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil in March and has shipped 1.71 million bpd so far in April, compared with an average of 1.68 million bpd in 2025.

From March 15 to April 14, it exported 55.22 million barrels of oil. The price per barrel of Iranian oil – across its three major variants, known as Iranian light, Iranian heavy and Forozan blend – has not fallen below $90 per barrel over the past month. On many days, the price has surpassed $100 a barrel.

Even at the conservative estimate of $90 a barrel, Iran has earned at least $4.97bn over the past month from its ongoing oil exports.

By contrast, in early February before the war started, Iran was earning about $115m a day from its crude oil exports, or $3.45bn in a month.

Simply put, Iran has earned 40 percent more from oil exports in the past month than it did before the war.

Stopping this is a key motivation behind the US naval blockade of Iranian ports.

In an interview with Al Jazeera on April 14, Frederic Schneider, a nonresident senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera that the previous six weeks had been a boon for Iran in terms of oil revenues, but with the US blockade, that will change.

“Iran has some buffer in the form of crude oil reserves in floating tanks – basically parked tankers – which was estimated at about 127 million barrels in February. But that doesn’t mean that the blockade wouldn’t hurt Iran,” he said.

On Friday, Schneider told Al Jazeera that Iran, however, seems to be “playing the longer game” and has anticipated and prepared for this sort of conflict to some degree.

“The naval blockade has added economic strain, as several civilian ships have been captured in international waters. But it remains unclear how tight the blockade is, how many ships manage to pass given the considerable amount of floating Iranian oil, and how long Trump can maintain the blockade,” he said.

Can the US keep the blockade going for long?

Schneider noted that Trump will face a legislative challenge by May 1, when the 60 days he can maintain a foreign offensive without congressional approval come to an end.

Dire conditions have been reported on the ships that are upholding the blockade, he said, and it remains to be seen how China will react to the continuing seizure of ships that carry any of its cargo.

“China has already said it sees the blockade of Chinese trade with Iran as unacceptable. Further, the closure of Hormuz by Iran in retaliation is hurting, if not the US itself that much, American allies in the region and globally, raising the pressure on Trump,” he said.

“If we can glean anything from the behaviour of the two sides, it is Iran that is signalling patience and Trump showing impatience,” he added.

Adam Ereli, a former US ambassador to Bahrain, told Al Jazeera’s This is America programme that while the US blockade of Iranian ports and seizure of vessels transporting Iranian oil “makes sense” as a policy, it may not work as intended due to domestic political considerations in the US.

“The Iranians have prepared for this, for this eventuality. They have their own plans. They’ve got alternative means of storing their oil or selling their oil,” Ereli told Al Jazeera.

“Even if they ran out of oil, they have ways to survive a very tough blockade and sanctions regime that, frankly, I think will outlast Trump’s patience and the patience of the American people,” he said.

“Remember, this isn’t just about moving soldiers and ships and planes around on a map. There’s politics involved here in the United States,” he added.

“Trump is nothing if not attuned to the political winds. And for that reason, I think that you’ve got this Iran strategy on the one hand that runs up against an electoral strategy on another hand, and therefore, the question is, which one is going to give?”

Can Iran store the oil the US is blockading in the meantime?

Iran’s domestic refineries have a capacity of 2.6 million bpd, according to consultancy FGE Energy. Its oil and gas production facilities are concentrated in southwestern provinces: Khuzestan for oil and Bushehr for gas and condensate from the South Pars gasfield.

Iran is also the third-largest oil producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and exports 90 percent of its crude oil via Kharg Island for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

The US naval blockade has begun affecting the country’s storage capacity, according to TankerTrackers, the maritime intelligence agency. The blockade means Iran has to store more oil, and space could become tight.

TankerTrackers said that on Kharg Island, to prepare for the possibility of running out of oil storage space, Iran has brought an old tanker named NASHA (9079107) out of retirement.

“She’s a 30yo [year old] VLCC [Very Large Crude Carrier] that’s been anchored empty for the past few years; currently spending 4 days on a trip that should take 1.5-2 days,” TankerTrackers said in a post on X, suggesting that the tanker is being used to store oil. It is unclear if the ship has a heading or course.

