The diplomat refused to be drawn on specifics but reiterated that the crux of the matter remained Iran’s controversial uranium enrichment program and that the talks would focus on “what kind of compromise would be feasible” on that issue.

But enrichment — which Iran says it needs for peaceful purposes, while also manufacturing large quantities of near-weapons-grade material — is a major sticking point, with the Trump administration vowing that any agreement with Iran would have to entirely prohibit the country from enriching any nuclear material.

For decades, Iran, which denies it intends to build a nuclear weapon, has categorically refused to give up its capabilities — instead plowing billions of dollars into refining the technology and constructing vast enrichment facilities, like the secretive Fordow installation, which is built deep underground inside a mountain.

After launching its first wave of strikes on Iran, Israel pointed to a recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which acknowledged Iran is enriching uranium to a higher level than other countries without nuclear weapons programs, in violation of its nuclear non-proliferation obligations.

“Because Iran is now under immense military pressure, it might run out of options, and their nuclear capability is being degraded,” the diplomat said.

Until Trump’s decision to allow diplomacy another shot, the Geneva talks had looked like a European sideshow, with the US seemingly poised to join with Israel in the destruction of Iranian nuclear facilities.

The meeting, between the EU’s foreign policy chief, alongside the British, French and German foreign ministers and their Iranian counterpart, is now taking on greater significance, setting the stage for next steps and possibly acting as a bridge between Iran and the United States.

But there is an underlying fear in Geneva that the reinvigorated talks here, the first formal meetings with Iranian representatives since the escalation of the Israel-Iran conflict, will still go nowhere.

“It’s impossible to read anything Trump says because there is a daily barrage of statements,” the diplomat added.

China and Russia positioning themselves as voices of reason, calling for de-escalation of a conflict the United States is contemplating on entering — these are the optics Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin sought to project during a phone call on Thursday.

As US President Donald Trump weighs joining Israel in attacking Iran, the fast-spiralling conflict between two sworn enemies in the Middle East has presented Beijing and Moscow another opportunity to cast themselves as an alternative to US power.

In their call, Putin and Xi strongly condemned Israel’s actions, calling them a breach of the UN Charter and other norms of international law, according to the Kremlin. (The elephant in the room, of course, is Russia’s own violations of international law in its ongoing war against Ukraine — which Beijing has consistently refused to condemn.)

In Beijing’s readout, Xi struck a more measured tone and stopped short of explicitly condemning Israel — unlike his foreign minister, who did just that in a call with his Iranian counterpart last week.

Instead, the Chinese leader urged the warring parties, “especially Israel,” to cease fire as soon as possible to avoid further escalation and regional spillover.

And notably, in a veiled message to Trump, Xi emphasized that “major powers” that have a special influence on the parties to the conflict should work to “cool the situation, not the opposite.”

Beijing has long accused Washington of being a source of instability and tensions in the Middle East — and some Chinese scholars are now seizing on the Iran crisis to underscore that point.

Liu Zhongmin, a Middle East expert at the Shanghai International Studies University, attributed the latest flareup to the uncertainty created by Trump’s second presidency and the chaotic, opportunistic and transactional nature of his Middle East policy.

“(Trump) has seriously undermined the authority and credibility of US policy in the Middle East, eroded America’s leadership and image among its allies while also weakening its ability to threaten and deter regional adversaries,” Liu wrote in state media this week.

Another Middle East ‘forever war’?

Some Chinese online commentators have noted that Trump appears on the brink of pulling the US deeper into another so-called forever war in the Middle East.

At the outset of his second term, officials close to Trump repeatedly stressed the need for Washington to redirect its focus and resources toward countering China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific. Yet five months in, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza continue to rage on — and Trump is now weighing US involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict.

Beijing has no interest in seeing an all-out war against Iran that could topple the regime. Under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has emerged as a formidable power in the Middle East and a vital counterweight to US dominance — just as China is working to expand its own diplomatic and economic footprint in the region.

In 2023, Beijing helped broker a surprise rapprochement between arch-rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran – a deal that signaled its ambition to emerge as a new powerbroker in the region.

China has long backed Iran through sustained oil imports and its seat on the UN Security Council. In recent years, the two countries have deepened their strategic ties, including holding joint naval exercises alongside Russia. Beijing welcomed Tehran into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS – groupings led by China and Russia to challenge the US-led world order.

Iran is also a critical node in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), its global infrastructure and investment drive. The country lies near the strategic Gwadar port — a key BRI outpost in Pakistan that gives China access to the Indian Ocean — and borders the Strait of Hormuz, a vital chokepoint for Chinese oil imports from the Persian Gulf.

