It is a defining initiative for both U.S. President Barack Obama and Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, both of whom faced strong opposition from hardliners at home in countries that have called each other “Great Satan” and part of the “axis of evil”. He says the USA wants to make sure Iran doesn’t “cut any corners”.
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The delegation led by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand also included Sens. Now, we may be only a matter of days from the JCPOA’s “Implementation Day”.
The United States and Iran are within days, possibly even hours, of completing the next critical phase of the landmark worldwide nuclear deal, State Department officials say, a step known as “Implementation Day”.
Under the front-page headline “Nuclear Burial”, Hard-line daily Vatan-e-Emrooz on Saturday criticized the removal of the core of Iran’s only heavy water reactor, which was filled in with cement earlier this week as one of the final steps under the agreement.
“The core vessel of the Arak reactor has been removed”, IAEA spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi said January 14. It will also mean that worldwide inspectors have unprecedented access to monitor Iran’s entire nuclear fuel cycle, which includes all of its uranium mines, mills, and centrifuge production facilities, far exceeding traditional IAEA authorities. Hirono. “In meetings with key leaders in Israel, my colleagues and I emphasized the need to work with Israel to implement the Iran Nuclear Deal”. Just last week, Treasury levied new sanctions against a Lebanon-based telecommunications firm for supporting Hezbollah.
“Through respect, through dialog, through negotiations, we can in fact reach mutually-acceptable solutions, implement mutually-acceptable solutions, prove that the nay-sayers were always wrong, and therefore move towards a world in which diplomacy – not force, not pressure – will prevail”, Zarif said.
Amid signs that a decision to provide Iran with billions of dollars in nuclear sanctions relief is imminent, the White House cautioned that the United States will not seek to establish diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic.
Congress can play a constructive role in a number of ways. A 2013 report by the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars found that imports to Iran from US and European drugmakers decreased by approximately 30 percent in 2012, when international sanctions began to target Iran’s financial institutions.
Zarif is due to meet his United States counterpart John Kerry, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, and IAEA chief Yukiya Amano later today.
“If your goal is to ensure Iranian compliance with the JCPOA, it is absolutely crucial that Iran’s blatant misbehavior is met with real consequences”, they said.
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But we can not enforce the deal alone. Iran says it has the right to nuclear energy – and stresses that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only.
