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Iran calls latest nuclear talks with US 'difficult' but both sides agree negotiations will continue

Witkoff/Araghchi
© Getty ImagesUS Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff • Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi
The latest round of high-stakes nuclear talks between Iran and the US have ended, with Tehran calling them difficult but with both sides agreeing to further negotiations.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei confirmed on X that the talks had concluded, saying they were "difficult but useful to better understand each other's positions and to find reasonable & realistic ways to address the differences."

A senior Trump administration official gave a more positive assessment, telling CNN the discussions "were again both direct and indirect" and lasted over three hours, calling them encouraging.

"Agreement was reached to move forward with the talks to continue working through technical elements," the official said, adding that the US side was "encouraged by today's outcome" and looks forward to their next meeting "which will happen in the near future."

No date has been agreed for the next round although Baqaei said it would be announced by mediator Oman.

Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi said the fifth round of talks would take place once both sides have consulted their leaders. He said Sunday's discussions included "useful and original ideas" that reflected a shared wish to reach an "honorable" agreement.

Comment: Without the US recent disconnect from Netanyahu and Israel, the nuclear deal with Iran may have been impossible. Now? Highly unlikely. Is this progress?


Stop

'Honey, he's had enough of you': Trump's Mideast moves increasingly seem to sideline Israel

Street scene
© Ahmad Gharabli/AFP)People pass by a sign with portraits of US President Donald Trump and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee • Jerusalem • May 7, 2025
On Friday, a popular Hebrew X account called "News From a Year Ago" tweeted a short video of Donald Trump, then running for US president, from May 2024.

"If any Jewish person voted for Joe Biden, they should be ashamed of themselves," Trump said in the video. "He's totally abandoned Israel and nobody can believe it."

One year later, if there's a president many Israelis are viewing with disbelief, it's Trump himself. Trump — who campaigned on his record of good relations with Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — has spent the past month building out a vision for US policy in the Middle East that appears to be sidelining the country and its leader.

Comment: How long before America endures a 9/11 reprise?


Warning

Who der Leyen: The EU has a major, unfixable problem with its foreign policy

Ursula
© Toby Melville/WPA Pool/Getty ImagesEuropean Commission President Ursula von der Leyen
It must be quite a burn for Brussels elites when Washington says their most vaunted quality is not as good as they try to make it look.

This one stings. When asked how the EU might dodge US President Donald Trump's tariff hammer, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent replied: "My observation... goes all the way back to [former US Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger's statement: 'When I call Europe, who do I call?' So, we're negotiating with a lot of different interests."

Translation: You can't sit with us until you stop fighting at your own lunch table.

Sure, the continent is tripping over its own policies and tumbling down an economic staircase, but at least everyone's falling in sync. Brussels tightens the "unity" straitjacket, and they all cheer, or risk getting whacked back into line.

Unity is the brand. Unity is the product. Unity is the hashtag.

Footprints

Hatred spreads from Israel to Pakistan

Speakers on mike
© UnknownLeader of the parliamentary opposition Fazal-ur-Rehman
In 1915, two years before the Balfour Declaration announcing the creation of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, then an employee of the British Foreign Office, called for the creation of a Jewish state in order to mobilize the diaspora in the service of His Majesty's Empire. He specified that this state should never be able to provide for its own security and should always be dependent on military support from London.

The same Herbert Samuel, who had become His Majesty's High Commissioner to Mandatory Palestine, chose the anti-Semite Mohammed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, while he sent his own son, Edwind Samuel, to serve in the Jewish Legion of the revisionist Zionist Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

This policy continues today when the "revisionist Zionist" Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister and son of Jabotinsky's private secretary, made sure to provide Hamas with $2.7 billion between 2012 and 2023 (cf. VIN 2505), i.e. to prepare for the "surprise" attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Blood calls for blood. The exterminating madness that is taking hold of part of the Israeli population as the majority lays down their arms (cf. VIN 3270) finds its answer in the madness seizing part of the Pakistani population.

Comment: The appetency for war increases and intensifies. Not a good sign.