Like Russia, China has offered to be a potential mediator in the Israel-Iran conflict, casting its role as a peace broker and an alternative to US leadership.

During his call with Putin, Xi laid out four broad proposals to de-escalate tensions, including resolving the Iran nuclear issue through dialogue and safeguarding civilians, according to the Chinese readout.

Meanwhile, Xi’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has had a busy week on the phone, speaking with his counterparts in Iran, Israel, Egypt and Oman in a flurry of diplomatic outreach.

Yet it remains unclear what Beijing is willing and able to do when it comes to actually mediating the conflict. In the early stages of Israel’s war on Gaza, China made a similar offer and dispatched a special envoy to the region to promote peace talks — efforts that ultimately yielded little in terms of concrete results.

Brokering peace in the Middle East is a tall order, especially for a country with little experience or expertise in mediating protracted, intractable conflicts – in a deeply divided region where it lacks a meaningful political or security presence.

And in the one conflict where China does hold significant leverage — the war in Ukraine — Xi has offered diplomatic cover and much-needed economic support to help sustain Putin’s war effort, even as China continues to cast itself as a neutral peace broker.

Still, at a time when America’s global leadership is under growing scrutiny, particularly in the eyes of the Global South, presenting itself as a voice of restraint in the Iran conflict may already count as a symbolic win for Beijing.

Pro-Palestinian activists broke into Britain’s largest air base and damaged two military aircraft in central England early Friday.

Palestine Action, a UK-based group that aims to disrupt the operations of weapons manufacturers supplying the Israeli government, posted footage of the action to its X account.

The video shows two people riding on electric scooters on the tarmac of RAF Brize Norton, in Oxfordshire.

The activists can be seen spraying red paint into the turbine engines of two Airbus Voyagers, which they said were targeted for their alleged role in carrying military cargo and for their use in refueling Israeli, American and British military aircraft and fighter jets.

“Britain isn’t just complicit, it’s an active participant in the Gaza genocide and war crimes across the Middle East,” a Palestine Action spokesperson said in a statement.

“By decommissioning two military planes, Palestine Action have directly intervened in the genocide and prevented crimes against the Palestinian people,” it added.

The incident raises wider questions as to how the activists – who have not been apprehended – managed to get into the airbase undetected. RAF Brize Norton has approximately 5,800 service personnel, 300 civilian staff and 1,200 contractors.

In a statement, the Ministry of Defence strongly condemned the “vandalism of Royal Air Force assets” and said that it was working with police who were investigating the breach.

In a statement posted to X, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the incident “an act of vandalism” and said it was “disgraceful.”

Ten months after the luxury superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily in a sudden storm, salvage crews managed to lift it 50 meters (164 feet) from the seabed on Friday afternoon, the company running the $30 million recovery operation said.

The superyacht was scheduled to be lifted at the weekend, but salvage crews from TMC Marine said the process went faster than anticipated.

The top of the hull is now visible above the surface and TMC Marine said it will be lifted fully out of the water on Saturday.

The 56-meter (184-foot) superyacht went down in less than a minute when hurricane-force winds swept through the area on August 19, 2024. Seven people, including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, died. Fifteen people survived, including Lynch’s wife, whose company owns the $40 million vessel, the ship’s captain and all but one crew member.

A Dutch salvage worker also died in an underwater explosion when the salvage operation began in May, prompting the company to replace most of the human divers with underwater robots.

That change in strategy led to “accelerated progress” in the operation to attach the lifting straps to the hull, which was originally scheduled to finish by the end of the month, the company said.

Marcus Cave, head of naval architecture and a director of TMC Marine, said in a statement Friday: “The salvage team has made very substantive progress in the last 10 days. They are now preparing for the final, complex and delicate lifting operation, to bring Bayesian to the surface and ultimately into port.

“This is a challenging programme of activity, that will be progressed in a measured and systematic way.”

Earlier this week, salvage workers used a remote-controled, diamond-wire precision-cutting tool to remove the vessel’s 72-meter (236-foot) mast.

Once the mast was removed, the salvage company was able to finish attaching eight steel lifting slings to the hull, and partially parbuckled the ship to an upright position on the seabed.

Final stabilizers, hoses and other rigging were attached before the yacht was lifted by one of Europe’s most powerful floating cranes, which had been brought in for the job.

The Bayesian sank with 18,000 liters of fuel on board, which has not been removed. Oil booms were laid around the work site to protect the area from potential pollution.

