Category: News

United States Vice President JD Vance has departed for Pakistan to engage in talks on ending the US-Israeli war with Iran, saying he expects “positive” results.

Vance spoke briefly to reporters on Friday as he boarded a plane bound for Islamabad, where talks with Iran were set to be held the following day.

“We’re looking forward to the negotiation. I think it’s going to be positive. We’ll, of course, see,” he said.

Vance added that President Donald Trump had given him “pretty clear guidelines” for the meeting.

“If the Iranians are willing to negotiate in good faith, we are certainly willing to extend an open hand, that’s one thing,” he said.

“If they’re going to try to play us, they’re going to find that the negotiating team is not that receptive.”

Some observers have seen the last-minute move to have Vance lead the US delegation as a sign of Iran’s wariness with US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Witkoff and Kushner, who will still attend Saturday’s talks, had twice led indirect negotiations about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Those talks were ongoing when Israel initiated a 12-day war on Iran in June 2025, which ended with the US striking three of Iran’s key nuclear sites, and when the US and Israel launched the latest war on February 28.

While deeply loyal to Trump, Vance is also viewed as less hawkish than many of the president’s other top officials.

A former member of the US Marine Corps during the 2003 Iraq war, Vance has become representative of the anti-interventionist wing of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement.

“It’s interesting that JD Vance has been singled out to head this delegation. He hasn’t played much of a role to date,” Al Jazeera correspondent Mike Hanna reported from Washington, DC.

“One of the reasons, possibly, is because the Iranians had expressed their preference for dealing with Vance, rather than the other envoys who they have been dealing with.”

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi are expected to lead the Iranian delegation, although it is not clear if any representative from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would attend.

The format of negotiations, and whether the US and Iranian officials would speak face to face or through intermediaries, was not revealed as of Friday.

From threat to ‘destroy civilisation’ to talks

The talks on Saturday will cap an extraordinary week in the war, which saw Trump threaten strikes on Iran’s civilian infrastructure, including power plants and bridges, if Tehran did not agree to his terms.

International law experts have said such strikes would likely constitute war crimes.

On Tuesday, just hours before the temporary ceasefire was announced, Trump went further, pledging that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if a deal was not reached.

While the pause in fighting has generally held, both sides have offered conflicting messages on the agreed-upon terms.

The Trump administration said it agreed to a 10-point plan put forward by Iran, but maintained the points are different from an earlier 10-point proposal it previously rejected.

No clarity has emerged on key issues, including control over the Strait of Hormuz, the future of Iran’s nuclear programme, and whether Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is subject to the ceasefire.

Both the US and Israel have maintained that pausing the fighting in Lebanon was not part of the initial ceasefire agreement, contradicting claims from Iran and Pakistan.

However, on Thursday, in a phone interview with an Israeli journalist, Trump said he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make the operations in Lebanon more “low key”, so as not to derail the talks in Pakistan.

In a phone interview with the New York Post on Friday, Trump re-upped his threat, saying the US was “loading up the ships with the best ammunition, the best weapons ever made” in the event the talks fall through.

Ghalibaf, meanwhile, cast doubt on whether the negotiations would move forward.

In a post on X on Friday, he maintained two conditions of the initial agreement had not yet been fulfilled. They included the “ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of Iran’s blocked assets prior to the commencement of negotiations”.

“These two matters must be fulfilled before negotiations begin,” Ghalibaf wrote.

Lack of trust

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs Majid Takht Ravanchi, meanwhile, told a meeting of foreign ambassadors on Friday that Iran welcomed the Pakistan dialogue.

But Ravanchi added he remained wary that it could be used as a deception, to cover for renewed escalation in the fighting. He said Iran seeks an agreement with guarantees that it will not be attacked again.

Before the negotiations, the two sides appear to be “miles apart, and there’s tremendous amounts of mistrust” before the meeting, according to Ali Vaez, the Iran project manager at the International Crisis Group.

“In fact, I would argue that they’re beginning from a negative starting point now, because of their recent experience of the Trump administration bombing them twice in the middle of negotiations in the past year,” Vaez explained.