Syringe

Best of the Web: MAHA Hugger Mugger: Fighting The Biomedical War On The American Public

Statue Lib Unk Sam
© softpanorama.orgThe probe of Liberty
"Those who perpetrated the greatest ruse in American presidential history by staging the Biden presidency will never tell us what their ultimate agenda was"
— Victor Davis Hanson
One baseline truth in current American life is that our bodily well-being gets worse as the so-called health care industry gets ever-largerit is now 17.6-percent of the economy (GDP). This is clearly the basis of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) campaign that attached itself to the Trump 2.0 program. You hear almost no arguments against MAHA itself, even from the Party of Hustles and Hoaxes, but plenty of calumny and objurgation against MAHA's chief advocate, Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Mr. Trump's initial nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, was pulled last week just before her scheduled Senate confirmation hearing. Her credentials looked a bit sketchy — med school on the tiny Caribbean island of St. Maarten (say, what. . . ?) and other irregularities — which she confabulated about anyway. Plus, she was a Covid vaccine cheerleader and an avid advocate of the censorship campaign to slam down debate over it.

Which leads directly to a glaring quandary in President Trump's current order-of-business: he has avoided engagement with the whole Covid fiasco that unspooled in the last year of his first term. Now, it is the opinion of this blog that Mr. Trump was played on Covid by blob-marshaled "experts" Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, who led the White House Covid "team," and then snookered the president into Operation Warp Speed, appealing to his vanity to play the superhero. You can also surmise that the Covid operation was hatched to run Mr. Trump out of office by enabling epic election fraud, making a chump of him.

Pills

Trump to sign executive order he says will slash drug prices by up to 80%

drug store shelf shelves prescription medication
© (Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty ImagesShelves of prescription medication are pictured at a pharmacy.
Trump calls out Democrats and announces plans to drop prices of prescription drugs 'almost immediately'

President Donald Trump announced he plans to sign an executive order on Monday that will reduce the cost of prescription drugs and pharmaceuticals "almost immediately, by 30% to 80%."

Trump made the announcement on Truth Social Sunday.

"For many years the World has wondered why Prescription Drugs and Pharmaceuticals in the United States States of America were SO MUCH HIGHER IN PRICE THAN THEY WERE IN ANY OTHER NATION, SOMETIMES BEING FIVE TO TEN TIMES MORE EXPENSIVE THAN THE SAME DRUG, MANUFACTURED IN THE EXACT SAME LABORATORY OR PLANT, BY THE SAME COMPANY???" Trump wrote. "It was always difficult to explain and very embarrassing because, in fact, there was no correct or rightful answer.

Comment: Newsmax adds:
[Trump's] proposal would likely only impact certain drugs covered by Medicare and given in an office — think infusions that treat cancer, and other injectables. But it could potentially bring significant savings to the government.

Medicare provides health insurance for roughly 70 million older Americans. Complaints about U.S. drug prices being notoriously high, even when compared with other large and wealthy countries, have long drawn the ire of both parties, but a lasting fix has never cleared Congress.

Under the planned order, the federal government would tie what it pays pharmaceutical companies for those drugs to the price paid by a group of other, economically advanced countries — the so-called "most favored nation" approach.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had teased this announcement late last month in a Newsmax exclusive.

"The United States of America pays for drugs, and the rest of the world free rides," Lutnick told Rob Schmitt Tonight in an exclusive sit-down. "You know how you can understand the rest of the world?

"We pay for the drug, and they pay the copay.

"They're paying like the $10, $20, $30."

The proposal will face fierce opposition from the pharmaceutical industry.

It was a rule Trump tried to adopt during his first term, but could never get through. He signed a similar executive order in the final weeks of his presidency, but a court order later blocked the rule from going into effect under the Biden administration.

A report by the Trump administration during its first term found that the U.S. spends twice as much as some other countries in covering those drugs. Medicare Part B drug spending topped $33 billion in 2021.



Putin

Putin proposes unconditional peace talks with Ukraine (FULL SPEECH)

Vladimir Putin
© Sputnik / Gavriil Grigorov
Moscow is "set on serious negotiations" with Kiev to bring a "long-term lasting peace," the Russian president has said

Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed starting peace talks with Ukraine without any preconditions as soon as Thursday.

The president made the remarks early on Sunday as he addressed the media at the conclusion of celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of Victory Day. Russia hosted numerous foreign dignitaries over the days surrounding the celebrations, including the leaders of China, Venezuela, and Vietnam.

Putin offered to start unconditional talks with Ukraine "without delay" on May 15 in Istanbul, where "they were held earlier and where they were interrupted," referring to the negotiations held in Türkiye during the early phase of the conflict in 2022.