On Friday afternoon, the top of the yacht, now covered in clay and algae, emerged out of the water. It is now being held in an upright position to allow water to drain out before it is taken to the Sicilian port of Termini Imerse on Monday.

There, it will be placed in a specially built steel cradle and sequestered while investigators carry out forensic investigations that may reveal the definitive cause of the accident.

The ship’s captain, James Cutfield, and two crew members are currently under investigation for their role in the deadly accident, and investigators need to examine the ship to determine whether human error or a design flaw led to the sinking.

They will also secure any possessions, including what are believed to be watertight safes in which Lynch kept encrypted hard drives.

Remote-controlled submersibles were previously used to recover the yacht’s anchor and boom, which were brought to the surface in May. An uninflated lifeboat and deck furniture have also already been recovered.

Lynch had organized the cruise to celebrate his acquittal in June 2024 on 15 felony charges in a United States court tied to the $11 billion sale of one of his companies to Hewlett-Packard.

His co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain, also acquitted on all charges, died on the same day the Bayesian went down, two days after he was struck by a car while out jogging in the United Kingdom.

Lawmakers in Britain have narrowly approved a bill to legalize assisted dying for terminally ill people, capping a fraught debate in Parliament and across the country that cut across political, religious and legal divides.

MPs passed the bill by 314 votes to 291, in their final say on the question. The bill – which has split lawmakers and sparked impassioned conversations with their constituents the breadth of Britain – will now move to the House of Lords for its final rounds of scrutiny.

Friday’s vote puts Britain firmly on track to join a small club of nations that have legalized the process, and one of the largest by population to allow it.

It allows people with a terminal condition and less than six months to live to take a substance to end their lives, as long as they are capable of making the decision themselves. Two doctors and a panel would need to sign off on the choice.

Canada, New Zealand, Spain and most of Australia allow assisted dying in some form, as do several US states, including Oregon, Washington and California.

A charged debate

Friday’s vote in Parliament coincided with a charged public debate about whether the state should be dictating the choices available to Britons in the final moments of their lives.

Proponents included Esther Rantzen, a BBC TV presenter with advanced lung cancer, who argued that the choice would save millions from unnecessary suffering.

“If we don’t vote to change the law today, what does that mean?,” asked Kim Leadbeater, the MP who introduced the bill last year. “It means we will have many more years of heartbreaking stories from terminally ill people and their families, of pain and trauma, suicide attempts, PTSD, lonely trips to (clinics in) Switzerland, police investigations.”

The option, she said, is “not a choice between living and dying: it is a choice for terminally ill people about how they die.”

But opponents have criticized the bill on religious and ethical grounds, and raised issues with a legislative process they accuse of being opaque.

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown argued that fixing Britain’s strained end-of-live care system should be prioritized, writing in a rare intervention in The Guardian that the bill “would privilege the legal right to assisted dying without guaranteeing anything approaching an equivalent right to high-quality palliative care for those close to death.”

Seriously ill people “need the health and social care system fixing first,” Labour MP Vicky Foxcroft said in Parliament Friday. “They want us as parliamentarians to assist them to live, not to die.”

More scrutiny expected

Friday’s debate was concluded with a free vote, meaning that MPs were allowed to decide for or against the bill according to their conscience, and free from any party-line whipping. It was the third and final time MPs cast a vote on the topic, after an earlier reading in November.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer was among those who voted in favor of the bill, despite objections from some in the opposing camp that he abstain to prevent influencing other lawmakers.

Even though the bill passed, some of its critics were emboldened by Friday’s results; the effort lost the support of 16 MPs compared to November, after months of controversy over changes made to the bill during its committee oversight stage.

Most notably, an earlier provision that stipulated each case of assisted dying must be approved by two doctors and then a judge was removed, amid concerns over courts being clogged up. The bill was tweaked to instead require the approval of two doctors and a three-person panel.

“We clearly won the argument,” Tim Farron, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats who had opposed the bill, wrote on X on Friday following the vote.

“With a tiny majority and growing opposition from expert groups, the Lords will now rightly feel that they have the right to disagree,” Farron said in a now-deleted post. “To my pleasant surprise, this is not over!”

A handful of countries allow some form of assisted dying, but the particulars of the law differ widely. Britain’s proposed bill is broadly in line with the Oregon model, and does not go as far as Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada, which allow assisted death in cases of suffering, not just for terminally ill people. It differs from euthanasia, the process in which another person deliberately ends someone’s life to relieve suffering.

It is currently a crime to help somebody die in England and Wales, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Performing euthanasia on a person, meanwhile, is considered murder or manslaughter.