“However, the reality is that every option possible has been tried: Sanctions, economic coercion, military coercion, and both sides ended up in a lose-lose scenario towards the end of this conflict.

“And if they are practical, they’ll realise it is so much better and less costly … to do concessions at the negotiating table,” he added. “But that is much easier said than done.”

Reporting from Islamabad, Al Jazeera correspondent Osama Bin Javaid cited multiple sources as saying some “ground progress is already being made” before the arrival of the marquee negotiators.

But he noted it remains to be seen whether the US and Iran resume their negotiations from February, when talks about Iran’s nuclear programme were unfolding in Oman and Switzerland.

“Now the question is: Where does that framework begin? Is it going to be where they left off in Oman and in Geneva?” Bin Javaid said. “Or after the evolution of the last six weeks, it is going to start from scratch?

“What are the modalities that they will have to agree upon?”

Government report shows gasoline going up by 21.2 percent in March as petrol remains above $4 per gallon despite a truce.

Consumer prices in the United States have risen by nearly 1 percent in March – one of the highest short-term inflation rates in years – largely due to the disruption of the energy markets amid the war on Iran.

A report by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, released on Friday, showed that inflation in March rose by 0.9 percent, compared with 0.3 percent in February. It was the largest uptick since May 2022, which took place at the height of the cost-of-living crisis prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The March increase was driven by energy prices, with gasoline going up by 21.2 percent and fuel oil increasing by more than 30 percent.

“The index for energy increased 10.9 percent in March, the largest monthly increase in the index since September 2005,” the government report said.

After the US and Israel launched an all-out war on Iran on February 28, killing the country’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil and gas prices across the world soaring.

The price for a barrel of oil reached $120 during the war, up from about $70 on February 27.

In the US, the price of one gallon (3.8 litres) exceeded $4.1. It was less than $3 before the fighting began.

Late on Tuesday, the US and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire that would see Iran lift its blockade on Hormuz.

But marine traffic in the strategic waterway that connects the Gulf to the Indian Ocean remains at a fraction of its pre-war levels.

On Wednesday, Iran’s Fars News Agency said “oil tankers have been suspended from passing through the Strait of Hormuz” in response to the Israeli assault on Lebanon, which killed more than 300 people.

US President Donald Trump has warned Iran against blocking the strait or charging vessels for safe passage.

About 20 percent of the world’s oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz before the war.

While the ceasefire has brought relative relief to the global energy market, bringing down the price of oil to less than $100, US consumers are still paying $4.15 on average at the petrol pump, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA). Experts say it will be many months before prices stabilise.

Friday’s inflation report came as many politicians in the US are focusing on the cost of living and affordability, before the November midterm elections that will determine control of Congress for the rest of Trump’s presidency.

Trump’s Democratic rivals have been rebuking him for launching the war without congressional approval, highlighting increased economic costs for Americans.

But the White House has argued that the uptick in petrol prices represents “short-term pain” that will be offset by the supposed benefits of defeating Iran.

A US delegation, led by Vice President JD Vance, is en route to Pakistan to meet with Iranian officials for talks to finalise a long-term ceasefire deal.

Cuba’s Diaz-Canel vows to resist US pressure to resign as Trump escalates threats, tightens oil blockade on the island.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel says he will not bow to pressure by the United States to resign.

“Stepping down is not part of our vocabulary,” he said in an interview with US broadcaster NBC News on Thursday.

The president described communist-ruled Cuba as a “free sovereign state” with the right to “self-determination,” adding that the island is not “subject to the designs of the United States”.

“In Cuba, the people who are in leadership positions are not elected by the US government,” he said.

The president since 2018 faces increasing pressure and demands for regime change from President Donald Trump’s administration.

Trump has hinted that Cuba could face the same fate as Venezuela and Iran.

“I built this great military. I said, ‘You’ll never have to use it.’ But sometimes you have to use it. And Cuba is next,” the US president said last month.

Cuba’s main oil supply was cut off after Trump ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in January. The US has since imposed an oil blockade on the island and threatened tariffs on any country that sells oil to Cuba.