Can Iran continue to earn revenues from oil?

Yes, analysts say that for a few months, Iran can continue to earn revenue from oil which is already in transit at sea.

Kenneth Katzman, former Iran analyst at the Congressional Research Service in Washington, DC, said Iran is not exporting new oil amid the US blockade of Iranian ports, but Tehran has between 160 million and 170 million barrels of oil “afloat” on ships around the world currently.

Those supplies, which transited the Strait of Hormuz before the US blockade was imposed, are on board hundreds of tankers and “waiting to be delivered”, Katzman told Al Jazeera.

Katzman said he had been informed by an Iranian professor that, based on those supplies, Tehran could have revenue flows that can last until August despite the US naval blockade.

“Which is a long time. Does President Trump have until August? Probably not,” he said.

“He’s probably going to have to look at kinetic escalation if he wants to bring this to the conclusion that he wants, or he’s going to have to accept less than the deal he ideally wants,” he said.

Iranian ships will still have to avoid US naval ships on the open ocean, as the US Navy has also recently intercepted ships carrying Iranian cargoes.

On Wednesday this week, for example, the US military intercepted at least three Iranian-flagged tankers in ‌Asian waters, Reuters reported, and was said to be redirecting them away from their positions near India, Malaysia and Sri Lanka.

How else can Iran earn revenue?

Besides oil revenue, Iran is also currently receiving revenue from a “toll booth” system that the country imposed on the Strait of Hormuz in March.

On Thursday, Iran’s deputy parliament speaker Hamidreza Haji-Babaei said Tehran’s central bank had received the first revenues from tolls imposed since the start of the war, according to the semiofficial Tasnim news agency. It is unclear how much that toll revenue is.

Iranian politician Alaeddin Boroujerdi told the United Kingdom-based, Farsi-language satellite TV channel Iran International in March that the country has been charging some vessels as much as $2m each to pass through the strait.

According to Lloyd’s List, the shipping news outlet, at least two vessels that have transited the strait so far have paid fees in yuan, China’s currency. Lloyd’s List reported that one “transit was brokered by a Chinese maritime services company acting as an intermediary, which also handled the payment to Iranian authorities”. It is, however, not clear how much the vessels paid.

How resilient is Iran’s leadership?

In recent days, while pressuring Iran to negotiate a ceasefire deal, US President Donald Trump has claimed that Iranians are “having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is”, alleging that there is “crazy” infighting between “moderates” and “hardliners” in Tehran.

But the country’s officials have insisted that Iran’s government is united.

Mohammad Reza Aref, Iran’s first vice president, said on Thursday: “Our political diversity is our democracy, yet in times of peril, we are a ‘Single Hand’ under one flag. To protect our soil and dignity, we transcend all labels. We are one soul, one nation.”

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also dismissed allegations that the Iranian military may be at odds with the political leadership.

“The failure of Israel’s terrorist killings is reflected in how Iran’s state institutions continue to act with unity, purpose, and discipline,” he wrote on X, referring to the assassinations of Iranian political and military figures Israel has carried out in recent weeks.

“The battlefield and diplomacy are fully coordinated fronts in the same war. Iranians are all united, more than ever before.”

One of the strongest messages of unity came from Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian.

“In Iran, there are no radicals or moderates,” he said on X.

“We are all Iranians and revolutionaries. With ironclad unity of nation and state and obedience to the Supreme Leader, we will make the aggressor regret.”

How strong is Iran militarily?

Iran has demonstrated considerable military resilience in the face of weeks of US-Israeli strikes through its use of asymmetric warfare.

This includes the use of guerrilla tactics, cyberattacks, arming and supporting proxy armed groups and other indirect tools.

During its war with the US and Israel, Iran has targeted energy infrastructure in Israel and across the Gulf, threatened to target banking institutions and targeted US data centres of technology companies such as Amazon in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Iran has also blocked the Strait of Hormuz and reportedly placed mines in the strait to disrupt shipping, sending global oil prices soaring.

Since the US began its naval blockade of Iranian ports in mid-April, Iranian officials have repeatedly promised that their country will defend itself and respond to any US attack.