Moscow is "set on serious negotiations" with Kiev and aims to "eliminate the root causes" of the conflict in order to achieve a "long-term lasting peace," Putin stated.

Here is the president's speech in full:

Comment: In this article, Ex-Pentagon analyst: Zelensky will reject Putin's peace proposal in order to stay alive, there was:
"Zelensky does not want to meet alone with Mr. Putin," Maloof explained. "And I think that if he decides to go ahead and negotiate something, and first of all, I question whether he'll be ALLOWED to do that because of internal politics... I think the Azov* group and his military will rebel,"
He did not hold back in his criticism: "They [Western Europe] just want to continue a conflict with Russia that, frankly, particularly the UK, that has been going on for almost 250 years. Their antagonism toward Russia is historic."
The level of radicalness among some of the leaders of Western Europe and their backers is in several respects comparable to what has previously been noted among transnational Salafi jihadists (think ISIS).

"Almost 250 years" raises the question whether the periods of peace inbetween were any more than interludes before more war?

Although it has happened before in the history of the world, including the more recent history of Ukraine, that more peace negotiations preceded more upheaval, peace should still be given a chance. Efforts made to achieve it are not wasted, but how this squares with the consideration that many peace efforts in Europe were like interludes raises the question of the human condition on this planet and the forces that influence it. Since these for the most part remain poorly understood, what kind of peace can we really expect?


Truck

Treasury secretary Bessant: Trump and China close in on trade deal after 'productive talks'

Donald Trump Xi Jinping
© REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/FileU.S. President Donald Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019.
Secretary Bessent says more details will be revealed on Monday

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday that the Trump administration has made progress in its trade negotiations with China.

"We will be giving details tomorrow. "But I can tell you that the talks were productive," Bessent told members of the media on Sunday from Switzerland. "We had the vice premier, two vice ministers who were integrally involved, Ambassador Jamieson [Greer] and myself. And I spoke to President Trump, as did Ambassador Jamieson last night, and he is fully informed of what is going on."

The Trump administration has leveled tariffs as high as 145% on Chinese goods as the president looks to bring parity to the nation's chronic trade deficit with foreign countries. Trump paused his April 2 reciprocal tariff plan on dozens of nations as countries called on the administration to make trade deals, but he upped the ante on China after Beijing rebuked Trump's trade policies with tariffs of its own, including 125% duty taxes on U.S. goods.

MAGA

Will Trump's ego save the remaining Palestinians?

trump netanyahu
© Profimedia / AC NewsPhoto / Alamy
Benjamin Netanyahu visiting the White House with US President Donald Trump in April this year
According to numerous sources, major developments in U.S.-Israeli relations have taken place over the past several days. If reports from Israeli and other media outlets are right, then President Donald Trump has decided to cut off communications with Netanyahu. As the evidence below suggests, the Trump administration has taken a veritable volte-face where Israel is concerned.

Trump's apparent irritation and humiliation over being "manipulated" by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or the appearance of having been manipulated, may have reached a threshold. Have the objections raised by recently disaffected Trump supporters finally reached the president and caused him to change course from MIGA to MAGA? Has Trump finally slipped his Israeli dog collar on purpose?

SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: NewsReal: US-Israel Split Over M.E.? India-Pakistan Provocation Explained, And Putin's Victory Parade

trump netanyahu pakistan CPEC newsreal
© Sott.net
Rumors are swirling this week that Trump and Netanyahu 'aren't friends anymore', and that the breakdown in their relationship portends divergence in US-Israeli policy in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Trump has suddenly declared an end to the US military bombing of Yemen, just as yet another US fighter jet 'falls off' the USS Truman. And US and Iranian officials are again meeting in Oman to 'further discuss a (new) nuclear deal'.

The 'wee war' between India and Pakistan appears have ended, for now, but what happened to kick it all off, who was likely really behind it, and why would they provoke a dangerous border conflict in that region? Joe Quinn explains the geoeconomics of pan-Asian integration - and why the US/UK/Israel/'West' will do whatever they can to prevent that happening.

Finally, the spectacular 80th anniversary Victory Day parade in Moscow's Red Square went off without a hitch, despite the inane efforts of Ukrainians and Eurolanders to threaten it with drone attacks, and then upstage it with 'alternative peace talks' in Kiev, resulting in a farcical 'ultimatum' to Putin's victorious Russia.


Running Time: 01:55:27

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