‘Hostile policy’

Diaz-Canel condemned the US “hostile policy” that has left Cuba reeling from widespread power blackouts, fuel shortages and disruptions to water and food distribution.

He also said the Trump administration has “deprived the American people from a normal relationship with Cuba.”

Since returning to office last year, Trump has labelled Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security and threatened a “takeover” of the island.

Current tensions stretch back to the Cold War, when the US took an adversarial stance against left-wing governments across the Americas.

The Cuban Revolution in the 1950s led to the overthrow of a US-backed military government. By the early 1960s, Washington had imposed a comprehensive trade embargo aimed at weakening revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.

‘We cannot betray Cuba’

Despite US pressure, Russia has remained a close ally of Cuba.

“We cannot betray Cuba. That is out of the question. We cannot leave it on its own,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said at a news conference in Havana on Friday.

Last month, a Russia-flagged tanker carrying 730,000 barrels of oil docked in Cuba – the first to reach the island in three months.

Donald Trump’s disdain for NATO allies dates back to even before he became United States president the first time. From anger over their relatively low defence spending to — more recently — threats to take over Greenland, the territory of fellow NATO member Denmark, the American leader has long left the alliance on edge.

But the decision of NATO allies not to join Trump’s war on Iran has deepened the fracture to unseen levels, say analysts. This week, Trump called their lack of support a stain on the alliance “that will never disappear”. Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany put it even more bluntly, hours later: The conflict “has become a trans-Atlantic stress test”.

That back and forth underscores a central question exposed by the Middle East crisis that experts say NATO can no longer put off: can the transatlantic alliance survive, especially if the US pulls out?

“There will be no return to business as usual in NATO, during neither this US administration nor the next one,” said Jim Townsend, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “We are closer to a break than we have ever been.”

Trump can’t pull the US out of the alliance on a whim.

To formally do so, he needs a two-thirds majority in the US Senate or an act of Congress — scenarios that are unlikely to come to pass any time soon, with NATO still enjoying broad support among many legislators in both major American parties.

But there are other things Trump can do. The US has no obligation to come to the aid of allies should they come under attack. The treaty’s Article 5 states members’ collective‑defence obligation, but it does not automatically force a military response — and there is scepticism among allies over whether Washington would ever come to help.

The US can also move the about 84,000 American troops spread across Europe out of the continent. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Trump was considering moving some US bases from countries deemed unhelpful during the Iran war and transferring them to more supportive countries. He could close down US military bases and cease military coordination with allies.

Since US security guarantees to Europe have undergirded NATO since its founding, such disengagement would do enough damage.

“He doesn’t need to leave NATO to undermine it; by just saying he might, he has already eroded its credibility as an effective alliance,” said Stefano Stefanini, former Italian ambassador to NATO from 2007 to 2010 and former senior adviser to the Italian Presidency.

Still, allies are not helpless. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the weakened state of European defence industries and their deep reliance on the US. That, coupled with the numerous diplomatic crises in the US-NATO partnership – including Trump’s threat to take control of Greenland – has pushed European allies to invest more in defence capabilities. Between 2020 and 2025, member states’ defence expenditure increased by more than 62 percent.

However, areas where Europe suffers from overdependence on the US include the ability to strike deep into enemy territory, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, space-based capabilities such as satellite intelligence, logistics and integrated air and missile defence, according to a report by the International Institute for Security Studies (IISS).

These challenges remain considerable. It will take the next decade or more to fill them and about $1 trillion to replace key elements of the US conventional military capabilities. Europe’s defence industries are struggling to ramp up production quickly, and many European armies can’t hit their recruitment and retention targets, the IISS report said.

Still, some experts believe a European NATO is possible. Minna Alander, an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, says NATO has, over the years, become a structure for military cooperation between European countries.

“NATO can therefore survive the Iran war — and even a US withdrawal — as European members have an incentive to maintain it, even if in a radically different form,” Alander said.

For some, the deadline is 2029. That is when Russia may have reconstituted its forces sufficiently to attack NATO territory, according to estimates by Germany’s chief of defence, General Carsten Breuer. “But they can start testing us much sooner,” Breuer said in May last year, ordering the German military to be fully equipped with weapons and other material by then. Others estimate that Moscow could pose that threat as early as 2027.