Earlier this week, after the US military said it had seized an Iranian vessel and ordered dozens of others to turn around, Iran also retaliated by capturing foreign commercial vessels around the Hormuz Strait, which it said violated naval regulations.

Ereli, the former US ambassador, told Al Jazeera that Iran and the IRGC have “revolutionary fervour”, which means they can “survive”. “They can tolerate pain for a lot longer than I think most American decision makers and planners calculate,” Ereli said.

Ereli said it was unknown how long Tehran could last under “siege conditions” imposed by the US, but probably a lot longer than the US anticipates.

“I think they can go a lot longer, especially than most people imagine, and especially when it comes to kneeling to the Americans,” Ereli said.

“There’s a level of pride and survival. They’re at war with us, and for them it’s a war of necessity. They’ve got to survive,” he added.

Pentagon email obtained by Reuters reveals US anger at Spain, UK as Iran war tensions persist.

An email has circulated within the United States Defense Department laying out potential measures the US could take against NATO allies it believes have not sufficiently supported its war on Iran, such as Spain and the United Kingdom, according to a US official quoted by the Reuters news agency.

The internal email considers options such as suspending Spain from NATO and re-evaluating Washington’s stance on the British Falkland Islands, which are also claimed by Argentina, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

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The email, which alleges “a sense of entitlement on the part of the Europeans”, is intended as a signal to NATO partners, according to the official.

Suspending Spain from the bloc would carry strong symbolic weight with little operational consequence to the US military, the email says.

Asked about the email while at an EU leaders’ meeting in Cyprus on Friday, Spanish ⁠⁠Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Madrid is a “reliable member” of NATO that meets all its obligations.

“As a result, I am absolutely not worried,” he said. “We do not work with emails. We work with official documents and positions taken, in this case, by the government of the US.

“The position of the government of Spain is clear: absolute collaboration with the allies, but always within the framework of international legality.”

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer hit back, saying the UK’s position on the Falkland Islands is longstanding and “unchanged”.

“Sovereignty rests with the UK and the islands’ ‌right to self-determination is paramount. It’s been our consistent position and will remain the case,” the spokesperson said.

Britain and Argentina fought a brief war in 1982 over ⁠the islands after Argentina made a failed bid to take them. Some 650 Argentine and ⁠255 British service personnel died before Argentina ⁠surrendered.

Asked if Starmer thought the email was an attempt by the US to put pressure on him to join the Iran war, the spokesperson said: “Pressure does not affect him, and he ‌will ‌always act in the national interest, and that will always remain the case.”

‘Baseline for NATO’

US officials have raged at European allies for refusing or hesitating to allow the use of their bases for attacks on Iran.

Spain has refused to let the US wage attacks on Iran from its airspace or bases. Trump called Spain “terrible” and threatened to end all trade with the country.

The US president has also slammed UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “no Winston Churchill” and mocked Britain’s aircraft carriers as “toys” while condemning what he views as insufficient support.

Initially, the UK did not authorise US planes to launch attacks on Iran from two British bases. Starmer later greenlighted their use for what he called “defensive purposes”.

The recent Pentagon email relayed Washington’s frustrations, saying basing and overflight rights should be “just the absolute baseline for NATO”, according to the US official quoted by Reuters.

Trump has also urged NATO countries to deploy their navies to help force open the Strait of Hormuz, which has been largely shut off to global shipping for two months.

Trump has called NATO countries “cowards” for not sending their forces to the Strait, and said the 77-year-old military alliance is a “paper tiger” without the US.

The email, however, does not present US withdrawal from NATO – an option Trump has previously suggested – nor the closure of US bases in Europe, the official said.

‘NATO not there for us’

In response to the report, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson told Reuters: “As President Trump has said, despite everything that the United States has done for our NATO allies, they were not there for us.”

“The War Department will ensure that the president has credible options to ensure that our allies are no longer a paper tiger and instead do their part. We have no further comment on any internal deliberations to that effect,” Wilson said.

India’s Foreign Ministry says comments by US radio host Michael Savage, circulated by Trump, are ‘uninformed’.

Comments shared by United States President Donald Trump referring to India as a “hellhole” were “in poor taste” and at odds with the countries’ relationship, an Indian official has said.