And what about the US — would it do better without NATO?

According to Stefanini, the former ambassador, the debate about NATO is often “twisted” to portray the alliance’s raison d’être as solely in function of protecting Europe from Russia, as a US favour to the continent.

NATO was a network of alliances born at the onset of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. For decades, the US fought to attract into the alliance as many countries as possible, treating those that refused as friends of the enemy.

Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, NATO invoked for the first and only time Article 5 to rally behind Washington and sent troops to fight in Afghanistan. Thousands of servicemen died there, including nearly 500 from the United Kingdom, and dozens from France, Denmark, Italy and other countries.

And during the war in Iran, European bases were beneficial staging sites for the US military — even if many countries publicly distanced themselves from the conflict.

“NATO served US interests and Trump comfortably overlooks these aspects,” said Stefanini. “Europe has its own responsibility by not investing in defence and creating strong dependence, but thinking that NATO serves only European strategic interests is simply not true.”

Israel has launched more than 50 strikes across Lebanon in the past 24 hours, raising fears that the escalating violence could unravel the fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran, reigniting a broader regional conflict.

Lebanon’s National News Agency said an Israeli air strike on the southern town of Hanawya killed one person and wounded another on Friday. The agency also reported that Israeli forces destroyed residential areas in Aita al-Shaab, with additional strikes on al-Majadel in the Tyre district.

Al Jazeera’s team on the ground reported that Israeli forces blew up homes in the town of Haneen in southern Lebanon.

The Lebanese group Hezbollah responded by firing rockets towards settlements in northern Israel, including Kiryat Shmona, Metula and Misgav Am. In a statement posted on Telegram, fighters said “these attacks would continue until the Israeli-American aggression against the country and the people stopped”.

Despite the escalation in the south, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr reported a relative lull in Beirut, following Israel’s large-scale assault on Wednesday. It killed at least 300 people and wounded about 1,000 others.

“What we’ve noticed in the past 24 hours or so is that the tempo of Israeli strikes has been reduced, at least in the Beirut area,” Khodr said.

“Yes, there’s still military activity in the south of Lebanon but really a marked reduction in strikes in Beirut – whether or not this is intentional or not. But the Israeli media is making it clear, and quoting Israeli officials, that there is US pressure on the Israeli government to de-escalate this conflict in Lebanon,” she added.

The pressure to end the conflict comes amid food security warnings from the United Nations World Food Programme.

“What we’re witnessing is not just a displacement crisis, it is rapidly becoming a food security crisis,” said WFP’s Lebanon country director Allison Oman, speaking via video link from Beirut on Friday.

She warned that food is becoming increasingly unaffordable due to rising prices and higher demand from displaced families, and as the Iran war disrupts supply routes.

Stalled diplomatic efforts

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he ordered direct negotiations with Lebanon “as soon as possible”. Diplomatic efforts appear limited, however.

A senior Lebanese official told the Reuters news agency on Friday that ⁠Lebanon ⁠intends to join a ⁠meeting next week in ⁠Washington with US and Israeli representatives to discuss and ‌announce a ceasefire. Beirut considers it a precondition to further talks ‌to reach a broader deal ‌with Israel.

But a senior Lebanese source told the Anadolu news agency that the planned talks in Washington will be preliminary.

“The meeting at the US State Department next week is preparatory, not a negotiation,” the source said.

The latest violence began days after Israel and the US launched their war on Iran on February 28. An attack by Hezbollah struck Israel on March 2, after which Israel launched an air campaign and ground operations in southern Lebanon.

The humanitarian toll continues to rise. The UN’s children agency, UNICEF, warned that escalating attacks are having “a devastating and inhumane toll on children”.

“As news of a regional ceasefire agreement briefly ignited hope across the country, deadly Israeli airstrikes struck across Lebanon, reportedly killing 33 children and injuring 153,” the agency said on Thursday.

“The latest bloodshed adds to a staggering 600 children either killed or injured in Lebanon since 2 March,” adding that it has received reports of children missing, separated from their families and being pulled from under the rubble.