Trump did not make the remark himself, but reposted it without comment on his Truth Social account on Thursday. The statement came from conservative radio host Michael Savage.

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Criticising US birthright citizenship – which Trump has sought to restrict – Savage said, “A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet.”

Reacting late on Thursday, India’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said the remark was “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste”.

The comments “certainly do not ⁠reflect the reality of the India-US relationship, which has long been based on mutual respect and shared interests”, Jaiswal added.

The US Embassy in New Delhi said, “The president has said ‘India is a great country with a very good friend of mine at the top’.”

China’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately comment on the matter.

‘Hurts every Indian’

India’s main opposition Congress party called the “hellhole” remark “extremely insulting and anti-India. It hurts every Indian”.

“Prime Minister ⁠Narendra Modi should take up this matter with the US President ⁠and register a strong objection,” the party said on X.

Indian government data shows nearly 5.5 million people of Indian origin live in the US. Indian Americans and Chinese Americans are the biggest groups of Asian origin in the US.

Savage’s comment, shared by Trump, continued: “There’s almost no loyalty to this country amongst the immigrant class coming in today, ‌which was not always the case. No, they’re not like the European Americans of today and their ancestors.”

Trump and Modi enjoyed ‌warm ties during Trump’s first term, but relations cooled after India was hit last year with some of the highest US tariffs, many of which were rolled back this year.

India and the US are ‌now ‌working on a trade deal aimed at preventing any renewed tariff increases and boosting sales to each other.

Trump has repeatedly used insulting language to refer to foreign nations and immigrant communities, including recently calling Somali immigrants “garbage”.

In 2018, Trump made global headlines for referring to El Salvador, Haiti and African nations as “s**thole countries”.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the US has not told the Iranian national team that it cannot play.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington has no objections to Iranian players participating in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, but he added the players will not be allowed to bring people with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with them.

Since the United States-Israeli war on Iran began on February 28, Iran’s participation in this summer’s edition of FIFA’s global showpiece has been in doubt because all of the country’s group-stage matches are scheduled to be played in the United States.

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“Nothing from the US has told them they can’t come,” Rubio told reporters.

“The problem with Iran would be not their athletes. It would be some of the other people they would want to bring with them, some of whom have ties to the IRGC. We may not be able to let them in, but not the athletes themselves,” Rubio said.

“They can’t bring a bunch of IRGC terrorists into our country and pretend that they are journalists and athletic trainers,” Rubio added.

Washington has designated the IRGC as a “foreign terrorist organisation”.

US President Donald Trump, speaking alongside Rubio, added that his administration “would not want to affect the athletes”.

The World Cup is set to begin on June 11 across the US, Mexico and Canada.

Speculation about Iran’s participation has been rife, with officials from both Iran and the US weighing in.

In a statement on Wednesday, however, Iran’s government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said all necessary arrangements for the team’s participation in the tournament have been ensured by the Ministry of Sports and Youth.

An envoy for Trump, though, has been quoted as suggesting that Italy, who failed to qualify for the World Cup for a third straight edition, should replace Iran at this year’s World Cup.

Paolo Zampolli, an Italian-American who is ⁠a US envoy for global relations, told The Financial Times that he made the suggestion to both Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

“I’m an Italian native, and it would be a dream to see the Azzurri at a US-hosted tournament. With four titles, they have the pedigree to justify inclusion,” Zampolli, who has no official connection with the World Cup ⁠or Italian football, said earlier this week.

Italian Sports Minister Andrea Abodi has rebuked the idea, saying “it ‌is not appropriate … You qualify on the pitch,” while Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti described the concept as “shameful”.

Iran qualified for a fourth successive World Cup last year but, after the start of the war, requested that FIFA move the team’s three group matches from the US to Mexico – a suggestion that was rejected.

Iran is now seemingly ⁠proceeding as planned.

“We are preparing and making arrangements for the World Cup, but we are obedient to the ⁠decisions of the authorities,” Iranian football federation President Mehdi Taj told reporters at a pro-government rally in Tehran on Wednesday.