Nearly 390,000 children are among more than one million people displaced, UNICEF said.

Human Rights Watch said Israeli strikes have crippled important infrastructure in the south, including bridges over the Litani River.

“Between March 12 and April 8, Israeli forces systematically destroyed or severely damaged all main bridges connecting areas south of the Litani River to the rest of the country,” the group said, adding that only one main crossing remains operational.

The US Justice Department is investigating the NFL amid concerns about broadcast sales to streamers.

The United States Department of Justice ⁠has opened an ⁠investigation into whether the National Football League (NFL) has engaged in anticompetitive tactics that harm consumers, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Major broadcast ⁠station owners, US regulators and senators have raised concerns in the past over the difficulties consumers face in watching sports games and the growing trend of selling broadcast rights ⁠to streamers.

The nature and full scope of the investigation could not be immediately ascertained.

However, the NFL said in a statement on Thursday that more than 87 percent of its games are aired on free broadcast TV and that all games are aired on free broadcast television ‌in markets of participating teams.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news, while The Associated Press identifies their source as a “government official”.

In February, the Federal Communications Commission opened a review into the growing shift of live sport away from broadcast networks to pay TV and subscription services, seeking comment on actions the agency “could take to ensure continued access by viewers to live sports through free over-the-air ⁠broadcast TV.”

In response, major broadcast station owners last month urged ⁠the regulator to address the trend of Big Tech companies acquiring the rights to broadcast football, baseball and other sporting events, saying it could weaken local TV news.

The FCC has said many sporting events previously available ⁠through free broadcast or traditional cable TV packages are now available only through standalone subscription streaming, which has frustrated many sports ⁠fans.

Last year, NFL games aired on 10 different services, ⁠the FCC said, citing estimates that it could cost a consumer more than $1,500 to watch all games.

In March, US Senator Mike Lee submitted a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission requesting ‌a review of antitrust exemptions for the NFL’s dealings with streaming platforms.

A 1961 law exempts major sports leagues from antitrust laws and allows them to pool their individual teams’ ‌television ‌rights and sell those rights as a package.

Washington, DC – Preliminary data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has found that international development aid from its members dropped by about 23 percent from 2024 to 2025.

Much of that decline was attributed to a major shortfall in funding from the United States.

The forum, which includes many of the the largest economies across Europe and the Americas, said on Thursday that the US saw a nearly 57 percent drop in foreign aid in 2025.

The OECD’s four other top contributors — Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and France — also saw declines in their foreign aid assistance.

The report marked the first time foreign development assistance from all five of the OECD’s top donors simultaneously declined. The total assistance for 2025 totaled only $174.3bn, down from $214.6bn the year before, representing the largest annual drop since the OECD began recording the data.

OECD officials warned the dramatic decrease comes at a time when global economic and food security has been cast into doubt amid the stresses of the US-Israeli war with Iran.

“It’s deeply concerning to see this huge drop in [development funding] in 2025, due to dramatic cuts among the very top donors,” OECD official Carsten Staur said in a statement.

Thursday’s preliminary data shows that only eight member countries met or exceeded their funding from 2024.

“We are in a time of increasing humanitarian needs,” Staur added, citing growing global uncertainty and extreme poverty. “I can only plead that DAC donors reverse this negative trend and start to increase their [assistance].”

The data covers the 34 members of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC), which provide the vast majority of global foreign assistance.

But the numbers offer an incomplete picture of global development aid, as it fails to include influential non-DAC members including Turkiye, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and China.

The data tracked by the OECD distinguishes official development assistance from other forms of aid, including military funds.

US drives ‘three-quarters of the decline’

In its preliminary assessment, the OECD noted that the US “alone drove three-quarters of the decline” in 2025, the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.

Trump has overseen widespread cuts to the US’s aid infrastructure, including dissolving the US Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of a wider effort to shrink government spending.

The US contributed about $63bn in official development assistance in 2024, which was cleaved to just short of $29bn in 2025, according to OECD.

Research this year from the University of Sydney has suggested that cuts to US funding over the past year have corresponded with an increase in armed conflict in Africa, as state resources grow more scarce.

Other experts have noted that the slashed assistance is likely to prompt upticks in cases of HIV-AIDS, malaria and polio.

Analysts at the Center for Global Development have projected that the US cuts were linked to between 500,000 and 1,000,000 deaths globally in 2025 alone. A recent article published in the medical journal The Lancet found that a “continuation of current downward trends” in development funding could lead to over 9.4 million new deaths by 2030.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has maintained it is transforming, not eschewing, the US aid model.

In recent months, it has struck a handful of bilateral assistance agreements with African countries that it says are in line with its “America First” agenda.

But while the details of such deals have not been made public, critics note that some negotiations appear to have involved requests for African countries to share mineral access or health data.

‘Turning their backs’

Oxfam, a confederation of several non-governmental aid organisations, was among those calling on wealthy countries to change course following Thursday’s report.

“Wealthy governments are turning their backs on the lives of millions of women, men and children in the Global South with these severe aid cuts,” Oxfam’s Development Finance Lead Didier Jacobs said in a statement.

Jacobs added that governments are “cutting life-saving aid budgets while financing conflict and militarisation”.

As an example, he pointed to the US, where the Trump administration is expected to request between $80bn and $200bn for the US-Israeli war with Iran, which has currently been paused amid a tenuous ceasefire.

The administration has separately requested a historic $1.5 trillion for the US military for fiscal year 2027.

“Governments must restore their aid budgets and shore up the global humanitarian system that faces its most serious crisis in decades,” Jacobs said. 

The United States fertility rate has now been in decline for two decades, dropping nearly 23 percent since 2007.

The fertility rate in the United States has dropped to an all-time low, continuing a trend that has seen births in the country drop by nearly 23 percent since 2007.

Data released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday shows that the fertility rate for 2025 was 53.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, a one percent drop compared to the year before.

Experts attribute the change to a variety of factors, from changing priorities among younger women to socioeconomic factors such as anxiety over the cost of living and the affordability of housing and childcare.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank focused on economic issues, the average cost of childcare in the state of California was nearly $22,000 per year. In states with a lower cost of living such as Alabama, it was nearly $8,000.

Even though Alabama’s costs were lower, the institute noted that $8,000 is the equivalent of 27 weeks of full-time work for a labourer making the minimum wage in the state.

For California, it would take a minimum-wage worker 33 weeks to earn enough for childcare costs alone.

Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, told the news agency Reuters that factors such as “greater and more demanding job market opportunities, expanded leisure options, [and] increased intensity of parenting” have made “the option to have children less desirable”.

Falling birth rates have also grabbed the attention of policymakers, with some seeking to roll out tools to incentivise young couples to have children.

The administration of United States President Donald Trump promised to embrace pro-birth policies, sometimes referred to as pro-natalist policies. Last year, the administration touted new guidance to increase access to IVF treatments as evidence that the Republican Party was the “party of parents”.

Such steps, however, have been paired with enormous reductions in access to government healthcare and other social programmes.

After unveiling his recent budget request for fiscal year 2027, Trump justified the need to slash social spending, while defending his $1.5 trillion request for military spending.

He has suggested that existing federal programmes be offloaded onto states, which have varying resources.

“The United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country,” Trump said last week.

“Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [basis]. We’ve got to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take care of them.”

Far-right politicians have also become fixated on falling birth rates in Western countries, using them to promote a narrative that white majorities could be “replaced” by migrants from non-Western countries.

The number of babies born in the US in 2025 also saw a slight drop of about one percent, down to 3.6 million.

Confusion over competing United States and Iranian proposals to end the war is deepening uncertainty about the fragile two-week ceasefire between the longtime foes, with officials presenting sometimes differing accounts of what has been agreed.

At the centre of the dispute is an Iranian 10-point plan, which is the basis for the upcoming negotiations with the US in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, this weekend. President Donald Trump has called the plan “workable”, despite initially handing Iran a 15-point plan that Tehran dismissed as “maximalist”.

However, hours after the ceasefire, US officials, including Trump, offered mixed responses to Iran’s proposal and what Washington understood the key points of the document to be.

Vice President JD Vance dismissed the publicised version as little more than a “random yahoo in Iran submitting it to public access television”.