Taipei, Taiwan — Japan’s southern island of Kyushu is known for its volcanic landscape and tonkatsu ramen, but the popular tourist destination is ground zero for one of the greatest shifts in Japan’s defence strategy since 1947, when it formally renounced the use of war to settle international disputes.

In late March, Japan deployed long-range missiles to Kumamoto Prefecture on the island’s southwest coast. Unlike previous defence installations, these missiles could hit China, reflecting the fact that Beijing has ranked as Japan’s top national security threat above North Korea and Russia since 2019.

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Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi told reporters at the time that “Japan faces the most severe and complex security environment in the post-war era” and the country must strengthen its “deterrence and responsiveness”.

Known as the “southern shield,” the new front in Japan’s defence strategy has seen the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), as the country’s military is formally known, deploy a range of weapons platforms as well as electronic warfare and air assets in southern Japan and its southwest outlying islands.

“The balance is changing. The defence posture has completely shifted towards the southwest, so the north is much less prioritised,” Suzuki Kazuto, director of the Institute of Geoeconomics, an independent think tank in Tokyo, said.

The ‘southern shield’

Much of Japan’s growing defence budget, which hit a record $58bn for the fiscal year 2026, has been allocated towards this build-up, he said. The strategy focuses heavily on the Nansei or Ryukyu Islands, which run from Kyushu to within 100km (62 miles) of Taiwan.

These islands form a natural barrier dividing the East China Sea from the Philippine Sea, and are a critical part of the United States-led “First Island Chain” maritime defence strategy, which aims to keep Chinese forces out of the Pacific.

While the “First Island Chain” strategy has its roots in the Cold War, Tokyo is worried about increased Chinese military activity in the Asia Pacific, including the East China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

The “southern shield” aims to create “anti-access or area-denial layers along the First Island Chain, complicating potential Chinese operations near Taiwan or in the East China Sea,” said Jonathan Ping, a political economist whose work focuses on statecraft at Australia’s Bond University.

It also incorporates a major shift in Japan’s defence policy towards acquiring “counterstrike capability” that would allow the JSDF to hit back if attacked, stretching the legal definition of what constitutes “self-defence”. These kinds of contradictions define the modern JSDF, which is a military in all but name and ranks alongside South Korea and France in the 2026 Global Firepower Index.

A military that uses ‘legal gymnastics’

The JSDF emerged from Japan’s post-war police, at a time when Japan was reckoning with the Imperial Army’s brutal wartime atrocities during the US occupation, according to Soyoung Kim, an assistant professor who researches Japan’s post-war security policy at Nagoya University.

JSDF members are legally classified as “special national government employees,” and until the end of the Cold War, focused largely on humanitarian and disaster relief. Their role began to change after the Gulf War, when Japanese politicians felt humiliated by their inability to offer military support to the US-led coalition, Kim said.

In the decades since, public attitudes about the role of the JSDF have begun to shift, Kim said, amid Japan’s ongoing territorial dispute with China over the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands. The Japanese public also regularly receives alerts each time North Korea test-fires a missile, as a reminder that Pyongyang still poses a major threat to Japan.

“There is increasingly greater acceptance or perhaps resignation to greater mission capability of the SDF,” Kim told Al Jazeera.

Over the past decade, the Japanese government has slowly moved the needle on what the JSDF can legally do, starting with a 2014 constitutional ruling that found Japan could participate in the “collective self-defence” of its allies.

“Japan has largely avoided formal amendments, choosing instead to ‘reinterpret’ the text. This makes Japan unique not just for its pacifism, but for the ‘legal gymnastics’ required to maintain a modern military under a constitution that explicitly forbids one,” said Taniguchi Tomohiko, who served as a special adviser to the cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

In 2022, Japan’s national security strategy was expanded to include “counterstrike capabilities,” which means it can hit back if attacked. As part of this strategy, Japan is due to acquire 400 US-made Tomahawk missiles, which can be launched from submarines and naval vessels.

The US, not just China, is driving Japan’s shift

Tokyo will release the next phase of its national security strategy later this year, covering 2026 to 2030. The document is expected to incorporate lessons from Ukraine and Iran about drones and supply chain chokepoints, according to Suzuki at the Institute of Geoeconomics. In its latest legal backflip, Japan separately approved the export of lethal weapons this month as it moves to build up a domestic drone industry.