Adding to the confusion, the Persian version of the plan notably diverges from the English one on a key sticking point between Washington and Tehran – Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

What was the US’s 15-point plan, and what was Iran’s response?

The Trump administration presented Iran with what officials described as a 15-point framework aimed at ending the war, and potentially achieving a permanent end to hostilities between the longtime foes.

While the full details have not been publicly released, reports by US media outlets and others included the following elements:

• Iran commits to never developing nuclear weapons.
• Iran must also no longer enrich uranium within the country, and hand over its stockpile of already enriched uranium to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
• Tehran would also commit to allowing the IAEA to monitor all elements of the country’s remaining nuclear infrastructure.
• Reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
• Ending Iran’s support for regional proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.
• A removal of all sanctions imposed on Iran, alongside the ending of the United Nations mechanism that allows sanctions to be reimposed.
• Limits on the range and number of Iran’s missiles.

Donald Trump on Wednesday said that “many of the 15 points” in the proposal had been agreed upon, signalling optimism about a broader deal.

“We are, and will be, talking tariff and sanctions relief with Iran,” the US president added.

However, Iran rejected the US framework, with its Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei confirming that Tehran had received messages from the US via intermediaries. He dismissed Washington’s demands as “maximalist” and “illogical”.

Tehran advanced its own positions in a 10-point counterproposal, which included demands of compensation for damages suffered by Iran during the war, a commitment to non-aggression by the US, Iran retaining its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and acceptance of Iran’s nuclear enrichment.

How has the US reacted to the 10-point proposal?

Trump on Wednesday said the US has received a 10-point proposal from Iran, which he called a “workable basis on which to negotiate”.

However, later in the day, confusion over what the official US position was started to become apparent.

Trump turned to his Truth Social platform to attack those he accused of spreading inaccurate accounts of supposed agreements.

“There is only one group of meaningful ‘POINTS’ that are acceptable to the United States, and we will be discussing them behind closed doors during these Negotiations,” Trump said, without providing details. “These are the POINTS that are the basis on which we agreed to a CEASEFIRE.”

The US president, in a separate post, said there will be “no enrichment of Uranium, and the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried (B-2 Bombers) Nuclear ‘Dust’”.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed certain reports about the Iranian proposal and said that Trump would reject any uranium enrichment by Tehran.

“The president’s red lines, namely the end of Iranian enrichment in Iran, have not changed,” Leavitt told reporters. While Iran says it is not seeking nuclear weapons, it insists on enriching its own uranium as a national right.

Moreover, Leavitt said Iran’s initial 10-point proposal was “literally thrown in the garbage” by Trump’s team, but Tehran later put forward a revised “more reasonable and entirely different” plan, one which could be aligned with Trump’s own 15-point proposal.

“The idea that President Trump would ever accept an Iranian wish list as a deal is completely absurd,” she said.

Trump’s second-in-command, Vance, dismissed the publicised version as little more than a “random yahoo in Iran submitting it to public access television”.

“We don’t really concern ourselves with what they claim they have the right to do; we concern ourselves with what they actually do,” he added in remarks made to reporters in Budapest.

He said he had seen at least three different drafts of the proposals. “The first 10-point proposal was something that was submitted, and we think, frankly, was probably written by ChatGPT,” Vance said.

Are there different versions of Iran’s 10-point plan?

In short, yes. At least two different versions of that same plan appear to exist, one in English and the other in Persian.

In the Persian version, made public by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, it said the “US has, in principle, committed to” a series of demands, most notably the “acceptance of enrichment”, signalling that any deal must recognise Iran’s right to continue enriching uranium.

However, this phrase was allegedly omitted from the English-language version.

Iran has consistently framed uranium enrichment as a sovereign right, while the Trump administration and its ally Israel call the demand a non-starter and a red line.

For years, Tehran has maintained that its nuclear activities are strictly civilian and that it has no plans to build nuclear weapons.

In 2015, it reached an agreement with the US to curb its nuclear programme in return for relief from sanctions. In 2018, however, Trump pulled Washington out of that landmark accord and reimposed sanctions on Iran.