While some of these changes are a response to the rise of neighbouring China, they also reflect growing concern in Tokyo about its longtime ally, the US, and its ability or willingness to defend its allies, say analysts.

Japan has historically fallen under the protection of Washington’s nuclear umbrella, but China’s rapid military and nuclear expansion has “reduced the credibility of the US extended deterrence,” according to Kei Koga, an expert in East Asian security and the US-Japan alliance, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

“Japan wants to play a more kind of active role to compensate for the relative gains of China,” he said, which includes a second-strike nuclear capability – the ability to retaliate after a nuclear attack. China’s close ties to Russia and North Korea have raised the stakes further, he said.

Japanese politicians are also worried about the long-running question of whether a conflict will break out over Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy of 23 million people. China claims Taiwan as a province and has pledged to annex it by peace or by force.

US military assessments state it will likely be capable of doing so by next year. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said in December that a Taiwan conflict could prove to be a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, which hosts multiple US military bases.

Some of Japan’s outlying islands also lie closer to Taiwan than the Japanese mainland. And under US President Donald Trump, many of the longstanding assumptions about the US commitment to defend allies like Japan are changing.

Whether Trump would intervene to help Taiwan is even less certain. Washington does not formally recognise Taipei, although it has pledged to help Taiwan defend itself under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. Known as “strategic ambiguity,” the policy stops short of committing US forces, but it has long been seen as a credible enough threat to deter China from moving on the much smaller island.

Trump’s shift towards an “America First” policy and combative relationship with longtime allies in Europe has worried Japan. A 2025 survey by Japan’s Asahi Shimbun indicated that 77 percent of respondents doubt that the US would protect Japan in a military crisis.

“Everything is focused on the American interest and American defence, so defending other countries is not the priority,” Suzuki told Al Jazeera.

Growing US scepticism in Japan has pushed Tokyo to shore up alliances with other US allies like the Philippines and Australia, while also dimming some of the public criticism about Japan’s military build-up.

“For many years, the opposition assumed that the United States would come and rescue Japan, and therefore we don’t need to have more than self-defence,” Suzuki said. “Increasingly, people are realising this assumption is too optimistic, and we need to have at least the minimum capability to have deterrence and counterstrike capability.”

The New York Times published a detailed account this week of Iran’s new leadership structure, based on interviews with more than 20 Iranian officials, former officials, Revolutionary Guard members and individuals close to the new supreme leader. It deserves a careful read, but not for the reasons the Times intends.

The piece describes the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, as gravely wounded, communicating via handwritten notes passed through a motorcycle courier chain, mentally sharp but with injuries that make speaking difficult, deliberately avoiding video out of concern for appearing weak. The key details of his condition come from unnamed Iranian officials. There is no photograph, no medical record, no independent verification of any kind. The article does not ask readers to weigh the incentives behind those sources. It presents the account as fact.

Reporting from inside an authoritarian state, especially one at war, where the regime decides who speaks to Western journalists and what they are permitted to say, requires deep scepticism that the article does not apply. The sources describing Mojtaba’s condition have a direct interest in the picture they are painting: a living, mentally engaged supreme leader who has simply delegated, but remains very much involved, during a difficult period. That picture serves the regime well. It preserves the fiction of functioning leadership. Perhaps this account is accurate. But reporting sourced entirely from people with a direct interest in what you believe deserves a disclaimer that the Times did not provide.

The sourcing problem would be significant on its own. But the historical framing underneath it is far more consequential.

The article states that power has shifted to “an entrenched, hard-line military” and that “the broad influence of the clerics is waning”. The implication, never stated outright but structurally present throughout, is that this represents a radicalisation of what came before. It does not.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the cleric who led Iran for 35 years, advanced Iran’s nuclear programme to the edge of weaponisation, built the ballistic missile programme, the drone programme, and the network of proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and the Shia militias in Iraq that threatened Israel, the Gulf states, and American forces across the region for decades. He crushed the Green Movement in 2009. His regime executed protesters in the crackdown that followed the 2022 uprising. He directed the IRGC’s Quds Force under Qassem Soleimani, whose operations killed and maimed American soldiers for years. The IRGC was not a force that the clerics restrained. It was the instrument through which the clerical vision was executed. Every major missile programme, every proxy network, every centrifuge facility was built under clerical direction.

Calling the current moment a shift from clerical moderation to military hardline is a rewriting of 45 years of history.

When President Trump says the new Iranian leaders may be more reasonable, he is not being naive about their character. He is making a harder observation: that after taking unprecedented military action against the regime, the people now making decisions in Tehran may have no viable path except the negotiating table. That is not a statement about Iranian goodwill. It is a statement about Iranian options. I remain sceptical that a real deal will materialise. But you do not find out without trying.

If Western policymakers and the analysts who shape their thinking come away believing that by going to war we have empowered hardliners instead of pragmatists within the Iranian system, they are drawing exactly the conclusion Tehran wants them to draw.

A claim repeated in media commentary and on Capitol Hill held that the United States was not already at war with Iran before the February strikes. That claim has always been a fiction. Iran had been waging war on the United States and its allies for decades, through terror proxies, attacks on American troops and a nuclear programme designed to hold the region hostage. Pretending otherwise did not make Americans or our allies in the Gulf and Israel safer. It made the eventual reckoning harder to explain and easier to mischaracterise as aggression rather than a long-overdue response to a severe threat that had been growing for 45 years.

A portrait that treats the clerics and the IRGC as distinct forces, one restraining and one radical, erases 45 years of evidence that they were always the same project pursuing the same ends. It helps the regime frame what is happening on its own terms. That serves Tehran, not the truth.

I served as the White House Middle East envoy from 2017 to 2019 and have remained engaged with regional leaders and diplomats in the years since. The Iranian regime, across every iteration, so-called reformist presidents, hardline presidents, pragmatic foreign ministers and IRGC commanders, pursued the same objectives. The faces changed. The goal did not. Anyone waiting for the clerical establishment to pull Iran towards moderation has not been paying attention for 45 years. The clerics built this. The IRGC executed it. They are not in tension. They are in partnership. The only thing that has changed is that sustained military pressure has left them with fewer options than they have ever had.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Jump in prices comes as Donald Trump says vessels will need permission of US Navy to transit key waterway.

Oil prices have jumped on heightened tensions between the United States and Iran in the Strait of Hormuz following Washington and Tehran’s tit-for-tat captures of commercial vessels.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, topped $106 per barrel early on Friday morning as Washington and Tehran stepped up their confrontation over the key maritime route for transporting the world’s energy.

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Brent stood at $106.80 as of 01:00 GMT, up nearly 5 percent from its closing price on Wednesday, when it surpassed $100 per barrel for the first time in two weeks.

US stocks fell overnight, with the benchmark S&P 500 index dipping 0.41 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropping 0.89 percent.

Shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries about one-fifth of the world’s supply of oil and natural gas, remains at a standstill as Iran continues to demand the right to decide which vessels may pass and the US blocks Iran’s maritime trade.

US President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post on Thursday that he had ordered the US Navy to destroy any Iranian boats laying mines in the strait, shortly after the Pentagon announced that it had seized a tanker carrying sanctioned Iranian oil for the second time in less than a week.

Trump also appeared to expand the scope of the US naval blockade beyond Iranian ports, writing on Truth Social that no ship “can enter or leave” the strait without the approval of the US Navy.

“It is ‘Sealed up Tight,’ until such time as Iran is able to make a DEAL!!!” Trump said.

Trump’s threats came a day after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced the capture of two foreign cargo ships in the waterway.

The IRGC said it had seized the Panamanian-flagged MSC Francesca and Greek-owned Epaminondas after the vessels had endangered maritime security “by operating without the necessary permits and tampering with navigation systems”.

The Greek Maritime Affairs and Insular Policy Ministry has denied that the Epaminondas was captured and said the vessel remains under the control of its captain.

Only nine commercial vessels transited the strait on Wednesday, compared with seven on Tuesday and 15 on Monday, according to maritime intelligence platform Windward.

Before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran on February 28, the waterway saw an average of 129 transits each day, according to United Nations Trade and Development.